The Venetian Discovery of America: Geographic Imagination and Print Culture in the Age of Encounters 1107150876, 9781107150874

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THE VENETIAN DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

Few Renaissance Venetians saw the New World with their own eyes. As the print capital of early modern Europe, however, Venice developed a unique relationship with the Americas. Venetian editors, mapmakers, translators, writers, and cosmographers represented the New World at times as a place that the city’s mariners had discovered before the Spanish, a world linked to Marco Polo’s China, or another version of Venice, especially in the case of Tenochtitlan. Elizabeth Horodowich explores these various and distinctive modes of imagining the New World, including Venetian rhetorics of “firstness,” similitude, othering, comparison, and simultaneity generated through forms of textual and visual pastiche that linked the wider world to the Venetian lagoon. These wide-ranging stances allowed Venetians to argue for their different but equivalent participation in the Age of Encounters. Whereas historians have traditionally focused on the Spanish conquest and colonization of the New World, and the Dutch and English mapping of it, they have ignored the wide circulation of Venetian Americana. Horodowich demonstrates how with their printed texts and maps, Venetian newsmongers embraced a fertile tension between the distant and the close. In doing so, they played a crucial yet heretofore unrecognized role in the invention of America. Elizabeth Horodowich is Professor of History at New Mexico State University. She is the author of Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice (2008) and A Brief History of Venice (2009), and is the recipient of awards and fellowships from a variety of institutions, including Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti, the American Historical Association, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

THE VENETIAN DISCOVERY OF AMERICA GEOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION AND PRINT CULTURE IN THE AGE OF ENCOUNTERS ELIZABETH HORODOWICH New Mexico State University

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107150874 doi: 10.1017/9781316596692 © Elizabeth Horodowich 2018 Published with the support of the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Publications Subsidy at Villa I Tatti This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. isbn 978-1-107-15087-4 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

to Peggy and Ron

CONTENTS

List of Figures Acknowledgments 1

2

INTRODUCTION: PRINTING THE NEW WORLD I N E A R L Y MO D E RN VE N I C E

page ix xiii

1

C O M P I L E D G E O G R A P H I E S : T HE V E N E T I A N T R A VE L O GU E A N D T H E A M E R I C A S

21

GI O V A N N I B A T T I S T A R A M U S IO’S V ENET IA N NEW WORLD

63

4

T H E V E N E T I A N MA P P I N G O F T H E A M E R I C A S

89

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VE N E T I A N S I N A M E R I C A : N I C O L Ò Z E N A N D T H E V I R T U A L E X P L O R A T I O N O F T HE N E W W O R L D

143

VE N I C E A S T E N O C H T I T L A N : T HE C O R R E S P O N D E N C E O F T HE OL D W O R L D A N D T H E N E W

173

CONCLUSION

219

3

6

Notes

227

Bibliography

287

Index

313

vii

FIGURES

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28

Jacopo Sansovino, statue of Tommaso Rangone. page 2 Paesi novamente retrovati, frontispiece. 36 Alessandro Zorzi, sketch map of the Caribbean. 44 Alessandro Zorzi, sketch map of Cuba. 45 Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of a hammock. 46 Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of a hammock. 47 Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of statues. 48 Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of a canoe. 49 Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of Cuban turtle fishing. 50 Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of islands. 51 Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of islands. 52 Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of a serpent. 53 Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of a serpent. 54 Alessandro Zorzi, sketch of Tenochtitlan. 56 Jacopo de Barbari, woodcut map of Venice. 57 The Contarini–Rosselli map. 90 Benedetto Bordone, “Terra de Lavoratore,” in Libro di Benedetto 90 Bordone. Battista Agnese, portolan map. 94 Bernardus Sylvanus, world map, in Claudii Ptolemaei Alexandrini liber geographiae cum tabulis. 96 Giacomo Gastaldi, Nueva Hispania Tabula Nova, from La geografia di Claudio Ptolemeo Alessandrino, translated by Pietro Andrea Mattioli. 97 Paolo Forlani/Bolognino Zaltieri, Il disegno del discoperto della Nova Franza. 99 Giuseppe Rosaccio, Universale descrittione di tutto il mondo. 100 La carta universale della terra ferma e isole delle Indie Occidentali (the Ramusio map), in Peter Martyr and Gonzalo Hernández de Oviedo, 102 Summario de la generale historia de l’Indie Occidentali. Benedetto Bordone, world map, in Libro di Benedetto Bordone. 103 Sebastian Münster, Tabula novarum insularum, in Cosmographiae uniuersalis. 104 Pietro Coppo, world map, in Portolano. 106 Giuseppe Rosaccio, map of the New World, in Teatro del cielo e della terra. 107 Giacomo Gastaldi, La Nuova Francia. 108 ix

x

LIST OF FIGURES

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Giacomo Gastaldi, Cosmographia universalis. Giacomo Gastaldi, Universale. Giovanni Francesco Camocio, “Carta del Nuovo Mondo in 9 Pezzi.” Giacomo Gastaldi, detail of Cosmographia universalis. Giacomo Gastaldi, detail of Cosmographia universalis. Giovanni Francesco Camocio, detail of “Carta del Nuovo Mondo in 9 Pezzi,” Correr cartella 32/70. Giuseppe Rosaccio, detail of Universale descrittione di tutto il mondo. Giuseppe Rosaccio, allegory of Asia, Universale descrittione di tutto il mondo. Giuseppe Rosaccio, allegory of America, Universale descrittione di tutto il mondo. Giuseppe Rosaccio, detail of Universale descrittione di tutto il mondo. Giovanni Francesco Camocio, detail of “Carta del Nuovo Mondo in Pezzi.” Giovanni Francesco Camocio, detail of a griffin, “Carta del Nuovo Mondo in 9 Pezzi.” Ferando Bertelli, detail of a griffin, Universale descrittione. Giovanni Francesco Camocio, detail of cannibalism in Brazil, “Carta del Nuovo Mondo in 9 Pezzi.” Giuseppe Rosaccio, detail of cannibalism, Universale descrittione di tutto il mondo. Giacomo Gastaldi, detail of Cosmographia universalis. Giacomo Gastaldi, Dell’universale. Giacomo Gastaldi, Universale della parte del mondo nuovamente ritrovata, in Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi. Barent Langenes, Typus orbis terrarum. Gerardus Mercator, detail of Nova et aucta orbis terrae descriptio ad usum navigantium emendate accommodata. Matteo Ricci, Li Zhizao, and Zhang Wentao, detail of Kunyu wanguo quantu (Map of the Ten Thousand Countries of the Earth). Nicolò Zen, Carta da Navegar, in Dello scoprimento. Michele Tramezzino, detail of double-hemisphere world map. Paolo Forlani, detail of Universale descrittione di tutta la terra conoscivta fin qui. Hernán Cortés, “Tenochtitlan,” in Praeclara Ferdi[n]andi Cortesii de nova maris oceani Hyspania narratio. Benedetto Bordone, “Venice,” in Libro di Benedetto Bordone. Benedetto Bordone, “Temistitan,” in Libro di Benedetto Bordone. Benedetto Bordone, “Cuba,” in Libro di Benedetto Bordone. Giulio Ballino, “Venice,” in De’disegni delle più illustri città et fortezze del mondo. Giulio Ballino, “Timistitan,” in De’disegni delle più illustri città et fortezze del mondo. Thomaso Porcacchi, “Venice,” in L’isole piu famose del mondo. Thomaso Porcacchi, “Temistitan,” in L’isole piu famose del mondo.

108 109 110 114 115 117 118 119 120 121 122 122 123 124 125 126 127 129 139 140 141 144 176 177 180 181 182 183 187 188 189 190

LIST OF FIGURES

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

Pietro Bertelli, “Atahualpa” and “A Noblewoman from America,” in Diversarum nationum habitus. Theodor De Bry, “Algonquian Woman and Child,” in Les grands voyages, vol. 1, plate 10. Cesare Vecellio, “Algonquian Woman and Child,” in Habiti antichi et moderni. Theodor De Bry, “The King and Queen of Florida Taking a Stroll,” in Les grands voyages, vol. 2, plate 39. Cesare Vecellio, “The Queen of Florida,” in Habiti antichi et moderni. Theodor De Bry, “A Chief Lady of Pomeiooc,” in Les grands voyages, vol. 1, plate 8. Cesare Vecellio, “A Married Woman from Virginia,” in Habiti antichi et moderni. Theodor De Bry, “Timucuan Warfare,” in Les grands voyages, vol. 2, plate 18. Cesare Vecellio, “A Floridian Page,” in Habiti antichi et moderni. Theodor De Bry, “Timucuan Warriors,” in Les grands voyages, vol. 2, plate 14. Cesare Vecellio, “A Centurion from Virginia,” in Habiti antichi et moderni. Cesare Vecellio, “A Mexican Youth,” in Habiti antichi et moderni. Cesare Vecellio, “A Woman from Peru,” in Habiti antichi et moderni. Francesco Grisselini, “Map of Asia and America,” Sala dello Scudo, Palazzo Ducale, Venice.

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193 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 209 210 220

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When we write about history, we always write autobiographies. Sometimes the connections between writing about the past and writing about ourselves are clearer than at other times, but in the case of this book, I have always known that when I was thinking about Venice and the Americas, I was considering my own experiences as a person from the New World in the Old. When I was a graduate student, I spent many summers with an extended family in a capanna or beach hut on the Lido, the littoral island that separates the Venetian lagoon from the Adriatic. In their company, I was surely a bit of a curiosity as one of the only foreigners in sight (or at least in earshot) on a beach otherwise crowded with locals. I was eager to learn Venetian and to continue to practice Italian, so with our feet in the sand, we made endless talk, small and large, on topics ranging from the temperature of the water that day to what had looked good at the market that morning. Since we did not always have a lot in common, our conversation often drifted toward America. What was it like? How expensive was it to live there? What was I doing in Italy, and didn’t my family miss me at home? No one in the beach hut had ever been to the United States, but it quickly became apparent that despite this fact, many not only had strong opinions about America but also seemed eager to assert a masterful knowledge of it. Over the years, I heard a series of regular refrains: that America had little history or culture, that it was rich, that family values were often lacking, and most importantly, that the food was terrible. As an American surrounded by these Venetians, I was often left feeling defensive. Of course, America could be horrible, but like any other country, it could also be great. But more significantly, over the years, a stronger reaction took hold: a growing fascination with the way that Venetians imaginatively represented the United States in their mind’s eye. How could so many people who had never been to America have such an assured and confident knowledge of what life there was like? And did early modern Venetians, who had also not gone to the New World in any notable numbers, also claim to possess such a knowledge? As my research slowly but surely revealed, they did. This book was born in these conversations that took place more than twenty years ago. I am eternally grateful to this family for embracing me as one of their own, and have many others to thank who, over the past several decades, have xiii

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

contributed each in their own way to the book I have written here. This work is the product of generous funding from many institutions, without which it could never have been written. These include the Atlantic History Seminar at Harvard University, the Renaissance Society of America, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, all of which provided grants for short-term research in Venice. A fellowship at Harvard University’s Villa I Tatti in Florence (2010–2011) allowed me to complete the bulk of my research, and played a key role in the formation of these chapters and their arguments by allowing me to flesh out my ideas in the daily company of other scholars of the Italian Renaissance. I am very grateful to all of these fellows, from whom I learned so much and whose company I enjoyed immensely. A short-term residential fellowship as a Sixteenth-Century Society Scholar at the Newberry Library (2014) gave me the chance to expand my research on Venetian printed texts, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers (2016–2017), and the associated financial support connected to this fellowship from the College of Arts and Sciences at New Mexico State University, allowed me to complete this manuscript. I am especially grateful to have been the recipient of a Gladys Krieble Delmas Publication Subvention, as well as a Lila Acheson Wallace - Reader’s Digest Subsidy, both of which allowed this book to be richer in images than would otherwise have been possible. This book has benefited from the comments and suggestions of a great variety of people at a range of conferences and invited talks at various stages of the manuscript’s production. While it is impossible to list them all here, I am particularly indebted to those who hosted these presentations and the feedback I gleaned from them, including John Alcorn, Melissa Conn, Virginia Cox, Paula Findlen, Nathalie Hester, John Hunt, Cindy Klestinec, Lino Pertile, Pier Mattia Tommasino, and Marsha Weisiger. In addition, James Akerman, Federica Ambrosini, Maria Matilde Benzoni, Surekha Davies, Davide Domenici, Massimo Donattini, Catherine Kovesi, Alexander Nagel, Nicholas Popper, Sean Roberts, Ann Rosalind Jones, Anne Ruderman, Alessandra Russo, and Chet Van Duzer all helped me consider complex questions and offered invaluable feedback along the way. I learned much from Camille Serchuk’s masterful knowledge of the history of cartography, which played a critical role in shaping Chapter 4. I am deeply appreciative of Linda Carroll for her unfailing help as a translator of Venetian; she is a true maestra of the dialect, and I cannot thank her enough. My research on Venice and the New World has been published in a number of forms over the years. I am grateful to the anonymous readers at the Sixteenth-Century Journal and Nicholas Terpstra and the anonymous readers at Renaissance Quarterly for their feedback and the opportunity these publications gave me to explore my ideas in print.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to many at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, who over the years have assisted me in navigating their library; I have enjoyed getting to know all of them, and their assistance proved crucial in the making of this book. I would not have been able to complete this work without the Interlibrary Loan office at New Mexico State University, whose services I have surely pushed to the limits over the course of this book’s production. The expert hands of Asya Graf, and especially Beatrice Rehl, guided this book from proposal to physical incarnation; they are masters of their craft, and it was a pleasure to work with both of them. In addition, I thank the four anonymous readers that they located to read my manuscript, each of whom provided invaluable feedback for the final version of this book, though of course whatever errors remain are my own. I offer a humble and special thank you to William Eamon, John Martin, and Edward Muir; without the magic that flows from their pens, this book would not exist, and I will always be in their debt. Lastly, I give a particular thanks to a handful of people who have been, surely for better and for worse from their point of view, consistently involved in the production of this book as readers, translators, fellow researchers, critical eyes, and devil’s advocates, including John Gagne, Emanuele Lugli, Lia Markey, Timothy McCall, Andrea Rizzi, and Monika Schmitter. My family, though dizzyingly complicated and impossible to enumerate here, has played no small part in contributing to my mental universe as a historian. Its members have helped me see the past in ways I never would have without them, and through it all, each of them has displayed an unfailing confidence in me, even in moments when I had little myself. They will always be united for me in the pages of this book. I especially thank Louis; he is the apple of my eye, and I could not have completed this work without his technical support and unflappable humor. I thank Bianca for keeping me company, and always being by my side. Finally, I thank Kenneth Hammond for things too numerous to list here. Mostly, though, I thank him for making New Mexico, so far from the Venetian lagoon, the warmest home one could ever have.

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ONE

INTRODUCTION Printing the New World in Early Modern Venice

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. – T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

The winding course of the Merceria – the historic, commercial thoroughfare that runs through the heart of Venice between the Rialto and San Marco – eventually leads to the curious façade of the church of San Giuliano, easy to miss in the bustling city center. Set back in the campo of the church and slightly removed from this central artery is a memorial to the doctor and philologist Tommaso Rangone (c. 1493–1577) (Figure 1). A triumphal arch surrounds a lunette above the church’s doorway, framing a bronze statue of Rangone, seated in a reconstruction of his study, all perched atop a fictive sarcophagus. Rangone commissioned the prominent Venetian architect Jacopo Sansovino, at the peak of his fame and influence, to undertake this memorial. The lunette functions as a tomb monument, in which Sansovino creatively transported the location of Rangone’s grave from the inside of the church to its more visible and monumental outside wall, transforming San Giuliano into a kind of selfglorifying, personal mausoleum.1 Originally from Ravenna, Rangone settled in Venice in 1528, eventually becoming a lecturer at the University of Padua, an astrologer and astronomer, a doctor to the Venetian fleet, and an advisor to the republic on issues of 1

2

THE VENETIAN DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

1. Jacopo Sansovino, statue of Tommaso Rangone. San Giuliano, Venice, 1553–1557. With permission from Alinari Archives, Florence.

sanitation. His social origins increasingly at odds with his newfound wealth, he spent much of his life aspiring for status in the city and harboring hopes of being admitted into the Venetian nobility. Rangone was an avid collector, and his library included a variety of globes, charts, and world maps of the Americas, as well as precious stones from the New World.2 Like many nouveaux riches and Venetian cittadini, he purchased his reputation, in part by developing an impressive career as a patron of architecture. He became well known for his obsession with having his image prominently displayed in the institutions he supported. His ambitions as procurator of the church of San Giuliano led him to approach Sansovino, who completed the commissioned façade in 1559. Executed in collaboration with his student Alessandro Vittoria, who cast Rangone’s bronze statue, the façade was contrived by Sansovino to represent a calculated celebration of Rangone’s career. Latin, Greek, and Hebrew inscriptions, as well as a lectern, a celestial globe, and classicizing architectural elements in Istrian stone, all surround the seated Rangone and demonstrate his familiarity with the world of classical antiquity in ways early modern viewers would have expected. More surprisingly, however, Sansovino also included a terrestrial

INTRODUCTION

globe turned to display the Atlantic World, including the eastern coast of the American continent, and Rangone’s hand, extended just below it, grasps a three-dimensional branch of guaiacum: a medicinal plant from that same part of the world, believed to cure syphilis, also thought to have its origins in the Americas.3 A specialist in this disease, Rangone was the author of De mali Galleci ortu et nomine (1537). Sansovino’s monument emphasized Rangone’s learned image not only through traditional Renaissance motifs such as a lectern, books, and classical inscriptions but also with a map of the New World and a sculptural embodiment of its products. Notably, the architect memorialized the public virtues of a private citizen in Venice in part by exalting his medical expertise as informed by his knowledge of the New World. That is to say, by the middle of the sixteenth century, an image of culture and learning in the eyes of Venetian patrons, artists, and audiences was represented not only through the language of classicism but also through a rhetoric of global worldliness and a portrayal of the Americas, just a stone’s throw away from the Piazza San Marco itself and the ceremonial heart of the city.4 Even the most casual student of Venice and its history knows that Venice is a city of the East. Founded at intentional remove from the crossroads of Roman trade and civilization, the city’s architecture – its ogee arches, mihrab windows, and mosaics – mimics forms from Cairo and Damascus, emphasizing visual motifs from the Byzantine, Islamic, and especially Mamluk worlds in the Eastern Mediterranean. Venice is, uncontestably, an Eastern city, in its foundation myths, historic relationships of trade, and aesthetics.5 What is less known, however, is that during the course of the sixteenth century, Venice also became a city of the Americas: not so much in its visual, material, or even commercial forms, but in its print culture and, more significantly, in the mental universe of its learned citizens and their ways of thinking about the wider world. Very few Venetians actually traveled to the New World in the early modern period, yet a variety of Venetian armchair travelers – writers, editors, mapmakers, printmakers, and cosmographers – developed a series of reactions to the Americas that revealed Venetian visions of European exploration. These visions often resisted or denied the importance of Iberian expansion by downplaying Iberian achievements in comparison to the glory of the Venetian past or by inserting Venetians as fictive or virtual players into the drama of the Age of Encounters. Venetians at times also embraced the emergence of these new empires by seeing curious and surprising reflections of themselves in news and images from the Americas; for instance, they valorized Columbus and rooted his voyages in the travels of Marco Polo, saw Venice and Tenochtitlan as reflections of one another, and likened Italians to New World peoples. A variety of sixteenth-century Venetian texts, maps, and prints about the New World demonstrate how learned elites often viewed the Columbian voyages,

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the conquests of Mexico and Peru, and encounters in the New World in general through the lens of Venetian history, especially the city’s colonialism in the Mediterranean and exploration of the Far East. This book explores the ways in which Venetian culture grappled with the surge of new knowledge arriving from the Americas and employed a variety of rhetorical strategies to reconfigure Italian and European conceptions of geography and assert the centrality of Venice in the first global age. Rather than through painted representations, the collection of American objects, or actual travel to the Americas, Venetians developed their ideas about the New World through the matrix of their presses, which were noted around Europe for their voluminous output. At the end of the sixteenth century, when the Roman Inquisition pressed the Friulian miller Menocchio to explain the origins of his heretical thoughts, he responded that his ideas had come from books printed in Venice.6 In I marmi, the Venetian writer and poligrafo Anton Francesco Doni claimed that even Florentines – coming from a city amply furnished with booksellers – arrived in Venice armed with lists of books that could be found only in the lagoon city.7 More than 150 printshops and bookstores crowded Venice’s city center between San Marco and the Rialto, and in the preface to his Latin grammar De latinae linguae reparation (Venice, 1493), Marcantonio Sabellico, then a teacher of rhetoric at the school of San Marco in Venice, described pedestrians unable to tear themselves way from the stalls and piles of books displayed for sale in the Merceria.8 Erasmus himself remarked on the fame and pervasiveness of Venetian print culture, pointing out that books, maps, and prints “shipped from Venice to foreign countries immediately find a readier market merely because they bear that city’s imprint.”9 Venetian prints and books, beginning with the printed texts of Aldus Manutius and continuing through the sixteenth century, traveled everywhere and were avidly sought out by European readers.10 Writers also knew that Venice was the print capital of Europe and endeavored to publish their texts there; as we shall see, Italian cosmographers and naturalists such as Bernardo Sylvanus, Lorenzo D’Anania, Pietro Andrea Mattioli, and Castore Durante all brought their New World texts to the lagoon city for publication, and every significant cartographer of note that built a career in the city had foreign origins. The European Age of Encounters unfolded concurrently with the print revolution, and they directly influenced each other.11 Columbus’s landfall at San Salvador retains a pride of place in global history, more so than the Norse settlement in Newfoundland, in large part because Columbus wrote about his voyage, and printing presses rapidly disseminated his news. If early modernism was characterized by a great deal of mobility, print represented a “critically important strand in this constellation of change and movement.”12 The relationship between print and discovery, however, was not always predictable. The absence of printing in the Ottoman world, for instance, handicapped

INTRODUCTION

scholarly exchange about otherwise intrepid Ottoman exploration, and while Portugal was on the forefront of fifteenth-century navigation, logging more voyages than any other European state, most travel narratives produced by the Portuguese remained unpublished manuscripts or first appeared in print in Italy, or later, in the Low Countries, rather than in Portugal itself.13 The same can be said for Spain.14 Unlike the Ottomans or the Portuguese, the Venetians did not undertake global exploration to any notable degree in the sixteenth century, but Venice became one of the most important centers of print culture in early modern Europe. The Venetian press grew to publish between 15,000 and 17,500 editions in the sixteenth century alone. This represented half or more of all the books printed in Cinquecento Italy, and the expansion of the Venetian press neatly coincided with the accelerated pace of European exploration.15 Generally speaking, printshops in Florence distinguished themselves for their publication of classical texts and literature; in Rome, for sacred texts and theology; in Turin, for scientific texts; and in Venice, for Arabic texts, history, philosophy, and travel literature.16 If print “revolutionize[d] the transfer of knowledge in the early modern world,” Venetian presses, in this way, brought the New World to Europe.17 If Italy in general was “one of the greatest centers for the spread of information about the discoveries,” Venice developed a unique position with respect to the discoveries as the print capital of early modern Europe.18 Venetians famously lived by news as much as by trade, and the city represented “the leading center of information and communication in Europe,” rivaled only by the cities of Genoa, Antwerp, and Rome.19 Among the seemingly endless kinds of information and arrays of books to be found in the sixteenthcentury city, texts about the New World abounded. As Theodore Cachey put it, “writing represented for these Italians a key instrument of spatial inventionintervention,” suggesting that while the Iberians conquered and colonized land and territory in a variety of new worlds, Venetian editors and translators produced and mediated an understanding of the conquests in print and, in turn, colonized the knowledge.20 Italian and indeed European literature about the New World was largely shaped in Venice, as the city occupied a prominent position in the transmission of information about the Americas.21 News of the Columbian voyages arrived first in Barcelona, Rome, Paris, and Florence, and Venetian presses in fact published nothing about the New World in the fifteenth century, making Venetian printmen latecomers to New World publication.22 After 1505, however, Venice functioned as one of the main clearinghouses of New World information through its production and diffusion of texts about exploration and conquest in the Americas, including accounts of the Columbian voyages, the travels of Vespucci, the conquest of the Yucatan and central Mexico, and Pizarro’s conquest of Peru. For the encounter with the Americas to produce knowledge, it needed to be textually

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represented, and the Venetians clearly capitalized on this process, avidly collecting information about the Americas and mediating the dissemination of this knowledge to the rest of Italy and Europe. Europeans often learned of Spanish activities through Italian translations, and Italian literature and maps were regularly among the first to offer representations of New World events, places, and commodities. To list just a few such examples: the first known printed world map to depict North America and the Columbian voyages was the Contarini–Rosselli map (1506) (Chapter 4, Figure 16), designed in part by the Venetian cosmographer Giovanni Matteo Contarini and most likely printed in Venice. Benedetto Bordone’s isolario (1528), entitled Il libro di Benedetto Bordone, contained the first printed map specifically of what we today call North America (Chapter 4, Figure 17).23 Venetian presses produced some of the earliest and most significant treatments of Columbus’s voyages.24 The city’s publications first described and depicted both the tomato and the cacao plant.25 Venetian maps were among the earliest to employ the toponyms of Canada and Brazil.26 The second edition of Benedetto Bordone’s isolario (1534) offered the first printed account of Pizarro’s conquests in Peru, and the earliest discussion of Peruvian architecture and urban planning in Cuzco was also first published in Venice.27 “Firstness” is by no means always an important indicator of historical significance; nevertheless, in this instance, this concentration of firsts pointed to the central role the city would play in the transmission of geographic knowledge to Europe. In addition, Venetian print culture contributed directly to the formation of the atlas – and the New World’s place in it – as well as to the creation of the Black Legend. The staggering quantity and variety of Venetian printed texts and images about the Americas prompt questions about how Venetians obtained their knowledge and what they had to say about lands they had never seen, questions that have hitherto been overlooked as a result of the traditional understanding that Venetians were little concerned with events in the Atlantic World. While the idea of an American Venice may at first seem surprising, in many ways, it should not be. The Portuguese had begun to explore “unknown” worlds along the African coast in the mid-fifteenth century; however, aside from these Portuguese endeavors, Venetians had otherwise developed an informed, global mentality long before much of the rest of Europe, so much so that from their perspective, Habsburg expansion was in many ways a mere extension of what Venetians already knew. Venice had long-established and tangible links to the Far East, allowing for a worldly consciousness that went far beyond the Mediterranean.28 As the Venetian traveler to the Near East Giosafat Barbaro (1413–1494) put it, “a large part of this [world] . . . would be unknown if Venetian merchants and sailors hadn’t discovered it.”29 Knowledge of the New World – even as explorers began to question the degree to

INTRODUCTION

which this “new world” was a part of Asia – was not new, but merely confirmed and extended what Venetians had already known for centuries: that Asia was on the far side of the known world, and that its riches exceeded expectations. Compared to the Venetians, most other European powers had relatively little substantive knowledge of what lay beyond the Holy Land before the end of the fifteenth century. Europeans had compiled the Hereford world map, gone on crusades, hosted Mongol ambassadors at their courts, seasoned their dishes with pepper, cloves, and nutmeg, and read Marco Polo, Prester John, and Mandeville; they understood intellectually that a wider world existed and had some sense of what was out there. Western knowledge of the non-European world, however, often remained shadowy and confused, consisting largely of scraps of information and fanciful legends. Italians in general, especially the Venetians and the Genoese, could by contrast claim the praxis of more global engagement, especially with the faraway world of the East.30 Venetian horizons extended from the North Sea to China, from Poland to North and West Africa, Persia, and India, all before 1492. The Venetians were by no means without parallel; there were Florentines in Timbuktu in the fourteenth century, and late medieval Jewish merchant families maintained wide connections between Spain, Kiev, and India. Nevertheless, among Europeans broadly cast, Venetians were precocious. They were among the few who had the most knowledge of the wider world before the Columbian voyages. As the historian Alberto Tenenti put it, “In Asia, the Venetians found themselves confronted with such a rich array of customs and practices that the Iberians or other westerners did not discover anything substantially new in the Americas. [The ideas of] discovery and anthropological engagement were for them already well established before [Europeans] arrived on the shores of the New World.”31 According to Tenenti, there exists no example of Venetian travelers employing the expression “other world” even among the most distant lands or in reaction to the most unusual foreign practices, since Venetians had the sense that “all regions were a part of one world and their inhabitants a part of a unified humanity.”32 Tenenti surely exaggerated – indeed, any reader of Marco Polo knows that he occasionally raised an eyebrow at the things that he saw – yet Venetian print culture confirms the existence of a grain of truth in Tenenti’s ideas. Knowledge of the New World, as much as it was “news,” remained a mere extension of a pre-existing global mentality and an affirmation of Venetians’ age-old knowledge of the expansiveness of the world. And as we shall see, Marco Polo figured prominently in Venetian printed texts about the New World, which was, for many Venetians, just another part of Polo’s Asia. Polo served as Venetians’ most fundamental reference point for travel and exploration and framed Venetians’ understanding of the Americas. Many if not most authors of Venetian Americana

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understood the New World through the matrix of Polo and his travels in Asia, and Venetians regularly linked Polo, in a variety of ways, to Columbus and the exploration of the New World. Though a seemingly unassailable maritime and territorial empire in the late Middle Ages – the center of the European spice trade, with a virtual monopoly in the trade of pepper – Venice suffered substantial territorial losses in the first half of the sixteenth century. In the summer of 1509, the League of Cambrai spectacularly defeated Venetian forces at Agnadello, resulting in the loss of almost the entire Venetian mainland state in the battle that has come to symbolize the end of the age of Venetian triumphalism.33 Among other maritime defeats, Venice lost the Peloponnesian island of Modone – one of the strategic “eyes” of the republic – to Ottoman forces in 1500, followed by its colony on Corfu in 1537. Much of this territory was recovered, but Venetian superiority in Mediterranean and European trade was slowly eclipsed by the emerging supremacy of Spanish, Ottoman, and Northern European traders. Among these, the Habsburgs especially humbled and hemmed in Italy; they colonized roughly a third of Italian territory in the sixteenth century, adding to Venetian concerns in the face of Spanish advancement. Venetians also demonstrated considerable worry about the newly plotted Portuguese maritime route to India and its potential to encroach upon the city’s spice trade. Managing to shift from international markets to a series of more regional and local ones during the course of the sixteenth century, the Venetian economy was not as seriously damaged by these changes as historians once thought.34 Nevertheless, the city’s commercial fortunes were in decline in exactly the same time period that Iberian empires were on the rise. Confronted with these changes, Venetian writers, printmen, editors, cosmographers, and cartographers wielded their editorial and artistic tools to make sense of the new global order, mobilizing a variety of rhetorical strategies to shore up images of Venetian superiority at a time when the city’s political and economic prestige were on the wane. A consideration of the relationship between Venice and the Americas necessarily entails noting that the terminology surrounding the history of early modern European exploration has long been fraught with anachronism and Eurocentrism. It is largely framed by the colonial experience and its binary identities of colonizer–colonized and colony–metropole, in turn often missing more nuanced and hybrid forms of interactions.35 It is difficult to situate observers like Venetians amid this language, since they existed on neither side of these relationships, and in many ways challenge such binary thought. Replacing the “Age of Discovery” or the “Age of Exploration” with the more neutral and evenly weighted “Age of Encounters” helps to overcome the limitations of some of these binaries by recognizing these complex global interactions as encounters among different parts of the world rather than the “discovery” of one part by another. Yet the notion of discovery remains

INTRODUCTION

problematic in other ways as well. Contemporary Ottoman activity in the Indian Ocean, for instance, tends to be less known than the time-honored narratives of the European landing in the Americas, but in terms of the territory added to the Ottoman sovereigns’ sway, the achievements of Columbus and Cortés were dwarfed by those of their Turkish contemporaries. Far from a pale imitation of the European voyages of exploration, Ottoman expansion into the Indian Ocean was much greater than that of Europeans in the Atlantic. As the historian Felipe Fernández-Armésto put it, whereas Muslim merchants were extremely well connected, the European age of expansion was launched “from the insecure edges of a contracting civilization” on the part of small and sparsely populated states that were only scantily endowed in natural resources compared to the wealthy Ottoman Empire at the height of its power.36 Furthermore, as Eviatar Zerubavel has persuasively argued, America was by no means “discovered” in 1492; it took Europeans hundreds of years to fully grasp its geography.37 The notion of discovery – historians are quick to remind us – is entirely relative.38 In addition, it remains impossible to fully neutralize basic terms such as “America,” “New World,” or even “Western Hemisphere,” all of which remain laden with Eurocentric and colonial meaning. Along similar lines, the Atlantic was just emerging in the sixteenth century as a geopolitical entity; the “Atlantic World” represents a way of describing this region that has evolved only since the 1960s, and it too is anachronistic and imperfect.39 Though some scholars find this lexicon to be problematic, many if not most of these terms have become conventional, and I too will use them here. The concept of discovery, furthermore, is not entirely to be discarded, since where the reception of ideas and information about the Americas in Europe was concerned, Europeans “discovered” a lot during the Age of Encounters. The act of discovery – of both the self and the other – happened as much in Italy as it did in the New World. Venetians were among the most significant virtual and vicarious explorers of the Americas, and investigating the myriad ways in which they received and configured knowledge and representations of the New World helps to move discussions about the Age of Encounters beyond the acts of conquest and domination, as well as beyond the more obvious commercial, political, and economic components of conquest. While the actual activities and experiences of Iberian and other agents in the Americas were, of course, entirely structured by their colonial ambitions, Venetian engagement with the Americas was devoid of colonial implications. This book emphasizes, therefore, the complexity of the term “discovery” and uses it to discuss a land that always existed. Whenever “discovery” is employed here, it is to evoke the exploratory nature with which Venetians reacted to the New World. While some Italians traveled to the Americas in the early modern period, for the most part, Venetians – and the Europeans who read their

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printed texts – did not “discover” the New World by going there but by reading about it at home. They made their own discovery of America, mostly secondhand, and in doing so, discovered much about themselves. That is, they learned much about their own anxieties, interests, and identities, which they then communicated to Europe at large through the mechanism of print. Pursuing these claims, The Venetian Discovery of America contributes to our understanding of how Europeans wrestled with the conceptual challenges of discovery and conquest during the making of the early modern Atlantic World. This scholarship includes the venerable studies of John Huxtable Elliott, The Old World and the New (1970), Anthony Grafton’s New Worlds, Ancient Texts (1992), Anthony Pagden’s European Encounters with the New World (1993), and Karen Ordahl Kupperman’s seminal volume America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750 (1995). To date, no one has explored these concepts through the lens of Venice, despite the fact that Venice is commonly acknowledged as one of the most important centers for the production of texts and maps of the New World.40 Along these lines, this study considers how knowledge is mediated, building on works such as Edmundo O’Gorman’s The Invention of America. Again, in this context, the Venetian case is a fascinating one deserving greater scrutiny. As the pivot of European preeminence shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, how older, Mediterranean powers like Venice sought to defend their centrality in changing circumstances will tell us much about the movement and politics of knowledge: one of the essential goals of this study. Scholarship among colonial Latin Americanists and ethnohistorians has consistently worked to uncover the agency of participants in the New World encounters who did not leave written records. It has revealed both indigenous ontologies and the role of Africans in the early modern Atlantic, and has encouraged historians to de-emphasize the role of the nation in the Atlantic World in favor of more hybrid perspectives.41 While not the subject of my investigation here, these studies remind us of the myriad ways in which European knowledge of the New World was regularly mediated by and derived from forms of indigenous knowledge. In European historiography, the acts of conquest, the imperial gaze, the politics of colonialism, and relationships between Europeans and indigenous peoples, by contrast, have traditionally garnered the most attention, with a customary focus on Iberian, French, or English interactions in the Atlantic World. For instance, Barbara Fuchs has demonstrated how the Spanish conquest of the Americas acted as an extension of the reconquista of the Moors, and Ricardo Padrón has tied the invention of America in literature and cartography to the development of “Spanish grandeza.”42 Michael Householder’s Inventing Americans in the Age of Discovery focuses on the English colonization of North America through the study of English travel writing, revising David Quinn’s comprehensive

INTRODUCTION

chronological survey of England’s engagement with the Americas.43 Indeed, many works that bill themselves as Atlantic histories focus almost exclusively on Britain and its colonies, and one historian went so far as to claim that “Atlantic history is in danger of becoming . . . dominated by the rise of the British Empire, and the birth of the United States.”44 While Iberian expansion was never monolithic – Spain remained more interested in conquest and colonization, while Portugal focused more on developing sea-based networks of trade – there is, of course, no question that Iberian powers dominated New World exploration in the first half of the sixteenth century.45 While understanding the dynamics of imperial power remains essential in the study of New World colonialism, examining how ideas and images from the Americas were received in Europe promotes an understanding of what those who never went to the New World – in effect, many more in number than those who actually undertook these voyages – made of these encounters. A few works such as Benjamin Schmidt’s Innocence Abroad, Michael Wintroub’s A Savage Mirror, Christine Johnson’s The German Discovery of the World, and Carina Johnson’s Cultural Hierarchy in SixteenthCentury Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans have explored the reception of ideas about the New World in other parts of Europe such as the Low Countries, France, and Germany.46 Stephanie Leitch has similarly demonstrated how early modern Germans did not stake claims over India, Africa, or the New World, yet nevertheless demonstrated a keen interest in representing the inhabitants of these lands with their presses.47 Venice clearly was not the only place that did not have a territorial empire yet maintained other sorts of interests in the Americas; at various times, the German lands, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Florence also fell into this category. However, Anglophone scholarship has largely overlooked how ideas about the Americas were received in Italy, in part because it is assumed that Italians were largely indifferent to the matter. Fernand Braudel, for instance, argued that “the Italians took part in the great discoveries – Venezuela is after all, little Venice – but the Italian population was not short of space at this period; the bourgeoisie was not interested in the world beyond the Mediterranean horizon.”48 The historian Peter Burke similarly remarked that “the Italians . . . responded warmly to the discoveries at first . . . but they seem to have lost interest in the course of the sixteenth century.”49 Until recently, the Italian response had been either conspicuously absent from or noted anecdotally in pan-European studies of the encounter.50 This is now beginning to change. The place of the New World in the early modern Italian consciousness had been amply considered by Italian scholars, and increasingly in Anglophone scholarship as well.51 While Italy did not become a colonial power in the Americas, Italians remained deeply concerned about how Iberian expansion would affect their place in the world, and the Venetian case illustrates this

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amply. This book pursues two distinct but related intellectual itineraries. First, it articulates the position of Venetian sources in the broader context of scholarship that has considered the reception of American knowledge in Europe. Second, it seeks to reconceptualize established Italian historiography (and its often outdated notions of discovery) in the framework of more recent scholarship about print culture, representation, conceptions of geography, and global history. As Stephen Greenblatt has argued, we can hardly speak of generic European practices of representation since European states expressed a variety of perspectives on the wider world. Catholics and Protestants saw different things and asked different questions, as did Iberians, Germans, and Italians. We better understand European responses to the first age of globalization if we attempt to understand them in their variety and specificity.52 Considering just the case of Italy, there existed a great diversity of regional responses to the New World. Indeed, the idea of Italy as a single political entity did not exist in the early modern period; Italy was an arbitrary abstraction that arose in the nineteenth century, and one that sixteenth-century individuals would have embraced little, if at all.53 Unlike the more politically unified states of France or Spain, Italy remained a conglomeration of numerous, independent states in the early modern period, yet with a shared geography and, to some degree, a shared linguistic and cultural heritage. It was dominated by the Habsburgs and consisted of a variety of hybrid states that were culturally and politically both Italian and Spanish, and various Italian states maintained decidedly distinct and different relationships to and interests in the Americas. These interests sometimes overlapped, but also varied regularly, and often remarkably, so that transcultural interactions typically occurred not between Italy and other parts of the world but between individual Italian states and other cultures: for instance, between Venice and Valladolid, or between Venice and Antwerp. For these reasons, “Italy” as used here refers to the multiple and changing republics and principalities of the Italian peninsula and their subjects in the early modern period, while at the same time acknowledging the various and changing identities and loyalties that both individuals and particular Italian states experienced.54 Since Italian involvement in the New World did not revolve around a centralized state or sense of imperium, understanding the relationship between Italy and the Americas involves acknowledging the discrete regional centers where Italian knowledge of the Americas was produced, each of which maintained a different local character.55 Romans acquired news and information about the Americas both from the papal court and from the Jesuits.56 In Genoa, aristocratic families commemorated Columbus in painted cycles and in silver pieces within their palaces.57 Naples was the site of the transmission of scientific and botanical literature, filtered into Italy through the vast networks

