In reality, Asia and Europe are the same continent, but Asia Minor APPEARS to be divided from Europe by water to those who lived in the eastern Mediterranean.
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Asia and Europe are on different plates, hence they are different continents.
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California and the rest of North America are on different plates, and yet they are not different continents.
Does the plate separating Asia and Europe actually run all the way down the Ural Mountains? I think that this is just a convenient fiction. They have redefined continents to preserve the ancient separation, it would seem.
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Columbus refused to accept that he had discovered a new continent, South America, because there are only three continents mentioned in the Bible (Asia, Africa and Europe).
Columbus' main source of geographical information about undiscovered lands was a book called Imago Mundi, by a Pierre D'Ailly.
http://www.millersville.edu/~columbus/data/art/WATTS03.ARTColumbus also read about the major rivers mentioned in the Bible, and concluded that the Orinoco was the river that flowed near Paradise, which he believed to be the Island of Trinidad. He mentions in his writings that the world was not just round, but shaped like a woman's breast, and on the nipple of the world was Trinidad and the Garden of Eden. The priests and monks back at the court felt that old Chris has been at sea for too long, and the Catholic Kings were not about to pay him his one-fifth share of the monetary value of the Garden of Eden.
He was charged with maladministration of the colony a Santo Domingo and returned home to Spain in chains. Then he was freed and named the Duque de Veragua, Veragua being the Atlantic Coast of Panama. His descendents still hold this title.
You can read all about this in several biographies of Columbus. The one I read was in Spanish, and I can't recall the name. El Almirante del Mar Oc?ano, perhaps.
Amerigo Vespucci was more of a realist, and concluded that South America had to be a continent, because of the tremendous volume f water flowing out of the mouth of the Orinoco, which has the Nile beat in volume of water by several times, though the Orinoco is smaller in volume than the Amazon.
Columbus was right about the shape of the world (if being sort of spherical, I mean). But he was wrong about the size.
On the coast of Panama, he had all his men swear on the Blessed Virgin that they were within 600 leagues of Cipango (Japan). Which, of course, they weren't.
There is a lot of fascinating stuff about Columbus that has been recently discovered in the Archives of the Indies in Sevilla, where it was lost for centuries.