ITALIAN HERITAGE SERIES
Science and Technology
The Man Who Never Was? Flavio Gioia and the Marine Compass
By Fred Peters
Preparations for Amalfi, Italy’s big commemorative event began a year in advance, in 1901. Excitement was high. A planning committee was formed. Events were being planned, including determining the location for commemorative plaques. A sculptor had been commissioned and was preparing a statue of the dignitary to be honored. He was of Flavio Gioia, the Amalfi man credited with inventing the marine compass 600 years earlier, sometime between 1295 and 1302. Not knowing an exact date for the invention, 1902 was arbitrarily selected. In spite of everyone in Amalfi knowing the name Flavio Gioia and his accomplishment there is no record of when he was born, when he died, where he lived, whether he had a family and for the sculptor, what he looked like. In fact, scholars past and present have disputed whether he ever existed. Flavio Gioia’s existence is a puzzle that is very difficult to solve. He is, as Winston Churchill so eloquently described of the USSR, “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” Consequently, it didn’t take long before Amalfi’s major event to honor its most famous citizen initiated a controversy in the history of Italian science that continues to this day. The basis for this controversy is the invention of the marine compass.
Amalfi is a small town on the west coast of Italy in the Province of Salerno: 22 miles southeast of Naples. Today it has no harbor. It’s an unlikely town to be the birthplace of the marine compass. One would think the better known Italian maritime powers of Venice, Genoa or Naples would be the more logical places. But Amalfi once did have a fine harbor. Unfortunately, an earthquake in 1343 caused a tsunami that destroyed the harbor as well as most of the town. Before then, for a short time, between 839 and 1200 A.D.. Amalfi was a Mediterranean maritime power, trading extensively with Byzantium (later Constantinople, today Istanbul) and Egypt. An indication of Amalfi’s maritime preeminence is the fact that one of its important products was the Amalfian Laws, a code of rules for maritime law that remained in force throughout the Middle Ages. Therefore, it’s not inconceivable that a naval innovation such as the marine compass should have emanated from Amalfi. The marine compass consists of basically two components, a magnetized needle and a wind rose.
The magnet has its origins in the lodestone, a black or brownish-black naturally magnetized mineral with a high luster known as magnetite. It was discovered in China hundreds of years before it was known in Europe. The Chinese, since early antiquity, knew of the lodestone’s ability to not only attract iron but to point in a specific direction—the direction they considered the most important, south. South pointing items such as fish, turtles and spoons or ladles were fashioned out of lodestone. Determining south was necessary for the important Chinese cultural practice of feng shui. Feng shui predates the discovery of the lodestone by more than 3500 years, but south had to be found astronomically. Without going into a detailed explanation, suffice it to say that historically feng shui was used (and still is today) to orient buildings, though this is an overly simplistic definition. The lodestone was used for feng shui long before its application as a compass. Chinese reference to the use of a magnetic compass for navigation dates to before 1040 A.D.or about 150 years before there is any reference to its use in Europe. It may have even been in use long before that time.
One of the earliest western references to the properties of lodestone is by the 6th century A.D. Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus. Miletus was an ancient Greek city in Anatolia (today, Turkey). The term magnet may even have come from the discovery of lodestone near the town of Magnesia which was located only 15 miles from Miletus.
The magnetic compass is a magnetized needle suspended in air, balanced on a pin or even floating in water. When left to rotate freely the needle will orient itself to the earth’s magnetic field. It will point north. Exactly when the magnetic compass began to be used for navigation in the west is a mystery. The earliest reference we have is in the 1187 A.D. writings of an English Augustinian Monk, Alexander Neckam. But Neckam never said where he saw it. Most sources credit the Italians with the first western use of the magnetic compass, so it’s possible Neckam saw a compass on a trip he’s known to have taken from Britain to Italy.
The wind rose, also called the compass rose, was used on ancient maps to display the four principal or cardinal directions—north (N), south (S), east (E) and west (W)—to let the reader know the directions of the major winds. Principal directions were known in antiquity, being defined at least 3000 years ago and recorded in the Bible. Tafon was north, Kedem east, Negev south and Yam west. By bisecting the 90 degree angle between the cardinal points eight intermediate wind directions (e.g. N, NE, E, SE, etc.) known as half winds could be displayed and bisecting the angles again yielded sixteen quarter winds (e.g., N, NE, NNE, etc.). North was indicated on the wind rose by a fleur de lis and east by a Christian cross. These symbols were intended to indicate the directions of Europe and Jerusalem.