INTRODUCTION

of the Habsburg Empire. In Florence, as Lia Markey has described, the Medici grand dukes collected American objects, such as featherwork and Mixtec masks, and artists regularly represented the New World in drawings, frescoes, and studiolo paintings.58 For the wedding of Cosimo and Eleonora’s daughter Lucrezia in July 1555, twelve people wore Indian costumes to a masked ball.59 While Florence’s interaction with the New World was largely material and visual, Venice by contrast was characterized by the immense output of its print culture (Florence also tended to be more interested in Brazil, and Venice in Mexico). There exist occasional examples of direct contact with the Americas or of physical or material exchange between the New World and the lagoon city, but not many. For instance, a handful of Venetian seamen accompanied both Columbus and Cortés on their respective voyages, and a strain of Italian historiography went so far as to assert that archival documents once existed to prove that Columbus first sought support for his Atlantic voyages from Genoa and Venice, suggesting that while these Italian cities turned him down, they would have been his first choice.60 Italian glassblowers, perhaps from Murano, settled in Jamestown in the 1620s, and archaeologists have also found early modern Venetian glass in excavations in San Salvador.61 Venetian glass beads made their way to various parts of the American continent, especially as a part of the North American fur trade.62 The first ambassador to Spain, Francesco Cappello, returned to Venice in the spring of 1497 and brought with him “a Saracen king, or more precisely, brown like a Canary islander, from those islands newly discovered by the king of Spain, who was given to him by the said king and whom he presented to the Signoria.”63 American imagery sometimes appeared in Venetian ceremonial processions, or as a part of allegorical representations of the “four parts of the world.”64 Aside from a few frescoes depicting corn and tobacco, however, sixteenth-century Venetian artists did not depict the Americas with any regularity.65 Compared to Bologna, which maintained a long tradition of missionaries returning to the city with artifacts from the American continent that were collected and catalogued for study and research, Venice did not support any recognizable missionary exchange with the Americas, and Venetian collections contained no American objects, or at least none that are still known today.66 Venetians wore pearls – sometimes from the New World – traded in cochineal, and even named one of their streets the Calle del Mondo Novo, but for the most part, Venetians’ engagement with the Americas and the developing Atlantic World was in the form of texts.67 For this reason, this study focuses on the transmission and mediation of narratives and representations rather than objects or commercial goods. Venetian perspectives promote an understanding of what a non-colonizing imagination looked like, considering the Atlantic World not from the point of view of travelers, missionaries, or conquistadors but instead from a perspective of European cosmopolitanism in a city whose history was long rich in

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transnational relationships. Furthermore, many of the sources considered here are entirely familiar to scholars, including Bordone’s isolario, Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi, and Gastaldi’s maps; however, they tend to be known as touchstones in the broader historiography. They have typically been studied unanchored in their Venetian context (especially in Anglophone literature) and have been read as part of an aggregate “European” response. Considering them instead as a coherent “Venetian” group sheds new light on their significance, illuminating how they worked together to generate a Venetian take on the Americas, as well as the ways that Venetians may have shaped the experience of others who read their texts. This study also contributes to an ever-growing scholarship in global history. As the historian David Armitage has suggested, to one degree or another, “we are all global historians now,” so much so that this methodology has come to need little to no introduction.68 Nevertheless, a brief nod to its main goals and practices will help to situate this study’s contributions within this ongoing scholarly discourse. Global history refers to a mode of thinking and writing that attempts to address wide or sweeping historical phenomena and aspires to explain global-scale changes over time by transcending traditional cultures. Global history most certainly has its own series of pitfalls, biases, and limitations; namely, it remains extremely difficult, if not impossible, to narrate global cultures without privileging one over another, often leaving global history to appear no more than a new manifestation of Western history. In addition, it often sacrifices depth for breadth, as in fact some of the most significant global histories to date do not employ primary sources.69 Nevertheless, a global perspective offers historians the great advantage of helping them see beyond the confines of the nation. It offers a way of thinking that is particularly informative for the early modern period: a time of great geographic mobility, as well as a time when nation-states and nationalism, for the most part, did not exist. A variety of philosophers, historians, art historians, literary critics, and anthropologists – including Charles C. Mann, Peter Sloterdijk, Serge Gruzinski, Inés Zupanov, Jean-Michel Sallmann, Timothy Brook, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Pico Iyer, and Kenneth Pomeranz, among others – have undertaken some of the most significant studies of the history of globalization, and have often articulated its relationship to our polyvocal modern world.70 As Fernand Braudel put it, “We shall of course have to return to this comparative history of the world which is the only scale on which our problems can be solved or at any rate correctly posed.”71 The Venetian Discovery of America focuses on the strains of global history that are concerned with interactions between societies and civilizations. It draws on and contributes to “encounter” or “exchange” scholarship that has considered transformational interactions between different cultures and that has long been part of the historiography of the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean studies,

INTRODUCTION

Caribbean studies, and the Atlantic World.72 To date, scholars of early modern Italian history have most notably begun to embrace global history by examining the cross-cultural interactions between the Islamic East and the Christian West.73 This recent scholarly attention to cultural exchange suggests that “the Renaissance” occurred as much because early modern Western culture stood on the threshold of an expanding world of multicultural contact as because of the rediscovery of antiquity. Acknowledging this fact has encouraged scholars to focus less on the intellectual and Western origins of the Renaissance – thereby curbing the centrality of the classical tradition – and more on the transmission of ideas and objects between various cultures.74 Such a perspective suggests how early modern cultural dynamism occurred as a consequence of growing cross-cultural knowledge and not just as a consequence of newly found antiquities and texts from Greece and Rome. To put it another way, in the context of Sansovino’s relief on the façade of the church of San Giuliano, scholars have begun to emphasize the celestial globe and sprig of guaiacum in Rangone’s funerary monument as much as they have traditionally emphasized its classical inscriptions and classicizing architecture. In short, by demonstrating Italy’s connections to the wider world beyond its shores and exploring the ways in which Italy was the recipient of early modern global culture as much as it was a donor of it, the pursuit of global and cross-cultural history has worked to reinvigorate the field of Italian Renaissance studies.75 This book both reflects and contributes to this scholarship. The contemporary vibrancy of Mediterranean studies suggests that we should more closely consider the ways in which developments in the Atlantic World shaped Mediterranean thought.76 Historians have traditionally conceived of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean worlds as separate and distinct, positing that as the Mediterranean economy declined, the growing power of the Atlantic economy replaced it.77 This study demonstrates, however, the ways in which these worlds overlapped and were connected, mentally, cognitively, and intellectually, if not also through the exchange of goods and people. To be clear, it does not investigate the material connections between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean; rather, it explores conceptions of the Atlantic (and, at times, Asia) from a Mediterranean perspective in Venice and the transfer of this Mediterranean expertise to an Atlantic and global context. As we shall see, the Venetian mapmaker Giacomo Gastaldi graphed Marco Polo’s visions of Asia onto the Americas; Nicolò Zen’s narrative of colonization of islands in the Atlantic built upon his writing on the Venetian–Ottoman war in the Mediterranean; Ramusio’s suggestions that Venice could become a colonial power again were inherently linked to Venice’s colonial past. Venetian writers and editors invested substantial discursive energy into the valorization of Columbus – more so than most of their European neighbors and contemporaries – making a Mediterranean and Italian claim to this otherwise Spanish

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hero. In other words, this book considers how Venetian forms of New World knowledge developed through the lens of Venetian history, and especially its own colonial projects in the Eastern Mediterranean. Venetian cosmographers, for instance, consistently employed the form of the island as a frame of reference for understanding the New World, suggesting how Mediterranean island colonialism influenced its cosmographers’ insular and colonial gaze. While this book does not consider Venetian–Ottoman interactions per se, Venetian print culture remained focused on New Worlds at large, both to the east and the west, which cannot easily be separated.78 In all these ways, this study proposes that the Mediterranean was a crossroads of information not just for the cultures that immediately surrounded it but for global knowledge more broadly. Attempts to illustrate the new by reference to the old are a commonplace of literature on travel and exploration. John Elliott noted that “even where Europeans in the New World had the desire to look, and the eyes to see, there is no guarantee that the image which presented itself to them . . . necessarily accorded with the reality. Tradition, experience, and expectation were the determinants of vision.”79 Stuart Schwartz has argued that “portrayals of another culture are important for what they tell us about the observer rather than the observed.”80 Stephen Greenblatt similarly posits that “we can be certain only that European representations of the New World tell us something about the European practice of representation.”81 Explaining his “Principle of Attachment,” Anthony Pagden hypothesizes that “to protect themselves from the ‘shock of the new’, most Europeans carried about with them a cluster of notions, categories, suppositions about what it was that they would encounter out there.”82 As such theories would suggest, Venetian reactions to the New World were directly conditioned by their own historical experience, and in this way, the Venetian case contributes to current debates on knowing and interpreting distant, other cultures in the early modern world.83 Venetian ideas about the Americas displayed a clear connective structure between memory and colonial projections, as they drew on an archive of previous experience to reconfigure and narrate the New World. They did not simply demonize difference, aspire to conquest and colonization, or valorize New World peoples, but as we shall see, deployed a great range of rhetorical strategies aimed at grappling with new knowledge and maintaining Venice’s place in the global order. While European states maintained often vigorous vicarious interests in the New World even when they may not have had their feet directly on American grounds, what is distinctive about the Venetian context is the fact that the lagoon city was home to the most prolific newsmongers of the sixteenth century, so that the ways in which they depicted the New World circulated widely. As we shall see, Venetians did not portray the Americas in any single or

INTRODUCTION

homogeneous fashion but rather spun it in myriad ways, emphasizing varying degrees of othering, diffusion, mobility, comparison, and simultaneity. At times, the New World was a version of Venice; at other times, it was a place that Venice had discovered before the Spanish, that Marco Polo had potentially explored, or that allowed them to prove the continued significance and legitimacy of their city at a time when Venetian fortunes were on the decline. Different people and groups offered distinctive modes of Venetianizing, including rhetorics of firstness and similitude. In addition, as we shall see, Venetian editors, cosmographers, and printmen did not conceive of the continents along modern lines by any means, and instead regularly embraced locally formed Venetian metageographies in which lands found in the West were part of those in the East.84 These wide-ranging stances allowed Venetians to argue for their different but at least equal participation in the world of exploration, despite their limited empirical engagement in it. The following chapters explore these varied Venetian takes on and approaches to the New World. Chapter 2, “Compiled Geographies: The Venetian Travelogue and the Americas,” offers an overview of Venetian publications of Americana, and focuses on Venetian compilations of travel literature, including the Libretto de tutta la navigatione de re di Spagna (Venice, 1504), and the Paesi novamente retrovati (Vicenza, 1507). It will consider, in addition, the manuscript travelogue compilations of the Venetian cosmographer Alessandro Zorzi. Intended for publication but never published, Zorzi’s manuscripts have extensive marginalia and sketches of New World peoples, objects, and maps, revealing how this Venetian cosmographer grappled with information and images coming from the Americas and saw them through the lens of Venetian history. As they sent printed New World knowledge out to readers around Italy and Europe, Venetian editors, translators, and printmen subtly but consistently soft-pedaled the imperial hegemony of Habsburg Spain and privileged the perspectives of Venetian and Italian history. Chapter 3, “Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Venetian New World,” will consider the work of the most significant Venetian cosmographer of the sixteenth century and his descriptions and depictions of the Americas. Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi (Giunti, 1550–1559) represented the culmination of Venetian travel compendia. It was the most influential history of European exploration at the time and gave travel literature the same critical attention and scrutiny that humanists had previously reserved only for the texts of classical antiquity. This chapter explores how Ramusio understood narratives about the discovery of the Americas through the lens of both Marco Polo’s Travels and Venetian colonialism in the Eastern Mediterranean. Ramusio’s seemingly celebratory, scientific, and disinterested compilation in fact made a decidedly patriotic case for Italian and Venetian preeminence in the world of travel and

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exploration. His compilation represented, in essence, a surrogate form of Italian participation in the Age of Encounters and conquest in the Americas, even and perhaps a kind of compensation for Italy’s more general lack of political identity as a whole, especially when he patriotically asserted the primacy of historic Venetian travel and exploration and the heroism of Columbus, and implied the possibilities for Venetian colonial expansion in the future. The legacy of Ramusio’s text in Northern Europe was significant, revealing the crucial role that Ramusio – and other Venetian cosmographers – played in the creation of the Black Legend and in the transmission of knowledge about the New World to the rest of Europe. Chapter 4, “The Venetian Mapping of the Americas,” scrutinizes Venetian printed maps of the New World. Venice was one of the most important cartographic centers in early modern Europe. It reached its peak in cartographic publishing in the middle of the sixteenth century, at which time it produced copious maps of the Americas. This chapter will examine a variety of Venetian maps of the New World, with special attention to the maps of Giacomo Gastaldi, often considered to be the greatest cartographer of the Italian school and one of the most important cartographers of the time. While most European maps depicted North America as connected to Asia, Gastaldi began intentionally and systematically to show these continents as separate, at a time when no concrete geographic knowledge could have influenced such decisions. That is to say, mapmakers’ depictions of the relationship between Asia and America were entirely imaginative and culturally based: informed in Venice, I argue, by Ramusio’s new edition of Marco Polo’s Travels. Cartographers’ knowledge of Venetian history, and especially their patriotic links to Marco Polo, directly influenced their depictions of America, both in general as well as in America’s relationship to Asia. In an age that valorized firsthand accounts of travel, Polo served as Venetians’ eyewitness, and as their framework for understanding the Americas. While treatments of the New World discoveries and Atlantic World history tend to skip directly from Iberian expansion to the Dutch and English mapping and representation of the Americas, this chapter demonstrates how Venetian cartographers and cosmographers played a significant but typically unrecognized role in the transmission of maps and cosmographic information about the New World. Chapter 5, “Venetians in America: Nicolò Zen and the Virtual Exploration of the New World,” turns from the more general overviews in the first half of the book to a consideration of one particular text: Nicolò Zen’s Dello scoprimento (1558), the publication of a Venetian patrician who claimed that the Venetians discovered America in the 1380s. Whereas other Venetian approaches to the Americas emphasized the significance of Polo or the shortcomings of the Spanish, Zen’s account argued that the Venetians arrived in America first. Zen’s textual pastiche blended passages from the accounts of

INTRODUCTION

Columbus, Vespucci, and Peter Martyr and inserted Venetian voices into this canon to depict the Venetians as authorities on the New World discoveries. Though most studies of this peculiar text have tried to determine whether these Venetian brothers actually went to America or not, this chapter sidesteps these debates and instead examines the rhetorical strategies that Nicolò Zen employed to create a vision of the Venetian appropriation of the Atlantic World. Chapter 6, “Venice as Tenochtitlan: The Correspondence of the Old World and the New,” considers Venetian printed images of Americana, especially in Venetian isolarii (books of islands) and costume books, which employed yet another Venetian spin on the New World: that of creating an ideology of commensurability, or likeness, between America and Venice. For these artists, writers, and cosmographers, Venice was like Tenochtitlan, and New World peoples were like Venetians. Furthermore, these sources, and indeed many of the sources queried in this book as a whole, once again proclaimed (either subtly or quite openly) Venetian expertise on the subject of the New World, asserting that Venetians did not necessarily have to go to the Americas in order to participate in the making of New World empires. It was enough that they produced texts about the Americas and, in turn, controlled and influenced Europeans’ knowledge of them, thereby confirming the continued relevance of Venetian culture. One of the goals of global history is to bring the traditionally unconscious Eurocentrism of historians into clear view and to introduce alternative models. One way to do this is to make visible links between parts of the world and their histories in which non-Europeans “interact with each other, and no longer only with Europe.”85 To be clear, where global and cross-cultural history is concerned, this study does not undertake this task and remains firmly grounded in Europe in terms of its sources. It is, at its core, a work of European intellectual and cultural history, albeit with a global content in the way it considers the development of European thought about the Americas, including the various ways in which Venetians regularly mapped Asia onto the New World.86 It aims to find a just balance between breadth and depth, between the global and the local, by considering the interwoven legacies of Marco Polo and Columbus – that is, by considering China, Mexico, and the Caribbean – through the intellectual, textual, and archival nexus of early modern Venice. Global history unfolded in mentalities as much as it did in the movements of goods and people. The Venetians participated in and shaped New World encounters secondhand, by avidly collecting information and marketing it in their printed books and maps. Rather than telling a traditional story of the discoveries or the Columbian exchange of plants, goods, diseases, and people, this book addresses what Ayesha Ramachandran has called world-making. It is a story about how new information traveled and was shaped by editors,

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cosmographers, and printmen into theaters of the imagination for Italians and Europeans as they brought the world into view with printed words and images.87 More than just a study of the Age of Encounters itself, this book is an exploration of the New World – often framed by ideas about Asia – as it existed vividly in the minds of a specific set of early modern people. Venetians were marginalized by the shift from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic World, but their distance gave them a special vantage on the situation. Visualizing and representing the relationship between the remote and the proximate and embracing a fertile tension between the distant and the close, they employed news and images of the Americas to tell a local history of the lagoon city and its empire, as well as a patriotic history of Italy more broadly. In the process, they shaped the way the New World was seen.88 Their narratives revealed the impact of overseas exploration and the effects of these global interactions on their changing perspectives on history as the city’s printmen attempted to reconcile a new and sudden multiplicity of histories with a growing sense of the unity of the planet. Venetian interpretations of the New World proved different from those of many other European powers, including the Spanish, French, and English, who were more closely involved in the Americas on the ground. Venetian texts and maps suggested that controlling knowledge was more important to the inhabitants of the lagoon city than acquiring land or building colonies, and that developing expertise on the New World ultimately trumped experience in it. By accumulating and spreading this knowledge, Venetian print culture played a crucial yet traditionally unrecognized role in the invention of America.

TWO

COMPILED GEOGRAPHIES The Venetian Travelogue and the Americas

I

n Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972), Kublai Khan and Marco Polo sit in a garden as Polo describes the cities of the Khan’s empire. At a certain point, perplexed, the Khan stops Polo to ask, There remains a city about which you never speak. Polo tilted his head; “Venice”, said the Khan, and Polo smiled and replied, “What else did you think I was talking to you about?” The emperor did not bat an eye; “But I have never heard you say its name!” And Polo answered, Every time I describe a city, I say something about Venice.1

Calvino perceptively understood how the eye of the traveler works, recasting the foreign in familiar terms. Polo demonstrated how explorers naturally employ visions from their native environments to make sense of the new, often resulting in surprising connections between the strange and the familiar. This conversation between Polo and the Great Khan echoes the way many of Polo’s Venetian descendants saw the New World when they flooded the European market in the sixteenth century with a torrent of printed texts about the Americas, including ambassadors’ reports, letters, travelogues, and histories of conquest and colonization. Venetians fashioned themselves as the organizers and transmitters of information about the New World. The city’s writers, editors, and cosmographers grasped news about the Americas through a Venetian conceptual framework, and their texts often broadcasted a Venetian understanding of the Age of Encounters. While they built their reputation as 21

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experts on the Americas through the production of a great variety of texts, they first transmitted materials about the New World through the production of a particular literary form: the anthology or compendium of travel literature. Printed compilations of travelogues, a genre that emerged in Venice, played a significant role in framing European understandings of the New World. Early sixteenth-century Venetian editors collected, compiled, edited, packaged, and printed news about the Americas in these compendia. In doing so, they established a Venetian tradition of producing a knowledge of global geography, travel, and European exploration, and in turn provided models for later editors in their wake, such as Giovanni Battista Ramusio in Venice, and Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas in England. This chapter offers a survey of Venetian printed publications of Americana, as well as a close look at early sixteenth-century Venetian edited compilations of travel literature and the attention they paid to the New World. Venetian texts about the Americas were the direct products of the cosmopolitan nature of the city, and they often placed a clear Venetian spin on New World information. These early compilations were among the first in what would eventually become a long line of Venetian publications that worked to make the New World Venetian, and they regularly depicted Venetian editors and cosmographers as authorities on the Americas. Around the edges, between the lines, and in the interstices of their printed texts – in their translations, prefaces, marginalia, glosses, and editorial choices – Venetian translators and printmen subtly but consistently downplayed the imperial hegemony of Habsburg Spain and privileged Venetian and Italian history, most notably that of Marco Polo, as they sent New World knowledge out to readers around Italy and Europe at large. THE NEW WORLD I N VENETIAN PRINTED TEXTS: AN OVERVIEW

Travel literature has a long history in Europe, including myriad accounts of men looking for riches in foreign lands, spreading Christianity, noting crosscultural difference, and occasionally knowing people from other worlds.2 The genre of travel writing is both elusive and flexible and encompasses a great variety of forms and sources, potentially including records of financial expenditure, papal dispensations, sermons, or miracle stories, as well as autobiographical, scientific, and literary accounts.3 The category is formed by texts that take “travel as an essential element for its production.”4 Travel writing flourished in the European Middle Ages. Reports of missionary journeys to the Far East, John Mandeville’s account of the Near East, and Marco Polo’s descriptions of China, India, and the lands “beyond the Ganges” in particular made great impressions.5 Following the Portuguese and Columbian voyages, both of which transformed the oceans from barriers into highways and launched

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modern globalization, travel writing increasingly became intrinsic to the formation of Western identities. As information about a great plurality of new worlds entered the European consciousness, it generated a heightened sense of cultural differences around the globe. Building on many medieval precedents, travel writing became one of the fundamental, conspicuous developments of early modern culture, becoming quantitatively and qualitatively different in its unprecedented ethnographic analyses and discussions of human diversity. Early modern travel writing also began to function increasingly in partnership with other genres such as history, natural history, geography, and cosmography, and often became inseparable from them. In addition, there were new kinds of travelers in the early modern period: explorers who were no longer just merchants or missionaries but curious, independent, secular individuals who, like practical reporters, wrote books of travel self-consciously addressed to a reading public and theorized about the meaning and writing of travel itself.6 Against this general background, where early modern travel literature is concerned, Venetian presses produced an outpouring of printed books about the Americas (see Appendix). Among this corpus, several particular texts or groups of texts will receive focus, both here and in the course of the rest of this book. Before we turn to these particular texts, a few prefatory remarks about the translation and transmission of these texts will help to illuminate how many New World texts arrived in the lagoon city, and why their translation into Italian was significant. Though Venetian production was sizable, texts of Americana were often first translated and published in other cities, since many other centers of European print also paid rapt attention to news from the New World. For example, despite Antonio Pigafetta’s local origins in the Veneto, his account of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe was first published in Paris.7 Venetian and Italian editions of Vespucci’s letters tended to lag far behind those of German publishers, and Nuremberg and Augsburg in particular demonstrated keen editorial interest in the Americas.8 The merchant city of Basel was a particularly notable metropolis of print and publishing, where Simon Grynaeus edited his Novus Orbis (1532) and Sebastian Münster composed his Cosmographia (1544), two of the most significant sixteenth-century texts on travel and exploration. Even considering editorial production in other European cities, however, Venetian presses tended to print more editions of popular texts on the Americas, even if they were first published elsewhere. The city’s presses occasionally reprinted up to twelve editions of texts on the New World in the course of the sixteenth century alone and in doing so established an incontestable connection between the lagoon city and the lands across the Atlantic.9 As the Appendix to this chapter indicates, translations of Iberian accounts of travel and conquest featured prominently in Venetian production.10 Whatever

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a text’s original place of publication or language, Italian translations were likely to have been read more widely than their Spanish originals – and perhaps even more than their German or French counterparts – since Italian represented the lingua franca of sixteenth-century Europe. In this period, while Latin continued to be the language of science, vernacular Italian began to surpass Latin as the language of scholarship and diplomacy. It was used at the courts of England, Germany, Spain, and the Ottoman Empire, and also functioned as the language of commerce around Europe and the Mediterranean.11 To be clear, Latin remained the most universal written language in Europe in the sixteenth century, and vernacular translations typically trickled down from it. Italian translations, however, regularly funneled reports about the Americas not only to Italian audiences but also to a European readership more broadly, suggesting the expansive impact of Venetian editorial production. Translation has always been intimately connected to the work of the voyager and the merchant; indeed, it represented the means by which the wider world – as well as dreams of mastering it – came to Europe in the early modern period.12 As Peter Burke has suggested, translation was an essential aspect of early modernism.13 If this was generally the case, the translation of Spanish literature into Italian had particular political import. As Theodore Cachey has suggested, the translation of European travel literature into Italian, beginning in the early sixteenth century and culminating in the work of Ramusio, functioned as a “form of compensation for Italy’s lack of national political identity and territorial integrity, as the ideal form of Italian participation in the conquest and colonization of the New World.”14 Shrewd Venetian bookmen were quick to recognize the potential of printing Spanish works and sought to develop such lines of publication, often making use of Spanish citizens resident in the lagoon as editors and translators, including figures such as Francisco Delicado, Domingo de Gaztelu, and Alfonso de Ulloa, all of whom translated Spanish works about the New World in Venice in the first half of the sixteenth century.15 While in many European cities, merchants or papal envoys first carried the news of encounters with new peoples and the exploration of previously unknown lands across the Atlantic, in Venice, ambassadors, and especially embassies to Toledo, Valladolid, Seville, and Lisbon, were almost always the carriers of such reports. Ambassadors and their entourages often transmitted what later became the content of printed accounts about the New World, and copious information about the Americas arrived in Venice through the nexus of the city’s diplomacy. Venetian diplomacy was the most developed among early modern Italian states, known far and wide for its professionalization and institutionalization. The lagoon city famously employed the longest-serving and most continuous series of foreign diplomats in other cities. Venetian ambassadors spent lengthy periods of time living at foreign courts and sent

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reports or dispacci home during their stay. When they returned, they presented summary accounts – relazioni – to the Venetian senate that offered distillations of the ambassadors’ experiences abroad. Relazioni typically gave an overview of the ambassador’s negotiations with a foreign monarch as well as a descriptive survey of the state he had visited. Historians have long noted the usefulness of ambassadorial reports as sources of ethnographic interest since, formed around cultural encounters, they tended to describe unfamiliar customs and societies, though they often, if not always, projected their own cultural norms onto others while doing so.16 They have long fed the curiosity of historians interested in travel, the exotic, and encounters with other worlds.17 A sampling of some of the most significant accounts of the Americas includes Venetian ambassadors who reported on the early exploration of Brazil (Domenico Pisani, 1501); the voyages of Gaspar Corte-Real (Pietro Pasqualigo, 1501) and Amerigo Vespucci (Leonardo da Cà Masser, 1506; Francesco Corner di Fantino, 1508; and Giovanni Badoer, 1514); the exploration of the Yucatan (Francesco Corner di Giorgio, 1518–1520); the conquests of Hernán Cortés (Gasparo Contarini, 1522–1525); and the voyages of Sebastian Cabot, Giovanni Verrazzano, and Ferdinand Magellan (Andrea Navagero, 1525–1528, and Marcantonio Contarini, 1536). Where the New World was concerned, Venetian ambassadorial reports were complex and contradictory; on the one hand, they often conveyed news in an extremely timely fashion, but on the other hand, sometimes the longest letters from Spain and Portugal included only passing phrases about the Americas, typically focused solely on Spanish income. They did not regularly offer detailed ethnographic descriptions, but when they did, as, for instance, in Gasparo Contarini’s account of Mexico, they could be comprehensive and meticulous. Many printed texts of Americana were grounded in, derived from, or copied directly from ambassadors’ narratives, and much sixteenth-century travel literature about the New World at large owed much to the work of Venetian government functionaries, especially diplomats and their entourages.18 Translations thrived when local printmen were invested in the value of a particular language (for instance, Latin in Rome, English in London, and in this case Florentine in Venice), a particular genre (here, the travelogue), and collaboration. Venice in the early sixteenth century maintained a strong concentration of intellectuals and printers who worked in groups and associations. This, in tandem with the fact that the city was a known center of diplomacy, as well as a known hub for the circulation of news, begins to explain the copious publication of Venetian travel literature.19 The sheer quantity of its textual production serves as a testament to Italian curiosity about the Americas. It reveals how Venetians played a substantial role in diffusing Spanish information to a wider Italian and European audience. Through these texts, Italians and Europeans “discovered” the New World at

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home. That is to say, since most Italians and Europeans did not encounter the New World personally through travel or any direct sensory experience; rather, the Age of Encounters arguably occurred primarily through the reading of these vernacular texts and the viewing of their maps and images. To imagine this phenomenon as “armchair travel” might appear on first glance to diminish or discount the real and lived experiences of the atrocities committed in the Americas. Indeed, for the city’s ample production of New World texts, Venetian authors, editors, and printmen rarely recounted narratives of Spanish violence in detail or emphasized their significance, even when evidence of these violent practices existed. That is to say, in the first half of the sixteenth century, Venetians remained hesitant to criticize Spain directly or at length, either in ambassadorial reports or in printed texts. However, as European knowledge of the Americas grew and Venetians became more emboldened, especially as the city emerged as one of the only Italian cities free from Spanish domination, Venetian texts came to contribute more directly – in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – to a European understanding of genocide in the Americas as well as efforts to counteract such violence. The flood of Venetian publications about the Americas in the earlier part of the century illuminates a different phenomenon. Venetians were not focused primarily on either the demonization of the Spanish or the physical exploration or conquest of land or territory, and did not participate in the violence typically associated with such acts. Instead, Venetian printmen obsessed over the conquest and marketing of reports about the New World, and in doing so played a significant role as the diffusors of information about new lands. THE AMERICAS IN VENETIAN PREFACES

Amid the corpus of Venetian print on the New World, when and how does any particularly Venetian perspective on the Age of Encounters ever emerge? This question arises particularly since little of this material – the vast majority of which was Iberian texts in translation – was actually written by Venetians. When if ever in their print culture, beyond the city’s chronicles, does it become apparent what Venetians – a population once central in the European economy but then eclipsed by the emerging markets of the Atlantic World – thought about the Americas? Literary scholars have suggested that ideas about travel and European exploration influenced the rise of utopian literature in sixteenth-century Italy. In Venice, this occurred especially in the work of Anton Francesco Doni and the themes of a golden age found in the sixth world of his I mondi (Francesco Marcolini, 1552), inspired by Thomas More’s Utopia, which More had placed in the New World and which had in turn been inspired by Vespucci’s travels.20 In the end, however, connections between this literature and the Americas remain nebulous and speculative.

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Pietro Bembo’s history of the Venetian state, written between 1544 and 1546, is similarly disappointing in this regard. It included a brief account of Portuguese and Spanish exploration, which in terms of offering up any Venetian opinions was decidedly ambivalent.21 On the one hand, he characterized the discovery of new worlds as an evil upon Venice, recounting how a letter from Pietro Pasqualigo, ambassador to King Manuel of Portugal, first brought news of the Portuguese spice route to India, and made it seem inevitable that Portuguese trade would diminish Venetian trade and profits. “Shaken by these setbacks, the city suffered an unexpected misfortune at the hands of distant peoples and lands.”22 Here, Bembo conflated Portuguese and Spanish navigation, pointing to the source of this “unexpected misfortune” in “a brief account of how all this began” as none other than “Columbus . . . a man from Liguria with a very sharp mind,” thereby linking Columbus to Venetian economic downturn. On the other hand, as he noted soon after, “at the same time, it provoked this further reflection, that it was really a fine thing to acquire new lands – almost another world – and to place on record peoples who had been concealed and cut off from us.”23 Drawing information from the published accounts of Giovanni Battista Ramusio and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Bembo described the exotic peoples and customs of the Americas, all of which represented “the greatest and most splendid achievement that any age has seen accomplished by man.”24 His matter-of-fact recounting of events in the New World offered no sign of regret for the destiny of Amerindian populations, which seemed to him deserving of little comment. “Overcome and beaten,” he remarked drily, “they stuff Spain with much gold.”25 The official historian of the Venetian state proclaimed that the peoples of the New World “lived for the most part in a golden age. They know no boundaries to their fields; they have no courts or laws; they have no use for writing or trade; they live not for the future but from day to day.”26 Bembo’s take on Spanish colonialism was uncritical, and with that note, he left the New World behind and passed on to other events. If they did not appear often in Venetian literature or official histories, Venetian reflections on Spain and the New World tended to show up more in the prefaces and introductions to Spanish translations. Literary scholars have long acknowledged the role of paratextual material in constructing a text’s meaning, in the ways that it surrounds, extends, and presents a text.27 Details such as titles, dedications, epigraphs, prefaces, intertitles, and chapter headings all work to mediate the relationship between a text and its reader and underscore a text’s content. Paratextual elements, and in particular the preface, often justify a text’s production or selection for translation, describe its origins, praise its aesthetic or utilitarian qualities, and assess its originality, significance, truthfulness, or authenticity. Perhaps more importantly, prefaces work to ensure that a text is read properly; they provide instructions for reading the

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book. Along these lines, many prefaces to Venetian texts on the Americas were not particularly innovative and remained essentially faithful to the usual formulaic devices of panegyrical discourse employed in the format of the preface. Occasionally, however, the writers of these prefaces broke out of these formulas to offer up Venetian perspectives on the New World, often using the space of the preface to proclaim the supremacy of Venetian culture.28 For instance, in the preface to the 1535 Venetian edition of Francesco de Xerez’s La conquista del Peru, the translator Dominico (Domingo) de Gaztelu, secretary to the Spanish ambassador in Venice Lope de Soria, included a dedication to Doge Andrea Gritti (r. 1523–1538). So that your majesty knows about the marvelous things that have been newly found in the new Indies – far from these parts, and unknown – they will be translated, neither more nor less, without adding or taking out anything that the Spanish author wrote. Even though I am certain that these things will not be very new for your majesty, since you will already have had a lot of exposure to them, having traveled and seen a great part of this world, having crossed into and lived in Asia, as well as in Europe, and being so well informed about Africa, where your majesty’s person spent much time in deeds immortal, and you will have seen with your eyes and heard many things, of no less quality and admiration than these.29

Gaztelu’s dedication first and foremost proclaimed a relationship between the doge of Venice and the New World, which was often the task of dedicatory material: to link dedicatee and textual content. Gritti had in fact spent much of his early life abroad, working as a grain merchant in Constantinople, but the translator implied an expectation of Gritti’s almost blasé worldliness where news from the Americas was concerned. While surely part literary convention, Gaztelu’s preface used the New World to draw a cosmopolitan portrait of Venice by suggesting that Venetians like Gritti were already so worldly that news about the conquest of Peru would hardly excite their attentions.30 Other prefaces took different approaches. The preface to the 1536 Venetian edition of Pigafetta’s Il viaggio fatto da gli spagniuoli a torno a’l mondo condescendingly pointed out that when Magellan’s ship had returned to Seville in 1522, “one of the greatest and most marvelous things of our times,” which “surpassed the ancients,” it took a foreign ambassador “representing his republic” to the Spanish court, “an excellent and rare man” and a “great philosopher” (the Venetian ambassador to Spain at the time, Gasparo Contarini), to explain to those present why it was that the ships would have lost a day on their calendar as they traveled around the world to the West.31 In the preface to the 1566 Venetian edition of Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia dello scoprimento della Nuova Spagna, the printer Giordano Ziletti described Cortés as “the first discoverer of New Spain and the great Mexico City, called the New Venice,

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with which it has many similarities in its placement, buildings, and riches . . . in the imitation of Julius Caesar, this lord recorded his own deeds in the war in which he found himself,” comparing Venice to Tenochtitlan and Cortés to Caesar.32 Ziletti went on to note that no one should marvel at Cortés’s victory by so few over so many, since similarly outnumbered Christian forces had also defeated the Turks during the Siege of Malta (1565), thereby drawing parallels between military engagements in the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds.33 The preface to the 1576 edition of Cieza de León’s Cronica del gran regno del Perù linked Spanish incursions into Italy directly to the Spanish conquest of the New World. King Charles VIII of France descended into Italy to conquer the Kingdom of Naples and prompted the jealousy of the Catholic King, concerned about his island of Sicily. He [the King of Spain] sent the great captain a subsidy of forces to protect it and help his relative, the King of Naples, all of which was the beginning of the end in Italy, which today finds itself in ruins . . . [A]lmost at the same time, by divine permission, and as a result of the most patient labors and constancy of the glorious Christopher Columbus, a native of Savoy, guided by God, [Columbus] made a glorious voyage for the Spaniards that was the beginning of the acquisition of the New World.34

Here, Spanish gains in Italy and the Americas were both part of the same process of Habsburg global hegemony. While the body of its text was not about the New World per se, Pietro Ochieri’s dedication to Doge Girolamo Priuli in the 1566 Venetian edition of Pietro Messia’s Selva di varia lettioni not only linked Spanish incursions into Italy to conquest in the New World but went a step further to argue that Spain’s rapid rise would soon be followed by its rapid decline: an event that many Italians surely hoped for. We know that before the time of Alfonso of Aragon, the King of Naples, Spain was never even mentioned in Italy, but with the passing of time and with large states conquered and with the discovery of the New World, Spain came to much greatness, passing the honor of all the others that are today in the world. [T]his is an important subject, that all worldly things are usually subject to celestial bodies; they rise, they fall to the bottom, and they rise [again] on the wheel of fortune.35

Prefaces also sometimes revealed the inherently political nature of translation, which was never a neutral or disinterested act. While original Spanish language texts on the conquests tended to emphasize themes of power, possession, and dominion, Italian translators sometimes worked to downplay these imperialist perspectives. For instance, in the 1524 preface to his translation of Cortés’s second letter, the Venetian translator Nicolò Liburnio asserted a series of provocative comments regarding the Spanish language.36 Liburnio

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belittled Cortés by noting that “while the above mentioned Captain Cortés was occupied with the conquest of such provinces and cities, every once in a while he sent information to his sacred majesty in his mediocre style, which was particularly mediocre because it was written in Spanish.”37 A haughty Venetian intellectual, Liburnio opted to translate Cortés’s letter from Pietro Savorgnan’s Nuremberg Latin translation (1524) rather than from the Spanish original (Seville, 1522), generating a series of implications about the rapport between Venice and Spain in the process. Scholars of translation have long noted that the relationship between the source language and the target language is rarely one of equality. The act of translation always follows a hierarchical structure involving mediation and negotiation between a language of lower status (which could be defined by prestige, popularity, or a variety of other factors) and one that is relatively higher. Along these lines, translating “up” (a colonial practice of domestication) aims to produce a text similar to one in the target language, while translating “down” tends to reflect the linguistic characteristics of the source language and its relative cachet.38 Liburnio would not touch the Spanish. Expressing his erudite disdain for Cortés’s uncultivated prose, his choice implied that Spanish could never reproduce the stylistic sophistication of Latin. That is to say, he was willing to translate “down” from Latin to Italian, but not “up” from Spanish. For learned Italians like Liburnio, Spanish was suspect. If the Venetians did not participate in the conquest of the Americas, at the very least, he posited, they were superior intellectuals: a fact Liburnio emphasized by snubbing the language of the Habsburgs and, in this case, refusing to work with it, point blank. Liburnio went on to note that Cortés’s letter merited attention, including the attention required of translation, not because of any interest it may have evoked in a newly encountered civilization but because geography represented an important Greek and Roman discipline. If the sublime geographers and cosmographers . . . could rise again from their sepulchers, they would have to thank the powerful nature of things that miraculously tenders light to the new day, and they would prepare their style to embellish with high eloquence the recently found New Spain of the Ocean Sea.39

In this way, ignoring the role of the Spanish in the discovery of the New World in his preface (thanking instead the vague “powerful nature of things”), Liburnio downplayed “newness” and Spanish initiative and instead emphasized the relationship of the New World to Greek and Roman classical geography, neatly linking Atlantic discoveries to ancient Mediterranean culture rather than Spanish hegemony.40 In addition, the printed marginal glosses of Liburnio’s Italian translation shared little of Cortés’s original enthusiasm. Liburnio worked to downplay,

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ignore, or even undermine the excitement, glory, and marvels of the Spanish conquest and replace Cortés’s valiant tones with a more impartial and neutral, if not uninterested, approach to events in Mexico. Glosses printed in the margins of texts regularly served to simplify and summarize the content, enabling the reader to skim or search. Liburnio’s glosses were often nothing out of the ordinary.41 At times, however, Liburnio’s laconic summaries had the effect of undercutting the novelty of Cortés’s accomplishments or neutralizing Cortés’s declaratives tones. For instance, while Cortés hoped to capture the interests of Charles V: “Most High and Powerful and Catholic Prince, most Invincible Emperor and our sovereign, in a ship which I dispatched to Your Sacred Majesty from New Spain on the sixteenth day of June, 1519, I sent a very long and detailed account of all that had occurred in these lands,” Liburnio’s gloss simply read, “Cortés names the new found lands Nova Hispagna.” While Cortés explained, “And because to attempt to inform Your Highness of every detail of these lands and new realms would be to continue almost forever, I beg Your Highness’s pardon if I do not render as long an account as I should,” Liburnio disdainfully glossed, “Cortés apologizes if, in writing, he forgot something.”42 Liburnio published his translation at a time when Venice had come to symbolize, for many, the ideal form of government: a wealthy city-state as opposed to an absolute monarchy.43 He noted that he had undertaken this work at the request of a group of learned Venetians, suggesting the ways in which his condescension potentially aligned with the political culture of his patrons.44 Liburnio’s rhetorical tone implied that for him, as surely for other Venetians and Italians rooted in learned and commercial societies, Spanish hegemony was shocking. Spain had been one of the participants in the League of Cambrai: a coalition of states concerned about Venice’s territorial expansion that had stripped Venice of its territorial holdings in the wake of the Battle of Agnadello (1509). In 1524, at the time of publication, the Habsburgs aimed to achieve political hegemony in Europe and Italy, and the Venetians did all they could to drive Spain from the peninsula. A growing sense of Italian subservience to the Habsburgs surely prompted Liburnio’s response, especially when it was becoming clear that Italians, like the peoples of the New World, were being forced into submission by Spain, whose conquests in Italy would become even greater by the middle of the century.45 The act of translation, in short, reflected complex expressions of different or shifting cultural perspectives that often accompanied the dissemination of information. As Lucia Binotti neatly puts it, “The practice of translation thus becomes a key historical process for understanding the influence of cultural and political conflicts in the transmission of new knowledge.”46 These texts – their prefaces and translations – represented conscious Venetian manipulations of Spanish accounts that worked to familiarize and appropriate Spanish exploration in a Venetian ambit.

