SOURCE: “Pletho, Strabo and Columbus” in Annuaire de l‘Institut de Philologie et d’Histoire Orientales et Slaves, Secrétariat des Éditions de l’Institut, 1953, pp. 1-18.

In the following essay, Anastos credits George Gemistus Pletho with the fifteenth-century introduction of the Geography to the Latin West and examines its popularity during the Renaissance, including its use by Christopher Columbus.

I hope to show in the course of this paper¹ that the geographical encyclopaedia of Strabo, designated infra as the Geographika … to distinguish it from Ptolemy’s Cosmographia came into prominence when it did because of the efforts of George Gemistus Pletho, the famous Byzantine humanist, who was almost one hundred years old at the time of his death in 1452². He was a man of prodigious learning and considerable versatility, and wrote on theology, history, government, philosophy, geometry, rhetoric, poetry, music, grammar, astronomy, and geography. Many of his...