03-02-2016, 02:41 AM
Onion domes stretched all the way across Europe into Spain at that time, so although the onion domes have to be considered, there were enough of them around that it would not be unusual for them to be included in a map of central European origins (I'm not saying it originated there, but that onion domes were not unprecedented in that area at the time).
The swallowtail merlons and saddleback rooflines were not restricted to the traditional Lombardic and Ghibelline areas. They took the architecture with them when they travelled and pillaged or colonized other areas. Many of the colonies were built exactly like their homelands. Ghibelline merlons had been around for a century or two before the VMS was created—plenty of time for them to spread to other areas.
If the map represents a journey, then the person (and other parts of the manuscript) might be from one place and the references in the map from another.
Travel as far as India and possibly also China (by westerners) has been recorded quite a bit earlier than the 15th century. Christian churches and Jewish communities (with less formal synagogues than the one established in the 16th century) sprang up all along the Arabian and Indian coastlines (typically along merchant stop-over ports).
Merchants and explorers sometimes wrote travelogues of their journeys but since only one copy of most of these documents existed, the majority have probably been lost
The swallowtail merlons and saddleback rooflines were not restricted to the traditional Lombardic and Ghibelline areas. They took the architecture with them when they travelled and pillaged or colonized other areas. Many of the colonies were built exactly like their homelands. Ghibelline merlons had been around for a century or two before the VMS was created—plenty of time for them to spread to other areas.
If the map represents a journey, then the person (and other parts of the manuscript) might be from one place and the references in the map from another.
Travel as far as India and possibly also China (by westerners) has been recorded quite a bit earlier than the 15th century. Christian churches and Jewish communities (with less formal synagogues than the one established in the 16th century) sprang up all along the Arabian and Indian coastlines (typically along merchant stop-over ports).
Merchants and explorers sometimes wrote travelogues of their journeys but since only one copy of most of these documents existed, the majority have probably been lost