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Though originally written by Spanish authors, in Venetian translation and production, they sometimes revealed what Venetians thought of themselves – worldly, knowledgeable, and more cultured than the Spanish – as they used narratives about the New World to assert claims about Venetian identity and superiority, make the global local, and bring the remote and far-flung closer to home. THE FIRST PRINTED VENETIAN TRAVEL COMPENDIA: THE LIBRET TO DE TUTTA LA NAVIGATIONE (1504 ) AND THE PAESI NOVAMENTE RETROVATI (1507)

Amid the prolific output of printed texts about the New World – and the sense of a Venetian perspective that they offered around the edges – a particular genre emerged that would have lasting repercussions on the reception of information about the Americas in Europe: the edited anthology, or compendium of travel literature. While the classical Latin term compilare tended to be endowed with a negative meaning, associated with the pillaging or plundering of people and buildings, and with no special meaning for texts, the term came to take on a positive literary meaning in the European Middle Ages, when there began a notable culture of anthology and a long tradition of publishing partial historical works or of stringing together the works of multiple authors to create a more expansive frame.47 The form of the collection offered readers access to texts that might otherwise have been rare or difficult to find, perhaps because they had been copied or printed long ago or far away. While compilation as a tool of “information management” had a long history in the West – indeed, the medieval habits of compilatio (compiling) and ordinatio (arranging) were well-worn ones – a culture of compiling and collecting texts and binding them together in one volume blossomed after the emergence of print but before the rise of more modern, ready-bound printed books. Sixteenth-century editors, printers, and readers regularly aggregated, resituated, and customized a great variety of texts, some of which, to the modern eye, had associated content and a sense of thematic coherence, as well as others that would appear to have nothing in common at all.48 The tradition of historical compendia is long and complex; printed compilations of travel, however, were new in the early modern period, and Venetian editions were at the forefront of this development.49 The Libretto de tutta la navigatione de re de Spagna de le isole et terreni novamente trovati (Venice: Albertino Vercellese da Lisona, 1504) represented the first printed collection of voyages in Western Europe, and the history of its production and publication offers an enlightening case study of how news and information from the New World arrived in the hands of European readers.50 The Libretto was primarily composed of an Italian translation of Peter

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Martyr d’Anghiera’s first Decade, translated by Angelo Trevisan, then secretary to Domenico Pisani, the Venetian ambassador to Spain and Portugal. The Piedmontese humanist Peter Martyr (1457–1526) was the official chronicler of the New World under Charles V. Often described as the first historian of the New World, he never traveled to the Americas but established relationships with Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Cortés, Magellan, Cabot, and Vespucci, and based on his conversations with them and his position as a member of the Council of the Indies, published his De Orbe Novo Decades (1511–1530). Through his personal contact with Martyr in Spain, Trevisan managed to obtain manuscript copies of Martyr’s work while it was in preparation. Between August and December 1501, Trevisan sent these sections of Martyr’s manuscript to the chronicler Giovanni Malipiero, a friend and patron of Trevisan’s in Venice, in four separate letters from Spain.51 Trevisan’s knowledge of Columbus’s voyages came from Martyr, as well as from interviews with Columbus himself, who Trevisan had befriended in Spain in the period when Columbus had just returned from his third voyage and found himself “in misfortune and disgrace with the king and queen, and with little money.”52 This correspondence between Trevisan and Malipiero carried Columbus’s account to Venice, and Trevisan’s letters became the centerpiece of the Libretto. Ranking “in historical importance as second only to the very earliest issues of the Columbus Letter,” this printed vernacular text about the Columbian voyages inaugurated the genre of the Renaissance travel anthology.53 By comparison, it would be another fifty years until the production of an English translation of Martyr, pointing to the precociousness of Venetian newsmongering.54 The compilation of the Libretto contained Columbus’s accounts of his first three voyages that correspond roughly to the first six books of Peter Martyr’s first Decade, as well as an account of the voyage of Pedro Alonzo Niño to the Gulf of Paria in 1500, and that of Vincente Yáñez Pinzón and his nephew Arias Pinzón to the northern coast of Brazil in 1499, announcing the first European sighting of South America.55 In the last of his letters, Trevisan informed Malipiero that Columbus was preparing for a fourth voyage.56 Soon after, Trevisan’s letters stopped, and the Pisani embassy returned to Venice. Malipiero presented the content of these letters to the Venetian senate and then to the printer Albertino Vercellese da Lisona, who took Trevisan’s letters and, echoing the larger history of the book in this period, enhanced their legibility by formatting them into thirty-one discrete chapters in the Libretto.57 This tiny book of sixteen pages survives in only two copies and was most likely printed only a few times, disappearing as a discrete publication within a few years of its printing; nevertheless it became “the prototype of all subsequent collections of voyages.”58 Before any printer managed to reissue the Libretto as a separate work, it was folded into a subsequent compendium, the Paesi novamente

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retrovati, which followed on the heels of the Libretto and, adding to its content, became exponentially more influential. The Paesi novamente retrovati et novo mondo da Alberico Vesputio Florentio intitulato (Vicenza: Henrico e Zanmaria Vicentino, 1507) incorporated the contents of the Libretto into a larger travel compendium, binding it together with accounts of the voyages of Alvise Cadamosto (da Ca’da Mosto) along the coast of Africa, and the Portuguese to India, indicating the widening scope of the travel anthology. The Paesi was first published in Vicenza – not Venice but a city under Venetian domination – and its origins and production history remain more obscure compared to those of the Libretto. Commonly attributed to Fracanzio Montalboddo, a professor of grammar and rhetoric in Vicenza between 1502 and 1505, the volume was dedicated to Giovanni Maria Angiolello, a Venetian traveler to Persia, best known for his time spent in service to the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II (r. 1451–1481).59 The Paesi offered the first complete synthesis of contemporary literature on European navigation and exploration in chronological order, with travel narratives dating between 1454 and 1502, divided into 142 chapters in six books. These books included 1) the account of Alvise Cadamosto’s 1455–1456 voyages to Senegal and Gambia; 2) Alvise Cadamosto’s accounts of Pedro de Sintra’s 1462 expedition to what is today Sierra Leone and Vasco da Gama’s 1498 voyage to India, which continues into 3) Book 3; 4) the contents of the Libretto; 5) Vespucci’s Mundus Novus letter sent from Lisbon to Lorenzo Pierfrancesco de’Medici, describing Vespucci’s third voyage to South America in 1501–1502; and 6) various letters of Venetian ambassadors and merchants between 1501 and 1502 concerning the Portuguese voyages to India, Gaspar Corte Real’s voyage to America, and Pedro Alvares Cabral’s voyage to Brazil.60 Wildly popular, the Paesi was reprinted at least eight more times in the next fifteen years and in fifteen editions overall in the sixteenth century, including editions in Latin, German, and French.61 As we turn from these texts’ production to their use, understanding how the genre of the compendium functioned involves taking into account what it meant to create and read an anthology or compilation of texts, and how that experience differed from either writing or reading a single text, such as the cosmographies of Johann Boemus (Omnium Gentium Mores Leges et Ritus (1520)) and Sebastian Münster (Cosmographia (1544)), both of whom rewrote the travel narratives of others to form synoptic accounts. By comparison, the compendium format appears non-interventionist, at least on the surface, as compilers could articulate a stance of neutrality by including texts in a compilation without necessarily endorsing or interpreting their positions.62 Much like the editorial productions of Aldus Manutius, Venetian travel compendia focused on conveying the contents of primary sources.63 Compared to a heavily glossed medieval manuscript page where the original text often came

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surrounded by copious commentary in which another “authority” instructed readers in how to understand and interpret the text at hand, early modern printed texts like travel compendia began more and more to offer readers original accounts – edited for accuracy and to sit cleanly on a page – without commentary (though with occasional paratextual material), prompting readers to interpret sources on their own. In doing so, travel compendia privileged readers as authorities. A compendium is, at once, unified and fragmented. An editor’s unifying perspective generates a narrative drive through a series of otherwise disparate texts, forging them into a single, sometimes teleological, and often celebratory account. At times, however, especially when a compendium is large, a sense of fragmentation dominates: the later compendia of Ramusio and Hakluyt bristle with a great diversity of intellectual, political, and commercial interests and become reference volumes more than texts a reader might read from start to finish. In either case, the act of compilation and collation works to produce a new text and new knowledge: that is, a text greater than the sum of its parts, generated through the process of appropriation, reorganization, and explication.64 While they might present themselves with a veneer of neutrality, as straightforward collections of primary sources, compendia influenced how readers interpreted their contents in a great variety of subtle and not so subtle ways. Ordering, for instance, was significant. By starting its discussion of newly explored lands with Alvise Cadamosto’s accounts of his travels down the coast of Africa, the Paesi implied that the influx of new information about lands around the globe began with, and was owing to, Venetian ingenuity. Indeed, the first sentence of this compilation, “I being Alvise of the House of Mosto, having been the first from the nation of the noble city of Venice, to navigate the ocean sea beyond the Straits of Gibraltar,” unmistakably announces, on first impact, the significance of Venice in global exploration.65 Cadamosto’s accounts take up fifty chapters, or more than a third of the compendium overall, giving additional weight to the Venetian contribution. The first Venetian edition of the Paesi (Giorgio dei Rusconi, 1517) went so far as to put a woodcut image of Venice on its cover, showing the Piazza San Marco in the foreground and the Rialto behind it, proclaiming in no uncertain terms that Venice was the place where the knowledge of new worlds was produced. As this popular text traveled around Italy and Europe, it advertised visually the idea that news of the Americas and the world was collected, translated, and organized according to Venetian editorial expertise (Figure 2). The format of the compendium also naturally encouraged readers to draw comparisons between texts, and in turn, in the case of the travel compendium, between distant peoples and places; as editors mapped people comparatively with words, compendia effectively created a rubric for their interpretation.66 Texts bound together in a compendium became contingent, and while we can never

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2. Paesi novamente retrovati, frontispiece. Venice, 1517. Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Rari V.644. With permission from the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo/ Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice. Reproduction prohibited.

fully enter the mind of the early modern reader, if we consider the texts bound together in the Paesi comparatively – in a participatory way, as a contemporary reader might – the result is illuminating.67 An attempt at reading the texts of the Paesi comparatively in this way might begin with an observation about Trevisan’s translation of Peter Martyr’s Decades, where Trevisan made Columbus decidedly more heroic and intrepid.

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A comparison of the introductory passages of the Libretto and Martyr’s first Decade reveals as much. Trevisan: Christopher Columbus, a Genoese, a man of tall and eminent stature, ruddy, of great intelligence and long in face, followed for a long time the most serene sovereigns of Spain wherever they went, seeking their help to fit out some vessels, for he offered to find islands in the west in the neighborhood of India, where there is an abundance of precious stones, spices, and gold, which could easily be obtained. For a long time the king and queen and all the prominent men of Spain made fun of the idea, but finally, after seven years and many hardships, they conceded to his will and fitted out a ship and two caravels, in which, sometime around the first days of September 1492, he departed from Spanish shores, and began his voyage.68 Martyr: A certain Christopher Columbus, a man from Genoa, made a proposal to Ferdinand and Isabella, our Catholic majesties, and persuaded them that he would find to the west of us the islands neighboring on India, if they would equip him with ships and items required for the voyage. By these means the Christian religion could increase and an unimaginable abundance of pearls, spices, and gold be easily had. He persisted and it was arranged that he should have three ships paid out of the royal treasury: one a cargo ship, with a crow’s nest, the other two light merchants’ ships, without crow’s nests, which the Spaniards call caravels. When he had taken possession of them, Columbus began his proposed voyage around the first of September in the 1492nd year of our salvation, with about two hundred twenty Spaniards.69

Whereas Martyr’s Decades are silent on Columbus’s labors, Trevisan focuses on his dogged persistence in the face of rejection. The Libretto begins with Trevisan’s depiction of Columbus’s impressive physical and mental being, compared to Martyr’s spare “Colonus quidam ligur vir.” Similar discrepancies between Martyr’s Decades and Trevisan’s translation occur throughout the Libretto. For instance, where Trevisan describes Pedro Alonso Niño’s voyage to the Caribbean, he begins by noting Columbus’s independent spirit. “Because of the admiral’s alleged willful resistance to authority, many of his pilots and helmsmen who had always been with him on these voyages decided among themselves to go by the ocean to discover new islands”: a passage that has no equivalent in the corresponding section of Martyr’s text.70 While Martyr’s learned Latin was elegant but cold and formal, Trevisan’s vernacular translation exalted Columbus, almost with a sense of fraternal solidarity and pride, perhaps stemming from their common patria. Trevisan recorded Columbus’s preparations for his fourth voyage as if he were personally involved. “Columbus prepared to go and discover, saying he wanted to undertake a voyage more beautiful and useful than anyone else ever had . . . Many of my friends went with him, and when he returns, they will involve me

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in everything.”71 Martyr’s Decades universalized Columbus’s news by means of Latin, compared to the work of Venetian translators, editors, and printers, who also localized this material by means of both vernacular translation as well as by promoting a Venetian perspective on Columbus and global exploration. The Libretto – that is, Trevisan’s translation of Peter Martyr – became Book 4 of the Paesi and with Vespucci’s Mundus Novus letter in Book 5 formed the core of the American content in this compendium. When read together, these texts emphasized the heroic and marvelous in the New World. Vespucci’s sensational Mundus Novus letter was incredibly popular with European audiences, in large part for its description of the remarkable and fantastic. Vespucci may have been a lesser navigator than Columbus, but he was a much more skillful writer and was often carried away by the wonders of the New World: its luxurious vegetation, perfumed air, abundant fruits, and fertile terrain. While Columbus had only heard of cannibalism, in this letter, Vespucci claimed to have met a man who had consumed three hundred people, as well as women who used the bites of venomous animals to swell their husbands’ genitals. The Mundus Novus was avidly read and quickly published around Europe within the span of a few weeks in early 1503, and later “found [its] greatest renown through the Paesi novamente retrovati,” whose sales were surely increased by the presence of Vespucci’s name (rather than that of any other explorer) in its title.72 Vespucci’s Mundus Novus and Trevisan’s translation of Martyr’s accounts of Columbus’s voyages became even more wondrous when read in relationship to the more staid Portuguese accounts of the Far East that made up the rest of this compilation. Like Vespucci’s writings, Trevisan’s abridgement of Martyr tended to emphasize the marvels of the New World, including exotic flora and fauna, indigenous clothing, food, and culture. Trevisan acknowledged Columbus’s colonial eye, for instance, by including details about the riches and commercial products of the New World such as gold or potential sites for harbors and ports, but the vast majority of the commercial and economic observations in the compilation of the Paesi were located in its Portuguese narratives and not its American ones. Ethnographic observations occurred in the Portuguese sections of the compendium (chapter 66, for instance, considers “The Multi-Colored Parrots and Great Fish” of India), but discussions of trade and income dramatically outnumbered them. Portuguese accounts instead regularly included comments about the demand for certain European goods, products that might have sold well in India, preferred means of payment, and the difficulties of trading in a foreign land. The Venetian ambassadorial letters from Portugal included in Book 6 of the Paesi discussed the newfound Portuguese spice trade with India by listing practical information about trade routes, tonnages of spices, and ships and their cargoes, with little additional description of local life in this part of the world. In the overall context of the

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Paesi, among new worlds, America was read as marvelous, luxuriant, and exotic, and India as mercantile, quantifiable, and workaday. While the Paesi did not employ lengthy introductions or prefaces as Ramusio later would, its chapter headings confirmed and supported these differing emphases on different new worlds: that is, an ethnographic interest in the wondrous in the Americas and the heroism of Columbus compared to a practical interest in commerce in Asia. For example, chapter headings in the Portuguese section of the Paesi read “Spices and Merchants, and the Currencies of Calicut” (Speciarie et mercantie cum le monete de Callichut) (chapter 54); “The weights and currencies that they use” (El peso et monete che se usano) (chapter 82), together with a listing of the prices and weights of a variety of spices such as tamarind, pepper, cloves, and musk at the end of this chapter; and “Places where Spices Come From in Calicut” (Lochi donde vengono le speciarie a Calichut) (chapter 83). Throughout his translation, by contrast, Trevisan referred to Columbus as “The Admiral” or “The Admiral of the Ocean Sea”: turns of phrase rarely to be found in Martyr’s Decades but that regularly appeared in the chapter headings of the Libretto and the Paesi.73 The titles of the chapters in the Paesi contained the name of Columbus four times, and called him “Admiral” twelve times; by contrast, they named Cadamosto three times, Vespucci once, and Vasco da Gama once, referring to da Gama as “the captain” twice, while Cabral and Cortereal appeared nowhere in chapter titles. Chapter titles such as “The Marvelous Things the Admiral Discovered” (Cose maravigliose retrovate per lo admirante) (chapter 98) and “New Islands with a Variety of Peoples and Lands That the Admiral Discovered” (Nove Isole com varieta de gente et paesi per lo admirante retrovate) (chapter 105) had no equivalents in the Portuguese sections of the compilation. While the text’s different takes on India and the New World are not surprising – the spice trade with India was well known compared to the new exoticism of the Americas – the direct juxtaposition of these accounts nevertheless produced a clear comparative perspective for readers. Once again, paratextual materials reflected and constructed the text’s meaning, as even seemingly negligible elements in a compendium such as the way sections were titled or ordered had repercussions for the group of texts as a whole when read together.74 If one reads the texts of the Paesi comparatively or even skims the table of contents as the compendium format would have encouraged readers to do, the subtext is clear: the Venetians began global exploration, the heroic Italian admiral Columbus discovered a world of wonder, and Portuguese travels to India by comparison invoked commercial anxiety for Venice by upsetting the Venetians’ long-term monopoly on trade to the East. While the heroicizing of Columbus and exoticizing of the world of his travels were by no means exclusively Venetian phenomena, as we shall see, over time, Venetian cosmographers regularly celebrated the figure of

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Columbus in ways that began to link his accomplishments to Italy. Here, it is important to note that from the outset, from the beginning of the sixteenth century and with their first printed texts of Americana, Venetian presses produced some of the earliest and most significant accounts of Columbus’s voyages, establishing a clear affinity between Venice and the Italian navigator. It remains extremely difficult to form firm conclusions about many aspects of early editions of printed texts. Often, as with the Libretto, these were editions of rapid production and consumption, made in relatively small runs at a low price, that frequently indicated no publication information.75 The relatively new technology of print was, of course, made to be discarded; print was inherently ephemeral, and once prints or books became damaged or outmoded, they were easily cast off or replaced.76 In the first decades of the sixteenth century in the Venetian and Italian markets, many texts were printed not for scientific or cultural purposes – that is, for learned communities or for posterity – but in popular editions, and primarily for making money. Many editions have been lost in the last five hundred years, leaving the results derived from the counting and categorizing of printed Americana necessarily incomplete, tentative, or contradictory.77 Usually, there is no way of knowing how an account first arrived in Venice, since these originals and the stories behind their appearance in the city have also been lost. Every text, each with its own story of creation, is a historically specific case, and few generalizations can describe them all. If we keep this in mind, the story of the Libretto is significant because its provenance and history are known, including Trevisan’s direct and personal relationship with Columbus himself. The story of its publication indicates that European readers did not learn about the Columbian voyages only as a result of Columbus’s personal, firsthand account of his explorations published upon his return to Spain. Printed letters announcing his return from his first expedition, including Columbus’s Epistola . . . de su gran descubrimiento (Barcelona, 1493) – often called his Letter to Santangel, describing his 1492 voyage – were indeed extremely popular and traveled widely.78 Many Europeans, however, would have learned about his explorations from the Venetian Libretto, especially after its contents were incorporated into the Paesi, which during the course of the sixteenth century was copiously reprinted in multiple languages. Scholars have long described the significance of the Paesi novamente retrovati in histrionic tones, noting that it was “more instrumental than any other work in disseminating knowledge of America, Africa, and the Far East” and “one of the main sources [of information] in Europe for knowledge of new worlds.”79 To break down these hyperbolic but otherwise vague assessments of this text and decipher their meaning more clearly: where the New World was concerned, many Europeans learned of Columbus’s voyages through a Venetian

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chain of knowledge transmission, when a Venetian secretary sent part of Martyr’s first Decade – still the major account of the first phase of Spanish conquest until the end of the sixteenth century – to a Venetian chronicler, who in turn took it to a Venetian printer, whose printed text eventually came to form the basis of one of the best-selling accounts of the Age of Encounters. The transmission of this New World knowledge, in this case, was Venetian to its core. The examples of the Libretto and Paesi illuminate the myriad lives of information arriving from the Americas, including its transfer between different states and hands, its Venetian reorganization, and its mediation to the rest of Europe. They reflect, above all, the blossoming Venetian desire “to appropriate and interact with . . . texts, to organize and repurpose them [and] to transform existing works into new works,” of which Venetians made themselves the authors.80 With these texts, Venetian editors such as Trevisan and Montalboddo introduced European printers and readers alike to the genre of the printed travel compendium, and in turn asserted both Venetian precociousness in global exploration as well as the heroicism of Columbus. German publishers in particular enthusiastically recycled the contents of these Venetian texts. In 1532, Sebastian Münster (the cosmographer) collaborated with Johann Hüttich (the compiler) and Simon Grynaeus (the humanist) to produce the first significant Northern European travel compendium in Latin, the Novus orbis regionum ac insularum veteribus incognitarum, which included the contents of the Libretto/Paesi as well as a host of other historical and contemporary travelogues, pointing to the spread of the Venetian travel compendium in both form and content. Münster’s Cosmographia (1544) was also based on these texts, as was the Duke of Bavaria’s 1580 personal collection of narratives of discovery, and the maps of Pierre Desceliers and Caspar Vopel.81 The construction of a compendium involved the process of defining, redefining, and confirming who established authorities were and what their authority meant, and in this way, the production of these and other compendia of travel allowed Venetian editors and printmen to use their sleight of hand to proclaim the primacy of Venetian travelers, to assert the heroism of Columbus, and to demonstrate Venetian expertise on the New World, not as explorers or conquerors, but as editors and publishers. With these compendia, especially the Paesi, Venetians began to promote themselves as authorities on New World travel. THE MANUSCR IPT COMPENDIA OF ALESSANDRO ZORZI: NEW WO RLD MARGINALIA

Around the same time that the Libretto and the Paesi were being prepared and published, another Venetian editor, Alessandro Zorzi, was also hard at work

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trying to understand what the New World looked like and what Venice’s relationship to it was. Little is known about Zorzi, a Venetian intellectual active in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.82 We are familiar with his name primarily as the author of two manuscript compilations of travel literature dating to the early sixteenth century: collections that contain letters, printed and manuscript travel accounts, exchanges with travelers that dated between 1470 and 1538, and extensive marginalia, all confirmed to be in his same hand.83 Zorzi must have lived to be more than eighty, and his lifetime neatly overlapped with many European voyages of exploration. Zorzi represented a significant precursor of Ramusio in the way that he collected, edited, and organized texts about European travel to distant parts of the globe. His manuscript collections were never published and therefore never entered into wide circulation; nevertheless, scholars concur that he was preparing texts for publication, perhaps even a newly enlarged and amplified version of the Paesi, so his manuscripts offer examples of Venetian travel compilations in a preparatory phase.84 They merit attention for the ways that they too reveal a Venetian perspective on travel and exploration, especially in the copious sketches and marginalia with which Zorzi covered his manuscripts. His compilations shed light on Venetian readings of New World information in the moments between manuscript and print, and between reception and production. Zorzi’s Ferrara Codex, eighty-one pages long, represents the earlier of his two manuscripts; he compiled it in the first decade of the sixteenth century, and it contains documents pertaining only to New World exploration dating from 1492 to 1506.85 The Ferrara manuscript is primarily a collection of letters and travelogues, including accounts of Columbus’s four voyages (derived from the contents of the Libretto), Vespucci’s Mundus Novus letter, accounts of the expeditions of Pedro Alonso Niño and Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, as well as Juan Vizcaino’s (also known as Juan de la Cosa) 1506 exploration of the Caribbean. It contains eighty-seven marginal sketches, made in his hand, that show Zorzi struggling to grasp the appearance of New World peoples, objects, landscapes, flora, and fauna, as he read and interpreted various texts that described these previously unknown lands. Zorzi’s other manuscript of compiled travelogues, his Raccolta Alberico, comprises four long and dense volumes.86 A much more expansive collection, it documents travel and exploration around the globe. The first volume includes material relative to Asia and the Portuguese navigations; the third volume contains accounts of European travel to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East; and the fourth, accounts of travel to North Africa, India, and the Moluccas. The second volume focuses on the exploration of the Americas. It numbers 223 pages, was compiled sometime between 1517 and 1538, and is divided into six books that include a great variety of texts about the New World.87 The Raccolta Alberico includes maps drawn in Zorzi’s hand, pages ripped

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from printed books mixed with Zorzi’s own handwritten notes, as well as copious marginalia, all forming a kind of zibaldone or scrapbook about the New World. These remarkable miscellanea of geography, Zorzi’s selected textual fragments glossed with his own thoughts and drawings, offer an excellent example of early modern practices of reading and writing and of textual combination and recombination, especially in the way they incorporated and considered the contents and texts of the Libretto and Paesi. Zorzi’s work makes clear the degree to which compilers relied on earlier works and worked in a kind of diachronic collaboration with them as one text or compilation physically became a part of others.88 His sketch maps in particular, including one illustrating Columbus’s fourth voyage and potentially copied from a map shown to him by Columbus’s brother Bartholomew, have attracted much scholarly attention, in particular for the way Zorzi imagined the New World attached to Asia, not through the north, across what is today Canada and Russia, but through the south, across the South American continent (Figure 3).89 Sketches like this one offer a tangible feel for Europeans’ creative attempts to understand new geographies, as well as how they struggled to grasp the changing parameters of the expanding world in the first half of the sixteenth century. In addition to these maps, a wide variety of sketches fill the margins of Zorzi’s manuscripts and demonstrate how interpreting the New World involved different levels of witnessing. For instance, Zorzi’s maps and drawings of Caribbean islands found in both manuscripts, including sketches of Cuba and Hispaniola, often offered fairly accurate representations of the coastlines that Zorzi most likely copied from actual maps, drawings, or portolan charts that he had access to among his circle of informants and sources of information (Figure 4).90 Similarly, Zorzi could easily have seen the parrots or lizards he drew in the margins of his texts imported from the New World to Rome or elsewhere.91 Other images, by contrast, involved more creativity. His sketches of Caribbean villages or hammocks in the margins of the texts of Columbus’s letters show Zorzi clearly struggling to imagine what material life in the New World looked like. Drawn only from textual description, his hammock appears more like a grate than a hanging bed, as he attempted to translate written words into a pictorial equivalent and take an imaginative leap from language to image (Figures 5 and 6).92 Illustrating a description of Indians bringing Columbus two statues of gold, Zorzi depicts these, not surprisingly, as classicizing European nudes (Figure 7), reflecting once again the common European practice of understanding the New World through the framework of classical antiquity.93 Zorzi inscribed almost every page of the Ferrara Codex with similar figures, drawings, notes, sketches, maps, and marginal glosses. Notably, while such marginalia crowd the pages of the American volume of the Raccolta Alberico, the other three volumes in this manuscript collection strikingly contain almost no

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3. Alessandro Zorzi, sketch map of the Caribbean. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, B.R. 234, 60v. With permission from the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo / Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence.

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4. Alessandro Zorzi, sketch map of Cuba. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, B.R. 234, 10v. With permission from the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo / Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence.

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5. Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of a hammock. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, B.R. 234, 5r. With permission from the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo / Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence.

marginalia at all, suggesting the larger gap between textual depictions of the New World and Zorzi’s ability to understand them. A disproportionate amount of mental activity spilled into the margins when ideas and images from the New World sparked the play of his imagination and prompted him to try to envision

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6. Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of a hammock. Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, Ferrara, Ms. cl. II. 10, 7r. With permission from the Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, Ferrara.

the Americas on the page. Sketching strange and unknown animals, botany, household utensils, furniture, weapons, art objects, villages, dwellings, and maps clearly helped him to visualize from textual description alone, revealing his dialogue with the Americas and his personal interpretation of these texts. Many of Zorzi’s glosses and marginalia highlight the marvelous and the unknown in a relatively straightforward and predictable way, such as gold, cannibals, nudity, or plants and animals. As with Liburnio’s glosses of Cortés’s letter, however, some of Zorzi’s marginalia point to a Venetian understanding of these novelties, as well as to the ways in which he considered these texts through a Venetian mental and conceptual framework. For instance, Zorzi frequently drew canoes in the margins of his texts (Figure 8).94 In the Ferrara Codex next to Columbus’s text describing, “Canoes, which are boats, are made of wood carved out with sharp stones, long but narrow; many affirm having seen them with eighty oars,” Zorzi glossed the word “canoe” and the Venetian words “zopoli” (canoes) and “zopoli de 80 remi” (canoes with eighty oars).95 He was particularly fascinated by the Amerindian method of turtle fishing that Columbus witnessed on Cuba during his second voyage. As the Paesi novamente retrovati that Zorzi had pasted into his compilation explained: Farther on they found fishermen in their boats hollowed out of a single tree, like pirogues, who were fishing in this fashion: they had a fish of a form unknown to us, which has the body of an eel, but larger, and upon its head it has very tender skin which seems like a large purse. They hold it fast

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7. Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of statues. Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, Ferrara, Ms. cl. II. 10, 12v. With permission from the Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, Ferrara.

with a line from the side of the boat, because it cannot stand the least bit of air, and when they see any large fish or turtle, they release the line, and it immediately shoots like an arrow after the fish or snake, attaching itself with the skin it has on its head, with which it attaches itself so securely that its prey cannot escape and does not let go until they pull it out of the water; upon which, as soon as it feels the air, it releases its prey, which the fishermen are quick to seize. In the presence of our men, they took four large turtles, which they gave to our men as a most delicate fare.96

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8. Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of a canoe. Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, Ferrara, Ms. cl. II. 10, 9v. With permission from the Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, Ferrara.

Zorzi attempted to visualize this practice by sketching a canoe suspending a fishing line with a wriggling eel into the water above a swimming turtle: one of the more elaborate marginalia in his collections (Figure 9). Furthermore, repetitively, indeed almost neurotically, sketched islands also populate the margins of many pages in both manuscripts – often labeled insule infinite or insule molte – suggesting that Zorzi envisioned the New World through the lens of his own island identity, perhaps including the Venetian tradition of island colonialism in the Mediterranean and/or the Venetian tradition of isolarii or books of islands (Figures 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13).97 Marginalia of boats, fishing, and islands all indicate some of the ways in which a Venetian might have been curious about the maritime cultures of Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, and Cuba and the cultures of fellow fishermen, all of which clearly attracted Zorzi’s attention. Notably, marginalia in both manuscripts highlight ideas and imagery from the text of Marco Polo that Zorzi clearly associated with the New World. For instance, in the margins of the text of the Libretto/Paesi that Zorzi had

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9. Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of Cuban turtle fishing. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, B.R. 234, 11v. With permission from the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo / Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence.

incorporated into his compilation, near passages that described Columbus’s landing on Cuba and next to the specific phrases “two serpents that were eight feet long in the form of crocodiles” (“doi serpenti di otto piedi lungo . . . ala forma di cocodrilli”) and “they saw many of these serpents tied to trees with cords” (“viddeno molti di questi serpenti ligati ad arbori cum cordi”), Zorzi

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10. Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of islands. Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, Ferrara, Ms. cl. II. 10, 11r. With permission from the Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, Ferrara.

drew large, crocodile-like figures tied to trees, and a sketch of a single claw. Between his drawings of the crocodile and its claw, he wrote: Pope Pius in Asia says that/Nicolò de’Conti/these serpents are delicious to eat/Marco Polo speaks of these serpents in the presence of the Great Khan, and they are delicious to eat, and their galls are medicinal. It is said to have only one nail on its foot, like a falcon (Figures 12 and 13).98

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11. Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of islands. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, B.R. 234, 7r. With permission from the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo / Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence.

Once again, as with the compilations of the Libretto and the Paesi, marginalia attest to a kind of interactive reading and repurposing of texts when Zorzi, through his textual cross-referencing, creatively combines Polo, Conti, and Columbus and equates Asia with America. Here, reading about the crocodiles

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12. Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of a serpent. Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, Ferrara, Ms. cl. II. 10, 20v. With permission from the Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, Ferrara.

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13. Alessandro Zorzi, marginalia drawing of a serpent. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, B.R. 234, 11r. With permission from the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo / Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence.

of Cuba, Zorzi imagines them to be, or to be similar to, the crocodiles Marco Polo reported in the Province of Carazan (the former Kingdom of Dali, today Yunnan Province), where Polo described the existence of similarly large serpents, which were purported to be good to eat and have medicinal galls and claws like a falcon.99 While Zorzi does not elaborate on the links he perceived between Columbus and Nicolò de’Conti (1395–1469), Columbus’s

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Cuba also made Zorzi think of the Venetian merchant and explorer who traveled to India and Southeast Asia and possibly to southern China in the fifteenth century and was potentially the first traveler to return to Venice from China after Polo in 1444. Zorzi regularly notes Polo, Cipangu (Japan), Kublai Khan, and spices (spezie) in his glosses.100 In the margins of his copy of Columbus’s fourth letter from Jamaica, dated July 7, 1503 – a letter that makes no reference to Marco Polo – Zorzi glossed “Kublai Khan, emperor, in 1257 sent the sons of Marco Polo. Cathay.”101 For Zorzi, Columbus was like Polo and Conti; Cuba and Jamaica were like China. He had his own, subjective, locally formed conception of global geography and the relationship between the continents in which East and West were one. When he scrutinized growing knowledge of the world up close in his marginal sketches, America was Asia, as it easily could have been for a learned Venetian observer. Zorzi linked the Asia of Venetian travelers to Columbus’s New World, much the way Ramusio and later Venetian cartographers would as well. Glosses and marginal annotations call attention to specific aspects of a text and give them prominence, showing what the author (or reader) thinks is important, and leading successive readers to view the contents in a specific way by manipulating their understanding of the text. If marginalia reflect the intellectual background and world of the reader and/or writer in this way, Zorzi’s marginalia revealed the ways in which he linked Venice to the New World through Polo, whose account helped Zorzi to understand and visualize the Americas through the lens of Venetian history. Zorzi’s sketches of Mexican cities also appear “Venetianized.” He represented the Mexican cities of Tlaxcala and Tenochtitlan in the Raccolta Alberico from a bird’s-eye view, rendering them from above, almost as if he saw them through the lens of Jacopo de’ Barbari’s 1500 map of Venice (Figures 14 and 15): an approach that was not normally taken in comparable representations of the Mexican capital at the time.102 While marginalia sometimes functioned as mnemonic devices, Zorzi’s sketches and marginal notes attempted instead to visualize the new and unfamiliar, often through Venetian imagery and Venetian words. Zorzi composed his compilations in a Venetianized Italian throughout, using words such as zopoli, zorni, cognosuta, laso, ziochi, faza, and mojere: Venetian words for canoes, days, know, leave, games, make, and wife that may have been intended for his final print publication.103 In this straightforward way as well, he Venetianized the New World. As Stephen Greenblatt has put it, “the principal faculty involved in generating these representations [of the New World] is not reason but imagination,” and along these lines, Zorzi’s ideas about the appearance of America demonstrate how “in most early European accounts of the New World, we are dealing . . . with the imagination at work.”104 In his Libraria (1550), the Venetian poligrafo Anton Francesco Doni ridiculed the composers of marginalia or postillatori as intellectual parasites.

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14. Alessandro Zorzi, sketch of Tenochtitlan. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, B.R. 234, 126r. With permission from the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo / Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence.

