Shores of Vespucci

Angelo Cattaneo (ed.)

Shores of Vespucci

A historical research of Amerigo Vespucci’s life and contexts

In collaboration with Francisco Contente Domingues

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available in the internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

This publication was made possible by a grant from FLAD - Fundação Luso- Americana para o Desenvolvimento and the support of FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia CHAM - Centro de Humanidades - Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Univ. Nova de Lisboa e Univ. dos Açores CH-ULisboa - Centro de História da Universidade de Lisboa

ISSN 1861-583X

ISBN 978-3-631-65601-3 (Print)

E-ISBN 978-3-653-04827-8 (E-PDF)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-70252-9 (EPUB)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-70253-6 (MOBI)

DOI 10.3726/978-3-653-04827-8

© Peter Lang GmbH

Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften

Berlin 2018

All rights reserved.

Peter Lang – Berlin · Bern · Bruxelles · New York · Oxford · Warszawa · Wien

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.

This publication has been peer reviewed.

www.peterlang.com

About the editors

Angelo Cattaneo is a Research Associate at the New University of Lisbon based at the CHAM – Centre for the Humanities and of the Laboratoire Géographie-Cités in Paris. His research focuses on the cultural construction of space from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century and the history of cultural exchanges between Europe and Asia.

Francisco Contente Domingues is Full Professor of History of Portuguese and European Expansion at the Department of History at the University of Lisbon. He is a member of the Maritime Academy, the Academy of Sciences and Por-tuguese Academy of History, and President of the International Committee for the History of Nautical Science.

About the book

This volume aims to advance the analysis about Amerigo Vespucci by con-sidering and connecting several fields of study such as literary history, philol-ogy, the history of science and cartography, economic history, and the history of ideas. The multifaceted research frames guide the reader through the com-plex vicissitudes of Amerigo Vespucci’s life. The receptions and implications explore the intense cultural and historical dynamics that shaped the decades between the end of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Contents

Angelo Cattaneo

Shores of Vespucci

I. Philology, Images and Memory

Luciano Formisano

The “Vespucci Question,” Today

Marília dos Santos Lopes

The Voyager as a Scholar. Amerigo Vespucci in Early Modern Graphical Representations

Ana Paula Avelar

Amerigo Vespucci’s Mundus Novus and the Exotic Perceptions of the Other in Sixteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Portuguese Historiography

II. Cosmography

Chet Van Duzer

New Insights on the Maps of the Vespuccis: Giorgio Antonio, Amerigo and Giovanni

Gerard González Germain

The Copy of Ptolemy’s Geography (Rome, 1478) owned by the Vespuccis

Davide Baldi

Ringmann, Waldseemüller and the Philological Cosmography of the New World

José María García Redondo

Waldseemüller’s 1507 World Map as Speculative Cartography. Landscapes on the Edge

Luís Adão da Fonseca

Islands in the Horizon: The Insular Thinking in the Writings of Amerigo Vespucci and the Early Portuguese Maritime Exploration←5 | 6→

III. Between Portugal and Spain

Consuelo Varela

Amerigo Vespucci in the Service of the Crown of Castile

Edward Collins

Vespucci, Imperial Competition, and the Casa de la Contratación, 1508–1530

IV. Beyond Iberia

Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli

Beyond Iberia: Florentine Bankers and Cabot’s Voyage to the “New Land”

Giancarlo Casale

Vespucci and the Ottomans: New Worlds for All? A description of the Americas from Seydi Ali Reis’s Book of the Surrounding Sea

