Vandino (sometimes Vadino or Guido) and Ugolino…

1291 CE

Vandino (sometimes Vadino or Guido) and Ugolino Vivaldi (sometimes Ugolino de Vivaldo), two brothers and Genoese explorers and merchants, are connected with the first known expedition in search of an ocean way from Europe to India.

Ugolino, with his brother Guido or Vadino Vivaldo, is in command of this expedition of two galleys, which he had organized in conjunction with Tedisio Doria, and which leaves Genoa in May 1291 with the purpose of going to India "by the Ocean Sea" and bringing back useful things for trade.

Planned primarily for commerce, the enterprise also aims at proselytism.

Two Franciscan friars accompany Ugolino.

The expedition of the Vivaldi brothers is one of the first recorded voyages to sail out from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century CE.

The galleys are well armed and sail down the Morocco coast to a place called Gozora (Cape Nun), in 28 47' N., after which nothing more is heard of them.

The principal documentary source is the Genoese annals of Jacopo Doria, presented to the city of Genoa in 1294.

Jean Gimpel suggests that the two Franciscan monks who accompanied the Vivaldi Brothers may have read the Opus majus written by their fellow Franciscan, Roger Bacon, in which Bacon suggested that the distance separating Spain and India was not great, a theory that will later be repeated by Pierre d'Ailly and tested by Christopher Columbus.

(Gimpel, Jean (1976).

The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages.

New York: Penguin.

196.)

Early in the next century, Sorleone de Vivaldo, son of Ugolino,will undertake a series of distant wanderings in search of his father, and even penetrate, it is said, to Mogadishu on the Somali coast.

In 1455 another Genoese seaman, Antoniotto Uso di Mare, sailing with Cadamosto in the service of Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal, will claim to have met, near the mouth of the Gambia, with the last descendant of the survivors of the Vivaldo expedition.

The two galleys, he is told, had sailed to the Sea of Guinea; in that sea one was stranded, but the other passed on to a place on the coast of Ethiopia-Mena or Amenuan, near the Gihon (here probably meaning the Sénégal River) where the Genoese were seized and held in close captivity.

It is uncertain how far the Vivaldi brothers reached; they may have seen or landed on the Canary Islands.

"Gozora" is a name found in some Medieval charts for Cape Non, which lies before the Canary Islands (e.g.

Caput Finis Gozole in the maps of Giovanni da Carignano (early 1300s) and the Pizzigani brothers (1367)).

The name of the ship Alegranzia may be the source for the Canary Island of Alegranza, and has led to the supposition that the brothers landed there (or that at least one of the ships capsized there).