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15. Jacopo de Barbari, woodcut map of Venice. 1500. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Tongue in cheek, Doni exclaimed, “I sincerely praise these efforts, and praise those who, not endowed with the natural ability to write books of their own . . . labor in these and similar virtuous undertakings.”105 While Doni refused to endow the writers of marginalia with any creative impulse, modern literary scholars have demonstrated how marginalia offer some of the best evidence of the historical and intellectual engagement entailed in reading since they demonstrate the active process of remaking meaning.106 As Anthony Grafton explains, marginalia “give off the scent of human flesh and blood” on the page, and offer evidence of how readers assembled a text’s cultural capital for themselves.107 Marginalia allowed medieval and early modern readers to assimilate and ruminate upon a text’s contents.108 They offer a precious glimpse into the private workings of the mind of the diligent reader, and can reveal the processes of amplification, annotation, correction, emphasis, evaluation, organization, parody, simplification, or translation. Renaissance literary scholars have long questioned the concept of authorship; along these lines, words and images in the margins of texts point to the fluid, shifting, and collaborative nature of Renaissance textual practices.109 In effect, both the generation of a compilation and its elaboration with marginalia reveal competition over authoring as well as battles for control over a text and its interpretation. That is to say, compilations and their marginalia expose a struggle over textual authority: a struggle we might imagine was particularly poignant for Venetians in the context of the literature of exploration as they watched the Spanish and Portuguese establish profitable colonies in an Atlantic world where Venice had no physical presence. Venetians were never the “authors” of these voyages, yet through their texts and textual

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practices, they made themselves the authors of these narratives, regardless of their actual participation in New World travel or the fact that they did not originally author any of these texts. Though it never came into print, Zorzi’s compilation represents another significant example of the Venetian travel compendium that aimed to spread knowledge of the Americas; it offers a sense of how Zorzi interpreted ideas and images from the New World through Venetian eyes. The scholar Roberto Almagià argued that Zorzi’s understanding of Ptolemy suggested that Zorzi was an erudite intellectual. However, perhaps Zorzi was more of a practical Venetian businessman, or a journalist linked to the book trade. While it remains unclear how his marginal images would have informed or influenced his final printed text, his drawings show him trying to render new knowledge clearly while creating a text aimed – if not just for himself – less at scholars and intellectuals and more at a general, heterogeneous public readership, including perhaps the mercantile and maritime classes of Venice, historically grounded in islands, boats, fishing, spices, and the routes to Marco Polo’s East.110 In the 1520s and 30s, most likely around the same time that Zorzi was scrapbooking the New World, the Venetian state and its citizens occasionally revealed passing interests in developing a tangible and material relationship with the Americas. For instance, at the request of the Council of Ten – the city’s central security council – the ambassador to Spain Gasparo Contarini entered into secret negotiations with Sebastian Cabot in 1522 and attempted to arrange for him to visit Venice to discuss the possibility of undertaking voyages of exploration on behalf of the city.111 In addition, a notarial document in Milan indicates that in 1537–1538, a group of Venetians, including Giovanni Battista Ramusio and Antonio Priuli, working with Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo and a potential fourth partner in Santo Domingo, invested four hundred gold ducats apiece in a ship to trade in sugar between Venice, Cadiz, and the New World.112 Beyond this handful of examples, which never came to anything, Venetians never exhibited any serious intentions of actually going to the New World as merchants or colonizers. By the 1530s, if not before, it seems, they had fully embraced their role as vicarious explorers of the Americas through printed texts. Venetians such as Angelo Trevisan, Fracanzio da Montalboddo, and Alessandro Zorzi all participated in the Age of Encounters secondhand, namely, by avidly collecting materials about the Americas and disseminating them in their printed compilations. In this way, similar to the labors of explorers themselves, the work of Venetian printmen was crucial to the development of early modern globalization and world-making. If the Columbian voyages and Iberian colonialism resulted in the movement of a vast range of commodities, flora

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and fauna, foodstuffs, precious metals, and diseases around the world, Venetian print culture disseminated global knowledge. Through the technology of print, editors, cosmographers, and printers shaped new information locally, putting a Venetian spin on American material. It then traveled quickly and widely, generating new theaters of the imagination as these printed texts brought Venetian visions of the New World to Italians and Europeans alike. The editorial work of these compilers who, like Calvino’s Polo, recast new worlds in Venetian terms, found its culmination in the publications of Giovanni Battista Ramusio, who developed the models that had been first established by these editors earlier in the century. As we shall see, Ramusio transformed these initial, smaller-scale compilations into an encyclopedic history of travel and exploration in the first global age that would have a dramatic impact on European knowledge of the New World for generations to come, a history that, like the texts of his predecessors, quietly but insistently propagated a Venetian view of the world.

APPENDIX:

VENETIAN AMERICANA The great quantity of texts about the New World published in sixteenthcentury Venice has long been noted.113 Massimo Donattini’s examination of eighty-eight works that focused on the New World and were printed in Italy between 1493 and 1650 counted forty-four publications from Venice.114 Rudolf Hirsch’s analysis of 119 European publications about New World exploration printed between 1493 and 1526 concluded that Paris produced the most volumes overall in this period, followed by Venice, Nuremberg, Antwerp, Rome, Strasbourg, and Augsburg.115 The most exhaustive of these studies, John Alden and Denis Landis’s catalogue of European Americana published between 1493 and 1776 – a catalogue that counted all the printed texts that touched upon the New World in any way, even only tangentially or peripherally – showed that Italian presses produced 1,007 volumes about the Americas between 1493 and 1600, 607 of which came from Venice. It also revealed that Venetian publications about the New World were distributed among a variety of publishers and that no single printing house tended to specialize in this subject.116 While the European production of Americana was uneven and varied between cities and from year to year, Venetian

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participation in the spread of news and information about the New World was by all accounts robust. The interested reader would do well to consult any one of these bibliographies to follow up on the Venetian contribution. Here, I offer a condensed sketch of some of these texts, their contents, and their significance. The 1503 Venetian edition of Jacopo Filippo Foresti da Bergamo’s Supplementum supplementi chronicarum (newly entitled Novissimae historiarum omnium repercussiones) – a massive chronicle of the history of the world from its creation to the present day of its publication – was the first Venetian printed text to note the New World when it dedicated a chapter to the Columbian voyages. Its numerous reprintings and successive translations (1506, 1508, 1513, 1520, 1524, 1540, 1581) all helped to spread descriptions of the nature and customs of the inhabitants of San Salvador, Santa Maria de Conception, Fernandina, and Hispaniola.117 Other early Venetian publications include, for instance, the Libretto de tutta la navigatione de’re di Spagna (Albertino Vercellese da Lisona, 1504), which offered an account of Columbus’s first three voyages, translated from the manuscript of Peter Martyr’s Decades (De orbe novo) by Angelo Trevisan. Amerigo Vespucci’s Mundus Novus letter (Giovanni Battista Sessa, 1504) described the explorer’s voyage to South America in 1501–1502. The Copia della lettera per Columbo mandata ali Serenissimi Re et Regina di Spagna: De le insule et luoghi per lui trovate (Simone de Lovere, 1505) was an Italian translation of Columbus’s fourth letter, narrating his voyage to Jamaica. The Paesi novamente retrovati et novo mondo da Alberico Vesputio Florentio intitulato (Vicenza: Henrico e Zanmaria Vicentino, 1507) also offered an expansive and pathbreaking collection of travel literature, including various texts pertaining to the Americas. Juan Díaz’s extremely popular Itinerario allo Yucatán (Giorgio dei Rusconi, 1520) described Juan de Grijalva’s expedition to the Yucatan in 1518. Díaz had been the chaplain of the Grijalva expedition, and his text presented readers with one of the earliest glimpses of Mexico as an advanced and civilized culture.118 Soon after, the poligrafo, grammarian, and humanist Nicolò Liburnio confirmed this impression with his translation of Hernán Cortés’s second letter to Charles V in La preclara narratione di Ferdinando Cortése della Nuova Hispagna (Bernardino de Viano de Lexona Vercellese, 1524), in which Cortés described his first contact with the Aztecs, his arrival in Tenochtitlan, and his capture of Montezuma; Benedetto Bordone’s isolario, entitled Libro di Benedetto Bordone, nel qual si ragiona de tutte l’isole del mondo (Nicolo d’Aristotile, 1528), elaborated upon Cortés’s letter, and additionally discussed a variety of islands in the New World. Domenico de Gatzelu translated Francisco Xerez’s history of the conquest of Peru in his Libro primo de la conquista del Perù e provincia di Cuzco de le Indie Occidentali (Maestro Stefano da Sabbio, 1535). Il viaggio fatto da gli spagniuoli attorno a’l mondo (Eredi di L. Giunti (?), 1536) offered two accounts of Magellan’s voyage around the globe, one by the imperial secretary Massimiliano

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Transilvano, who had interviewed the survivors of Magellan’s voyage in 1522, and the other by Antonio Pigafetta. The Sevillian navigator Pedro de Medina’s L’arte del navegar (Giambattista Pedrezano, 1554), translated by the Dominican Vincenzo Paletino da Curzola, discussed the art of navigation that had promoted the discovery of new lands. Venetian presses were often the first to publish accounts of the exploration, conquest, and colonization of the New World. Trevisan’s Libretto contained the first published account of Columbus’s third voyage, the first physical description of Columbus, and an account of Vicente Yáñez Pinzón’s 1499 voyage to South America, offering the earliest recorded account of a European explorer sighting the Brazilian coast. Benedetto Bordone’s isolario offered the first printed version of Pizzaro’s conquest of Peru. Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi (Giunti, 1550–1559) most notably published many New World travel accounts for the first time.119 While being “first” in and of itself is not always an indicator of significance, a concentration of firsts with regard to printed books of Americana indicates Venice’s status as a city deeply concerned with being on the cutting edge of the news market. Additional Italian translations of Spanish works printed in Venice included Pedro Cieza de León’s La prima parte del l’historie del Perù (Andrea Arrivabene, 1556), as well as Francisco López de Gómara’s multivolume Historia delle nuove Indie Occidentali (Giordano Ziletti, 1557; Andrea Arrivabene, 1557; F. Lorenzini, 1560), translated first in Rome by Augustino di Cravaliz in 1556 and dedicated to Cosimo I de Medici, and famously recounting the conquest of Mexico in chivalric tones.120 Alfonso Ulloa produced an Italian translation of an account of the life of Charles V in his Vita dell’invittissimo e sacratissimo imperator Carlo V (Vincenzo Valgrisio,1560). In addition to Ramusio’s third volume on the Americas from his Navigazioni e viaggi (Giunti, 1556), Venetian presses produced an Italian edition of Johannes Böhm’s text, Gli costumi, le leggi, et le usanze di tutte le genti (Gironimo Giglio, 1558), with a new appendix dedicated to the Americas, as well as André Thevet’s Historia dell’India detta America detta altramente Francia Antartica (Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari, 1561). These were followed by Augustín de Zárate’s La historia dello scoprimento et conquista del Perù (Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1563), translated by Alfonso de Ulloa; Girolamo Benzoni’s Histora del Mondo Nuovo (Francesco Rampazzetto, 1565); Ferdinand Columbus’s Historie nelle quali s’ha particular et vera relatione della vita et de’fatti dell’ammiraglio don Christoforo Columbo suo padre (Francesco de’ Franceschi Sanese, 1571); and the Jesuit missionary and naturalist José de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Bernardo Basa, 1595), a summation of European thought on the Americas translated by the mathematician and cosmographer Paolo Galluci da Salò. Scientific and medical texts that considered the New World – a particular and prominent subset of literature on travel, conquest, and colonization – also

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featured conspicuously in Venetian production, again often in translation from Spanish. For instance, Venetian presses published Francisco Delicado’s El modo de adoperare el legno de India Occidentale, salutifero remedio a ogni plaga et mal incurabile (Sumtibus Francisco Delicato, 1529); Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s Summario de la natural y general historia de las Indias (n.p., 1534); and Nicolò Monardes’s Delle cose che vengono portate dall’Indie Occidentali (Giordano Ziletti, 1575), translated by the Neapolitan medical doctor Annibale Briganti. Monardes discussed tobacco, guaiacum, and the armadillo, and a range of additional medicinal American plants.121 Briganti also translated Garcia da Orta’s Due libri dell’historia de i semplici, aromati e altre cose che vengono portate dale Indie Orientali (Giovanni and Andrea Zenaro, 1576). The Sienese doctor and physician to Ferdinand, the archduke of Austria, Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s Dei discorsi (Vincenzo Valgriso, 1563) – Mattioli’s commentaries on the Materia medica of Dioscorides – similarly included tomatoes, guaiacum, and maize. Later in the seventeenth century, the Roman physician and lecturer on naturalia Castore Durante published his Herbario novo (Li Sessa, 1602) in Venice, which recorded American aloe, pineapple, potatoes, tomatoes, and maize, as did the Vicentine Giovanni Battista Barpo’s Le delitie et i frutti dell’agricoltura et della villa, libri tre (Sarzina, 1634), which considered “mahice” or maize in particular. In this way, Venetian print culture participated actively, if vicariously, in the scientific revolution associated with the Age of Encounters, reflecting the deep connections between exploration, commerce, representation, and scientific discovery (in particular in the field of botany) in early modern Europe.122 Such publications indicated how interests in science and exploration were not necessarily linked to statebuilding or colonization – as indeed they were not in Venice – as well as the ways in which the practices of early modern science both reflected and constructed a growing sense of early modern global connectedness.123

THREE

GIOVANNI BATTISTA RAMUSIO’S VENETIAN NEW WORLD

I

n his preface to readers in the third edition of Volume 1 of Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi (1563), the Venetian editor Tommaso Giunti proclaimed that as a result of the publication of Ramusio’s voluminous history of global travel and exploration, “it was no longer necessary to read either Ptolemy, Strabo, Pliny, or any other of the ancient writers on geography,” since the contents of Ramusio’s text had surpassed their knowledge.1 By the middle of the sixteenth century, many discussions about geography and cosmography had begun to note the phenomenon that modern people, in fact, had come to know more than the ancients.2 Giunti did not exaggerate. The massive tomes of Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi (Giunti, 1550–1559) contributed decisively to Europeans’ understanding of the globe; no other author, editor, or cosmographer to date in Europe had accumulated and published so many accounts of travel and exploration. What is surprising, however, is not the idea that ancient knowledge had become outdated but rather that one of the individuals who played such a significant role in this process was not an explorer, conquistador, traveler, or even a scientist, but instead a humble Venetian bureaucrat and armchair traveler who rarely left the confines of his island city. Ramusio’s Navigazioni built directly on the Venetian travel compendia that had come before him. His synthetic, textual redimensioning of the world was a product of this tradition, of Venetian diplomacy and cosmopolitanism, and of the historical moment in which Venetians and Italians found themselves by the 63

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middle of the sixteenth century, increasingly hemmed in by Habsburg hegemony both around the world and in Italy. At a time when Europeans had become more aware than ever of the growing dimensions and complexities of the globe, including most notably the Iberian domination of the New World and its resources, Ramusio’s text reminded Europeans that historically, Romans and Venetians had had the most experience in the wider world. At the twilight of Venetian international commercial power, Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi interpreted the history of the New World in light of Venetian mercantile and maritime history, and much like his predecessors, he used Spanish and Portuguese accounts of the Americas to mount a case for the continued global centrality of Venice. RAMUSI O’S SUMMARIO (1534)

Before publishing his opus, Ramusio produced a lesser-known compilation, his Summario, which illuminates his early thoughts on the genre of the compendium as well as the ways in which he began to experiment with its format. By the end of the first decade of the sixteenth century, the printed travel anthology had become an established Venetian genre, and its contents traveled regularly around Europe. Venetian travel compendia reached a turning point in 1534, however, when a more general interest in the Americas on the part of ambassadors and the editorial world at large gave way to the curiosity of intellectuals and high culture and began to attract attention in the spheres of cartography and more scholarly publishing. The travel compilation began to shift away from popular editions, toward more academic and scientific publications. This change manifested itself with the publication of the Summario de la generale historia de l’Indie Occidentali (n.p.,1534), an anonymous compilation commonly attributed to Ramusio (1485–1557).3 Born in Padua, Ramusio was a Venetian cittadino who became a lifelong civil servant in Venice, first as secretary to Alvise Mocenigo, ambassador to France, later as secretary to the senate, and most significantly as secretary to the Council of Ten. He married the noblewoman Franceschina Navagero in 1524, oversaw the workings of the Bessarion library between 1530 and 1542, and developed a regular correspondence with a variety of intellectuals during that time, including Andrea Navagero, Girolamo Fracastoro, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, and Pietro Bembo, all of whom formed a network that nourished Ramusio’s interests in humanism, exploration, natural history, and travel literature. Under all these influences, Ramusio became one of the most significant cosmographers in sixteenth-century Europe.4 His compilation of the Summario – the publication that launched his career as an editor of travel literature – comprised three texts: 1) an edition of Peter Martyr’s first three Decades, translated by either Navagero or Ramusio;5 2) Navagero’s translation of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s

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Sumario de la natural y general istoria de las Indias (first published in Toledo in 1526), which discussed the flora and fauna of the New World;6 and 3) two letters about the conquest of Peru, one by Francisco Xerez and the other attributed to the captain Cristóbal de Mena, both most likely translated by Ramusio himself.7 The Libro primo of the Summario included material from Martyr’s first three Decades, and removed the internal subdivisions from the original to form a continuous prose narrative. Ramusio reduced the text in length, and more importantly, introduced new passages of possibly invented material not included in any previous publication of Martyr, including Venetian editions, that served once again to heroicize Columbus and dramatize the New World. For instance, the first paragraph of the Summario valorized Columbus’s intelligence and abilities as a navigator. “Having great abilities,” Ramusio narrated, Columbus became “in a few years the most practiced and able ship’s captain that there was in his day,” who “diligently observed that at certain times of the year, winds blew from the West.”8 Describing Columbus’s men preparing to rebel after thirty-three days at sea, Ramusio added a segment of text, again not found in either the Libretto or Martyr’s first Decade: Three days before his landfall, while he was sleeping, a miraculous vision appeared to Columbus, such that awakened full of happiness, he called his companions around him and told them that in a short time, they would see land. And one morning at dawn, throwing down the probe [used to check depth] into the sea, and seeing a certain sort of land on the bottom, he knew he was not far [from land].9

Here in the Summario, Columbus took on saintly qualities in Ramusio’s almost hagiographic narrative. Martyr’s first Decade and Ramusio’s Summario both describe a hurricane that hit Hispaniola during Columbus’s fourth voyage in June of 1502. While both accounts recount furious winds, uprooted trees, and ships sunk to the bottom of the sea, the Summario’s retelling added a great variety of details to further dramatize the story, depicting the storm as an “impetuous turbine” that “moved rocks from mountaintops, bringing them down low to incredible ruin.” According to Ramusio, “everyone thought that the end of the world had come”: passages all absent in Martyr’s original.10 Similarly, when relating the story of a banquet offered to Bartolomé Colon by Anacaona on the island of Hispaniola, Ramusio’s narrative included a romance between the explorer and the scantily dressed Taíno queen who, adorned from head to toe with flowers, “looked at the governor lovingly, thinking he was the most handsome man she had ever seen”: a sensual elaboration on Martyr’s more staid original.11 Martyr’s humanistic style tended to describe Columbus and the New World in rhetoric that was measured, harmonious, elegant, fitting, and agreeable. Trevisan and Ramusio in turn often transformed Martyr’s conventional

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expressions and scholarly formulas into prose that made the New World more alluring, fearsome, and awe-inspiring, at times to highlight the challenges of Columbus’s journey as well as his valor in facing them.12 In 1534, for many, the Columbian voyages were still fresh news, and the Summario maintained Venice’s role in spreading information about Iberian discovery and exploration, including the topos of a heroic Columbus, recurrent in Venetian editorial production since the beginning of the sixteenth century. Ramusio’s Summario also widened the scope of the genre of the travel compilation in its innovative juxtaposition of Martyr, Oviedo, and Xerex/de Mena. For instance, while Martyr sometimes expressed curiosity about indigenous religious culture, respectfully admiring Amerindians’ sense of fantasy and rich world of imagination, Oviedo rarely missed an opportunity to point out the supposed intellectual inferiority of Amerindians.13 Binding these two accounts together generated a comparison between two different perspectives on the nature of New World peoples, reflecting a discussion that would in fact soon become deeply polemical in Europe following the publications of Benzoni and Las Casas by the middle of the sixteenth century. More significantly, the Summario broke with the established structure of the Venetian compendium by synthesizing narrative accounts (Martyr and Xerex/de Mena) with descriptive ones (Oviedo). Read together, these texts presented a more totalizing vision of the Americas, and one that linked political narrative to the material world and natural history. In this way, the Summario represented a kind of second phase of acquiring knowledge of the Americas: one that went beyond simply announcing news to offer instead a nascent appreciation of new worlds. By juxtaposing news (Martyr) with more detailed analysis (Oviedo), the Summario displayed another example of the Venetian organization and production of the knowledge of Spanish activities in the New World.14 RAMUSI O’S NAVIGAZIONI E VIAGGI (1550–1559)

Ramusio folded the contents of his Summario into his Navigazioni e viaggi (Giunti, 1550–1559), often considered the first comprehensive European history of travel and exploration. The Navigazioni was a three-volume compilation of firsthand accounts of travel in which Ramusio systematically translated, critically examined, and commented upon eighty-two narratives of global exploration.15 With this encyclopedic anthology, Ramusio enabled Italians and Europeans alike to study the history of travel in one “complete” collection, including texts that until then had often been difficult to obtain. Most significantly, he treated travel literature with the same attention and respect previously reserved only for the texts of classical antiquity; that is to say, he methodically subjected travel accounts to the rigorous, critical methods of humanist scrutiny and philological models, the likes of which had been done before only by Poggio Bracciolini a

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century earlier.16 Noting his monumental labors, Francesco Sansovino praised Ramusio in his Venetia città nobilissima (1581) as the “new Strabo or Ptolemy of this century.”17 The tradition of the Venetian travel compendium and its discussion of the New World that began with Trevisan’s Libretto in 1504 culminated in Ramusio’s compilation, which was published in multiple editions in Venice through the beginning of the seventeenth century.18 Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi has received considerable scholarly attention that has, in large part, pointed to the ways in which Ramusio was able to fill voids in cosmographic and geographic knowledge with more accuracy, authority, and neutrality than anyone who had preceded him.19 According to this historiography, he updated the geographical knowledge of antiquity, and for the most part “his goal was a purely scholarly, scientific one.”20 While Ramusio’s interests were undoubtedly dominated by scientific, cosmographic, historical, and ethnographic questions – a point beyond dispute – like other Venetian editors before him, he too saw the world through Venetian lenses and pursued patriotic concerns. If editors such as Trevisan, Montalboddo, and Zorzi had hinted as much, Ramusio’s compilation made such Venetian claims more unabashedly: a point that deserves further exploration. Compendia aimed to manipulate readers in a wide variety of ways through their translation, editing, prefacing, and ordering of texts. In this tradition, the way Ramusio organized the travelogues in his compendium demonstrates how he hoped to depict Venice as a global power. Ramusio ordered his materials geographically according to different zones of exploration and paths of traffic. Volume 1 (1550) contained travel narratives associated with the history of the spice trade, including the accounts of Leo Africanus, Alvise Cadamosto, Amerigo Vespucci, Vasco da Gama, and Antonio Pigafetta, among others. Volume 2 (published last in 1559, posthumously) focused on the vast spaces of central Asia and the European overland Silk Road, including most notably the accounts of Marco Polo, Giosofat Barbaro, and Ambrogio Contarini. Volume 3 (1556) considered the New World and highlighted the works of Peter Martyr, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, Giovanni da Verrazzano, and Jacques Cartier.21 Through this commercial ordering of global geography – a unique format, since most travel compendia had hitherto arranged texts chronologically, or by continent – Ramusio emphasized zones of political and economic power according to the three main populations of explorers. Volume 1 embraced Portugal’s recently developed maritime empire, Volume 3 that of Spain (and other European powers) in America, and Volume 2 emphasized Venetian hegemony in Asia following the travels of Marco Polo.22 This organization allowed Ramusio to place the travels of Venetians to the Near and Far East on par with the exploration of Cortés, Columbus, and da Gama, making Venice an equivalent of Spain and Portugal in the exploration of the known world. His arrangement

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of texts served as a clear reminder of Venice’s historic geopolitical presence in an epoch of Iberian expansion, a result that a simple chronological organization would not have achieved. In this way, Ramusio’s compendium once again reveals the flexible, shifting, and collective nature of early modern textual practices, where assembly, reassembly, and changing juxtapositions produced tangible effects. In addition, it demonstrates clearly, as the work of Ricardo Padrón, Martin Lewis, and Kären Wigen has similarly suggested, the ways in which geographies are subjectively constructed and historically contingent.23 Modern conceptions of the continents – a convention that is historically unstable – were nowhere in sight for Ramusio, who instead understood the piecing together of the globe according to historic Venetian patterns of trade and commerce, demonstrating how he and other locals had their own set of spatial structures through which they organized knowledge about the world. Even more importantly, Ramusio’s arrangement offers penetrating insights into the Venetian ways of classifying knowledge about the wider world as they were informed by Venetian history and culture. Ramusio not only depicted Venice as an equal of Spain and Portugal; the organization of his text also represented Spain and Portugal as equivalents of Venice, as arrivistes, just catching up in knowledge and experience that Venetians had long possessed. That is to say, based on their history of trade with the Far East, Venetians had developed an informed, global mentality that extended far beyond the Mediterranean long before much of the rest of Europe, so that from Ramusio’s perspective, Iberian expansion was merely an extension of what Venetians already knew. Ramusio’s organization – and indeed, much of the content of his text – proclaimed that for Venetians, a knowledge of the New World was an affirmation and broadening of their age-old knowledge of the expansiveness of the world, as much as it was “news.” Ramusio’s textual organization functioned as an acknowledgement that other European powers had begun to encroach on Venetian turf, by going either around Africa or across the Atlantic, and his text represented a decisive and defensive reaction to this encroachment.24 RAMUSI O, CH RISTOPHER COLUMBUS, AND MARCO POLO

Ramusio often prefaced the texts in his collection with brief discorsi, and in addition to his format for organization, these prefaces also betrayed his Venetian biases. In these introductory essays, peppered throughout his volumes, Ramusio established the primacy of Venice first and foremost by asserting the historical preeminence of Italian explorers in general. His Essay on the Spice Voyages (Discorso sopra li viaggi delle spetierie), which concludes Volume 1, recounted a history of the Silk Road and Europe’s spice trade with India from the antique world through the sixteenth century. While governed by the enlightened Romans, as Strabo had recorded, Alexandria became the richest city in the world when trade between the Red Sea and India brought a

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seemingly infinite amount of precious goods to Egypt. Cinnamon, pepper, cloves, ginger, and saffron, as well as a wide variety of other luxury items (Ramusio numbered more than fifty-five), arrived from the East in great quantities, and this trade route became “very well known and traveled – perhaps even more than it is today.”25 The kings of Egypt at one point even considered building a canal that would connect the Red Sea to the Mediterranean in order to facilitate this trade. This profitable exchange ended, however, with the destruction of the Roman Empire by the barbarians (barbare nazioni): a tragedy Ramusio repeatedly lamented throughout his volumes.26 Medieval Italian traders managed to develop overland routes through the Caspian Sea and Crimean peninsula, “where up until just one hundred and fifty years ago, Venetian and Genoese ships and galleys went to buy spices and jewels.”27 Though the Portuguese had more recently become “lords of all the seas, so that no one can travel without their permission,” for Ramusio, their accomplishment merely reinstated the Eastern trade routes long traveled by the Romans and Italians.28 Italians in fact might have still been the padroni of trade with the Indies, Ramusio reasoned, had the Germanic tribes not descended upon Rome.29 Among Italian travelers, Columbus represented the greatest explorer of his time: for Ramusio, as for Venetian editors before him, an Italian hero. In the discorso that opened his third volume on the New World, Ramusio exalted Columbus, who “brought to light . . . half of the world, many centuries cloaked in darkness,” which was “the most marvelous and greatest [thing] done in infinite centuries.”30 Envy over the achievements of this Italian foreigner had prompted Spanish backbiting, including the rumor that it was actually a Spanish pilot, blown off course, who had first landed in the Americas and then told Columbus of his findings: a “truly ridiculous fable,” according to Ramusio.31 His passionate defense of Columbus included the fact that numerous Venetian ambassadors to Spain had returned to Venice remarking that Columbus merited a statue in bronze so that the Kingdom of Spain would always have before its eyes “the procurer of so much treasure and greatness added to those realms.”32 In addition, like other Venetian editors before him, Ramusio continued to depict Columbus as a sympathetic and larger-than-life figure.33 Peter Martyr, for instance, had only casually noted Columbus’s death, adding that he did not know – though Martyr was a member of the Council of the Indies – what happened to Columbus and his men after they returned from Santo Domingo.34 In comparison, Ramusio noted Columbus’s death with a moving homage to the navigator not found in Martyr’s original: A man who verily, had he lived among the ancients, for the admirable and stupendous undertaking of having found a new world, beyond temples and statues, they would have named a star in the celestial constellations for him, as for Hercules and Bacchus; our age can consider itself glorious for having had in its time such a great and famous Italian man.35

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In having given birth to another world, Columbus was greater than Homer.36 For Ramusio, he had heroically altered the direction of history by connecting the world in revolutionary ways that on the one hand, as global history suggests, diminished the role of nations. On the other hand, however, his voyages clearly also resulted in expressions of local pride, nascent nationalism, and competition between European states. Columbus paradoxically represented both the most significant Italian protagonist in the history of the New World as well as a painful reminder of Spanish dominance. To depict Columbus as an Italian hero risked promoting Spain and calling attention to Italy’s failure as a colonial power, but clearly Columbus could also stand for an Italian sense of patria, as Ramusio’s pointed emphasis of his Italian identity demonstrates. A comparison to Spanish accounts is revealing. Peter Martyr, for example, rarely praised Columbus; an intimate of the Spanish court, he likely viewed Columbus with a sense of disenchantment. Never able to return with enough wealth from the Indies, Columbus remained an almost embarrassing presence compared to Cortés, who had enriched Spanish coffers. Both Oviedo and López de Gómara paid generous tribute to Columbus’s achievements, but their praise was always tempered by a resentment of his foreign status. Indeed, their texts were the source of the idea that an anonymous Spanish or Portuguese pilot had discovered the Indies before Columbus, a narrative that came to have a life of its own in the humanist Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of the Incas, among other texts, well into the twentieth century.37 Praise and blame of Columbus similarly alternated in the works of Las Casas, who admired Columbus’s explorations but criticized his ignorance of Spanish violence in the New World. For Las Casas, Columbus began his voyages under divine protection – his exploration would lead to the conversion of countless people – but ended his career by betraying these intentions when he perpetrated many great acts of injustice against the indigenous people of the Antilles.38 Sixteenth-century Italian depictions of Columbus also tended to vary. In his Orlando furioso (1532), for instance, much like Peter Martyr, the poet Ludovico Ariosto ignored Columbus and instead praised Cortés for adding vast and wealthy dominions to the Habsburg Empire.39 Later in the sixteenth century, Torquato Tasso claimed in his Gerusalemme liberata (XV) that Columbus evoked Hercules; he also promised to write an epic poem about Columbus but failed to actually produce it.40 By comparison, representations of Columbus in Venetian publications were consistently positive. For instance, Sansovino inserted an encomium of Columbus, not found in other editions, into his 1581 translation of Jacopo Filippo Foresti’s Supplementum chronicarum, describing Columbus as a skilled navigator who died mistreated and unappreciated by the ungrateful Spanish monarchs.41 In addition, Venetian texts often reinforced subtle but consistent connections between Columbus and Venetian

GIOVANNI BATTISTA RAMUSIO’S VENETIAN NEW WORLD

traditions of travel and exploration. Sansovino, for instance, asserted in his Venetia città nobilissima (1581) that Alvise Cadamosto and his explorations along the African coast compelled Columbus to discover the New World, stating that “[a]t the age of twenty-two he passed the port of Scussa in lower Ethiopia [and] his example moved Columbus to find the New World,” a sentiment that other Venetian writers of Americana agreed with.42 While Ramusio praised Columbus, it was Marco Polo who provided him with the greatest evidence of Venetian superiority in travel and exploration. One of Ramusio’s most significant editorial undertakings in the production of his Navigazioni was his publication of a new, authoritative edition of Polo’s Millione. Published in Volume 2 in 1559, this edition became widely used and had lasting repercussions for centuries to come.43 Ramusio noted that he had undertaken his new edition in order to reinstate Polo to his correct place in history. He lamented that medieval texts and translations had corrupted and discredited Polo’s work. The Portuguese, however, had confirmed the veracity of Polo’s account, and Ramusio aimed to repair Polo’s reputation with a researched and humanistically curated edition of the Polian narrative. This text, according to Ramusio, was for many decades considered a fable as the result of infinite mistakes and error. The names of the cities and provinces [were thought to be] all invented and imagined, with no foundation whatsoever, or even [considered] dreams. But over the past hundred years those who travelled to Persia began to recognize the province of Cathay; then the navigation of the Portuguese beyond the Aurea Chersonese (the Malay Peninsula) towards the east discovered first many cities and provinces in India and many islands with the same names our author had used . . . Now it is seen that many particularities that are discovered in that part of the world in our time, the forenamed sir Marco had written about, so I judged it reasonable to produce his book, using many examples written more than two hundred years ago, in my opinion perfectly correct and in the scheme of things much more faithful that what has been read up until now, so that the world does not lose the fruit of so much work and diligence that can be gained from such an honored study . . . And even though there are written in this book many things that seem fabulous and incredible, they are no less worthy of belief than the other things he narrates that are true, nor [should we] accuse him of committing a large error, for he reports what he was told.44

Ramusio aggressively defended Polo’s text against those who had attacked the seemingly imaginary elements of his travels. Strabo, Pliny, Herodotus, and Columbus, he argued, had all reported marvels beyond belief, so that while Polo may have reported incredible things, they remained no less worthy of credence than the “discoveries” in the New World.45 The fabulous elements of Kinsai were as believable as those of Tenochtitlan, as Ramusio, like Alessandro Zorzi before him, neatly linked Venetian travels to Asia with the

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exploration of the New World by Columbus and Cortés. As Ramusio put it, his philological labors and editorial skills served to redeem his fellow Venetian for contemporary readers, an initiative with clear patriotic meaning in and of itself.46 In addition, he notably changed the title of Polo’s text from the likes of The Description of the World (Divsement du monde), The Book of the Great Khan (Le Livre du Grand Caan), The Book of Marvels (Le Livre des merveilles), or The Millions (Il milione), to The Travels of Sir Marco Polo (Dei viaggi di Messer Marco Polo). While the effects of or intentions behind this title change remain unclear, it perhaps served to underscore Polo’s agency rather than the exoticism of the East. Ramusio’s preface to Polo’s text is among the longest in his three volumes, equaled in length only by his discussions of the history of the spice trade in Volume 1 and of Christopher Columbus in Volume 3. Ramusio elaborated on the story of Polo’s life in a way that he did for no other figure in his compilation, as well as in ways that no other previous editions of Polo’s text had. For instance, Ramusio first developed the narrative that after their long absence in the Far East, the Polos returned to Venice as unrecognizable foreigners, clothed in rags, who revealed their true identity by ripping precious gems and jewels out of their robes during a banquet. Ramusio asserted his personal connection to this knowledge through the chain of Venetian storytelling handed down to him when he was a boy, especially from Venetians whose fathers had lived near the corte del million, the Polo family residence.47 In this discorso, Ramusio marveled at the fact that the Polos had journeyed through regions of the world that the ancients had known of only as terra incognita, arguing that the Venetian overland voyage to Cathay was much more dangerous, arduous, lengthy, and ultimately monumental than that of Columbus to America. Many times I have thought this same thing to myself about the most marvelous voyage made by land by our Venetian gentlemen and that made by sea by the aforesaid Don Cristopher Columbus, and wondered which of the two was more marvelous? And if I am not deceived by affection for my country, it seems likely to me that the one by land should be placed before that by sea, it being necessary to take note of the enormous greatness of soul with which so difficult an enterprise was carried out and brought to a conclusion along such an extraordinarily long and bitter route, along which, for lack of life, not for days but for months, they were forced to bring supplies with them for themselves and their animals.48

By comparison, Ramusio reasoned, Columbus had been “merely blown by the wind,” having easily and comfortably carried abundant provisions with him to the New World.49 Columbus had landed in the golden-roofed, verdant land of Cipangu (Japan), with a vision of that land that had been inspired by Polo’s account, as a surviving Latin copy inscribed with Columbus’s copious notes attests.50 That is to say, for Ramusio, Columbus’s and da Gama’s accounts, more than just records of marvelous navigation and exploration,

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served to legitimate Polo. Put another way, the Iberians had discovered nothing – whether it be the Portuguese going East or the Spanish going West – and had merely followed in Polo’s footsteps. According to Ramusio, it was Polo who had first introduced the Portuguese to the wealth of the Indies when the Venetian senate gave Prince Don Pedro, the regent of Portugal, a gift of Polo’s text in 1428, when Polo’s narrative became “the reason why all the great kings began to yearn to discover the East Indies.”51 Ramusio similarly depicted Niccolò de Conti, a fifteenth-century Venetian traveler to India and Southeast Asia, as the direct successor of Marco Polo, thereby asserting a Venetian paternity for Portuguese initiatives in maritime exploration, much like Alessandro Zorzi had linked Conti to Columbus in his marginalia. For Ramusio, both Polo and Conti had inspired Portuguese voyages down the coast of Africa, and Ramusio pointed out that in his 1502 Portuguese publication of texts by Conti and Polo, the Portuguese translator Valentim Fernandes had acknowledged this as well. In his preface to Niccolò Conti’s account, Ramusio quoted from Fernandes’s introduction, noting how Fernandes’s translation of Polo and Conti would be of great use to the Portuguese King Manuel I in understanding the Indies. Ramusio concluded, “one can understand how momentous and significant the voyages of these two Venetians were for this most serene king.”52 Ramusio remarked in conclusion that no other European in his day had dared to follow Polo’s original path, since “it is more difficult to go to Cathay – longer and more dangerous – than it is to go to the New World.” By contrast, taking the less valorous route, the year following the discovery of these Eastern [i.e., West] Indies, there immediately returned many ships, and every day to the present time infinite numbers go there as a matter of course, and these parts are so known and have so much commerce that it is greater now than between Italy, Spain, and England.53

Ramusio’s edition of Marco Polo’s Travels is the first text in his second volume, and subsequent texts in Volume 2 (aside from accounts of travelers to Poland, Lithuania, and Russia) are almost all framed, in one way or another, either by Polo’s account or by their links to Venice. For instance, Ramusio compares the Mongolian geography described by Hayton the Armenian to that of Polo, “judging it to conform to that which is narrated in the book of the aforesaid Sir Marco.”54 This volume included a series of fourteenth-century letters from Venetian ambassadors and travelers to the East such as Giovanni Maria Agiolello, Giosafat Barbaro, Odorico of Pordenone, Caterino Zen, Ambrogio Contrarini, and Pietro Querini: a pantheon of Venetians who established, for Ramusio, a lineage of the city’s predominance in global travel, especially in Asia. Ramusio’s attention to Polo was not surprising, since Marco Polo had long represented the most significant point of reference in Venetians’ relationship to

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travel, exploration, and the wider world. Venetian presses published seven versions of Polo’s text between 1496 and 1597 and nine more up to 1672, all in Venetian dialect, attesting to the traveler’s local significance as well as to a local desire to perpetuate his story.55 A 1431 Florentine manuscript of Polo’s text even claimed that Polo’s work was made available to all for public consultation in Venice, in a version that was fastened by a chain to the Rialto.56 Alessandro Zorzi had interpreted Columbus’s letters through the lens of Marco Polo, and sixteenth-century Venetian mapmakers such as Giacomo Gastaldi would also rely on Polo’s account to understand and map both Asia and the New World.57 For Ramusio, simply put, as for other Venetian cosmographers, Polo was a Venetian hero, and most contemporary exploration, in one way or another, was rooted in his experience. It is difficult to overestimate the influence that the symbol of Marco Polo had on sixteenth-century Venetian cosmography; Ramusio’s Tuscan translation reaffirmed Polo’s legitimacy and promoted his valor among wider European audiences. If Europeans saw and interpreted new worlds through old lenses, including the lenses of classical antiquity or Christian civilization, Marco Polo represented one of the most fundamental vantage points from which Venetian editors, cosmographers, geographers, and cartographers understood the expanding geography of the early modern world. Building on these representations of Italians and Venetians, Ramusio challenged the idea of Spanish and Portuguese commercial hegemony and implied the commercial possibilities for other European powers by insisting that unknown but ultimately more profitable routes to the Indies remained to be discovered. Most notably, Ramusio recounted a conversation with an anonymous interlocutor, “a great philosopher and mathematician,” that had supposedly taken place at Girolamo Fracastoro’s villa in the Veronese countryside.58 This gentleman argued that the princes of Northern Europe could navigate an even quicker northern route to the Indies. [If they] wanted to use just a little bit of industry and diligence, they would not be able to imagine a route so useful and profitable for all of Christianity as this would be, since this way one could arrive in India and Cathay that was discovered two hundred years ago by sir Marco Polo. And taking the globe in his hands, he demonstrated that the trip would be much shorter than that which the Portuguese take now, as well as that of the Castilians to the islands of the Moluccas.59