A compass had been used by Mediterranean sailors for a long time. But it is an Amalfian marine pilot Flavio Gioia who has been credited with taking an ancient idea, a magnetized needle to point north, suspending it freely so it rotated over a sixteen point fleur de lis design wind rose and enclosing it in a small wooden box with a glass cover. This was the mariner’s compass. The name given to this invention was bussola, an ancient Italian word derived from a somewhat linguistic corruption the Latin word buxida meaning “a wooden container.” Bussola is still the Italian word for compass.
Activities were progressing smoothly and rapidly in Amalfi toward the anniversary celebration in 1902 when suddenly in May 1901 the citizens received a shock. A letter, signed by P. Timoteo Bertelli, and published in a Naples newspaper, questioned the existence of Flavio Gioia, and therefore, the very reason for the whole big event. Padre Bertelli followed his initial letter with another few weeks later explaining the results of his three decades research into the invention of the marine compass. His argument for exploding what he called “the myth of Flavio Gioia” was interesting to say the least. It was based upon an historical misunderstanding of a simple error in syntax—a missing comma. Credit for the discovery of the marine compass in Amalfi was first documented by the Italian historian Flavio Biondo in a work published in 1450 titled Italy Illustrated by Regions. In the section covering Amalfi Biondo wrote:
But it is well-known that we give glory to the people of Amalfi because the use of the magnet in navigation, which relies on the magnet’s quality of orienting itself to the north, was invented in Amalfi,
Then in 1511, sixty one years after Biondo’s attributing the invention of the compass to Amalfi, there was another reference to its founding in Amalfi. This time by the Philologist Giambatista Pio in his commentary, written in Latin, of the work of the poet Lucrezio Caro. Pio wrote:
According to tradition, the use of the magnet was invented in Amalfi, in the ancient region of Campania, by Flavio, by which method the navigators direct themselves north, an advance not known to the ancients.
The Flavio Pio refers to is Flavio Giaio. However, Bertelli argued that Pio’s Latin (inventus a Flavio traditur….) in the first part of the sentence, was misread. Pio had left out a comma. With the proper syntax, inserting a comma, the sentence, in Latin, becomes, inventus, a Flavio traditur….In this form it now reads:
As related by Flavio, Amalfi in ancient Compania invented the use of the magnet…
The comma, Bertelli pointed out, changes everything. The Flavio referred to by Pio is not Amalfian Flavio Giaio, but Flavio Biondo the historian who made the initial reference to Amalfi. Needless to say, this challenge to a 600 year old tradition, published in the popular press, caused quite a sensation not only in Amalfi. There were soon angry rebuttals and counter rebuttals to Bertelli’s interpretation by Italian scholars.
So, did Flavio Gioia exist? Bertelli could possibly be right. He points out that the last name Gioia was not added to Flavio until about three centuries later by a Neopolitan historian Seipione Mazzella. Mazzella claimed that Flavio was from Gioia, a town in Puglia and that is the origin of Flavio’s last name. For Bertilli this long time delay in assigning a last name was further evidence of nonexistence. The name Flavio, a classical Roman name doesn’t appear in any registry of names in Amalfi during the period from the late medieval to modern times. Bertelli asked the Director of State Archives in Naples to search all available documents for the time between 1268 and 1320 for any reference to the names Flavio or Gioia. None were found but even that extensive didn’t put the controversy to rest. The director reported that one folio of records for the time frame selected was missing. So, it’s not possible to say with certainty that Flavio Gioia didn’t exist. He may be recorded in that missing folio.
It’s now over 100 years since the Flavio Gioia controversy began, and it’s still going on. Chiara Frugoni, an Italian historian, recently published the results of his research into the matter. He stated that there is no doubt Flavio Gioia did not exist. Another historian, Alesandro Barbero, took Frugoni’s research and cited and confirmed his study on the Italian TV program Superquark which aired on August 7, 2008.
It’s interesting to note that the marine compass was used in conjunction with two other Italian creations, whose inventors are also unknown, and created a revolution in navigation. Both were called in Italian Compasso but were not compasses. Remember, compass in Italian is bussola. The first Compasso was a carta, a nautical map of the Mediterranean and the second a portolano. a book containing instructions for sailing the in the Mediterranean. This combination enabled cities like Venice and Genoa to become very wealthy maritime powers during the middle ages.
So, the controversy over the existence of Flavio Gioia continues. And through it all I seriously doubt there is any movement under way in Amalfi to remove the statue and commemorative plaque. It’s an interesting statue. We see a hooded man whose face, height and build was assigned by the sculptor, with a serious expression on his face, looking down at a compass in his outstretched hand. And we have to think, is this a monument to the man who never was?
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