Erdogan: “Muslims discovered America, not Kolumbus”

In the year 1492 the Italian sailor Christoph Kolumbus, who drove for Spain to sea, with its fleet wanted to find a western sea route from Europe to India. It discovered coincidentally: America. Thus it stands itself for historians in story-books world-wide, is over this occurence united.

But Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan stepped now before the television cameras - and presented his own historical understanding: Therefore not Kolumbus discovered the American continent, but Muslims. “Contacts between Latin America and the Islam leave themselves to in 12. Century retrace”, said Erdogan on Saturday during a summit with Latin American Muslims in Istanbul; the speech was transferred by the television.

Kolumbus discovered first the Caribbean islands. The ancestors of the native Americans are to have already entered and settle before approximately 15,000 years the continent. However most researchers assume meanwhile Kolumbus was thereafter actually not all all this: Already around the year 1000 Scandinavian settlers are to have set their feet on the American continent.

Kolumbus' discovery was nevertheless in the modern times the crucial: The message of the existence and the following investigation and conquest of a “new world” became a turning point of world history.