The anonymous speaker had also heard the report of a Genoese ambassador whose hatred and disdain for the Portuguese had motivated him to plot a new overland spice route from India through the lands of the Tartars and the Caspian Sea to Moscow, up the Riga and into the North Sea. The Genoese had seriously considered developing this trade, but wars among the Tartars ultimately proved too dangerous and the deserts too vast to pursue such an

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idea.60 The speaker then considered Sebastian Cabot, the Venetian who “knew the art of navigation better than anyone else.” Don’t you know that you can find the Indies with the western wind, as one of your Venetian citizens already has? One who is so valorous and experienced with things related to navigation and cosmography that he has no equal in Spain. His virtue is a model for all the pilots navigating to the West Indies, and without his permission they cannot arrive; for this reason they named him the Pilot Major.61

Regarding the Portuguese voyages around the Cape of Good Hope, he stated, In my humble opinion, [this route] will not last long, and in the end they will have to give it up, not because of the expense that is required in order to maintain defense in the Indies, but because it is long and dangerous. You can obtain spices through shorter and easier routes.62

Ramusio later concluded in Volume 3 that “God is still holding back the discovery of this route to Cathay,” for obtaining spices which “would be the easiest and quickest of all others located until now.”63 Though always vague about their locations, Ramusio suggested that the discovery of other trade routes would once again soon offer Europeans – and perhaps Italians and Venetians – new pathways to Asian wealth, implying that Iberian commercial hegemony could eventually be undermined.64 This was, most certainly, a hopeful perspective on Ramusio’s part at a time when Venetians’ role in the spice trade remained uncertain. In the first half of the sixteenth century, spices had begun to arrive in Venice from Lisbon. Nevertheless, Ramusio clearly considered Venice to be still in the game. Ramusio staked one final metaphoric claim for the superiority of Venetian travelers by asserting the importance of his own textual explorations and discoveries. As an armchair traveler, Ramusio consciously made many of the texts in his collection available to a wide readership for the first time: an act of intellectual largesse that he liked to emphasize. For instance, Ramusio reminded readers that Pigafetta’s account would have been lost in the Sack of Rome had he not recovered and published it.65 As Ramusio called attention to the labors of his collecting, preserving, editing, codifying, and publishing, he implied that printing accounts of discovery was perhaps as significant as discovery itself and that Venetian printmen were the parallels of Spanish conquistadors, in the way that their texts enabled readers to become travelers and explorers themselves. In his preface to Polo’s text, Ramusio declared that among ancient writers, “the first was Homer, who knew no other form of words to express the perfect man, full of knowledge, than to say that he had traveled to various parts of the world and had seen many cities and popular customs.”66 Along these lines, he indirectly fashioned himself as a kind of Venetian Homer in the way he gave his readers this ability to travel the world virtually. Ramusio depicted Marco Polo

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returning home to Venice like Odysseus returning from Troy, a comparison that once again established the Venetian editor as a kind of new Homer in his reediting of Polo’s work and the reestablishment of his account, made possible by Ramusio’s editorial labors.67 While he may have questioned Iberian accomplishments or implied ways to challenge Iberian success in trade and navigation, Ramusio’s main interest undoubtedly lay in extolling Venice. While the vast majority of texts in his compendium narrated the travels of non-Venetians, Ramusio nevertheless framed and manipulated these accounts to tell a local history of the lagoon city. His collection allowed Venice to claim its place as the center of European geographic knowledge with the potential to reassert its global commercial and cultural dominance. To be clear, to argue that Ramusio had mobilized these narratives exclusively toward this single, homogeneous end would be to flatten out the great variety of texts in his voluminous collection, and Ramusio was more subtle and less dogmatic than this. Nevertheless, at the level of the frame, his critical introductions clearly sustained a narrative and ideological unity, focused on the Venetian and Italian origins of global exploration, especially in the related figures of Marco Polo and Columbus. Considering the compendium format’s natural tension between consolidation and fragmentation, Ramusio’s synthetic device was the quiet but consistent glorification of Venice. If later collections of travel accounts such as those of Hakluyt and Purchas more aggressively subordinated their collected narratives to a proto-national purpose, Ramusio represented a step toward such ends, articulating a sense of patria, but one not yet as pronounced as that of the English editors who followed in his wake. Bringing to fruition the Venetian tradition of the travel compendium, Ramusio was one of the most significant narrators of the Age of Encounters, compiling for generations a model text about global exploration as seen from a Venetian perspective. By the time of the publication of Ramusio’s volumes, Venice had begun to lose its place as one of the centers of the commercial world order; his ideas about his city were rhetoric rather than reality. His compilation nevertheless, both in form and content, on a variety of levels, linked the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds in the minds of European readers, by comparing Columbus to Polo and other Venetian travelers, and even simply by writing about the Americas from his desk in the Venetian lagoon.68 VENICE AND THE BLACK LEGEND

Ramusio’s editorial project inherently evoked Italy’s vexed relationship to Spain. In his Problemi naturali e morali (1549), published just before Ramusio’s Navigazioni, the Roman bishop Gerolamo Garimberti had asserted the dignity of Mexicans and Peruvians. He insisted on their equality to Europeans by referring to Plato’s Timaeus to imply the plausibility of an Atlantis, or a landmass that had once joined

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Europe and America, and therefore the inhabitants of the Old and New Worlds.69 Ramusio echoed this suggestion with a similar discussion of Plato’s Atlantis in the introduction to his third volume on the New World.70 The idea of Atlantis countered the otherwise hostile approach to peoples of the New World otherwise so prevalent among mid-century Spanish accounts published in Venice, such as those of Oviedo, Francisco de Xerez, and Pedro Cieza de León. Building on Plato, Ramusio went on to blame Spain for the diffusion of disease and the destruction of Amerindian populations.71 He lamented that Spanish historians had focused too much on the details of the wars of Charles V and as a consequence had missed other more significant contemporary events, including discoveries in the natural world in the Americas.72 He went on to note wryly that “it must have threatened the honor of Spanish pilots and mariners, when it became known to the world that a foreigner, a Genoese, had enough spirit to do that which [the Spanish] had never known about nor tried to do.”73 Ramusio’s criticism of Spain represented a relatively small component of his opus overall; nevertheless, it contributed to the development of the Black Legend, the criticism and defaming of Spain and the Spaniards that began to unfold across Europe, in particular in the north, during the course of the sixteenth century. The Spanish chronicler Antonio Herrera y Torsedillas attacked Ramusio in the preface to his Descripción de las Indias Occidentales (1601) and went so far as to accuse him of being the “founding father” (padre fondatore) of the Black Legend.74 According to the rhetoric of the leyenda negra, Spain was responsible for everything that went wrong in sixteenth-century Italy, including the end of the Renaissance, the introduction of the Inquisition, and stalled Italian economies.75 Many Italians deplored the Spanish presence, Venetian ambassadors and printmen among them. This wider context both reflected and constructed Ramusio’s understanding of contemporary events. Ramusio’s criticisms echoed Venetian ambassadorial reproaches of the Spanish that became evermore transparent and aggressive during the course of the sixteenth century as diplomats increasingly used information about the New World as a means of representing and comparing the respective values of Spain and Italy, much as Ramusio himself had modeled. For instance, Gasparo Contarini, ambassador to Spain from 1522–1525, learned from Peter Martyr and informed the Venetian senate that at the hands of the Spanish, almost all of the population of Hispaniola and Jamaica had become extinct. When [Hispaniola and Jamaica] were discovered by Columbus, there were more than a million people. Now, because of the cruel treatment of the Spaniards, be it for the great labors they demanded of the poor, unaccustomed natives, in making them mine for gold, or be it their deaths out of desperation, which has been an enormous factor – such that they found mothers who killed their own children – almost everyone is gone, so much so that now, Hispaniola has less than seven thousand people.76

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Many other ambassadors, including Andrea Badoer (1561), Sigismondo Cavalli (1570), and Leonardo Donà (1570), similarly commented on the genocide of New World peoples.77 In 1533, the ambassador to Charles V Marc’Antonio Contarini remarked in a letter that “if it weren’t for these Indies, Seville would be nothing, and [neither would] Spain, which shines because of this commerce; the goods that are brought from the Indies beyond gold and pearls, which used to arrive in abundance, now come only in small quantities.”78 Here, Contarini reassured his readers that Spain’s newfound greatness, while enviable, remained inherently superficial and could potentially be short-lived. Even more telling, in 1536, Contarini remarked that “infinite and vile men of the basest and most infamous condition in Spain have moved to [the Americas], and within the space of very little time have returned rich and have bought many possessions; they have married noble women to the great disdain and displeasure of all the nobles.”79 Here, news about the Americas enabled Contarini to comment on the base character of the Spanish, and in turn, imply the censure of Italians and Venetians, who by implication would never deign to accept the nouveaux riches into their noble ranks. By the second half of the century, Venetian ambassadors began to express regular criticism of Spanish greed, Philip II, and his mismanagement in the New World. In 1560, for instance, Paolo Tiepolo, the Venetian ambassador to Philip II, likened him to a highwayman.80 Giovan Francesco Morosini, ambassador to Philip II between 1578 and 1581, went so far as to note in his report to the Venetian senate that republics were naturally enemies of princes and were intrinsically incompatible with princely states “since the former are governed for the most part by reason and law, while the princes govern with emotion, making law by their own will; the former are the ones who, through their example, reproach the injustice of the latter.”81 The city’s diplomats also commented regularly on the depopulation of Spain as its men moved to the Indies. As Antonio Tiepolo put it in 1565, “everyone happily ran to that part of the world in the hopes of enriching himself,” and Spain in turn by default became increasingly populated with rich moriscos.82 Ambassadorial reports increasingly highlighted Spanish hubris and arrogance in the Americas, depicting the populations of the Spanish colonies as uncontrollable, violent, and always conspiring to overthrow their cruel Spanish overlords. For instance, Michele Suriano reported in 1559 that since Amerindians lacked European military technology, the Spanish conquest had been easy; maintaining control in the Americas, however, was another story, since “those who go there are almost always failed and desperate men, or men running from the law, or similar such men to be feared greatly.”83 The ambassador Paolo Tiepolo’s relazione from 1563 similarly complained that among the Spanish “almost everyone appears impatient with work, [and] given to leisure, sleep, [and] vanity, without industry or any kind of diligence.” He went on to lament the Spanish

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contribution to the death of a generation of New World peoples – noting especially their suicides – as a result of Spanish cruelty.84 In 1573, Leonardo Donà described a public celebration in Madrid held in honor of the birth of the king’s son. In addition to jousting and a variety of tournaments, he observed two performers appear in the festival in costumes, dressed and adorned as Indians, similar to two of their subjugated kings who had become tributes to His Catholic Majesty. As a symbol of trophies and triumph, they gave us outside spectators an idea of how great the power of Castile was, since it had been able to impose laws and controls on these distant lands and kingdoms.85

Donà was awed, if not perhaps unsettled, by this Indian parade before the Spanish monarch, and remained struck by the immense power and extraordinary control that Philip II wielded over even faraway places.86 Donà noted that while the peoples of the New World hated the Spanish, “they would not dare to try anything, but would remain unarmed, as timid as hens.”87 Instead, he believed the king of Spain should fear rebellion among his own subjects in the New World, who had developed their own “desire for rule” (desiderio di regnare), commenting on the one hand on the natural tendency for distant colonies to break free from the metropole, but also, on the other hand, on the self-interested character of the Spanish. Not all Venetian observers demonized the Spanish, and like other Europeans, many depicted New World peoples as prone to sexual excess, theft, laziness, dishonesty, and even diabolical possession.88 Tommaso Garzoni, for instance – a comic writer beloved of Venetian readers – thought the Amerindians to be so unintelligent that he jested that Europeans should send baboons to the Indies as their ambassadors, since they would have more in common with the peoples of the New World than men would.89 Even Girolamo Benzoni, as we shall see, one of the most ardent critics of the Spanish and defenders of Amerinidan rights, said that cocoa was for pigs.90 Nevertheless, Venetian ambassadors maintained a clear and persistent dislike of Spain and Spanish practices in the New World. Long critical of the Spanish Inquisition, and in particular Spain’s treatment of conversos and moriscos, Venetian ambassadors recognized the dark and sinister underbelly of Spanish society as it was reproduced and elaborated in the Americas.91 One particular sixteenth-century Venetian publication, however, stands out as a foundational text for the Black Legend in Venice: Girolamo Benzoni’s La historia del Mondo Nuovo (Venice: Francesco Rampazzetto, 1565).92 Benzoni (b. 1519) was a Milanese traveler who lived in the Indies between 1541 and 1556 and returned to Milan to write a damning condemnation of Spanish tyranny in the New World. His text was republished in 1572 with illustrations, and translated into Latin in 1578 and French and German in 1579, suggesting the receptive market it found. While Benzoni’s text has tended not to receive

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as much attention as Barolomé de Las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Seville, 1552), and indeed is often considered little more than a clumsy rehash of Las Casas’s work, Benzoni’s account was the first truly significant representation of the Black Legend outside of Spain. He recounted Amerindian slaves being flayed and doused with boiling oil and salt water, being forced to carry unbearable loads when they could no longer walk, and being chopped to pieces. He described streams of thousands of Amerindian slaves being marched from one territory to another, including mothers with children clinging to their necks, bound with cords and chains and overwhelmed with grief, among which there was “not a girl who had not been violated by the predators.”93 The Spanish had drained the New World of both its wealth and populations. “This province of Panama used to be inhabited by several tribes of Indians, and in all their rivers there was a great deal of gold. But the Spaniards have consumed everything.”94 According to Benzoni, Indians in Darien protested by proclaiming that gold was the God of the Christians. “Of those they caught alive, especially the captains, they used to tie the hands and feet, throw them down on the ground, and pour gold into their mouth, saying ‘Eat, eat gold, Christian,’” as illustrated by woodblock prints depicting New World peoples holding down the Spanish as they ladled liquid gold into their mouths.95 Benzoni’s account was especially significant for its discussion of Amerindian suicides, which while mentioned by Peter Martyr, assumed more dramatic tones in Benzoni’s pages where he linked these deaths to the overall decimated populations of the islands of the New World. Describing events, for instance, on Hispaniola in one of his most notable passages, similarly accompanied by a woodcut illustration of New World peoples hanging themselves in the woods rather than serve the Christians, Benzoni recounted: Wherefore many went to the woods and there hung themselves, after having killed their children, saying it was far better to die than to live so miserably, serving such and so many ferocious tyrants and wicked thieves. The women, with the juice of a certain herb, ended their pregnancies, in order not to produce children, and then following the example of their husbands, hung themselves. Some threw themselves from high cliffs down precipices; others jumped into the sea; others again into rivers; and others starved themselves to death. Sometimes they killed themselves with their flint knives; others pierced their bosoms or their sides with pointed stakes. Finally, out of the two million original inhabitants, through the number of suicides and other deaths occasioned by the oppressive labor and cruelties imposed by the Spaniards, there are not a hundred and fifty now to be found; and this has been their way of making Christians of them . . . In short, I may say, that wherever the Spaniards have unfurled their banner, they have, by their great cruelties, inspired the inhabitants with perpetual hatred.96

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While previous Venetian publications about the New World and Spain had tread lightly and at best had only tentatively hinted at Spanish atrocities, Benzoni’s descriptions left nothing to the imagination and offered a clear and concise critique of Spanish violence in the Americas. While Benzoni’s attention to Spanish brutality is well known, less considered is the fact that mixed in to the middle of his account, between stories of Spanish butchering and cruelty, Benzoni added several anecdotes that, like Ramusio’s, pointed to Italian valor. He recounted, for instance, that Columbus once happened to find himself at a gathering among Spaniards who claimed that even if he had not found the Indies, it would have been only a matter of time before one clever Spanish cosmographer or another had done the same. According to Benzoni, in response, Columbus had an egg brought to him, placed it on the table, and challenged the Spaniards to stand it on its end. When no one succeeded, he broke the egg and easily stood it on its broken edge, drily pointing out that “after the deed is done, everybody knows how to do it.”97 He further noted that the Spanish tended to be “so vain-glorious that they never cease praising themselves, especially those who have been to Italy.”98 Regularly boasting of their military victories and the various towns they had sacked, they sometimes asserted that “one Spaniard is worth four Germans, three Frenchmen, or two Italians: and five hundred of them would doubtless suffice to conquer painted Venice, as if it was a straw or wooden village consisting of some twenty-five or thirty houses, like those that they have built in India.”99 He described an incident in which a Spaniard in Siena named Il Montanese had boasted publicly of his military prowess. Hearing his unbearable arrogance, a young Roman nearby, Giuliano, exclaimed, “Oh Montanese, if you will agree to fight, body to body, and with similar arms, I should like to prove to you that there is no better or more courageous foreign soldier to be found than an Italian.”100 Embracing Giuliano’s challenge, the Spaniard chose a youth from Cordova to fight by his side, and Giuliano chose likewise “Il Tiracoscia da Castello, whom he lovingly and pleasingly invited to the honor and glory of Italian blood.”101 The Italians, not surprisingly, were victorious, and the battle, to which “almost all of Tuscany flocked,” was “gloriously and learnedly sung by the poets, of whom there was always a great abundance in Tuscany.”102 Benzoni’s side stories may at first appear entirely tangential, having seemingly nothing to do with the rest of his history of the New World. As in so many Venetian published texts about the Americas, however, Benzoni employed the New World as a means of talking about Italy, and these vignettes illuminated Benzoni’s – and his Venetian publisher’s – understanding of Venice and Italy’s status and reputation. Columbus’s genius was not to be doubted, but beyond this, not only were the Italians better swordsmen but more importantly they were in possession of a vibrant and historic literary culture, laudable in the face of such unbridled, and according to Benzoni,

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ineffective Spanish violence. Benzoni wrote at a time when the settlement of the Italian Wars had just left much of Italy under Spanish sway after decades of violent conflict, so that he, like other Venetian writers, could easily have identified the Italians with indigenous Americans. Spain may have won the New World, but Italy remained culturally superior, as well as militarily more valorous. While during his time in the New World, Benzoni had often heard the Spanish in the Indies claim their descent from the Goths, “when the truth is discovered,” he remarked, “we find that in Spain they were mere swineherders or shepherds.”103 Much like Nicolò Liburnio’s condescending treatment of Cortés’s letter from Mexico earlier in the century – as well as countless additional examples of Venetian printed texts about the Americas, including Ramusio’s contemporary Navigazioni – Benzoni used the history of the New World and the foil of the Americas to praise Venice and Italy. As we will see with Ferdinand Columbus’s Historie, it was not surprising that Venetian presses published Benzoni’s text.104 Indeed, on the Italian peninsula dominated by the Habsburgs, few other Italian publishers could have produced such an account by this time: a text that graphically described Spanish violence in the Americas and compared it to Italian valor and nobility.105 Later in the century, Theodor de Bry, one of the most vociferous proponents of the Black Legend, incorporated Girolamo Benzoni’s Historia into his America occidentalis (Frankfurt, 1590–1598), where Benzoni’s text continued to exert impact, especially in Northern Europe, well into the seventeenth century.106 The Spanish may have boasted that they could conquer Venetian “houses of straw,” but Venice was no such house, and the power of its press was significant and lasting. To be clear, both the widespread presence of Imperial Spain in Italy as well as the editorial controls wielded by Counter Reformation Rome meant that Italians had to be cautious with their anti-Spanish sentiments; the most fullblown expressions of the Black Legend were Northern European. Benzoni’s Historia, for instance, was published in Italy only two times before 1600, while it became a best seller around much of the rest of early modern Europe where it was printed thirty times before 1704.107 Las Casas’s Brevissima relación was undoubtedly the most significant text in the formation of anti-Spanish attitudes among European powers, and it was published in English and French before it was published in Italian.108 Nevertheless, as the Black Legend grew and came to constitute one of the main rhetorical and political weapons with which the Dutch and the English fought the Spanish, its development owed much to Italian, and specifically Venetian culture and editorial output, which fed the production of this genre in Northern Europe. Venetian ambassadorial accounts and print culture echoed one another’s criticism of Spain in the middle of the sixteenth century. The Venetian travel compendium, including Ramusio’s Navigazioni, was formed in this context, which helped shape its development.

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THE TRAVEL COMPENDIUM IN VENICE: THE MOVEMENT OF INFOR MATI ON IN A GLOBALIZING GENRE

A consideration of the Venetian travel compendium and a more complete understanding of its origins and development as it culminated in the work of Ramusio raise the questions as to why this genre first took root in Venice and how its origins in the city potentially impacted European conceptions of the New World more broadly over time. Among all of the significant collections of geographic and travel literature printed in the first half of the sixteenth century, only Johannes Huttich’s Novus orbis (Basel, 1532) was not published in Venice.109 To some degree, the origins of this genre lie in Venetian mercantile and commercial life that naturally brought information about travel to the lagoon city.110 Numerous studies have noted the elaborate and complex webs of information that Venetians participated in as diplomats, merchants, humanists, editors, naturalists, printers, and friends, as well as the various ways in which Ramusio in particular was situated in these networks, especially through his correspondence with Fracastoro, Navagero, and Bembo, among others.111 Even before Ramusio began his career, editors such as Trevisan, Montalboddo, and Zorzi had belonged to communities of information that linked the worlds of politics, diplomacy, humanism, and the press.112 As we have seen, Venetian travel compilations had their roots in Venice’s political culture and diplomacy, and sixteenth-century travel literature drew directly from the work and knowledge of Venetian bureaucrats such as Angelo Trevisan, Domenico Pisani, Giovanni Matteo Cretico, Pietro Pasqualigo, and Andrea Navagero, all of whom worked in diplomatic roles and in this capacity collected information about global exploration that was published in Venetian compendia. The translators Domingo de Gaztelu and Alfonso de Ulloa both served as functionaries to Spanish ambassadors to Venice, and the careers of these quintessentially transnational and globalizing figures demonstrate the links between Venetian diplomacy, the publication of Spanish literature in the city, and the transmission of New World knowledge to a European audience. While it often remains impossible today to trace how a book, manuscript, or map first arrived in Venice, it was surely significant that the Giunti printing firm – the publisher of Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi – was active in Spain in the middle of the sixteenth century and had branches in Burgos, Salamanca, and Madrid, providing pathways for the arrival of geographical information from Spain to Venice.113 Though not as prominent in Venice as in Florence, Italian academies also played some role in bringing together those interested in European exploration. While it was short lived, the Venetian Accademia della Fama maintained a clear interest in the study of global geography, and its members included many Venetians known for their cosmographic interests.114 Venetians, like many early modern Europeans, obtained their information from

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a wide variety of sources and contacts, including ones that were often smallscale and personal.115 Venetian travel compendia were direct products of all of these forms of cosmopolitanism, whose networks produced abundant information that directly influenced the quality and quantity of news about the New World that the city transmitted to the rest of Europe.116 Venetian cosmopolitanism was especially influential for Ramusio, who worked for the Venetian state for more than fifty years and regularly obtained information about travel and exploration through official state diplomatic contacts, including Francesco Contarini, the Venetian ambassador to Charles V in Flanders, and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, the Spanish envoy to Venice.117 Even though it remains impossible to know all the daily tasks Ramusio undertook in his work for the Venetian chancery, as a secretary, first to an ambassador and later to the senate and Council of Ten, he operated at the heart of the Venetian state and was one of the rare Venetians who, while not part of the patrician class, had direct and daily exposure to a great variety of diplomatic information, including avvisi, dispacci, and relazioni, both printed and read out loud. While he never would have published documents that compromised the state, his job enabled him to know Venetian international diplomacy inside and out, as well as to possess a degree of real political power in the workings of the state, arguably even more than some patricians. Limited-term elected nobles came and went, but Ramusio was always there. He had unparalleled access to a great variety of political documents and information, and surely not accidentally, there existed a direct analogy between the role of compiler and the work of a Venetian secretary, whose labors entailed the registering, accumulating, archiving, classifying, deciphering, transcribing, annotating, translating, and rewriting of documents. Ramusio always kept the identity of the sources of his geographic information hidden, revealing how as both an editor-compiler and secretary, he served as a gatekeeper between secret and public information.118 As the Venetian and Italian bent of his text suggests, his work as a state functionary not only fed him information but also potentially influenced his sense of identity and patria.119 He aspired for Venice to have a geopolitical role of primary significance at a time when the world was growing larger and Iberians were commanding more and more of its resources. In these ways, his Navigazioni had political motivations as much as literary and scientific ones, and his long-standing and deep connections to the Venetian state help explain these links.120 Ramusio stated clearly that he hoped his readers would be not only scholars of geography but also “lords and princes” who would read his text for its political message.121 In comparison, while German publications of Americana, copious in their own right, tended to reflect on the degrees of similarity and difference between Germans and global peoples, they never appeared to work to glorify German states or cities per se.122

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The birth of the Venetian travel compendium – and the prominent place of the New World in it – was also the direct result of Spanish incursions into Italy in the first half of the sixteenth century. It was by no means a coincidence that Spanish armies flooded Italy at exactly the same time that Venetian translations of Spanish texts (and maps, as we shall see) did. For Venice, the Italian Wars brought the Battle of Agnadello in 1509 and the loss of almost all of Venice’s mainland empire. Even if this territory was recovered incrementally, the impact was lasting. The middle of the sixteenth century brought the Peace of Bologna (1529), and six years later, the establishment of imperial power in Milan. The Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis (1559) permanently established Spanish rule over most of Italy, including the entire southern half of the peninsula, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia, and Milan, as well as Tuscany and Genoa as dependent states, leaving Venice and Savoy as the only independent Italian powers until the eighteenth century and producing complex and sometimes antagonistic relationships between Italy and Spain.123 Using symbolism that linked ancient Rome, Italy, and the New World, triumphal arches adorned with American imagery depicting the West Indies and Peru framed Habsburg ceremonial entries into Italian cities at this time, announcing not only the Habsburg conquest and domination of the Americas and Italy but also its embrace of an imperial Roman ethos.124 By 1559, Venetian ambassadors to Spain regularly noted Spanish global ascendancy, including and especially in the Americas.125 When Pope Clement VII crowned Charles V Holy Roman Emperor in Bologna in 1529, the Venetian chronicler Marin Sanudo noted in his diaries that “the world was changed.”126 Italian literary scholars have regularly pointed to the ways in which Habsburg (and French) military incursions into the Italian peninsula resulted in a deep sense of uneasiness about the state of Italian culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.127 Italians were certainly aware of the extent to which Italy had been diminished, territorially and politically, and manifested their sense of inferiority and powerlessness in various ways. In Venice, this occurred in part through printed publications of Spanish texts about the New World, including collections of printed travelogues that asserted Venetian control over Spanish knowledge.128 This was a direct reaction to and defense against the Spanish domination of the peninsula, as if to insist that while the Spanish were capable of producing the raw material of their accounts of conquest and colonization, it took the Venetians to manage the textual production of this information. Ramusio’s Navigazioni in particular allowed Venice to project a position of cultural primacy amid this series of otherwise staggering and devastating changes in Italy. Ramusio’s volumes focused heavily on Iberian exploration at a time when both Spain and Portugal continued to adopt rigid policies of censorship and hold their travel accounts in great secrecy. It was perhaps not

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accidental that his volume on the Americas (Volume 3) preceded the publication of his volume on Asia (Volume 2), reflecting a sustained Venetian and European curiosity for information about the New World. Against the background of a series of violent crises in Spanish-dominated Italy, Ramusio offered Europe a synthesis of global information, and one that reminded readers of the primacy of Italy amid the changing dimensions of the world, even as Venice’s position in it was clearly in decline. Travel compendia themselves, and especially Ramusio’s Navigazioni, were works of conquest, albeit the conquest of information rather than space. Editors of travel literature such as Trevisan, Montalboddo, Zorzi, and Ramusio were clearly readers as much as they were writers, and as Michel de Certeau has suggested, “readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write,” an apt concept for understanding the motivations of these editors (and the audiences of their books), who colonized knowledge rather than actual land or territory.129 THE LEGACY OF RAMU SIO’S NEW WORLD

The circumstances that formed and structured Venetian travel compendia, including Venetian cosmopolitanism and political life, never influenced their reception or interpretation, and the extent to which the attitudes of Venetian editors transferred to readers will always remain a matter of speculation. Stanley Chojnacki argued that where Venetian Americana was concerned, it remained difficult “to trace the impact of geographical and politico-religious writings on the Venetian reading public.” Scholarship on the subject, he claimed, offered “little documentation or analysis of the Venetians who read about it and their responses to it,” and failed to show “how America penetrated the idiosyncratic culture of early modern Venice.”130 Indeed, while the message of the production side is clear, readership remains notoriously difficult to measure, and conclusive evidence about reception continues to remain – and likely will always be – elusive. To the extent that it is possible to study readership in the form of libraries or inventories, it appears that while there surely was a European audience of readers interested in global exploration, including the New World, these readers were also interested in other subjects, including the threat of the Turks, religious culture, and popular science and medicine.131 An examination of the marginal annotations of extant copies of the Paesi, Summario, and Navigazioni might one day reveal additional nuances in readers’ responses to and assessments of these works. One clear indication of the reception of these texts, however, is found in their legacy in the north. Following Ramusio, scores of editors – indeed seemingly endless numbers – produced travel compendia, often focused on the New World, for generations to come, first in England and then in Holland

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and France, well into the Enlightenment.132 In his wake, “thereafter, English, French, and German writers were to go to Ramusio as to a treasure chest, plundering it for references and for texts to translate into their own languages.”133 In particular, Ramusio’s compendium provided the English editors Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, as well as the French historian André Thevet, with their basic knowledge of the Americas. Hakluyt’s debt to Ramusio was considerable; he owned a copy of Ramusio’s collection before 1580, and used accounts from Ramusio’s collection for his own purposes. In his Divers Voyages (1582) and The Principal Navigations (1589), he replicated Ramusio’s Venetian organization and ordering of travel narratives into three volumes focused on voyages to the south and southeast (Africa and the Indies), to the north and northeast (the polar regions, Russia, and the Far East), and to the New World, though in Hakluyt’s sequence, they underscored the legitimacy of and need for English expansion. He translated many of Ramusio’s documents into English, and both John Florio and Richard Hakluyt – among the most significant authors of such literature later in the sixteenth century – even republished parts of Ramusio’s discorsi in their own travel compilations.134 Ramusio’s text also formed the basis for the single main Ottoman text about the New World in the sixteenth-century, the Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi (c. 1580), in a culture that otherwise appeared little interested in the New World.135 Where Marco Polo was concerned, Ramusio’s edition continued to be popular in the seventeenth century; in his Purchas his Pilgrimes, Samuel Purchas defended Ramusio’s Italian translation as the best example of the book, better than Hakluyt’s English translation from Latin.136 Northern European audiences appeared to read Ramusio eagerly, and successive editors knew the collection well. In the late seventeenth century, John Locke still believed it to be the best example of the genre and deemed Ramusio’s work superior to the collections of Hakluyt, Purchas, and De Bry.137 The conquest of knowledge – the power of the pen or of the press – would always pale in comparison to the conquest of land and colonies that yielded tangible wealth. Nevertheless, the power of knowledge was hardly negligible; discovery, knowledge, control, occupation, exploitation, and domination were interlaced. The travel compendium quickly became a permanent fixture in the European literary tradition, especially in states developing colonial power in the Americas, which clearly took Ramusio’s promotion of colonization and commercial exploitation to heart, albeit for themselves rather than for Venice. Venetian print culture embraced a different kind of power than the brute force of Spanish empire, but the control of language and knowledge was likewise a form of authority, significant in the way that this information was transmitted to the north, where the Dutch and English later took on the real and direct work of combatting Spanish hegemony. Bookmen were always among the most shrewd, creative, and innovative of merchants. As with

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cartographers, novelty was a crucial component of their productive strategy, and they knew well what they were doing when they brought new works onto the market, as they did with translations of Spanish texts and the Venetian travel compendium. This Venetian story is, of course, part of a much larger picture, since especially by the second quarter of the sixteenth century, Europeans in other cities also began to take a keen interest in the New World as knowledge of it became more widely available. The Medici at this time, for instance, “vicariously conquered the Americas through their display of American things and particularly their representations of the New World in works of art.”138 In this way, the Venetian penchant for the travel compendium reflected larger early modern cultural phenomena that included the stockpiling of notes, collections of natural and artificial objects, paintings, and curiosities, “devoted to recording, saving, and managing information about places, objects, and authors both familiar and new.”139 Nevertheless, travel lore in its broadest meaning had always been a particular and integral part of Venetian culture, since over the centuries, merchant guidebooks, ambassadors’ reports, travelers’ accounts, and pilgrims’ narratives had recorded voyages made in the interests of diplomacy, trade, and religious devotion. The collecting of information about other lands had long been a crucial component of both the education and the day-to-day workings of Venice’s mercantile nobility. When these Venetian traditions combined with a kaleidoscope of additional circumstances, including Iberian secrecy and weak book markets, and the savvy of Venetian printmen at a time when Spain was conquering both much of the globe as well as much of the Italian peninsula, the result was that many of the most significant accounts of travel and exploration in the New World were published in Venice. In turn, these accounts, subtly or more directly, for a time framed the European understanding of the New World in Venetian terms, at least on the production side. It would be wrong to call this propaganda; rather, it was a quiet but insistent reminder of the perspectives of those who produced knowledge about the New World in print. Crucially here, Venetian editors revealed that while modern historiography has tended to frame the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds as separate and distinct – the decline of the former leading to the rise of the latter – in fact, early modern individuals did not see things this way, as additional perspectives from the world of Venetian print culture will continue to reveal.140 The collecting of knowledge and amassing of information about the wider world in Venice also occurred in other arenas, including the related realm of cartography, where once again, Venetians asserted their own traditions of travel and exploration as they funneled information about the Americas to the rest of Europe.

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V

enice represented one of the most important centers for cartographic production in the early modern West.1 In their studios and printshops in the Adriatic lagoon – somewhat incredibly, so very far from the desert and jungle geographies of conquest and colonization – Venetian cartographers produced a staggering number of maps, especially of distant parts of the world. In the middle of the sixteenth century, scores of engravers, printers, and publishers maintained shops on the Merceria in the center of the city or on streets nearby, including some of the most prolific printers of maps such as Giovanni Francesco Camocio, Paolo Forlani, Michele Tramezzino, Ferdinando Bertelli, and Bolognino Zaltieri, all of whom produced numerous maps of the Americas. In his survey of “every printed [European] map that depicts any part of North America,” Philip Burden counted 139 maps printed between 1511 and 1600; of these, 31 were printed in Venice – more than in any other single city – followed by 21 in Antwerp, though almost entirely after 1575.2 When map engraving and printing were at their height, there existed up to six hundred copperplates for maps in active use, double the number in Rome at the time.3 The development of Venetian map printing neatly coincided with Europeans’ expanding knowledge of the world, and in this way, early modern Venetian cartography was significant not only in quantity but in quality, and included a rather long list of “firsts,” especially where the history of New World cartography is concerned. For instance, the 1506 Contarini–Rosselli map, designed by the Venetian cosmographer Giovanni Matteo Contarini and most likely also printed 89

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16. The Contarini-Rosselli map. Venice or Florence (?), 1506. Copper engraving. With permission from the British Library Board, BL Maps c.2.cc.4.

