MALOCELLO, LANCILOTO (" LANZAROTE, the ` Lancelot Maloisiel ' of the French ")

This article appears in Volume V17, Page 494 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: MAL-MAR

MALOCELLO, LANCILOTO (" LANZAROTE, the ` Lancelot Maloisiel ' of the French ") , leader of the first of modern European oceanic enterprises. This was a Genoese expedition, which about 1270 seems to have sailed into the Alantic, re-discovered the " Fortunate Islands " or Canaries, and made something of a conquest and

settlement

SETTLEMENT
SETTLEMENT, ACT OF

in one of the most northerly isles of this archipelago, still known (after the Italian captain) as Lanzarote. According to a Spanish authority of about 1345, the

anonymous

ANONYMOUS

Franciscan's Conos4imiento de todos los reinos, "Lancarote" was killed by the Canarian natives; but the castle built by him was

standing

STANDING

in 14021404, when it was utilized for the storage of grain by the French conquerors under Gadifer de la Salle. To Malocello's enterprise, moreover, it is probable that Petrarch (born 1304) alludes when he tells how, within the memory of his parents; an armed

fleet

FLEET

of Genoese penetrated to the Fortunatae "; this passage some would refer, without sufficient authority, to the expedition of 1291. Malocello's name and nationality are certainly preserved by those early Portolani or scientific charts (such as the " Dulcert " of 1339 and the " Laurentian Portolano " of 1351), in which the

African

AFRICAN

islands appear, for the first time in history, in clear and recognizable form. Thus Dulcert reads Insula de Lanzarotus and Marocelus, the Laurentian map I. de Lanzarote, against Lanzarote

Island

ISLAND (O.E. ieg =isle, +land')

, which is well depicted on both designs, and marked with the

cross

CROSS

of Genoa. The ConosQimiento (as noticed above) explicitly derives the

island

ISLAND (O.E. ieg =isle, +land')

-name from the. Genoese

commander

COMMANDER

who perished here. Malocello's enterprise not only marks the beginning of the oversea expansion of western Europe in exploration, conquest and colonization (after the age of Scandinavian world-roving had passed) ; it is also probably not unconnected with the

great

GREAT

Genoese venture of 1291 (in

SEARCH, or VISIT AND SEARCH

of a waterway to India, which soon follows), with which this attempt at Canarian discovery and dominion has been by some unjustifiably identified.
See the Conoscimiento, p. too, as edited by Marcos Jimenez de la Espada in the Boletin de la sociedad geogrdfica de Madrid, February 1877) ; Le Canarien in P. Margry, Conque"te des . Canaries, Co. 177; M. A. P. d'Avezac in vol. vi., part ii., of L' Univers, pp. 141 (Iles africaines de l' ocean atlantique) ; C. R. Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, iii. 411413, 449, 451.

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