Ricardo Padrón

Mundus Novus – China – Terra Australis: Successive New World Fantasies

Plates

Bibliography

Notes on the Contributors

Afterword←6 | 7→

Angelo Cattaneo

Shores of Vespucci^*

Amerigo Vespucci (Florence, 9 March 1454-Seville, 22 February 1512) and his life are among the most diffusely studied and talked about subjects within the history of the European expansion and, in particular, of the mundus novus. Three cities stand out in Vespucci’s biography: Florence, Seville and Lisbon. In Florence, he first became acquainted with the distinguished cultural ambiance surrounding Marsilio Ficino, and was under the patronage of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici (1463–1503), or Lorenzo il Popolano (Lorenzo the Peasant)—cousin of Lorenzo de’ Medici. In Seville he worked for the Florentine merchant Giannozzo Berardi, a commercial agent of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco and one of Christopher Columbus’ lenders. In Seville and Lisbon, on the other hand, Vespucci embarked on—or according to some simply invented—four extraordinary oceanic voyages, which he systematically described in his compelling written narrative, as noted by Todorov.¹ Such (real or alleged) voyages were to have taken place between 1497 and 1504, after which in 1508 Vespucci was chosen as the first Piloto Mayor (Pilot Major) of the Casa de la Contratación (the House of Trade) of Seville. Vespucci’s vicissitudes have been investigated by a substantial international cohort of historians against the backdrop of the corpus of studies on (and glorifications of) Christopher Columbus—whom, by the way, Vespucci himself met upon his first arrival at Seville thanks to Giannozzo Berardi. It was these studies that brought life to the so-called “Vespuccian question.”

The following notes want to introduce and contextualize the contributions contained in the volume, which explore some commonly studied topics related to Vespucci, but have also the merit of prompting further reflection on issues that have not been addressed by historians so far, or at least not in relation to Vespucci. Aimed at an audience of non-specialists and mainly based on documentary sources, while resting on the critical and philological contribution by Luciano Formisano, Ilaria Luzzana Caraci and Consuelo Varela, this essay frames the complex vicissitudes of Amerigo’s life, their receptions and implications, exploring the intense cultural and historical dynamics that shaped the crucial decades between the end of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth century.²←7 | 8→

In short, Vespucci’s legacy has been linked to two early sixteenth-century books: the Mundus novus and the so-called Lettera al Soderini.3 The Mundus novus was possibly first printed in Latin in Florence in 1503 (though if this edition ever existed, it is lost). Other probable prints also followed: in Paris the same year,⁴ later in Augsburg in 1504⁵ (the first edition with a precise date) and Rome,⁶ then in Strasbourg in 1505 where it was almost immediately republished under the title of De ora antarctica per regem Portugallie pridem inuenta,⁷ in a German translation in Basel⁸ and Antwerp⁹ in 1505, and lastly in Nuremberg in 1506.¹⁰ This pamphlet tells the story of a voyage carried out by Vespucci between 1501 and 1502, reaching 52˚ S. in the western South Atlantic on a ship belonging to the Portuguese crown. An important moment in the textual history of the Mundus novus was its reprinting in Venice in 1507, when the text was translated into Venetian, edited by the grammarian and cosmographer Fracanzio da Montalboddo (active in the Venetian region between the second half of the fifteenth century and the first decades of the sixteenth century),¹¹ and significantly entitled Paesi nouamente retrouati et Nouo Mondo da Alberico Vesputio Florentino intitulato. Having broadly circulated Europe, this six-book travel anthology mostly included unpublished reports and letters on the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries between 1454 and 1504.¹² The Paesi nouamente retrouati were reedited into Latin in←8 | 9→ Milan in 1508, and later into French in 1514, besides being often reprinted into Venetian until around 1520. Thanks to the number of “single editions” of the work as well as the anthology compiled by Fracanzio da Montalboddo in Latin, German and Venetian, the Mundus novus circulated widely throughout Europe in a multilingual format.

The second work, the Lettera al Soderini,13 was first printed in the Tuscan dialect in Florence in 1505 or 1506. Counting with brief biographical notes about the Florentine period, the letter describes four voyages held by Vespucci to the western South Atlantic: a first trip from 10 May 1497 to 15 October 1498 serving on Spanish ships under the command of captain Juan Díaz de Solís (a claim not all historians agree upon); a second one from 16 May 1499 to 8 September 1500 (usually accepted by historians), on Spanish vessels under the command of Alonso de Hojeda; a third trip from 10 May 1501 to 7 September 1502 on Portuguese ships under the command of Gonçalo Coelho, that is the same as in the Mundus novus (which historians mostly agree upon); and finally, a mysterious and disputed fourth trip, supposedly held between 10 May 1503 and 18 June 1504, again on Portuguese ships.