17. Benedetto Bordone, “Terra de Lavoratore,” in Libro di Benedetto Bordone. Venice, 1528, 6v. Woodcut. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

in Venice, represents the first printed map of America (Figure 16); Benedetto Bordone’s 1528 isolario contained the first printed map – albeit vastly undersized – of what we today call North America (Figure 17); and – while perhaps hard to prove with absolute certainty – the toponyms of Canada and Brazil perhaps first

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appeared on Venetian printed maps.4 The Venetian cosmographer Giacomo Gastaldi, often referred to as “the greatest of the Italian map-makers,” was arguably the first “professional” cartographer.5 As I have indicated elsewhere, “firstness” is not always the most important indicator of the significance of historical phenomena; however, a pattern of firsts can imply, at least in the world of print and maps, the presence of new information, new editorial interests, and maybe also the attention of new audiences or an interest in new markets. Evidence suggests that up until its peak in the mid-1560s, that is, until the death of Gastaldi in 1566 and the eruption of the plague in August of 1576 that killed a third of the population of the city, Venice was the European entrepôt for the collection, editing, and marketing of printed maps, including world maps and maps of the Americas. Commercial Italian cartographic production between 1560 and 1575 in particular was essentially Venetian.6 Early modern maps replaced images from classical geography with more modern visions of global knowledge. They demonstrated a growing cartographic secularization, as their representations of the world transformed in the Age of Encounters from a spiritual space to one that was geometrically and scientifically ordered.7 A great deal of the history of cartography has traditionally focused on topics like these, as well as on authorship, sources, plates and print technology, and the states of maps.8 Recent studies have additionally demonstrated how rather than being used just for travel or navigation, maps often worked to help viewers visualize distant lands, understand and compare them, or assert a sense of mastery over them.9 They were used pedagogically, as gifts, or as vehicles through which their owners crafted their individual identities as cultured and learned people.10 They served as tools with which to shape the development of the territorial state, or functioned diplomatically to bind different rulers, their states, and their subjects together into transnational communities.11 Along these lines, the connections between mapping and power have by now been laid bare by generations of scholars, and need not be reviewed here.12 This chapter will focus instead on how local anxieties and concerns shaped Venetian mapmaking. While Venetian maps show up regularly in various discussions of the history of early modern cartography, there has been surprisingly little study of their content or close scrutiny of their imagery and toponyms. By looking at the details of several Venetian maps of the New World, I will consider the ways in which printed maps interpreted and laid claim to the Americas.13 In doing so, this chapter aims to integrate a corpus of traditional historiography about these Venetian maps with more recent studies in geography, cartography, and global history. Knowing that Venetian presses produced so many maps – and so many maps of the Americas in particular – we might ask: How did these maps depict the New World? While this discussion will by no means attempt to survey, count, or describe all of them, a great number of these maps embedded a Venetian perspective on the expanding world into their representations.14 How did Venetian cartographers

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balance what was probable in the Americas with what was possible, what they knew with what they imagined? If cartography is an art of persuasion – if maps are always rhetorical constructions rather than neutral, scientific objects, or pieces of material and artistic culture, indeed literary texts, that try to convince their viewers of certain claims and perspectives – what did the content of these maps argue about the expanding world of the sixteenth century? If the power of maps resides in their ability to persuade their audiences that the world looks as they display it, if they represent the “projection of a mental schema on a medium, the materialization of an abstract intellectual order,” Venetian maps of the New World emphasized certain information in order to achieve a series of specific goals and make several distinct claims.15 First and foremost, they self-consciously displayed a quest for knowledge, power, and cultural resources. They did this in part by offering a dazzling and comprehensive experience of armchair travel: a synthesis of up-to-date information gleaned from a great variety of voyages. In addition, for Venetian cartographers, the Americas represented an arena of luxurious wealth and ethnographic contrast, as well as one of self-reflection and compatibility, as we shall see, in the ways Venetians demonstrated how the Americas were both unlike and like Europe. Mapmakers often positioned themselves – as well as the viewers of their maps – between fear and suspicion of “the other” and commercial lust and a desire for knowledge of the expanding world, aiming to convince early modern viewers that the Americas were both wildly different from and, at the same time, eerily similar and familiar to early modern Europeans and Venetians in particular. They balanced awe and resonance. While many of these tropes were common to maps produced in other European cartographic centers, Venetian maps of the Americas put a particular spin on representations of the New World by quietly but insistently pointing to Venetian participation in the Age of Encounters through the historic travels of Marco Polo, creatively using maps and the space of the New World once again to tell a local story about Venetian history. With their maps, Venetian cartographers served as a conduit of knowledge between Iberian conquest and colonization and the Northern European mapping of the Americas. As a result of their plentiful production, Venetian printed maps provided a significant means of transmission of New World information and became influential sources for later producers of maps and atlases, many of which continued to include Venetian and Polian toponyms in their maps of the New World, well into the seventeenth century. In this way, much like Venetian travel compendia, this subset of Venetian print culture played a crucial but traditionally unrecognized role in the invention of America, not as a colonial power but through the collection, production, and dissemination of cartographic knowledge about the New World. If travel literature emphasized that the Venetians wielded great expertise about the New World, and if Ramusio argued that

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Venetians could still be players in the global economy, Venetian maps posited that East and West were the same, giving the New World a Venetian legacy. VENETIAN MAPS, AN O VERVIEW: WO RLDLINESS, AUTHO RSHI P, AND THE TRANSMISSION O F IBERI AN KNOWLEDGE

Christopher Witcombe has likened the development and growth of printmaking in late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy to the introduction of the television in the late twentieth century in its rapid adoption by the public, as well as for the ways in which the introduction of print drove new professions and generated new audiences and marketable products.16 As Suzanne Karr Schmidt has noted, prints were “revolutionary, versatile objects, potentially limitless in quantity and highly portable,” that were purchased by a wide section of the population.17 If the rise of print culture changed the face of early modern Europe, printed maps were very much at the center of these innovations in visual culture. The Italian map trade began in Florence in the late fifteenth century, centered around the workshop of the painter and miniaturist Francesco Rosselli, who was among the first in Europe to make a living from engraving and printing maps. Map production moved to Rome and Venice in the early sixteenth century, where printers and engravers began to produce maps for ordinary individuals, often to keep in a collection or display at home. Following the Sack of Rome in 1527, much Italian mapmaking shifted to Venice, when the city emerged as one of the main centers of both Italian and European cartography, together with a handful of other Northern European cities such as Strasbourg, Nuremberg, and Augsburg.18 Mapmaking – of nautical charts, territorial maps, and world maps – had an established place in Venetian political life, and cartographic literacy was deeply rooted in the city’s culture. The Venetian state had long employed maps in the work of government, especially for administrative and military purposes, for instance, among army engineers and their patrician supervisors. While the overall survival rate of maps makes it difficult to ascertain for certain, the Venetian government likely used maps as tools with which to oversee its subject territories well before any other state in early modern Europe.19 The lagoon city had a long established tradition of nautical chart-making, including pilot charts of the Mediterranean and European coasts, for example those of Andrea Bianco and Grazioso Benincasa.20 In his description of the Rialto, the central marketplace of the city, Francesco Sansovino noted the presence of a painted world map that dated to the fourteenth century. Though little about this map is known, it may have offered merchants a point of reference for their international commerce and celebrated the global reach of Venetian trade.21 The chronicler Marin Sanudo recorded that when word of the disastrous Venetian defeat at Agnadello arrived in Venice on May 15, 1509, Venetian

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18. Battista Agnese, portolan map. c. 1540. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence, B.R. 32, 5v–6r. With permission from the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo / Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence.

senators instinctively rushed to view the battle’s location on a wall map in the Ducal Palace in order to understand its strategic importance.22 Maps of the Venetian mainland empire were commissioned for the Sala del Senato in the Ducal Palace.23 In a great variety of ways, Venetian magistrates had clearly long understood both the practical and ceremonial need for maps.24 Against this background, Venetian cartography became characterized by two interrelated trends that shed light on the production of Venetian maps of the Americas. First, during the course of the sixteenth century, the city’s mapmakers began to tailor an increasing number of maps for the geographic curiosity of learned audiences. The manuscript atlases of Battista Agnese illustrate such a shift. Agnese’s maps preserved many of the usual markings of portolan (or nautical) charts intended for use aboard ship, including detailed coastlines and networks of rhumb lines indicating maritime routes. His maps, however, were also decorative, portraying the rivers, mountains, lakes, and hinterlands of various regions of Europe and the world (Figure 18). Scholarly consensus suggests that the city’s mapmakers showed less interest in usability than did many other cartographic centers: that is to say, less interest in producing maps designed for guiding travel over long distances.25 To be clear, maps were made for many purposes besides way-finding, and all European centers of cartographic production manufactured world maps for collection

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and display; nevertheless, other European cities increasingly began to make more functional maps to meet the diverse needs of conquest and settlement, especially in the Americas.26 Second, Venetian mapmakers in the sixteenth century tended to produce increasing numbers of world maps, or universali.27 If Rome and Venice represented the two main centers of cartographic production in sixteenthcentury Italy, Roman presses tended to produce maps with a more local and topographical focus, while Venetian maps tended to look further afield. Roman presses specialized in maps of cities, while Venice “projected a far more cosmopolitan, even global, awareness and commitment,” and Venetian maps also sold more in foreign markets.28 While a more expansive focus was surely a reflection of markets and audiences as much as wholesale philosophy, compared to Roman mapmakers at the time, Venetian mapmakers were much more cartographers of fusion and amalgamation. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the production of world maps became common in all centers of cartographic production, since eventually, one of the aims of European mapmakers everywhere was to sell maps to viewers who wished to contemplate the world as a whole. Nevertheless, if the idea of “the world” emerged in the sixteenth century as a foundational category of modernity and “worldmaking was a ubiquitous cultural practice in the early modern period,” Venetian cartographers were at the forefront of and integral to this process.29 Sixteenth-century Venetian printed editions of Ptolemy confirm these ideas. According to the most complete inventory to date, more than twothirds of all European editions of Ptolemy’s Geographia were printed in Italy. Between 1475 and 1600, forty-one editions of Ptolemy were printed in total; nineteen of these in Italy, and twelve in Venice and the Veneto, including two vernacular translations by Pier Andrea Mattioli (1548) and Girolamo Ruscelli (1561).30 Among these, Venetian editions of Ptolemy were among the first and most influential in expanding the Ptolemaic model to include maps of the Americas. The first printed edition of Ptolemy to contain a map indicating the New World was the 1508 Rome edition; it was produced by the Celestine monk Marco Beneventano and contained a copy of Johannes Ruysch’s world map (1507). However, the Ruysch map was essentially a copy of the Venetian Contarini–Rosselli map (Figure 16), and all of the new supplementary maps in the 1508 Roman Ptolemy were made in Venice.31 Paolo Canal (1481–1508), a Venetian noble and close friend of Andrea Navagero, the Venetian humanist and ambassador to Spain, had been preparing a Latin translation of Ptolemy around the turn of the sixteenth century. He applied for a privilege to protect this publication on April 19, 1506, but died before it was published, supposedly due to his intense labors on the Geography.32 Had it been published, Canal’s would have been the first printed Venetian edition of Ptolemy, as well as the first edition to contain images of the Americas, possibly even the Contarini–

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19. Bernardus Sylvanus, world map, in Claudii Ptolemaei Alexandrini liber geographiae cum tabulis. Venice, 1511. Woodcut. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Rosselli map itself.33 Soon after, the 1511 Venetian edition of Ptolemy contained a world map by Bernardus Sylvanus, in which visible along the western border are eastern South America, Cuba and Hispaniola, and the tip of Labrador or Newfoundland (Figure 19), offering another example of one of the earliest printed maps to show the Americas, as well as evidence of the precociousness of Venetian editors, cartographers, and printers in publishing information about the New World.34 The 1513 (Strasbourg) and 1540 (Basel) editions of Ptolemy continued to include maps of the Americas by Martin Waldseemüller and Sebastian Münster, respectively, followed by Giacomo Gastaldi’s 1548 Venetian edition of Ptolemy, which became “the most comprehensive and up-to-date world atlas available” at the time.35 This edition was the first published translation of Ptolemy in Italian and the first complete publication of Ptolemy in octavo or a manageable, pocket-sized format, and it contained sixty engraved maps by Gastaldi, including a series of the first printed regional maps of America: New Spain (Figure 20), the northeastern coast of North America, Mexico, South America, Cuba, and Hispaniola.36 Gastaldi’s maps were then reengraved in a slightly larger format for an edition of Ptolemy published by Vincenzo Valgrisi (Venice, 1561), and reissued several times until 1599. Either Valgrisi or the

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20. Giacomo Gastaldi, Nueva Hispania Tabula Nova, from La geografia di Claudio Ptolemeo Alessandrino, translated by Pietro Andrea Mattioli. Venice, 1548. Copper engraving. With permission from The Newberry Library.

editor Girolamo Ruscelli added additional maps of the Americas: a doublehemisphere map of the world, a map of Brazil, and a map of the North Atlantic – the Zen map – which included the northeastern coast of America.37 In this way, through their numerous printed editions of Ptolemy, Venetian printmen and cartographers – the foremost European newsmongers – played a crucial role in synthesizing and communicating news, information, and images of the Americas.38 If developments in early sixteenth-century cartography at large were fueled by two principal impulses – the revival of Ptolemy’s Cosmographia and the drive to map Iberian exploration – these two trends fully intersected in Venetian mapmaking.39 The extent to which Venetian cartographic culture maintained a global vision and worldly interests, especially compared to Roman presses at the time, was certainly linked to Venetians’ sense of their city as one of the centers of the world order, as well as to concerns about Iberian incursions upon this centrality. Florentines and Romans, more earthbound powers in the early sixteenth century, had naturally more landlocked and local rather than maritime or expansive interests in cartography. As we shall see, the production of world

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maps both asserted the prominence of Venice on the global stage and functioned as a surrogate for empire: much as Ramusio’s Navigazioni did. Venetian mapmaking was not a family business as it was in other places, but rather, almost all Venetian cartographers of note, including all of those considered here, originally came from different parts of Italy and the Mediterranean, including Battista Agnese (Genoa), Giacomo Gastaldi (Piedmont), Giorgio Sideri (Crete), Antonio Millo (the Greek island of Milo), and Giuseppe Rosaccio (Friuli), all of whom produced world maps and maps of the Americas. In many ways, this is nothing out of the ordinary, since maps were regularly produced in both cosmopolitan workshops and transnational settings elsewhere.40 In Italy, however, Venice appeared to attract these and other mapmakers with the possibility of earning wages in a more open market; in turn, they potentially brought with them a “greater openness toward the foreign and the new,” offering a potential explanation behind the large number of world maps and maps of the Americas produced in Venice at this time.41 When considering Venetian maps of the New World and early modern print culture, it is important to note that authorship is always difficult to establish. While maps are regularly attributed to individual cartographers – including in this discussion – scholars have long noted the complex relationships between cosmographers (conventionally called the “author”), engravers, and printers at all of the stages of a map’s creation with regard to intellectual conception, drafting, engraving, and final print. Sometimes more than one person signed a map.42 Workers in the trade tended to play various and often interrelated roles in the production of a map, and plates could be borrowed, rented, sold, and even stolen and then engraved by new distributors, so that typically, no single individual was ever responsible for all aspects of a map’s manufacture.43 Confusion surrounding Paolo Forlani’s Il disegno del discoperto della Nova Franza (1566) (Figure 21) illustrates the point. It was believed for some time that Paolo Forlani sold this map of North America without giving any credit to its original designer, Bolognino Zaltieri (it was long referred to as “the Zaltieri map”). However, David Woodward later deduced that Zaltieri played no role whatsoever in the creation of the map’s content; instead, Zaltieri purchased Forlani’s plates and placed his own imprint on them, indicating how the person who attached his name to a map did not necessarily participate in the creation of its contents.44 In this way, while it remains convenient to name, list, and categorize maps by single authors, maps were always collaborative products, or to put it even more expansively, expressions of local learned culture at the time, as well as expressions of broader, cosmopolitan republics of letters and intellectual communities at large. Along similar lines, cosmographers regularly “copied,” transmitted, and rebranded other maps. While sixteenth-century cartographers may have

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21. Paolo Forlani/Bolognino Zaltieri, Il disegno del discoperto della Nova Franza. Venice, 1566. Copper engraving. Courtesy of Pusey Map Library, MAP-LC G3300 1566.Z3 Harvard University.

frequently and purposefully marketed their maps as “new,” maps rarely established themselves on entirely fresh ground and tended to inherit some, most, or even all of their content from previous maps, especially after the introduction of the work of Abraham Ortelius.45 As we shall see in Chapter 5, this was a culture in which the value accorded to originality was flexible, and copying was not considered plagiarism but was in fact entirely acceptable, if not to be expected. Venetian maps, like most European maps at this time, were rarely original in either design, projection, nomenclature, or authorship – though they could be occasionally – and there exist myriad examples in Venetian mapmaking to underscore this point.46 Giuseppe Rosaccio states quite directly along the borders of his Universale descrittione di tutto il mondo (1597) (Figure 22) that he had copied the maps of Ortelius and Gastaldi. Mapmakers regularly printed the maps of other cartographers; for instance, the woodcut map that Oronce Finé made for Francis 1 in 1534 – based on another map made in the early 1520s – was later copied in copperplate by the Veronese engraver Giovanni Cimerlino in Venice in 1566.47 Tomaso Porcacchi printed an exact, smaller version of Paolo Forlani’s 1565 Il disegno del discoperto della Nova Franza (Figure 21) in his isolario, L’isole piu famose del mondo (1572). To make his

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22. Giuseppe Rosaccio, Universale descrittione di tutto il mondo. Venice, 1597. Copper engraving. Courtesy of Houghton Library, 51–2554, Harvard University.

double-hemisphere polar map (1555), Antonio Florian copied the work of Antonio Salamanca in Rome, who in turn had previously copied the work of Mercator.48 Numerous cartographers copied the 1558 Venetian Zen map, well into the seventeenth century.49 With this background in mind, this chapter will not attempt to establish systematically the sources for Venetian maps of the New World. The manuscript maps Venetians copied have for the most part been lost, making this task particularly difficult for early printed maps. Nevertheless, understanding the relationship between Spanish and Venetian mapping is crucial to comprehending the significance of Venetian map production in the sixteenth century. Put quite simply, Spain and Portugal kept their maps under lock and key, and Venetian presses sought to profit from Iberian secrecy during a period when almost no complicated presswork was undertaken in the Iberian world.50 While Venice employed a number of magistracies whose authorities made and used maps in the exercise of local and territorial control, it did not maintain any single state workshop for the production of maps. By contrast, at the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese had established the Amazém de Guiné: a kind of navigational office where cartographers, pilots, and chartmakers constantly worked to update and maintain a master world map, the padrão real. This office gave charts to pilots leaving Lisbon, and when they returned, pilots gave back these charts, together with any updates that would allow the office of the Amazém to correct and extend its master map. Government officials often ordered the destruction of certain types of maps and

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restricted map ownership by private individuals.51 In 1503, the Spanish established their own counterpart to the Amazém: the Casa de la Contratacíon in Seville, similarly staffed with cosmographers, pilots, and cartographers who worked ceaselessly to keep their own padrón real up to date.52 In Spain, new pilots took a formal oath in the name of the Holy Trinity never to relinquish their charts to foreigners, and the publication of maps or any geographic knowledge was strictly prohibited. The exemplars for all pilot charts were kept in a locked chest in the Casa itself, for which two separate keys held by different people were required for access.53 Iberian maps were primarily manuscript maps kept as state secrets.54 Notably, in Burden’s survey of the mapping of North America, only 6 out of 139 maps produced in the sixteenth century were printed in Spain, all of which were relatively small, crude, and lacking in detail: a powerful indicator of the degree to which the Spanish state heavily guarded the secrets of its maps in the hopes of limiting the diffusion of its cartographic knowledge.55 It was at exactly the same time that Spain and Portugal competed for territorial dominance in the Americas, always keeping their map production under wraps, that Venice became one of the main centers for the collection, distribution, and marketing of printed maps. Venetian cartographers profited from Iberian secrecy by copying directly from leaked Iberian manuscript maps. Despite the Iberian rhetoric of secrecy, there existed many informers, and mariners, cartographers, and their maps often traveled between states. The movement of Iberian cartographic material into Italy was significant, much like the movement of Spanish texts. The 1534 Ramusio map (as it is often referred to) of the eastern coast of North and South America that accompanied Ramusio’s first compilation, his Summario delle historie de l’Indie Occidentali (Venice, 1534) (Figure 23), offers perhaps the best example of the transfer of cartographic knowledge from Spain to Italy. As we have seen, this text was an abridged volume of the works of Peter Martyr and Oviedo, most likely brought to Venice from Seville by the Venetian ambassador Andrea Navagero and whose production is now credited to Navagero and Ramusio.56 The text contained this woodcut map, derived from Spanish maps and the padrón real, possibly printed in Venice by Andrea Vavassore (c. 1510–1572), and folded to fit into the back of the book. The legend in the cartouche in the map’s upper left states that it was “drawn from two navigational charts made in Seville by the pilots of His Majesty the Emperor.” A paragraph in the text itself describing the map’s publication similarly states that it copied from two Spanish navigational charts. One of these was made in Seville by the pilot and master chart-maker Niño Garzia de Loreno (Nuño Garciá Torreño) and belonged to Peter Martyr, councilor of the royal Council of the Indies at the time, and the other was similarly made by an imperial pilot in Seville, unnamed here, but most likely Diogo Ribeiro.57

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23. La carta universale della terra ferma e isole delle Indie Occidentali (the Ramusio map), in Peter Martyr and Gonzalo Hernández de Oviedo, Summario de la generale historia de l’Indie Occidentali. Venice, 1534. Woodcut map. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

The Ramusio map was among the earliest European printed maps to portray fully the shape of South America as well as the continuous eastern coastline of the Americas in modern forms.58 It placed the name Estéban Gómez (Stevá gomes) (1483–1538) near what is today the Penobscot River, pointing to a knowledge of Gómez’s voyages along the northeast coast of America. Gómez was a Portuguese cartographer and explorer who also had worked as a pilot in the Casa de la Contratacíon. He explored the coasts of Nova Scotia and Maine in 1524–1525, and these explorations were recorded on the

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24. Benedetto Bordone, world map, in Libro di Benedetto Bordone. Venice, 1528. Woodcut. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

1529 Diogo Ribeiro world map, which the Ramusio map in turn copied. It marks the Rio de la Plata (here named biblically as the River Jordan (iorda)), as well as the recently explored estuaries of the Amazon and the Orinoco. It also notes the Inca city of Túmbez (Tumbes) where Pizarro had landed in 1527, as well as Ailon, the Spanish province of Ayllón or the area around present-day North and South Carolina where the Spanish conquistador Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón (1475–1526) had tried to found a colony. Compared to other world maps printed at the time, such as the Bordone world map of 1528 (Figure 24) or Sebastian Münster’s Tabula novarum insularum that dates from the 1540s (Figure 25), the Ramusio map demonstrates a clear jump from more tentative and vague depictions of the Americas to a more fully articulated one, informed by the most recent news of Spanish exploration.59 It offered an excellent synopsis of Spanish activities in the New World, summarized the progress of Spanish cartography at the Casa de la Contratacíon during its most productive, creative, and innovative period, and made this otherwise secretive material publicly available to Italian and European audiences.60 While the Ramusio map offers some sense of its provenance, it is not always so easy to locate the Spanish or Portuguese sources for Venetian maps. To a large degree, Iberian secrecy worked as intended, and very few Spanish manuscript maps survive from the first half of the sixteenth century as points of comparison.61 Nevertheless, other similar examples of Iberian–Venetian transmission exist.62

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25. Sebastian Münster, Tabula novarum insularum, in Cosmographiae uniuersalis. Basel, 1550. Woodcut. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Venice was by no means the only cartographic center drawing on Spanish sources for the content of its maps; German maps also drew on Iberian maps, and the Dieppe school, exemplified by the manuscript maps of Jean Rotz and Pierre Desceliers, collaborated regularly with Portuguese mapmakers, placed Portuguese place names on its Norman maps, and also worked to visualize and promote the content of Iberian cartography.63 As with Venetian translations and publications of textual accounts of Spanish conquest in the Americas, however, the sheer magnitude and productive power of Venetian print culture enabled Venetian cartography to play a particular and substantial role in funneling Spanish geographic information to the rest of Europe. Just as Venetian texts frequently provided timely information about Spanish exploration, Venetian printed maps did much the same. Evidence suggests a variety of pathways by which Iberian knowledge arrived in Venice. In 1494, for instance, Duke Ercole d’Este of Ferrara sent his envoy

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Alberto Cantino to Lisbon, purportedly to trade in horses but secretly to hunt for geographic information. Cantino famously smuggled a map back to Italy, and the Cantino planisphere (1502), copied regularly in Venice, came to be seen as one of the most significant early European representations of the Americas.64 Sebastian Cabot, a pilot for Spain but of Venetian origin, tried several times to sneak secret cartographic information to the Venetian state. Cabot had been cosmógrafo mayor at the Casa de la Contratacíon before Ribeiro, and had maintained personal relationships with scholars such as Peter Martyr and Oviedo as well as with a variety of pilots and conquistadors. He corresponded with Gasparo Contarini and the Venetian Council of Ten to potentially bring Spanish texts and maps about the New World back to Venice.65 As we have seen, Ramusio had access to Spanish information through a variety of contacts, and Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi became the primary source of information for many Venetian maps. Influential editors such as Tommaso Giunti were often able to obtain confidential materials about geography through prelates in the Roman Curia.66 And, of course, cartographic information often arrived orally, in ways less traceable, through the personal collaboration between cartographers and visitors to the city.67 Using a variety of sources, Venetian mapmakers profited from Iberian secrecy by acquiring Spanish and Portuguese maps by whatever means they could, editing and transforming cartographic drawings and manuscripts into accessible and affordable printed maps, and marketing this otherwise largely unknown material to a wider European audience. In this way, the acquisition and publication of Iberian maps offer yet another example of the Venetian command of information about the Americas. While the Spanish rapidly acquired perhaps more uncharted territory in the first half of the sixteenth century than any other state in history, Venice by contrast became the European clearinghouse for New World knowledge. MAPS FOR ARMCHAIR TRAVEL: THE WEALTH , EXOTICI SM, AND MARVELS OF THE NEW WORLD

Venetian printed maps of the New World came in a variety of sizes and formats. Printed books often contained small and relatively crude images of the New World or the globe, such as the world map located in Pietro Coppo’s Portolano (Venice: Augustino de Bindoni, 1528) (Figure 26), or the map of the Americas in Giuseppe Rosaccio’s Teatro del cielo (Venice: Domenico Louisa, 1598 (?)) (Figure 27), primitively copied from Ortelius’s map of 1570.68 Printers and cosmographers also produced numerous single-page folios (for instance, Giacomo Gastaldi’s 1556 La Nuova Francia, Figure 28), many of which were later incorporated into atlases, as well as large-scale wall maps printed on multiple sheets. In contrast to both smaller-scale printed maps of the world as well as

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2 6. Pietro Coppo, world map, in Portolano. Venice, 1528. Woodcut. Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Misc. D.5341, 104–105. With permission from the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo/ Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice. Reproduction prohibited.

large-scale painted wall maps such as those of the Guardaroba in Florence (1563–1589), the Sala dello Scudo in the Ducal Palace in Venice (restored 1762, originally painted 1549–1553), the Sala del Mappamondo in the Villa Farnese at Caprarola (1573–1575), and the Sala del Mappamondo in the Vatican (1580–1585), large-scale printed world maps often incorporated quantitatively and qualitatively more detail, including more textual discussions of global cosmography and ethnography.69 For this reason, they offer some of the best surviving and best overall examples of Venetian depictions of the Americas. Compared to smaller maps, their scale allowed for more description, especially in the empty spaces of oceans, relatively unknown continental interiors, or beyond the borders of the map proper.70 Furthermore, compared to painting, printed etchings, engravings, and often even woodcut maps could produce extremely sharp edges on a small scale and thus render with more precision. In order to define precisely boundaries and geographical measurements, engraved maps employed a high degree of line definition: a quality enhanced by the absence of color and therefore producing images of greater delicacy and topographical detail than similarly scaled painted maps.71 Large-scale printed maps of the world often also contained scores of textual descriptions of local peoples, customs, flora, and fauna, as well as quantitatively more toponyms and named locations than either painted

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27. Giuseppe Rosaccio, map of the New World, in Teatro del cielo e della terra. Venice, c. 1598. Woodcut. Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Misc.1950.2. With permission from the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali e del Turismo/Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice. Reproduction prohibited.

mural maps or smaller-scale printed maps. In sum, large printed maps often offered the most information about the lands they depicted; in doing so, they were able not only to assert specific claims about the expanding world and the populations that inhabited it but also to support such claims with a variety of details, including visual and textual evidence to undergird and visualize their arguments. Three surviving large-scale printed wall maps of the world from sixteenth-century Venice permit the scrutiny of Venetian visions of the Americas: one by Giacomo Gastaldi (1500–1566), one by Giovanni Francesco Camocio (d. 1575), and one by Giuseppe Rosaccio (c. 1530–c. 1620). Gastaldi’s Cosmographia universalis et exactissima iuxta postremam neotericorum traditio[n]em (c. 1561) (Figure 29) – a woodcut map on ten sheets – measures 90 by 182 centimeters and survives in one copy in the British Library. Gastaldi’s maps offered the most recent cartographic news from the Americas in print and completely transformed European maps of the New World.72 His first world map, his 1546 Universale (Figure 30), was among the earliest European printed maps to provide a relatively complete outline of the Americas as a whole and offered one of the most up-to-date representations

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28. Giacomo Gastaldi, La Nuova Francia. Venice, 1606. Woodcut. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

29. Giacomo Gastaldi, Cosmographia universalis. Venice, c. 1561. Woodcut. With permission from the British Library Board, BL Maps c.18.n.1.

of New World geography at that time. Gastaldi produced some of the earliest printed maps of the east coast of North America, such as the Tierra Nueva map in the 1548 Venetian edition of Ptolemy, perhaps the first map to record the first voyage of Jacques Cartier to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Many

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30. Giacomo Gastaldi, Universale. Venice, 1546. Copper engraving. Courtesy of Houghton Library, pf 51–2492, Harvard University.

of his other maps were equally precocious.73 Though the originals no longer exist, the Venetian Council of Ten invited Gastaldi to fresco maps onto the walls of the Ducal Palace: a sign of his prominence as a cosmographer and mapmaker.74 His large-scale wall map under consideration here represents the earth in an oval-shaped frame, placing its title across the top of the map and Gastaldi’s name along the bottom. The four corners of the map, in the space between the contour of the oval and the rectangular frame that encloses the map as a whole, depict allegorical personifications of “Astronomy,” “Cosmography,” terrestrial maps of the eastern and western hemispheres, and views of the northern and southern poles of the globe supported by Strabo and Ptolemy. It is richly adorned with animals, monsters, mermaids, and a variety of ships, has an extremely large “Terra Australe” or southern continent covering the bottom quarter of the map, and has seven blank cartouches that would have eventually contained details about the printer and publisher as well as legends describing various parts of the world.75 Giovanni Francesco Camocio was a prolific Venetian engraver and publisher. He wrote books (including an isolario, entitled Isole famose, porti, fortezze, e terre maritime (Venice, 1571)), produced approximately thirty-six large maps between

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(a)

(b)

(c)

31. Giovanni Francesco Camocio, “Carta del Nuovo Mondo in 9 Pezzi,”Correr cartella 32/70. Venice, c. 1569. Copper engraving. With permission from the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2017 © Photo Archive.

1560 and 1575, attracted the attention of the Inquisition for selling prohibited materials, and most likely died in the Venetian plague of 1575. His wall map of the Americas in the Biblioteca Correr in Venice (Figure 31) was designed as one of four parts, the other three depicting Europe, Africa, and Asia. The other three sections of this world map are each composed of twelve sheets,

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while the New World section is made of only nine, which measure 98 by 105 centimeters when assembled. When placed all together, these maps would have formed perhaps the largest world map assembled to date.76 Camocio’s map of the Americas has twenty descriptive legends – some quite lengthy – placed primarily in the spaces of the oceans, and an extensive southern continent across the bottom of the map. For David Woodward, this map represented a “masterpiece of the copper engraver’s art, at its height in Venice of the 1560s and 1570s.”77 Lastly, Giuseppe Rosaccio, originally from Friuli, was a Venetian physician, cosmographer, and expert on Ptolemy, of which he published an Italian edition, with his own additions, in 1598–1599. His Universale descrittione di tutto il mondo (1597) (Figure 22) – his magnum opus – was engraved in copper by Giovanni Battista Mazza. It is a map in ten sheets measuring 108 by 185 centimeters that exists in several copies in various states.78 Much like Gastaldi’s Cosmographia universalis, Rosaccio’s Universale descrittione depicts the world in an oval frame. Here, the frame contains Ptolemaic coordinates, and an ornamental rectangular frame encloses the entire map as a whole. The corners of the map depict allegorical figures representing Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, surrounded by numerous city views from these respective parts of the globe. The map has lengthy columns of text along its top and bottom edges, which among other topics discuss the mapmaker’s craft and offer a Ptolemaic description of the world. Rosaccio gives special attention, around the map as a whole, but especially in an extensive southern continent, to the earliest colonization of the eastern part of the Americas. Quite differently from the other two largescale maps considered here, Rosaccio depicts prominently, in a series of dramatic scenes drawn from Theodor de Bry’s America occidentalis (Frankfurt, 1590–1598), both French settlements in Florida by Huguenot colonists (1562–1565) and English settlements in Virginia (1584–1587), demonstrating how by the end of the sixteenth century, there existed copious ethnographic imagery for Rosaccio to draw on (as well as how late Italians were in embracing illustrated cartography). An abstract northern continent drips down from the upper edge of the map, offering additional space in which to describe the inhabitants of Brazil and Lapland.79 All three of these grand-scale maps of the world incorporated extensive topographic details and ethnographic descriptions, and in turn, posited several claims about the Americas. A close examination of their contents offers an understanding of the overall messages, themes, and arguments about the New World that Venetian maps communicated to a European audience. First and foremost, these maps self-consciously offered a dazzling and comprehensive experience of armchair travel. The idea of maps as tools for armchair travelers had a long history, both in general and in

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particular in Venetian cartography. Petrarch had famously declared that he had decided not to travel just once on a very long journey by ship or horse or on foot . . . but many times on a tiny map, with books and the imagination, so that in the course of an hour I could go to those shores and return as many times as I liked . . . not only unscathed, but unwearied too, not only with sound body, but with no wear and tear to my shoes untouched by rains, stones, mud and dust.80

On his 1506 world map (Figure 16), Giovanni Matteo Contarini intentionally noted that his map insulated its viewers from the dangers of long-distance travel, as he proclaimed, “Whither away? Stay, traveler, and behold new nations and a new-found world.”81 The publication information on the last page of the Summario de la generale historia de l’Indie Occidentali – the text that accompanied the 1534 Ramusio map (Figure 23) – stated quite directly that “with these charts, the reader can inform himself of all this New World place by place, as if he himself had been there.”82 Among the best examples of the idea of maps as substitutes for travel was the work of Batista Agnese, whose manuscript maps and atlases clearly directed the reader to follow Magellan’s journey around the world along the path of his crisply painted line.83 Venetian maps participated in this tradition by shrinking the globe for easy scrutiny and study to allow viewers to survey the world with a seemingly divine, all-seeing gaze without having to undertake the trials and tribulations of travel itself. As substitutes for travel or pilgrimage, Venetian maps offered mesmerizing and all-encompassing graphic repositories of knowledge. In the border of his wall map, for instance, Rosaccio neatly summed up this work of the mapmaker. In the second column of this text, Rosaccio noted how he had constructed such a divine view of the world. So regard, gentle readers, the present universal machine through which you will see everything positioned in its place and according to its proper proportions, in such a way that you will be able to see, with the eye of a falcon or an eagle . . . regions and provinces, so that in one moment you will see East, West, North and South. (Percio mirate benigni lettori la presente machina universale che in essa ogni cosa vederete posta à suo luogo per quando s’appartiene alla detta proportione, di maniera, che potrete à guisa di falcone, ò aquila . . . regioni, et provincie, cosi voi in un momento potrete il Levante, il Ponente, la Tramontana, et l’Ostro vedere.)

Continuing in this vein, Rosaccio points to the labors he has undertaken in order to render the world clearly for his viewers. It has not been an easy enterprise, since it required me first and foremost to personally see many faraway places and be exposed to great dangers.

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And this would not have been enough, in fact it would have been of little help, if I had not [also] heard many things from knowledgeable cosmographers. (Ne mi è stata facile impresa, poscia che mi è convenuto primieramente veder personalmente molti lontani paesi et gran pericoli scorrere. Nè questo mi sarebbe bastato, anzi di pocho giovamento sarebbe stato se da huomini sientiati in cosmografia io non havessi udite molte cose.)

A good mapmaker, he argues, was a kind of surrogate traveler who protected viewers from the hazards of travel and offered his readers a carefully curated summary of his knowledge, boiled down from a vast collection of information and rendered succinctly in his map. Here, Rosaccio goes so far as to suggest that seeing for oneself is not even that useful compared to learning about cosmography secondhand, from the accounts of others. In the address to his readers in his book Il mondo e sue parti cioe Europa, Affrica, Asia et America, Rosaccio claimed that he had traveled far and wide to consult the works of the most famous cosmographers of his time in order to make this map, including those of Vopel, Finé, Apian, Mercator, Ortelius, Gastaldi, and many others.84 This suggests that people traveled to see maps, and in this way, seeing maps rather than traveling to actual places became a means of knowing the world. Again, in Rosaccio’s view, the authority of print could be greater than firsthand knowledge, a sentiment Venetian printmen appeared to embrace. Medieval maps may have similarly purported to offer the ability to see many things at once, and in relation to one another. In early modern Europe at large as well, maps became sites of discovery and conduits of knowledge about the world and global connectedness, and such rhetoric was commonplace. Nevertheless, in a Venetian context, Rosaccio’s claims worked to underscore the centrality of the city’s knowledge production and supported Venetian perspectives on the world by insinuating that there was no need to visit new lands: one merely had to study Venetian maps. Even a firsthand visit to a distant place, he argued, was no substitute for the accumulated, aggregated, and integrated knowledge maps offered. Venetian cartographers were almost always armchair travelers themselves in the way that they gleaned the information for their maps not from travel or eyewitness encounters but from copying other maps – especially Iberian ones – making the process of armchair travel in Venice entirely circular. Venetian mapmakers studied the maps of others in order to accumulate knowledge and promote the experience of armchair travel to a broader European public. Rosaccio concludes, in the last box of text on the bottom right of his map: Here benign reader I have, with the greatest diligence possible, brought to conclusion the present cosmography, for which I believe you will be grateful for more hours than it took to create; be it for being the most

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copious as well as for being the most modern. In it, I have placed everything that up until now, one could know, with no regard for how much effort this took. (Ecco benigno lettore che ho con la maggior diligenza che sia statto possibile ridotto a fine la presente cosmografia la qual credo ti sarra grata piu di quante fin hora siano state fatte; si per essere la piu copiosa come anco perche è la piu moderna; nella quale ho posto tutto quello, che fin hora si ha potuto sapere; non havenndo havuto riguardo a fatica alcuna.)

The mapmaker managed to capture the world magically in a universalizing, orderly image, editing information from many voyages of exploration into a single, rich, and condensed form that in this context worked to reflect, construct, and reinforce Venetian expertise. A close look at Gastaldi’s Cosmographia universalis and in particular its toponyms allows for an understanding of the kind of synthetic knowledge these maps offered, including the types of information cartographers selected and the arguments they made in doing so. Beginning in the area of what is today the American West and Southwest on this map (Figure 32), Gastaldi’s

32. Giacomo Gastaldi, detail of Cosmographia universalis. Venice, c. 1561. Woodcut. With permission from the British Library Board, BL Maps c.18.n.1.

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toponyms depicted a knowledge of at least fourteen expeditions and voyages of exploration that took place in the first half of the sixteenth century, including the 1539 exploration of Fra Marcos de Niza (1495–1558) in northern Sonora and southeastern Arizona (Ysola delle Perle, Tontonteac); Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s (1510–1554) journey into New Mexico between 1540 and 1542 (Quivira, Tuchano, Tiguas, Axa, Chichuco, Topira); Hernando de Alarcón’s (1500–1542) expedition into the Gulf of California in the hopes of meeting up with Coronado (Colima, Coana); Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo’s (1499–1543) voyage up the California coast in 1542 (Siera Nevada, Parte de Ogni Santi [near modern Los Angeles], Parte del Fuoco, Parte San Michel [modern San Diego]); and Francisco de Ulloa (d. 1540) in the Gulf of California and along the Pacific coast (Mar Vermeo, Ysola de Cedri).85 The toponym Azatlan indicated Gastaldi’s knowledge of the peregrinations of Cabeza de Vaca.86 In the northeast part of the North American continent (Figure 33), Gastaldi included geographic information about the Corte Real brothers’ 1499–1502 expeditions to Newfoundland (Ysola Rotunda Corte Real, Rio Nevado) as well as those of Jacques Cartier (1491–1557) in the 1530s (Punto di Santa Croce, Ochelai [present day Montreal], Punto di San Lorenzo, Punto de Grad, Punto de San Antonio, Golfo Calore, Ysola del Ucelli, Capo Rasso).87 The provincial title of Terra del Labrador on the far eastern edge of the continent

33. Giacomo Gastaldi, detail of Cosmographia universalis. Venice, c. 1561. Woodcut. With permission from the British Library Board, BL Maps c.18.n.1.

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indicates the voyages of João Fernandes (d. 1505), a landowner or lavrador from Terceira in the Azores who received letters of patent both from King Manuel of Portugal and later from Henry VII of England to search for new lands along the northeast coast.88 The toponyms Arcadia and Norumbega indicate Giovanni da Verrazanno’s (1485–1528) voyages along the eastern coast of North America in 1524.89 His toponyms also represent the voyages of Ponce de Leon (1474–1521) in Florida (Rio de Ioan Ponce), Esteban Gómez along the Atlantic coast (rio de Gamas), Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) in Mexico (Tenochtitlan), and perhaps also Hernando de Soto (1496–1542) in the southeastern part of North America (Rio di Santo Spirito and Punto di Santo Spirito).90 Camocio and Rosaccio’s maps depicted many of the same toponyms and added to them toward the end of the sixteenth century. Rosaccio’s 1597 map, for instance, indicated the voyages of Sir Walter Raleigh and the English colonization of Virginia after 1585.91 As Rosaccio suggested, all of these maps compressed a great quantity of geographical information into a small, concentrated space. As Bronwen Wilson puts it, “the world and the viewer’s place within it could be seen in ways never imagined before, [and the] novelty of this experience overlapped with the discovery of worlds unknown to Europeans.”92 Despite Rosaccio’s claims that maps included “everything,” they of course were always selective and carefully chose specific information to emphasize certain themes and undergird particular arguments. While claims of universalizing vision and knowledge were meant to underscore cartographers’ authority, the slippage between such claims and the actual details depicted on maps themselves lays bare the contentions they intended to forward. These maps focused intensively – and with a conspicuous colonial eye – on the extravagant wealth of the Americas, in part through the toponyms they included. For instance, all of these maps depict the Seven Cities of Cibola in the territory of what is today the American Southwest. The story of the Seven Cities had its origin in the Moorish conquest of Visigothic Spain in 711, after which seven Visigothic bishops supposedly each founded a city on an unknown island. They were thought to have established them on the island of Antillia, a phantom island in the mid-fifteenth-century Atlantic, but when the Seven Cities were never found there, explorers began to look for them in the New World, where they remained an elusive goal for Spanish explorers throughout the sixteenth century.93 Both Marcos di Niza and Francisco de Coronado, the earliest Spanish explorers of what is today the Rio Grande Valley and its environs, searched for these cities, including Quivira, Tuchano, and Cibola or Cevola, all reputed to be cities of fantastic wealth. De Niza first claimed that he had seen Cibola from a distance, that it was larger than Tenochtitlan, and that its inhabitants used vessels of gold and silver, decorated their houses with turquoise, and had gigantic pearls,

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34. Giovanni Francesco Camocio, detail of “Carta del Nuovo Mondo in 9 Pezzi,” Correr cartella 32/70. Venice, c. 1569. Copper engraving. With permission from the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2017 © Photo Archive.

emeralds, and other beautiful gems.94 The Gastaldi map indicated Cucho, Tiguas, Axa, and Chichucho, all pueblos that Coronado had visited or heard about as he attempted to make his way toward Quivira, where he hoped to find these great riches. According to Coronado, in the province of Topira (today the Mexican state of Durango), “you find deposits of gold” (“si trovano giacimenti d’oro”) and “they wear gold clothing, emeralds and other precious stones, they serve themselves daily [on plates of] gold and silver, their houses are covered with gold and silver, and the chiefs wear great chains of well-worked gold around their necks” (“portano adosso gli abitatori oro, smeraldi e altre pietre preziose, e si servono ordinariamente con oro e argento, col quale cuoprono le case; e li principali portano a torno al collo catene d’oro grosse e ben lavorate”).95 Camocio and Rosaccio’s maps show the same toponyms, or variants of them (Figures 34 and 35). Most significantly, the narrative accounts of both de Niza and Coronado include the names of many other settlements and towns they passed through during their travels: names that do not show up on these maps. By selecting these particular toponyms and ignoring others, these cartographers emphasized the wealth of the New World, much as contemporary printed texts did as well.96

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35. Giuseppe Rosaccio, detail of Universale descrittione di tutto il mondo. Venice, 1597. Copper engraving. Courtesy of Houghton Library, 51–2554, Harvard University.

Gastaldi also noted in a passage in the center of North America that “here one finds the finest sable” (“qui si trovano zubellini finissimi”).97 In the northeast, he indicated the Sanguinai River and the Kingdom of Saguenay (Sogvenai Regno, Figure 33), first described by Cartier on his second voyage in 1536. During this voyage, the Frenchman recorded an Iroquoian legend of a kingdom to the north, rich in gold, gems, furs, and blonde men, a kingdom they searched for in vain and most likely, like Cibola, was an Iroquoian attempt to trick the French into moving on.98 All of these maps indicate the widespread presence of pearls, regularly used in Europe at this time to adorn clothing, jewelry, and ecclesiastical objects. The Gastaldi map shows, for instance, the “cape of pearls” on the southernmost tip of the Baha Peninsula, and on the Camocio map, a legend describes the islands of the Caribbean as rich in “pearls, gold, slaves and other things” (“perle, oro, schiavi, et altre cose”). The Rosaccio map states, in a tiny legend in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, “in this sea, one finds a great quantity of pearls” (“in questo mare si trova gran quantita di perle”), and between the feet of his allegory of Asia in the bottom left of the map lies an oyster (Figure 36). The Camocio map notes in legends that in Paria (the northern provinces of

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36. Giuseppe Rosaccio, allegory of Asia, Universale descrittione di tutto il mondo. Venice, 1597. Copper engraving. Courtesy of Houghton Library, 51–2554, Harvard University.

Latin America), the natives “used to wear golden pants adorned with pearls” (“prima usavano bragette d’oro ornate di perle”) and that the Spanish abandoned Paria when they discovered there were no more pearls there (“dalli spagnoli sia stato abandonato per non ritrovarsegli piu pescagion di perle”). Camocio describes the Rio de la Plata as full of a “quantity of gold, pearls, and jewels” (“quantita di oro, perle, et gioie”).

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37. Giuseppe Rosaccio, allegory of America, Universale descrittione di tutto il mondo. Venice, 1597. Copper engraving. Courtesy of Houghton Library, 51–2554, Harvard University.

In the bottom left and right corners, Rosaccio depicted allegories of both America and Asia, which unlike the more simply adorned allegories of Europe and Africa are dripping in wealth; both figures sit on pots and piles of coins and jewels, and are laden with necklaces and chains (Figures 36 and 37).99 Rosaccio

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38. Giuseppe Rosaccio, detail of Universale descrittione di tutto il mondo. Venice, 1597. Copper engraving. Courtesy of Houghton Library, 51–2554, Harvard University.

shows Timucuans panning for gold in the southeast corner of North America, and states near this image that “in these mountains one finds a great quantity of gold” (“in questi monti si trova gran quantita de oro”) (Figure 38).100 In terms of other examples of natural wealth, both Gastaldi and Camocio indicate the rich fishing grounds off Newfoundland with an exaggerated dotted band that hugs the coast (Figures 33 and 39). Gastaldi’s widely circulated map La Nuova Francia, published in the third volume of Ramusio in 1556 (Figure 28), similarly emphasizes the Grand Banks with the stippled tail that dramatically snakes around the bottom and right sides of the map. With much the same rhetorical tone employed by Odysseus as he commented on the colonial possibilities of the islands of the Mediterranean, these maps regularly noted the great natural wealth of the New World: its navigable rivers, abundant in fish, accessible natural harbors, and fertile lands for the growth of vines, fruit, legumes, or grain.101 As with Herodotus’s description of the Persian Empire, portraying other worlds as luxuriously if not unnaturally wealthy represented a fundamental means by which mapmakers “othered” them, and not surprisingly, based on a long tradition of medieval expectations of marvels to be found in distant lands,

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39. Giovanni Francesco Camocio, detail of “Carta del Nuovo Mondo in 9 Pezzi,” Correr cartella 32/70. Venice, c. 1569. Copper engraving. With permission from the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2017 © Photo Archive.

40. Giovanni Francesco Camocio, detail of a griffin, “Carta del Nuovo Mondo in 9 Pezzi,” Correr cartella 32/70. Venice, c. 1569. Copper engraving. With permission from the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2017 © Photo Archive.

all three of these cosmographers consistently represented the Americas as exotic, marvelous, and often horrifying in their dramatic otherness.102 Both Gastaldi and Camocio populated the territory that is today Canada with elephants, unicorns, and a series of strange and often unidentifiable creatures. Various kinds of griffins spread their wings in Camocio’s Terra de Bacala and Arctic Circle (Figure 40). Ferdinando Bertelli’s 1571 Universale descrittione shows a giant lizard or

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41. Ferando Bertelli, detail of a griffin, Universale descrittione. Venice, 1571. With permission from the British Library Board, BL Maps K.Top.5.

crocodile, a wild dog, a clawed griffin, and a giant turtle in Canada (Figure 41), and both Camocio’s and Gastaldi’s maps are noteworthy for their sea monsters. Both also included the Kingdom of the Picne Maay or “pygmies” in northeastern Canada (PICNE MAAY REG in Gastaldi (Figure 33), or Picnemaay Reg in Camocio (Figure 34)): a kingdom of onelegged men that Cartier claimed to have learned of from local informants on his second voyage.103 The tip of South America in Camocio’s map shows the giants who populated this “Gigantum Regio.” One of Camocio’s legends describes how Cubans hunted for duck by hiding underwater and covering their heads with pumpkins so that they could surreptitiously approach unsuspecting fowl and grab their feet from below. Gastaldi and Camocio both show an Isola delli Ucelli, reported by Cartier, off the eastern coast of Labrador (Figures 33 and 34). As Camocio’s legend describes it: This island of the birds is so-called on account of its birds being so numerous that if many ships went there from France to be loaded with them, it would not seem as if more than one shipful had been brought away out of the marvelous abundance which exists there. (Questa Isola degl’Uccelli cosi detta dalla inumerabile quantittà di uccelli in essa, che quante nave, che di Francia vi vanno, se tutte ne caricassero li pareria che un solo ge ne fusse stato levato alla maravigliosa coppia, che di essi vi sono.)104

Gastaldi’s 1556 map of La Nuova Francia (Figure 28) clearly labels the large island in the northeast of this archipelago the Isola de demoni, here referring to the Beothuk Indians, a now extinct tribe who Cartier reputed to be demons for their hostility and cruelty. All three of these wall maps pay particular and consistent attention to the exotic clothing and houses of a variety of New World peoples. For instance, in a legend in Canada drawn directly from Cartier’s account of his voyages, Camocio describes the Agovionda tribe. “They live in the countryside in towns without walls . . . [and] they always go around armed from head to

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42. Giovanni Francesco Camocio, detail of cannibalism in Brazil, “Carta del Nuovo Mondo in 9 Pezzi,” Correr cartella 32/70. Venice, c. 1569. Copper engraving. With permission from the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2017 © Photo Archive.

toe with armor of rope and wood tied together and decorated with feathers of various colors” (“habittano alle champagne senza terre murate . . . andando sempre armadi da capo a piedi con armature di corde, et legno insieme tessuti, et lavorate con piumi di varii collori”).105 The largest images in Rosaccio’s North America, the ones that dominate the map, drew on De Bry to depict the annual Timucuan ceremony of consecrating a deerskin to the sun, and in other parts of North America, to show indigenous villages, often surrounded by circular wooden fences. Rosaccio placed descriptions of Peru in the Arctic and of Florida and Virginia in Canada and across the entire bottom register of the map, emphasizing the exoticism of New World peoples, even in the empty spaces on other continents. Like other European cartographers, Venetian mapmakers represented America’s “otherness” and “unnaturalness” with representations of cannibalism: Gastaldi in Canada, and Camocio in numerous legends, especially in Brazil (Figure 42).106 Rosaccio inserted cannibalistic images from Theodore de Bry’s America occidentalis, including a large image of New World peoples beating and dismembering each other, labeled “in many regions of America, after they have beaten their enemies in battle, they cut off their arms and legs and carry them as trophies, placing them on an altar in front of their houses” (“Nell’America in molte di quelle regioni dopo che ano superatto i suoi nemici in bataglia gli troncano i brazzi, et gambe, poi li portano per trofeo ponendoli sopra a un pallo avanti la sua casa”) (Figure 35). On the very top register of the map in an ambiguous arctic zone, Rosaccio depicts the butchering, preparation, and roasting of human limbs, describing how Brazilians and other New World peoples did what “for us would be irrational” (“come da noi si fa delli irationali”) (Figure 43).

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43. Giuseppe Rosaccio, detail of cannibalism, Universale descrittione di tutto il mondo. Venice, 1597. Copper engraving. Courtesy of Houghton Library, 51–2554, Harvard University.

For all that they strove to emphasize the alterity of the Americas, however, all three maps did so in conjunction with simultaneous efforts to assimilate the Americas to Europeans and make the New World compatible with European practices and ways of thinking.107 Both Gastaldi and Camocio noted prominently on their maps the similarities between herd animals in America and Italy, illustrating bison in the western part of North America as “bulls and cows that on their backs have a hump like camels, with a chest and tail like a lion, and the rest of their bodies like our [bulls and cows]” (“torre et vache, et sopra la schena tengono la gobba simile alli camellia, con il petto et coda de leone, et il resto del corpo come li nostri”) (Figures 32 and 34). Gastaldi placed a series of figures dressed in European clothing in Canada, notable in particular for their breeches, to indicate that this was a land Europeans were populating; they were becoming familiar to this landscape just as the landscape was coming to know them (Figure 44). A legend in Camocio’s South America describes the clothing of Paria with admiration. “The inhabitants of this country worship the sun, and when they go to war, in place of a standard, they carry tied above them the bones of famous men who have died in war that announce their valor” (“Gli habittatori di questi paesi adorano il sole, et quando vanno alla guerra in locho di stendardo porta legati sopra . . . ossi di morti famosi homini in fatti d’arme accio emettino le loro valorosita”), suggesting that success in

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44. Giacomo Gastaldi, detail of Cosmographia universalis. Venice, c. 1561. Woodcut. With permission from the British Library Board, BL Maps c.18.n.1.

battle, no matter how such bravery was achieved or displayed, was respected in both worlds. MARCO POLO IN THE NEW WORLD: AMERICA AS ASIA

These features of Venetian maps – their emphasis on cartography as a means of armchair travel, the wealth, exoticism, and otherness of the Americas, and the compatibility between Europe and the New World – were not unique to Venetian cartographic culture and were common to other European maps of America at the time. What was exceptional about these maps, however, was the way they assimilated the Americas to Venice by emphasizing Venetian participation in the exploration of the New World. At times, they placed a local claim on the production of geographic knowledge in relatively straightforward and clear ways; for instance, by including images of Marco Polo, or of the city of Venice itself, in the corners of a map. Gastaldi’s Cosmographia universalis depicted the lion of St. Mark in its bottom left corner (next to his map of the New World in miniature), and the corners of his 1550 Dell’universale (Figure 45) showed the figures of Christopher Columbus, Strabo, Ptolemy, and Marco Polo. An unsigned Venetian world map in the British Library, Totius orbis descriptio (1560), possibly by Paolo Forlani, showed Venice in its upper left-hand corner.108 These maps also argued for Venice’s historical and cultural connections to America in more nuanced ways. The Rosaccio map, for instance, included the apocryphal Zenian territories and islands of Estotiland, Icaria, Drogeo, and Frisland off the eastern coast of Canada:

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45. Giacomo Gastaldi, Dell’universale. Venice, c. 1550. Woodcut. With permission from the British Library Board, BL Maps c.7.c.17.

imagined islands in the Atlantic and territory in the New World (Estotiland) that the Venetian Zen family claimed to have discovered at the end of the fourteenth century.109 More importantly, however, all of these maps depicted America as Asian, or as a part of the world first explored in Europe by Marco Polo. They did so through a variety of means, but especially through their use of the Strait of Anian: a concept that merits additional discussion. From the beginning of the sixteenth century, mapping America presented certain problems for cartographers, in particular, assimilating a growing knowledge of America with Ptolemaic models, as well as getting new information “right.” Confusion about many aspects of American geography persisted for even hundreds of years after 1492, including whether straits across North America could lead to Cathay, whether the Yucatan or California was an island, and in particular whether the New World was a separate continent or an extension of Asia.110 Where this question was concerned, the vast majority of cartographers posited that Asia and America were connected. The earliest European (and Venetian) maps of the New World, such as the Contarini– Rosselli map (Figure 16) showed an Asiatic mainland in the north that extended from Cathay to Labrador and Newfoundland, below which were peppered a series of islands near the equator and eventually, also, an enormous

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Vespuccian continent to the south, leaving unclear if or how this southern continent was also potentially connected to Asia. Francesco Rosselli’s 1508 Universale and Bordone’s 1528 world map (Figure 24) were similar illustrations. A great majority of early modern European maps made North America an extension or peninsula of Asia, a single landmass linked by a continental bridge that extended roughly across forty degrees of latitude in the north that made the Pacific an enormous Asiatic gulf, as did Gastaldi’s 1546 Universale and 1550 Dell’universale (Figures 30 and 45).111 In addition, and perhaps most crucially here, all of these maps demonstrate how placing the continents over the edges of a map allowed cartographers to remain vague or fudge what they did not know. There were good reasons for such an approach. Connecting Asia and the Americas would explain the biblical origins of New World peoples, as well as how the ten tribes of Israel could have crossed an Asiatic continent and arrived in the Americas.112 Gastaldi’s 1550 Dell’universale (Figure 45) labeled this land bridge with the name of Arsarot: the biblical name indicating where divine punishment had exiled the ten tribes of Israel (Esdras 4:13). Furthermore, in larger terms, a depiction of Spanish possessions in the New World as terrestrially contiguous with Asia would always be in the interests of the Spanish crown. The Spanish renounced the Moluccas in Indonesia in 1527 only after numerous clashes with the Portuguese there, and the Spanish continued to maintain their rights to the Philippines. As Ricardo Padrón has demonstrated, Spanish interpretations of Habsburg expansion were invested in portraying Spain as having a foothold in Asia. The cartographic rhetoric of Spanish imperialism worked to place New Spain in closer proximity to the wealth of the East by describing a narrow Pacific and by collapsing East and West in Spanish texts and images.113 A much smaller group of maps, including the Cantino planisphere (1502), the Waldseemüller map (1507), and some of the early world maps of Ortelius (1538) and Mercator (1538) depicted the New World as distinctly separate from the easternmost parts of Asia.114 Such a separation would suggest the limits of Spanish continental expansion and could potentially have appealed to the Portuguese, as well as to any and all of the commercial powers seeking a northwest passage to Asia. Mapmakers were not necessarily politically motivated in these ways, and Iberian expansion need not always have informed maps, but if and when political interests did influence early modern cartography, such motivations could help explain these cartographic decisions. In any case, the vast majority of sixteenth-century world maps and maps of the Americas presented one unified and contiguous Amerasian continent that incorporated American lands into the Asian landmass. While some cartographers experimented with separating the continents, their maps were very much in the minority.115

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46. Giacomo Gastaldi, Universale della parte del mondo nuovamente ritrovata, in Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi. Venice, 1556, 455–456. Woodcut. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Though some cartographers had experimented with the placement of a sea between the continents, Gastaldi’s 1561 wall map was the first to place decisively and intentionally a narrow strait – the Strait of Anian – between North America and Asia, followed by Paolo Forlani’s Il disegno del discoperto della Nova Franza (1566) (Figure 21).116 While Gastaldi had previously maintained the long tradition of connecting these two continents, his Universale della parte del mondo nuovamente ritrovata (1556) (Figure 46), printed in the third volume of Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi, shows him starting to hesitate, with this part of the world left blank and unfinished and the link between Asia and North America unclear. Five years later, he described his conception of the Strait of Anian as well as its placement on his 1561 wall map in a contemporaneous pamphlet, La universale descrittione del mondo (1561), where he states that Asia “terminates in the East, although on this world map, it appears in the West; the Strait of Anian extends with a line through the Gulf of Cheinan, and passes into the Sea of Mangi . . . This is the border in the East between Asia and the New World.”117 Gastaldi continued to place the Strait of Anian on his

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world maps for the rest of his career, and the other two wall maps in discussion here also depicted it. While historians of cartography have suggested a variety of origins for the term “Anian” (or Amu), as well as myriad theories behind its appearance in mid-century maps, Gastaldi most certainly derived Anian from Ramusio’s 1559 edition of Marco Polo’s Travels.118 In Ramusio’s section “On the Gulf of Cheinan,” his edition of Polo recounted that a large gulf existed in northeastern China. Leaving the port of Zaitum (modern Quanzhou), one sails westward and a bit southwest for 1500 miles, passing through a gulf named Cheinan (roughly the modern South China Sea) which takes two months to travel across, navigating towards the north. The entire gulf is bounded on the southeast side by the province of Manzi and on the other side by Ania and Toloman, besides many other provinces . . . This gulf is very large, and so many people live there that it seems almost (like) another world.119

This passage about Anian, which describes the geographic relationship between Asia and America, was significantly absent from all other previous editions of Polo’s text.120 Looking to the south along the Chinese coast, Ramusio’s Polo describes the mainland province of Manzi ahead of him to his right, and Anian and Tholman distantly behind him to his left, or otherwise, in the northwest corner of the American continent, just as Gastaldi’s maps illustrate. Ramusio encouraged Gastaldi to understand that Anian was “on the other side” of this large gulf, in “another world” or in other words, potentially, in a New World, in America. In addition to depicting the Strait of Anian, all three of these wall maps prominently placed the Asian provinces of Tolman (or Toloman, Tholman) and Agama (or Angaman) in what is today the northwestern part of the American continent (Figures 32, 34, and 35), and over time, Anian also became a kingdom or province in North America. When he had been sent to travel west by the Great Khan, Polo visited Toloman on his return voyage after passing through Tibet, reporting that it was near India. According to Polo, Tolman or Tholman was an Asian kingdom in southwestern China, abundant in gold.121 Fifty years earlier, the Ruysch map (1507) had placed Tolman near Cathay and the Kingdom of Agama on an island near Sumatra; the Behaim globe (1492) had similarly placed Tholoman north of Cathay, and Jacob Stampfer’s contemporaneous “Globuspokal” (1552) or chalice globe also continued to place Tholoman on the coast of China. While the provenance of Polo’s nomenclature remains slippery, the Polo scholar Paul Pelliot placed Anian in either Yunnan Province or bordering the Gulf of Tonkin, associated Agama with “Andaman” or the

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Malay name of the Andaman Islands, and placed Toloman in the northeast of Yunnan Province.122 Gastaldi by contrast began to place the Asian toponyms of Tolman and Agama in America, as did Camocio and Rosaccio.123 In addition, both Gastaldi’s and Rosaccio’s maps indicated that Pegu (Pagul or Pagu), the capital of Burma, was in the Americas. After separating Asia and America with a strait, they showed their audiences that these places were in the New World, suggesting a clearly conceived and purposeful understanding of their American location. Gastaldi similarly underscored the Asian nature of the New World in his wall map by depicting and describing Tartars (Mongols) riding into the western part of North America on camels on the left edge of his map, and by populating Canada with elephants (Figure 32).124 That is to say, these Venetian cartographers illustrated Asian fauna and toponyms in what is today Canada. Gastaldi’s change of mind about the relationship between Asia and America as well as his insertion of Tolman, Pegu, and Agama into North America had nothing to do with any contemporary geographic or scientific discoveries, since no European voyages had gone to this region. These were entirely imaginative cartographic decisions. While there existed a variety of models for depicting this part of the globe, ultimately, no one could clarify the relationship between Asia and America at this time with any certainty. Gastaldi’s Anian happened to correspond to reality, but no European voyages of exploration would confirm this hypothesis until Vitus Bering discovered the passage that bears his name in 1728, demonstrating how factors other than eyewitness encounters or representations of them could influence the changing contents of printed maps, whether they be fashions in cartographic thought, the commercial realities of map publishing, or the patriotism of mapmakers themselves. The way that European cartographers chose to depict unknown or at that time “empty” parts of the world reveals their creative processes, fantasies, and subjectivities. When one looks at almost any of these world maps, where toponyms and geographic knowledge are concerned, the emptiness of North America compared to Western Europe, Asia, or even South America is visually striking. This was clearly a part of the world that cartographers knew very little about in the middle of the sixteenth century, and Gastaldi used his Venetian sensibilities to populate these otherwise unknown and open spaces, using the blank canvas of this part of the Northern Hemisphere to paint a picture of Venetian authority in the New World. Placing Tolman, Agama, Anian, and Pegu in or near North America emphasized America’s connection to Marco Polo, Asia, and its wealth, and allowed these cosmographers to claim a Venetian role in the exploration of the New World. Gastaldi’s process reflects the way that makers of world maps were not copyists but creators. The early modern world was both discovered and invented, charted and made up,

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during which processes even large geographical elements of maps could be influenced by the individual interests, concerns, and motivations of their makers.125 The land link between Asia and America – long prominent on Venetian and European maps – has long been considered a sign of European reluctance to accept America as “new.” Ramusio and Gastaldi’s thought about mapping this part of the world instead demonstrates a conscious desire not so much to keep it familiar, in a Ptolemaic sense, but to frame it as Venetian. The Venetian case illuminates how world-making – understanding how pieces of the world were connected and attempting to capture the world’s entirety – was indebted as much to imagination as it was to empirical observation. In this way, while Venetians did not explore the Americas themselves, these maps, like their copiously produced textual counterparts, once again represented Venetians as experts on the Americas. Much like Alessandro Zorzi’s marginalia, they revealed subjective, locally formed conceptions of global geography that blended and collapsed East and West. In addition, they emphasized some of the timeless themes of Marco Polo’s travels, namely, that exploration, otherness, luxury, and Asia were always linked and intertwined (here also with America and, we might add, Venice). This understanding of the Asian toponyms of Tolman, Agama, Anian, and Pegu on the American continent, together with the fact that these maps were designed and printed in Venice, all asserted the idea that Venetians had always been, and still were, at the center of world exploration, in the intrepid pursuit of Eastern wealth, first in Asia and now in America. Here, in a tradition typical of the literature of travel and exploration, Venetians illustrated the new by reference to the old. The legacy of Marco Polo, of course, belonged to everyone, including Columbus – who read and annotated his own personal copy of Polo – as well as the Spanish and the Portuguese.126 Indeed, from the thirteenth century onward, one of the most powerful forces in global history was the European pursuit of Asian goods. In this, Marco Polo had led the way, prompting all European explorers and conquistadors – including Coronado, Cartier, Verrazano, Champlain, and countless others – to see the world through Polo’s text and search for China, or routes to it, in America. For the Venetians, however, Polo had a particular patriotic meaning. In an age that gave primacy to firsthand knowledge and eyewitness accounts in both travel and the history of science, Polo effectively became Venetians’ eyewitness. Along these lines, Gastaldi subtly but distinctively framed his image of America and its relationship to Asia through the lens of Marco Polo and Venetian history. Polo’s text represented a fundamental reference point for Venetians. As we have seen, Ramusio believed that the travels of Marco Polo were historically more significant than those of Christopher

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Columbus. The popular sixteenth-century Venetian writer Tommaso Garzoni went so far as to attribute the “discovery” of the New World to Polo, asserting that Polo “had found new lands before Columbus, but did not have the faith [in his account] that he should have.”127 Polo’s legacy was clearly alive and well in sixteenth-century Europe at large, and in Venice in particular.128 Gastaldi’s use of Polian geography in his maps of North America implied the primacy of Venetians as explorers and masters of the knowledge of exploration. Once again, print was essential to the proliferation of this message. The mid-century manuscript atlases of the contemporaneous Dieppe school – one of the most significant cartographic centers of the mid-sixteenth century – expressed many of the same themes as Venetian maps, including representations of the luxurious wealth, exotic otherness, and striking similarities between the New World and the Old. Occasionally, at times, they also labeled parts of North America with Asian toponyms.129 However, these Norman cartographers produced maps for government officials and kings, and indeed “the whole output of Norman cartography was manuscript, not printed, which limited its diffusion and thus its influence.”130 They were never intended for a wider public, and at the time were never seen by one, pointing to the ways in which Venetian maps, as we shall see, ended up having a unique influence on European understandings of the Americas, not only in their quality but also in their quantity, which very much enhanced the power and impact of their arguments. VENICE AND SPAIN

If these maps associated exploration, exoticism, wealth, and the New World with Venice, they of course also linked these things to Spain. Like a continent itself, an image of Philip II in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean dominates the center of Gastaldi’s wall map, and almost every legend in Camocio’s wall map recounts tales of Spanish conquest, especially in South America. If we consider that every element in a map participates in its persuasive force, including borders and corners, blank spaces, and otherwise vast and empty oceans, it is striking that seemingly every inch of the seas in these maps has also been colonized by scores of ships, many of which, especially in the Pacific, would have been Spanish.131 By the middle of the sixteenth century, the empire of Charles V (1500–1558) extended over much of continental Western Europe as well as vast territories in the Americas, including, as we have seen, most of Italy, so that Italians under Spanish rule could have easily likened – and sometimes did liken – themselves to the peoples of the New World.

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As with printed texts, it was not accidental that it was at exactly this time that Venice reached the pinnacle of its cartographic production. When the city became one of the only remaining independent powers on the peninsula, it was simultaneously producing more maps, and more maps of the New World, than most other European cities, suggesting how in the moment when Spain became politically and territorially indomitable in both the New World and the Old, Venetian cartographers “colonized” information about the Americas and produced more of it than ever before. Map production came to represent a Venetian form of reaction or resistance to seemingly invincible Spanish power, or at the very least, an assertion of Venetian agency through the conquest of knowledge in a world otherwise dominated by Spain. John Brian Harley contended that ‘‘insofar as maps were used in colonial promotion, and claimed lands on paper before they were effectively occupied, maps anticipated empire.”132 In the case of Venice, it seems, they functioned instead as a surrogate of empire, and their increased production resulted from concerns about the decentering of the lagoon city in the first age of globalization. Just as Rosaccio suggested in the borders of his wall map, maps allowed Venetians to exploit the knowledge of global geographic exploration without having to travel to foreign lands or dominate and control their populations. As Benjamin Schmidt has pointed out, ideas about geography always have “a double context: the place and time of production, and the place and time of consumption.”133 Historians of cartography have demonstrated that at this time, where consumption was concerned, everyday people regularly began to purchase maps for their homes, and owners developed often quite personal relationships with their prints.134 In a domestic context, wall maps embodied the anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler’s concept of the “intimacies of empire”: the idea that colonialism’s power was constituted and reproduced not only in the New World, on the fields of battle or in the halls of state, but also visually in the intimate spaces of the household, where both their owners and visitors stood around them, looked upon their imagery, and discussed their significance.135 In this way, even though these maps depicted far-flung territories around the globe, they nevertheless inevitably generated meaning in a local context. Wall maps functioned as what Renata Ago has called a “pivot for sociability”: pieces of material culture that, especially when surrounded by guests to the home, brought audiences together in discussion and conferred upon their owner the qualities of ingenuity, politeness, civility, and learnedness.136 In addition, maps in homes suggest how technologies of image-making played a constitutive role in empire building. Reflecting upon these ideas in a Venetian context, we have to wonder what it would have meant for Venetian viewers to gaze upon these images of Habsburg global hegemony in their

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domestic worlds: images of the ascendancy of the state that had, to a large degree, deprived Venice of its historical position. At the very least, they might muse, Venetian editors, cosmographers, cartographers, and printmen had compensated for these devastating losses, albeit temporarily, by asserting control over this knowledge. While Walter Mignolo has suggested that maps on display offered “performances of colonization,” in a Venice diminished to a passive role as a spectator of New World drama or reduced to being a disseminator of knowledge rather than a participant in the acts of conquest and colonization, there must have been a certain irony or bittersweet quality associated with the viewing of large-scale wall maps of the world in Venetian homes.137 They allowed and indeed encouraged Venetians to contemplate a world that had once been much more in their possession and was now possessed by others, leaving them, by the middle of the sixteenth century, in a position of merely indirect participation. But their participation, albeit vicarious, had lasting repercussions, especially in the cartographic world of Northern Europe that would soon come to take Venice’s place in the production of geographic knowledge about the wider world. THE VENETIAN CAR TOGRAPHIC LEGACY: NORTH ERN EUROPE AND THE ATLAS

Even though by the sixteenth century they were no longer in the position of dominating a large portion of the European economy, Venetians were clearly in the possession of copious information, especially a substantial amount of cosmographic knowledge about the New World during much of this period. Atlantic World scholarship has traditionally posited that Iberians colonized the New World, and Northern European powers mapped it. Narrative accounts of the history of the mapping of America tend to skip directly from Spain to Holland, a historiographic construction that even today continues to frame our understanding of the Age of Encounters and its reception in Europe.138 Venetian editors, mapmakers, and cosmographers, however, played a crucial part in conveying the first blush of New World knowledge, one that is traditionally overlooked, perhaps because the work of Venetian cartographers was quickly eclipsed by that of the Dutch in the 1570s, whose cartographic production, especially through the form of the atlas, made such a great and lasting impression. Venetians expressed real concern about their changing place in the world. The threat of Iberian expansion was exacerbated by the growing economic influence of Northern European powers, which resulted in Venetian efforts to cope with such changes in the sphere of knowledge. These efforts represented perhaps their last-ditch attempts to assert their significance before their long-term commercial decline.139

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Information that passed through Venetian presses primed Northern European cartographers, since Venetian print culture allowed Spanish knowledge to make its way to the north. Mapmakers in the Low Countries, including Ortelius, Mercator, and de Jode, regularly obtained Italian maps – especially at the Frankfurt Book Fair – and copied them as a matter of course.140 As evidence of the movement of Venetian maps, a rare 1573 catalogue published by George Willer, the largest book dealer in Augsburg, lists books appearing at the fair around this time. His catalogue records eighty-eight maps, sixtyseven of which were designed and/or printed in Venice.141 Through pathways such as these, Europeans consumed Venetian images, and Venetian print culture influenced Northern European cartography through the development of the atlas, through the lasting influence of the maps of Giacomo Gastaldi in general, and more specifically through the long duration of Gastaldi’s toponyms on Northern European maps. If Western Europeans tended to see the world (and the Americas) increasingly through the form of the atlas toward the end of the sixteenth century, Venetian cartographic culture played a role in prompting this development. Historians of cartography have argued that the most significant antecedents of the atlas were isolarii, Ptolemaic atlases, portolan atlases, and composite atlases.142 While various European cities produced such texts, a significant number of all of them were printed in Venice, and Venetian cartographers and cosmographers made some of the earliest books of maps, pointing to the crucial role the city played in the emergence of the atlas format, including the images of the Americas they contained. For instance, Pietro Coppo (1469–1556), a Venetian contemporary of Alessandro Zorzi, designed a magnificent manuscript atlas, his De toto orbe (1520), which was intended for publication. It incorporated twenty-two hand-drawn maps and described “the provinces and places of the whole earth in the round” (a linguistic precursor to the Theatrum orbis terrarum), including the lands discovered by both Columbus and Cabral, with text taken from Peter Martyr’s Decades.143 In this manuscript, Coppo generated “the first description of the whole world, independent of Ptolemy, to whose work a complete atlas including the New World was now added.”144 Battista Agnese similarly produced approximately sixty manuscript atlases between 1536 and 1564. The work of these two cartographers exemplified embryonic forms of the atlas.145 Perhaps the best known example of the early gathering or assembling of maps in Europe into a book form occurred with composite or “Lafreri” atlases, so named since the Roman printer Antonio Lafreri regularly bound collections of maps into volumes starting in the 1560s.146 Lafreri’s principal supplier of maps, however, was Giacomo Gastaldi, and the earliest and indeed majority of these composite atlases were produced in Venice.147 The Casanatense atlas, for instance, assembled in 1567 perhaps by Bertelli, Forlani, or

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Camocio, represents “one of the earliest collections of its kind.” It contains ninety-six maps and plates, forty-five of which were printed in Venice, and names twenty-three Venetian editors or engravers. The Casanatense atlas and the “Marciana atlas” were among the earliest of such atlases assembled in the mid-1560s (both in Venice), primarily by engravers and publishers such as Forlani and Bertelli.148 There exists much debate as to exactly what an atlas is, since European mapmakers produced many kinds of books of maps, including editions of Ptolemy and bound sets of portolan charts, before that of Ortelius.149 Norman manuscript books of maps from the 1540s are also called “atlases,” and the French cartographer Jean Rotz claimed he was the first to produce such a book, which manifestly was not true.150 The category of the atlas is a messy one. But even given these complexities, there was certainly a Venetian precociousness in responding to a sense of European demand for bound sets of maps, or maps in a book format that were relatively easy to store and consult. The atlas as it developed in the Low Countries in the tradition of Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum (Antwerp, 1570), de Jode’s Speculum (1578 and 1593), and Mercator’s Atlas sive cosmographicae (1585) differed from these earlier Italian bound books of maps. Forlani and Lafreri had assembled a variety of maps, but did so by binding maps of different sizes, cutting larger maps down to size, pasting on additional paper margins, or folding larger maps down in order to standardize them in one volume. Ortelius and his followers instead printed uniformly sized maps and attached a description to each page so that text and map formed a single unit. In this way, Ortelius is traditionally described as the revolutionary and visionary author of the first atlas since he standardized maps’ formats. Nevertheless, the Venetian heritage of the Dutch atlas – and the place of the New World in it – is certain.151 In addition to playing this formative role in the development of the atlas, Venetian cartographic culture, including maps of the New World, influenced Northern European cartographers through the particular work of Giacomo Gastaldi. Gastaldi’s name is much less known than that of Mercator or Ortelius; nevertheless, it remains difficult to overestimate the lasting influence of his maps. Gastaldi’s earliest world map, his 1546 Universale (Figure 30), was the first map printed in Western Europe to provide a relatively accurate outline of the Americas as a whole. Cartographers copied this map for decades, in numerous versions and editions, making Gastaldi’s representation of the world effectively the most commonly held one for centuries as it served as a prototype for a whole generation of cartographers. The maps of Paolo Forlani (1560, 1562, 1565), Ferdinando Bertelli (1562 and 1565), Donato Bertelli (1568), Camocio (1569), Duchetti (1570), and Valgrisi copied it directly.152 Gastaldi exerted a particular influence on the Antwerp

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cartographer Gerard de Jode, who copied this map for a variety of his maps, and especially for his Speculum orbis terrarum (1578).153 Among all of these cartographers, however, Ortelius represented the most significant transmitter of Gastaldi’s maps. Ortelius notably borrowed from the work of a wide variety of cartographers, including several in Venice. In his Catalogus auctorum in the preface to his Theatrum orbis terrarum, Ortelius lists numerous Venetian cosmographers, mapmakers, printers, and maps that he drew upon for the making of his atlas. Sections of Ortelius’s depiction of North America were based on Paolo Forlani and Bolognino Zaltieri’s map of New France (Venice, 1566), and in particular, in choosing an oval projection, Ortelius drew on a series of Venetian models, especially that of Gastaldi.154 By channeling and transmitting Gastaldi’s maps, Ortelius effectively promoted Gastaldi’s conception of the world and made it the most commonly held one, even up through the modern era.155 In addition, Gastaldi was perhaps the first European to make a career out of printed mapmaking; while he did not make nautical charts, he was equally comfortable making world maps and regional ones for the entire world, including wall maps and mural maps, and while he worked under the official title of cosmographer to the Venetian republic, he also sold many maps on his own. He drew and designed maps and, beyond his intellectual contribution, often had nothing to do with their subsequent publication. Though Mercator was a humanist scholar – his maps are much more learned than Gastaldi’s – Gastaldi was, in many ways, a kind of mapmaker that did not exist anywhere else in the world at this time, the new kind of mapmaker that Ortelius and Mercator would later become.156 In this capacity, Gastaldi represented European mapmakers’ reference point until 1580 and beyond, in such a way that all European cartography, to a certain degree, had roots in Venice.157 While a chorus of scholars has regularly suggested the effect that Venetian maps, particularly those of Gastaldi, had on Northern European mapmakers, in many ways these suggestions remain vague and generalizing. Focusing on Gastaldi’s North American toponyms, however, reveals clearly a direct transfer of specific knowledge from Gastaldi to Ortelius, Mercator, and scores of Northern European mapmakers in Gastaldi’s wake. Seemingly endless cartographers adopted Gastaldi’s North American toponyms on their maps and in their atlases, including those that first recorded Coronado’s explorations, but more significantly, the Asian toponyms of Anian, Tolm/Tolman, Pegu, or Agama. These included Ortelius’s Nova totius terrarum orbis (Antwerp, 1564) and Typus orbis terrarum (Antwerp, 1564), reprinted in his atlas, the Theatrum orbis terrarum (Antwerp, 1570), and Cornelis van Wytfliet’s Descriptionis ptolemaicae augumentum (Louvain, 1597) – the extremely popular, first atlas devoted exclusively to the Americas – and countless others, including the most significant cartographers in the West, for at least another century.158 While

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47. Barent Langenes, Typus orbis terrarum. Amsterdam, 1609. Copper engraving. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

these toponyms sometimes occupy just a tiny corner of otherwise detailed and crowded maps, in some instances, they are some of the only toponyms in this part of North America, especially in miniature maps presented in atlas form where they often stand out clearly as Gastaldi’s Venetian legacy. For example, in Barent Langenes’s copy of Ortelius’s world map in his tiny, pocket-sized atlas (Middleburg, 1598), Anian and Tolm stand alone in this part of the world (Figure 47).159 The same is true in Cornelis van Wytfliet’s Limes occidentis/Quivira et Anian (1597) – a map of what is today the northwestern corner of Canada – which is boldly labeled with Anian and Tolm.160 Perhaps most significantly, Mercator’s Nova et aucta orbis terrae descriptio ad usum navigantium emendate accommodata (New and More Complete Representation of the Terrestrial Globe Properly Adapted for Use in Navigation) (Duisberg, 1569) – printed on eighteen sheets and measuring 202 by 124 centimeters – was a work of immense scope that offered the most rigorous and comprehensive effort to map the world at the time. It prominently marked the Kingdom of Anian (Anian regnum) on the western edge of North America (Figure 48). The impact of Gastaldi’s toponyms at times

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48. Gerardus Mercator, detail of Nova et aucta orbis terrae descriptio ad usum navigantium emendate accommodata. Duisberg, 1569. With permission from the Newberry Library.

may seem small, but Venetian printed maps and the Northern European maps that copied them traveled widely, bestowing a Venetian presence on maps of the Americas and the world, especially since “virtually every world map for several decades was based on either Mercator’s [1569] original or its reduction by Ortelius.”161 As just one example, in 1575 the French cartographer François de Belle-Forest produced a French edition of Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia, called La cosmographie universelle (Paris, 1575), and included in it a folding, woodcut copy of Ortelius’s Typus orbis terrarum, in this way transmitting Gastaldi’s toponyms at three degrees’ remove.162 Ortelius’s maps were copied repeatedly, through numerous, similar chains of transmission, perpetuating Gastaldi’s Asian toponyms even long after much of the rest of the content of Gastaldi’s maps became outdated. The Kunyu wanguo quantu (also known as the Ricci map, or Map of the Ten Thousand Countries of the Earth) (1602) – a world map that was the product of the collaboration of the European and Chinese scholars Matteo Ricci, Li Zhizao, and Zhang Wentao and the earliest surviving Chinese map to show the Americas (Figure 49) – also depicts Anian. By the turn of the seventeenth

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49. Matteo Ricci, Li Zhizao, and Zhang Wentao, detail of Kunyu wanguo quantu (Map of the Ten Thousand Countries of the Earth). 1602. Wood block print. Courtesy of the James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota. The Kunyu wanguo quantu is owned by the James Ford Bell Trust and has been loaned to the University of Minnesota for the benefit of the James Ford Bell Library.

century, the idea of Anian had come full circle around the globe, from Marco Polo, to Ramusio, to Jesuit missionaries and Dutch atlas makers, and finally to Chinese cartographers, from China to Venice and back again. It remains somewhat remarkable to imagine the likes of Gastaldi, Camocio, or Rosaccio, perhaps on a typically foggy Venetian winter day, carefully opening precious letters, manuscripts, and charts from Spain and bending over their drafting tables to try to draw the Chihuahuan desert, the Rio de la Plata, or the forests of Canada, with the waves of the Adriatic lagoon lapping softly at the sides of the canals just outside their windows. The Venetian legacy that Gastaldi bequeathed to generations of European maps neatly illustrates how

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armchair travelers and their imaginations could have a real and lasting impact on conceptions of geography. Six years before Balboa sighted the Pacific and thirteen before Magellan circumnavigated the globe, the mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller in landlocked Lorraine had already imagined a vast ocean west of the emerging American continent, as well as a vision of a completely insular America. Similarly, it was Giordano Bruno – a poet, rather than a mathematician or scientist – who first insisted on the existence of an infinite universe, suggesting the priority of the conceptual over the empirical. Sometimes, armchair travelers happened to be right and had an influence on the “discovery” of new lands. Often purely conjectural visions could influence how people conceived of the world, long before such ideas had a basis in reality.163 In this way, with the Strait of Anian in particular – especially as it was adopted by almost every cartographer who copied either Gastaldi’s maps or those of Ortelius – Gastaldi played a crucial role in the mental discovery of America. If Gastaldi’s Venetian vision had this lasting effect on the representation of the New World, especially along its western coast, as we shall see, another Venetian vision – that of the patrician Niccolò Zen – had a similarly lasting effect on European cartography and its representations of America on the Atlantic side of the Americas.

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VENETIANS IN AMERICA Nicolò Zen and the Virtual Exploration of the New World

I

n 1558 – five years after Rangone commissioned the façade of San Giuliano, and around the same time that Ramusio was publishing his Navigazioni e viaggi and Gastaldi was producing his maps of the Americas – the Venetian patrician Nicolò Zen published a brief but provocative account describing how his ancestors had discovered the New World before Columbus. According to Zen’s remarkable narrative, accompanied by a carta da navegar (Figure 50), his ancestor, also named Nicolò Zen, left Venice in 1380, headed for England and Flanders. Caught in a storm, he was carried for several days until he was wrecked upon an island called Frisland. Here, he met a prince named Zichmni, a Latin speaker who took Nicolò under his protection. Nicolò’s brother Antonio soon joined him in Frisland, and Antonio eventually became the captain of Zichmni’s fleet. The brothers undertook extensive explorations of Greenland, but Nicolò eventually fell ill and died in Frisland. Antonio, however, had heard from a mysterious fisherman of hitherto unexplored islands to the west named Estotiland, Icaria, and Drogeo, where there existed gold, temples, the worship of idols, nudity, cannibalism, and, as in Frisland, the presence of Latin literature. Zichmni and Antonio went in search of this nuovo mondo (in Antonio’s words), and some of Zichmni’s men briefly landed on Icaria before being chased away by hostile natives and eventually returning to Frisland. In his sixteenth-century text, Nicolò Zen the younger (here referred to as the writer, as opposed to his ancestor, the traveler) claimed to know about these travels because when he was a young boy, he had found 143

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50. Nicolò Zen, Carta da Navegar, in Dello scoprimento. Venice, 1558. Copper engraving. With permission from the Newberry Library, Chicago.

letters and a map describing these voyages amid the Zen family papers. Being a child and not understanding their significance, he tore them to pieces. As an adult, however, he later came to regret the destruction of these papers and attempted to reconstruct them, eventually publishing them in the hope of memorializing the travels of his ancestors, resulting in the 1558 text Dello scoprimento.1 Nicolò Zen the writer’s account, and especially his map, had an immediate impact on sixteenth-century geography and cartography. Early modern audiences accepted his text unproblematically, and the most significant mapmakers of his day quickly incorporated his carta da navegar into their work, including Ortelius and Mercator, who grafted the Zenian names of Frisland, Estotiland, Icaria, and Drogeo onto their depictions of the North American continent.2 Martin Frobisher used the Zen map on his first voyage in search of a northwest passage to Cathay in 1576.3 Nevertheless, doubts about the authenticity of the account eventually surfaced. In 1835, the Danish admiral Christian Zahrtmann proclaimed the Zen account to be nothing but “a tissue of fiction.” The English geographer, cartographer, and editor at the Hakluyt Society Richard

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Henry Major disagreed with Zahrtmann and in 1873 argued that Zen’s text represented an “authentic . . . genuine, and valuable narrative,” while Frederick W. Lucas, after having reviewed the case, declared in 1898 that Zen was a shameless liar and that the text was “a contemptible literary fraud – one of the most successful and obnoxious on record.”4 Numerous scholars exchanged similar attacks and rebuttals during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.5 They pored over hundreds of maps and travelogues to argue, for instance, that Zichmni was actually Henry Sinclair, a Norwegian nobleman and the Earl of Orkney (c. 1345–c. 1400), that Frisland was one of the Faroe Islands, and that Estotiland was actually Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, or Labrador. The language peppering these studies, and in turn framing these debates, has hitherto both reflected and constructed a relentless focus on the veracity of the Zen narrative through the habitual use of words such as “authenticity,” “probable,” “hoax,” “trick,” “fraud,” “mythological,” “fable,” “fact,” and “fiction.” The definitive scholarly account of the Zen text to date, the Venetian philologist Giorgio Padoan’s meticulous 1989 analysis, argued that Nicolò Zen the writer was not a forger, that he did in fact possess a “real” map and five letters, and that Estotiland was Nova Scotia.6 The most recent, twenty-first-century, popularizing account of the Zen voyages by Andrea Di Robilant continues to replicate this search for the truth as well as the language that supports this quest.7 Indeed, Di Robilant’s Irresistible North (2011) is entirely based on the question of veracity; he assumes the fourteenth-century Zen voyage to be true and attempts to prove this by following in the travelers’ footsteps across the Atlantic. The Zen narrative has attracted the attention of scholars, including historians of cartography, for centuries. However, studies of this text appear stuck in the nineteenth century and seem to have ignored completely modern methods of analysis, including the ideas of the New Historicism, which posit that no text – literary or archival – gives access to the truth and that texts themselves are worthy of historical investigation. Scholars have remained remarkably attached to positivist interpretations, in part because segments of the Zen narrative seem incredibly accurate and truthful.8 Nevertheless, the persistence of such traditional lines of questioning is somewhat surprising since there exist much more productive questions to ask of Zen’s account. Focused on separating fact from fiction, scholars to date have entirely overlooked the rhetorical and historical strategies of the text. If we pry it open in a different way, we see that what is interesting about Zen’s Dello scoprimento lies not in its truth or falsity but rather – much as with Venetian travel compendia and Ramusio’s Navigazioni – in the construction and implications of the narrative. Sidestepping entirely these centuries of detailed and painstaking debate about the veracity of the Zen voyages, this chapter will instead examine the

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writerly techniques Zen used to build an authoritative Venetian travelogue about the New World. Focusing on the latter reveals the ways in which Nicolò Zen the writer used a variety of textual tools to build a specifically Venetian narrative about the Americas. Such an analysis exposes the politics of knowledge at work, revealing how subjective and politicized visions of discovery influenced how Europeans learned about the New World. Zen’s text was not a trick or a fraud, or an empirical account of events, but represented the methodical creation of a skillful and patriotic author. In the end, it cannot be classified as either real or fictive; like many other early modern travel accounts, it was always a combination of both. Truth and fiction can almost never be separated in early modern travelogues, since it was verisimilitude, not truthfulness, that counted for early modern audiences. Shifting the focus about what is significant from the text’s truthfulness to its tactics – from the historicity of the voyage to the mechanics of the composition – reveals a series of fascinating textual strategies surrounding the European production of knowledge about the New World. Specifically, Zen followed well-established patterns for European travel writing, playing with quotation, pastiche, temporality, and rhetorics of firstness to manipulate the relationship between travel, fiction, and authority and depict his fellow Venetians as virtual but viable contestants in the race to New World empire. Zen’s text functioned in many ways as a kind of compilation, in the Venetian tradition; it was a collage that narrated a fable about the Venetians as experts on the Americas. Like other examples of Venetian print culture, it too suggested that the conquest of knowledge (and the marketing of it through print culture) was more important than acquiring land or building colonies. For Venetians, Zen’s text argued, developing expertise on the New World ultimately trumped experience in it. THE ZEN FAMILY IN VENICE

The Zen family was among the oldest and most prominent patrician families in Venice. One of the Zens participated in the election of the first doge in 703, and following the Fourth Crusade, Marino Zen, the vice doge of Constantinople, had the bronze horses taken from the Hippodrome sent back to adorn the Basilica of San Marco.9 Both Vivaro Capellari and Marco Barbaro – two of the most significant genealogical sources for the city – list the Zen family, including Antonio (d. 1402 (?)) and (most probably) both the older (d. 1403 (?)) and younger Nicolò Zen (1515–1565), in their pages. Following the medieval and early modern practice of reconstructing fantastical genealogies, Giacomo Zabarella claimed that the Zens had descended from Noah.10 Both Antonio and Nicolò Zen the traveler had had maritime careers, and Nicolò had commanded a galley in the Battle of Chioggia (1380). Like his ancestors, Nicolò Zen the writer worked throughout his entire life in service

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to the Venetian maritime state. Already known at age twenty-two for his expertise in maritime engineering, he became Savio agli Ordini dell’Arsenale or special commissioner for the Arsenal in 1538, and came to hold a great variety of offices in the Venetian state during his lifetime.11 Nicolò was one of the most eminent statesmen of his time. Public esteem for his dedication to civic life was so great that Paolo Veronese included him in his depiction of the 1160 Convocation at Pavia with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa: a painting that hung in the Hall of the Great Council.12 Nicolò Zen the writer was also at the center of Venetian intellectual and cultural life. Knowledgeable in the fields of mathematics, engineering, and architecture, he was a sponsor of Sebastiano Serlio’s books on architecture, a patron of Palladio, and an editor of Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture. His works on Venetian history include his unpublished Storia della guerra veneto turca del 1537,13 and Dell’origine de’ barbari che distrussero per tutto’l mondo l’imperio di Roma, onde hebbe principio la città di Venetia (Marcolini, 1557). Aretino praised him as a poet, Giuseppe Moleto lauded his abilities in geometry, and perhaps most importantly here the Venetian poligrafo Girolamo Ruscelli referred to Zen in the introduction to his 1561 edition of Ptolemy as “universally held to have, in this day, few equals in history and geography in the whole of Europe.”14 A portrait of him by Titian hangs in the Kingston Lacy Estate Collection in Dorset. In Titian’s portrayal, Nicolò Zen turns with the seriousness of a statesman to gaze out of the frame, wearing wide, fur-lined sleeves and feeling his stole: the unmistakable attributes of nobility and high political office in Venice.15 Nicolò Zen the writer lived at the Crosechieri, in what is now a solemn if not severe-looking palazzo that overlooks the campo of the Gesuiti (then called the church of the Crociferi or Crosechieri), of which the family were patrons. Some of the most significant Italian intellectuals of the day lived in the same area, including the architect Sebastiano Serlio, Zen’s publisher Francesco Marcolini (best known for publishing the works of Pietro Aretino), the humanist Daniele Barbaro, Titian, Paolo Veronese, and Zen’s friend Pietro Aretino himself.16 By now the Zen palazzo is faded and worn. Weeds push out from the cracks in its walls, and exposed electrical wires dangle from its eaves. Nevertheless, the façade that faces the Fondamenta Santa Caterina still clearly bears a soot-covered, nineteenth-century plaque recording the Zen journey to the North Atlantic, memorializing what has perhaps become Nicolò Zen’s most significant legacy.17 CREDIBILITY IN THE EARLY MODER N TRAVELOGUE

Joan-Pau Rubiés has pointed out that even for European powers with infrastructures and economies solidly rooted in the New World, tangible gains often fell short of what Europeans had hoped and expected to find in the

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Americas. In Zen’s account, therefore, as in other European travel accounts that mixed the plausible and the implausible, “myths grew out of . . . historical frustration.”18 At least in some part, Zen’s Dello scoprimento reflected concerns about Venetians’ lack of participation in voyages to the New World and like Venetian maps patriotically asserted that indeed Venice had played a role in these events. Any sense of the mythical, imaginary, invented, or implausible, as Rubiés suggests, reflected Zen’s Venetian identity. Accepting Zen’s patriotism and potential insecurity in turn suggests the importance of considering the virtual or textual strategies he employed in order to assert a sense of Venetian power and authority in the increasingly important Atlantic World. Before we explore these specific textual tactics, however, it is important to note that while generations of scholars have expressed a sense of disappointment with the fraudulent nature of the Zen narrative, Dello scoprimento was part of a well-established and long-standing European tradition of travel literature that regularly mixed the believable and the implausible as a means of expressing what Europeans feared about and desired from foreign, unknown lands and their populations. For instance, Prester John’s 1161 letter to the Byzantine emperor Manuel I offered a glittering account of the lands that had come under Prester John’s sway somewhere in Africa or Asia. Mixing the credible and the fantastical, his letter became one of the most popular reads of its time and clearly captured the medieval imagination.19 Perhaps most famously, The Book of John Mandeville (c. 1360) neatly illustrates the relationship between the believable and the unbelievable in travel literature. The Book of John Mandeville described the passage of a partially fictional and imaginary traveler, an English knight from St. Albans, to the Holy Land, and was written by someone who probably never visited any of these places. The Book of John Mandeville was a pious text devised to entertain, instruct, and imaginatively re-create the mythology of the Holy Land, but like the Zen narrative, it also contained remarkably accurate descriptions of the geography, lands, and peoples encompassing much of the known world.20 Most early modern travel accounts from the Americas blended the plausible and the fantastical. Columbus did so famously in his journal that described real Caribbean islands and mythical Cipangus, real gold and native empires together with fabled Amazons and men with tails. The lesser-known story of Madoc represented a similar mixing of the credible and the less credible in a legend of the pre-Columbian voyage to America. First appearing in print in 1583 in an English pamphlet published to promote the British colonization of America, the story claimed that a Welshman named Madoc had traveled to America in 1170, established a colony there, and returned to England. While the colony could never be located with any precision, proof of its existence lay in some of the Welsh-seeming linguistic practices of Montezuma, suggesting the Welsh origins of or influences on Mexican peoples. In the same way that

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they endorsed the Zen tale, “scholars believe . . . that the story is based on some core of truth.”21 The German Hans Staden likewise composed a travelogue, notably entitled the True History (Warhaftige Historia, 1557), which became a sensationalist best seller in the sixteenth century. Staden recounted his voyages to Brazil, including the dubious tale that he had witnessed a French crew give a Portuguese sailor to the Tupinambá Indians to be eaten.22 In this tradition, a great multiplicity of travelogues went on to blend the believable and the marvelous between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries.23 At no point did readers question the veracity of these accounts or complain about authorial license, textual embellishment, or exaggeration. In this context, the events that befell the Zen brothers at the end of the fourteenth century should not seem so impossible, especially to early modern readers who knew their Venetian history. Marco Polo had entered into the service of a foreign king. Pietro Querini’s account of shipwreck and survival in Scandinavia also made ample mention of a certain, hitherto unidentified Zuan Franco who remained in Sweden as a retainer of the Swedish king.24 Surely, another Venetian traveler could have similarly settled into the service of a foreigner. Nicolò Zen’s historical text Dell’origine de’ barbari (1557) in fact specifically addressed the issue of credibility. After discussing the Amazons, Zen commented: Today we find a lot of things in the world about which, when others tell us about them, be it for their distance or where they happen, we do not believe them. It is not at all surprising that if something is remote from us by centuries, it is rarely believed, and little accepted by common people, who do not believe what they cannot see. But intelligent men, having a knowledge of the writers listed above [i.e., Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch] . . . will believe what I have written about the Amazons. (Molte cose hoggidì si trovano al mondo, che, quando altri le dice, per la lontananza del luogo dove ò sono ò si fanno, non si presta lor fede; non si deve maravigliar alcuno, se cosa per tanti secoli rimota da noi, poco è creduta, et men accettata dal vulgo, che non crede, se non tanto quanto vede; ma gli huomini d’intelletto, havendo riguardo à gli scrittori di sopra allegati . . . crederà quanto delle Amazzoni ho scritto.)25

Zen asked his learned readers to draw on their knowledge of classical history and, armed with that erudition, not condemn the Amazons as false even though they might have seemed incredible. These words describing the ability to believe that which you could not see could easily refer to Dello scoprimento, published one year later. As early modern readers were open to the mixture of the plausible and the less plausible in ancient accounts, distant in time, Zen encouraged them to accept this coexistence in accounts of travel to distant lands. Seen in this light, Zen was not a liar but a compiler of visions, credible and incredible, as many medieval early and modern travelers and travel writers

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were. By modern standards, Mandeville appears to have invented quite a bit, Columbus some, and Ramusio less, but all of these writers and their accounts mixed the truthful with the imaginative. Zen was in no way unique. That is to say, in terms of the early modern study of geography, both fiction and real travel played a role in geographical perception. Travel writing clearly worked within a host of related genres, including chronicles, cosmographical treatises, political reports, histories, and fiction, including chivalric romances and utopian literature. Rubiés has noted “the existence of fictional elements within a substantial proportion of early modern travel accounts,” in ways that defy their simple classification as “travel literature.”26 That is to say, a mixture of desire, imagination, and experience pervaded most accounts of travel and discovery; to conceive of travel literature otherwise would be to misunderstand entirely its intent. Travel literature ranged from the matter-of-fact to the fanciful and dramatic, and all early modern travelogues existed somewhere on a continuum between the two.27 This said, it is important to note here that the inventiveness of Zen’s text differed from the inventiveness of other travelogues. Zen’s account did not contain examples of the monstrous or the fantastical. It invented documentation more than fantastical experiences: a point that will be discussed at length later. Despite this difference, Dello scoprimento was nevertheless situated among this body of texts that considered credibility differently from the modern world. If Zen’s text looked like this, it was because he embraced and imitated European approaches to the travelogue. THE CREATION OF A VENETI AN AMERI CA: PASTICHE

Within this tradition of travel writing, the first significant textual strategy that Zen used to insert Venice into the history of the Age of Encounters was pastiche. Pastiche denotes a mixture of borrowed forms and texts from a variety of sources, and the use of pastiche enabled Zen to express his sense of patriotism by inserting Venice into his own personal collage of canonical texts on the New World. Zen’s account functioned as a pastiche first and foremost on the level of its framing. Zen the writer claimed that he had constructed his text from the fragments of five different letters from Nicolò Zen the traveler to his brother Antonio and from Antonio to his brother Carlo: as he described them, scraps of paper that he knit together with connecting passages in his own voice. That is to say, Zen the writer presented his account as a collage of three different voices: Antonio and Nicolò Zen the travelers, and Nicolò Zen the writer. Furthermore, the language that Nicolò Zen the writer employed to describe the creation of his text merits scrutiny. I grieve that the book and many other writings on this same subject have come, I know not how, unhappily to harm, because, being still a boy when they came into my hands, and not knowing what they were, I tore

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them to pieces and destroyed them, as boys will do, which I cannot remember now without the deepest of regret. Nevertheless, in order that so fair a memory of such things may not be lost, I have placed in order in the above narrative what I have been able to recover of the aforesaid materials. ([M]i dolgo, che il libro, e molte altre scritture pur in questo medesimo propsito siano andati non sò come miseramente di male; perche, sendo io ancor fanciullo, e pervenutomi alle mani, ne sapendo ciò che fossero, come fanno i fanciulli le squarciai, e mandai tutte à male, ilche non posso se non con grandissimo dolore ricordarmi hora. Pur, perche non si perda una sì bella memoria di cose quel, che ho pututo havere in detta materia, ho posto per ordine nella narration di sopra.)28

At once, Zen stated confusingly that he both did and did not know how the original texts and letters regarding these voyages had been damaged, and then went on to describe the physical construction of his collage: the tearing or shredding of the paper (le squarciai, e mandai tutte à male), the destruction of the texts, and their reorganization (ho posto per ordine) to form his revised narrative. Here, Zen neatly described the production of a pastiche. Whether this destruction and re-creation actually happened will never be known; what is clear is that Zen used this rhetorical strategy to give his text a fable of creation: the creation, specifically, of a collage about his Venetian ancestors and their relationship to the New World.29 A closer look at the sources that Zen drew upon for the story of the Frisland fisherman (Antonio Zen’s first letter to his brother Carlo Zen, folios 51v to 53v, the same section of the text that claims a Venetian, pre-Columbian discovery of America) allows us to examine the specific textual components of Zen’s pastiche. In this fourth letter that Nicolò the writer collaged into his text, Antonio Zen described how an anonymous fisherman had returned to Frisland after spending twenty-six years on hitherto unknown islands to the west, including the islands of Estotiland and Drogeo. The fisherman’s description of these islands – again, islands purported to be somewhere in the Americas – represented an elaborate pastiche of other early modern travelogues about the New World, including the letters of Columbus and Vespucci, Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia de la conquista de Mexico, and most significantly the isolario of Benedetto Bordone. (López de Gómara and Bordone, notably, were also both armchair travelers themselves.) For instance, after wrecking on Estotiland and living there for some time, the fisherman later shipwrecked a second time on the island of Drogeo, and the story of his shipwrecks and subsequent knowledge of cannibalism on these islands corresponds neatly with the story of Gerónimo de Aguilar (1489–1531). Aguilar was a Franciscan who had come to work in the Spanish colonial town of Santa María la Antigua del Darién that had been founded by Vasco Núñez de Balboa in 1510. Aguilar left Panama in 1511 for Santo Domingo, accompanying the procurator Juan de Valdivia. Their ship ran

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aground near Jamaica, and it is from this point in Aguilar’s story that Zen drew for his text, as recounted in book twelve of Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia de la conquista de Mexico. Zen’s account of the fisherman’s shipwreck on Estotiland repeats the language of López de Gómara’s description of Aguilar’s wreck. Zen: This Estotiland . . . on which one of the boats wrecked. The six men who were in it were seized by the islanders. ([D]etta Estotilanda . . . nella quali si ruppe un de’ navigli, e sei huomini, che v’erano su furono presi da gli isolani.) López de Gómara: We got as far as Jamaica when the caravel struck on the shoals . . . I and six others. ([L]legamos a Jamaica se perdio la caravella en los baxos . . . Yo, y otros seys.)30

Both Zen’s fisherman and López de Gómara’s Aguilar came into the service of two successive native chiefs. Following Zen’s narrative, when the fisherman heard that some ships had arrived on Drogeo, he went to the coast and with great happiness discovered that they were from Estotiland. The sailors on these ships took the fisherman with them since he understood their language and could function as their interpreter on Drogeo. Similarly, Aguilar also heard of the arrival of foreigners on his island in the Caribbean and went to the coast to look for them; when Aguilar realized they were Spaniards, he wept for joy, and the sailors in turn were content to have him among them as an interpreter. Zen: [B]y good fortune, he learned from the countrymen that some ships had arrived at the coast, and he hoped to accomplish his desires. He went to the coast and, enquiring from what country the ships came, learned to his great pleasure that they were from Estotiland. Then, having begged to be taken away, he was willingly received, because he knew the language of the country, and there being no one among the sailors who understood it, they used him as their interpreter. ([Q]uando per sua buona ventura intese dà paesani, che erano giunti alla marina alcuni navigli. Ond’egli entrato in buona speranza di far bene i fatti suoi, venne al mare, e dimandato, di che paese erano, intese con suo gran piacere, che erano di Estotilanda: perche, havendo egli pregato di essere levato, fu volentieri ricevuto per aver la lingua del paese, né essendo altri, che la sapesse, lo usarono per lor interprete.) López de Gómara: And then he said in Spanish “Gentlemen, are you Christians?” They replied that they were Spaniards, and he was so overcome at their words that he burst into tears . . . Jerónimo de Aguilar’s story caused the greatest astonishment among his listeners, and also fear, because of his account of the sacrificing and eating of men, and the hardships that he and his companions had endured. But they thanked God to see him out of the hands of these barbarous and cruel people: also, because they saw in him a true and trustworthy interpreter. (Y dijo luego en castellano, “Señores, sois cristianos?” Respondieron que sí y que eran españoles. Alegróse tanto con tal respuesta que lloró de placer . . . Gran

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temor y admiración puso en los oyentes este cuento de Jerónimo de Aguilar, con decire que allí en aquella tierra comían y sacrificaban hombres, y por la desventura quell él y sus compañeros habían pasado; pero daban gracias a Dios por verle libre de gente tan inhumana y bábara, y por tenerle por faraute cierto y verdadero.)31

Zen derived much of his description of Estotiland from Benedetto Bordone’s account of Mexico in Bordone’s isolario. For instance, Zen described a mountain in Estotiland “from which four rivers rise” (havendo nel mezzo un monte altissimo, dal quale nascono quattro fiumi, che la irrigano). Bordone described an identical mountain in Hispaniola, “and from this mountain, four rivers flow down into the plain” (et da ditto monte, quattro fiumi scendono giuso nel piano).32 Both Zen and Bordone described the locals’ literacy; according to Zen, the natives on Estotiland “have a language, and separate letters” (hanno lingua, e lettere separate), while for Bordone, the Mexicans similarly “have distinct characters in their writing” (hanno certe charratere nel loro scrivere).33 Zen related that to the south of Estotiland, there was a country “very rich in gold” (molto ricco d’oro) where “they sow corn and make beer, which is a kind of drink that northern people drink as we [the Venetians] do wine” (seminano grano, e fanno la cervosa, che è una sorte di bevanda, che usano i popoli settentrionali, come noi il vino). Bordone included a passage about Paria, “rich in gold . . . they have wine, red and white, but not made of grapes (for they do not have vineyards), but of fruits not known to the Spaniards” (sono molto richi, e la loro richezza è perle e oro . . . hanno vino bianco e vermiglio, al gusto suavissimo, ma non di uvo (perche questo luogo vite non produce), ma fatto di alcuni frutti da noi del tutto sconosciuti).34 Bordone, in turn, had derived this passage from Columbus’s account of his third voyage, when Columbus stated that “for making the white and red wine they use maize, which is a plant that bears an ear like that of wheat.”35 Both described the inhabitants of Drogeo and of Hispaniola respectively as rough, destitute, naked, and cold from lack of clothing.36 Both Zen and Bordone discussed temples, idols, and human sacrifice.37 Perhaps most significantly, Zen described Drogeo by saying, “The country is very big, and almost [like] a new world” (il paese essere grandissimo, e quasi un nuovo mondo), compared to Bordone’s “Land of the Holy Cross, or New World . . . a very great island” (Terra di Sancta Cruce over mondo novo . . . grandissima isola).38 As a final series of examples, Zen also drew heavily on the letters of Amerigo Vespucci. For instance, Zen described the inhabitants of Drogeo: They do not have metal of any kind. They live by hunting, and carry lances of wood sharpened at the tip, and bows whose strings are made from animal skins. They are a very ferocious people; they fight to the death and eat one another. (Non hanno metallo di sorte alcuna, viveno di cacciaggioni, e portano lancie di legno nella punta aguzze, e archi, le corde de i quali sono di pelle di animali. Sono popoli di grán ferocità, combatteno insieme mortalmente, e si mangiano l’un l’altro.)39

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Vespucci similarly noted: Their arms are very well-made bows and arrows, except that they do not have any iron or any other kind of hard metal. In place of iron, they put the teeth of animals, or of fishes, or a spike of good wood, and harden the point by fire . . . They have other arms, such as fire-hardened spears . . . Warfare is carried out among them, very cruelly, against people who don’t speak their language, without granting life to anyone except to reserve him for greater pain . . . They eat little flesh except human flesh . . . They eat all their enemies whom they kill or capture, women as well as men . . . and they wondered to hear us say that we did not eat our enemies. (Le loro armi sono archi e saette molto ben fabricate, salvo che non tengon ferro, ne altro genere di metallo forte; et in luogo del ferro pongono denti di animali, o di pesci, o un fuscello di legno forte arsicciato nella puncta . . . Altre arme tenghono, come lance tostati . . . Usono di guerra infra loro con gente che non sono di lor lingua molto crudelmente, senza perdonare la vita a nessuno, se non per maggior pena . . . Mangion pocha carne salvo che carne del huomo . . . si mangiono tutti eloro nimici che amazzano, o pigliano, si femine come maschi . . . e si maravigliorono udendo dire a noi che non si mangiamo nostri nimici.)40

While the complete list of Zen’s sources and comparisons to other texts will not detain us here, it is enough to note that every component of this “letter,” that is to say, the vast majority of the fisherman’s story, except for the fisherman’s observation that there existed Latin texts in Estotiland, was borrowed from other sources. Nineteenth-century scholars long ago noted many of these textual similarities and made lengthy lists of the sources that Nicolò Zen “plagiarized,” indicating the inherently deceitful nature of his text.41 Notably, his carta da navegar also represented a pastiche of other maps that Zen borrowed from a wide variety of cartographic sources. To name just a few, a manuscript map of the North Atlantic by the Danish geographer Claudius Clavus, as well as three Florentine manuscripts of Ptolemy, served as models for both the outlines and place names of Zen’s Greenland and Iceland. The Swedish mapmaker Olaus Magnus, who visited Venice in 1535 and perhaps met both Giovanni Battista Ramusio and the Venetian mapmaker Giacomo Gastaldi, published a map in Venice in 1539 that directly influenced Zen’s depiction of Scandinavia and Norway in particular. Zen also drew on the maps of Mercator, Michele Tramezini, Fra Mauro, Alberto Cantino, and many others.42 Reconsidering Zen’s rhetorical tactics in a more analytical and historicized and less positivist way illuminates how Zen used textual and visual pastiche not to lie but as a means of framing his Venetian vision of fiction, travel, and authority. He collaged together a series of quotations from a group of recognized authorities on travel to the New World to form both a style and content that would be plausible to an early modern audience. He then grafted his

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ancestors into his pastiche, thereby likening them to heroic explorers such as Columbus and Vespucci while at the same time imbuing them with the authority of recognized historians of the New World such as Peter Martyr, López de Gómara, and Bordone. The Book of John Mandeville had also employed historical collage and pastiche, using the most up-to-date, European accounts of travel and pilgrimage as its sources – especially accounts from China and India – to form a unified, new narrative.43 As Iain Macleod Higgins points out, recomposing old books into new ones was a common medieval practice and “a basic medieval mode of original research and ‘creation.’”44 The creation of a pastiche was very much a process of redefining and confirming whom established authorities were and what authority meant. Pastiche represented a method of quotation, or the search to find accepted authorities that could be used or exploited to create a new text. Regarding pastiche, collection, and compilation, especially where the New World discoveries were concerned, as we have seen, the Venetians were experts. Compilers such as Zorzi and Ramusio are traditionally categorized as “editors” and authors of history as opposed to Zen and his “fiction,” and yet they too collaged together travelogues that were themselves based on a mixture of the plausible and the imaginative, as the genres of early modern history and biography regularly combined such elements. Vasari’s biographies, for instance, were compounds of fact and fiction, and his Lives of the Artists represented a collaborative pastiche involving a variety of both authors and genres.45 Scholars would hesitate to label Ramusio or Vasari liars, as they have regularly labeled Zen, when in fact all these editors undertook the similar tasks of compiling, editing, arranging, and blending texts together. Ramusio and Zorzi distinguished between various voyages and attributed narratives to existing sources and known authors, but the process was comparable. Assuming that Zen’s textual mixing was willful and not the result of a complete lack of awareness of the provenance of his texts, this narrative rather than more traditionally encyclopedic style allowed Zen to insert a Venetian presence into this history and in turn to construct Venetians – as both travelers (his Venetian ancestors) and editors (himself ) – as authorities on the Americas. To put it another way, Zen created an ideologically welcome, creative hybrid of a range of accepted and plausible texts about the Americas – again, much like Ramusio and Zorzi – and then collaged Venetian voices into it to elevate the Venetians to the level of other recognized authorities on the New World. The format of collage created a space for Venetian authority and asserted, most fundamentally, that Venetians needed not colonize the New World if they could lay claim to the knowledge of it. The text’s existence alone makes this point in its proclamation that the Venetians were the first Europeans to know of the New World through the story of the Frisland fisherman as well as Antonio Zen’s initial sighting of it. Through his pastiche, Zen asserted that Venetians did

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not necessarily have to go to the Americas; it was enough that they produced texts about them and in turn controlled and directed Europeans’ understanding of them. Above all, Zen’s collage, like other Venetian travel compendia, proclaimed Venetian expertise on the subject of the New World. While Patricia Fortini-Brown has argued that Venice maintained a prominent culture of chronicling, Zen’s text affirms a kind of Venetian notebook culture of collection, juxtaposition, reassembly, fusion, and comparison.46 THE CREATION OF A VENETI AN AMERI CA: SUBSTITUTION

Pastiche not only represents a creative mixture or synthesis of texts but additionally can result in the creation of a new work in a plausible past style. Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood have labeled this process “anachronic substitution,” or the legitimate reproduction of documents that had accidentally gone missing over time.47 Nicolò Zen aimed to do just this, and his second significant textual strategy was to manipulate his readers’ sense of temporality and in effect fold time backward with his pastiche. Dello scoprimento represented precisely this type of retroactive substitution, since Nicolò Zen claimed to be replacing his ancestors’ lost or damaged papers with his own effectively substitutional ones. Attempts to substitute documents and objects were in fact very common in early modern culture, as a multitude of artists and writers created paintings, sculptures, architecture, or texts that aimed to appear older than they were. Ancient coins, for instance, were often produced or copied without originals, and early modern audiences accepted their antiquity unproblematically. Michelangelo famously copied the work of Giotto and Masaccio so well that according to Vasari and others, no one could tell the difference between the original and his copy or seemed to care.48 Medieval and early modern scholars regularly created and planted documents in archives – there exist hundreds of known cases – to attest to the origins of or shore up claims for the antiquity or legitimacy of a monastery, bishopric, town, or duchy.49 Few questioned the authenticity of these texts and objects, in part because “forgery and counterfeit are both words that started out with positive connotations and over time acquired bad connotations.”50 That is to say, early modern audiences were happy to accept copies and substitutions, and in fact, such copies were antiquities in their minds, as long as they effectively appeared to be. It was achieving verisimilitude or a likeness to the truth that counted, not our modern sense of authenticity.51 While there exist scores of examples of early modern substitution similar to Zen’s, perhaps the most illuminating comparison is the case of Annius of Viterbo (c. 1432–1502): a Dominican historian who produced a treatise entitled De marmoreis Volturrhenis tabulis (c. 1492) stating that he had discovered a group of antique vases, bronzes, and inscriptions near Viterbo.52 In short, Annius faked a series of Etruscan antiquities and then also published a thesis

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about them. Annius’s eloquent volume mixed original sources by real Babylonian and Egyptian authors such as Archilochus, Berosus, and Manetho with imaginary Greek authors like Metasthenes, as well as imaginary texts by real people such as the Roman Cato, the Roman historian Quintus Fabius Pictor, and the Egyptian historian Manetho, some of which he claimed to have found in Mantua and Armenia. Like Zen with his text and map, Annius produced both artifacts and a text (a text that was also a pastiche) that corroborated one another; he established, in effect, a self-affirming circuit of information from antiquity. This comparison allows us to better understand how for Zen, the relationship between the transmission of information about the discovery of new lands and the creation of information about them was incredibly subtle, and for his early modern audience, of less import than for modern audiences. Annius’s artifacts and text appeared to have been intentionally falsified, which one cannot claim with certainty for Zen. It is enough to note the similarity that, as for Zen, Annius’s text (though rejected as a forgery by some) exerted an impact for generations.53 Again, early modern audiences tended to accept Annius’s substitution, and in fact, “[i]t would be difficult to overstate the pervasiveness of Annian historians in the sixteenth century.”54 Whereas Annius of Viterbo wanted to date his objects retroactively to the world of antiquity, Nicolò Zen by contrast dated his ancestors’ voyage and map to 1380, to the moment when Venice had just defeated the Genoese in the Battle of Chioggia, one of the most significant and decisive battles in the history of the city. Carlo Zen, Nicolò Zen the writer’s ancestor, was instrumental in defeating the Genoese in this battle, and afterward went on to be elected captain general of the sea, the highest position in the Venetian fleet.55 Nicolò Zen the writer’s folding of time brought his ancestors’ accounts of unexplored islands in the 1380s into dialogue with Venetian knowledge of the Americas in the mid-sixteenth century. At the end of the fourteenth century, both the lagoon city and the Zen family were, in many ways, at the height of their powers in the Mediterranean. It made sense for Nicolò Zen the writer to use this historical moment as the temporal foundation on which to situate his narrative of Venetian prestige and authority. Annius’s was one case among many; medieval substitutions (or what moderns might label forgeries) of documents were common, and in this way, Zen once again merely followed a well-established tradition. It was as if Zen, like Annius, had conceived of a gap in the historical record and arranged to fill it, substituting his sixteenth-century document representing his ancestors’ letters for absent or damaged letters and documents that once existed. Annius, on the one hand, wanted his artifacts and texts to be perfect substitutions that worked as undisputable evidence from the ancient world; Zen, on the other hand, did not make such claims and openly pointed out that his substitution was imperfect. For Zen, the rhetoric of his authority or

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antiquity revolved more simply around the damaged condition of his materials. Where his map was concerned, Zen stated, It occurred to me to draw out a copy of a navigating chart that I once found that I possessed among the ancient things in our house. Although the map is all rotten and many years old, I have succeeded tolerably well, and when placed before the eyes of those who enjoy such things, will serve almost like a light to make intelligible that which, without it, they would not be so well able to understand. (M’è paruto di trarne una copia dalla carta da navigare, che ancora mi trovo, havere tra le antiche nostre cose di casa; laquale, con tutto che sia marcia, e vecchia di molti anni, m’è riuscita assai bene; e posta davanti gli occhi di che si diletta di queste cose servirà quasi per un lume à dargli intelligentia di quell, che senz’essa non si potrebbe cosi bene sapere.)56

Regarding the text, and specifically the letter containing the story of the anonymous fisherman, Zen claimed that the narration had “so much detail that, except that we have changed the old language and style, we have let the matter stand as it was” (sua lettera scritta . . . così puntalmente, mutate però alcune voci antiche, e lo stile, e lasciata star nel suo essere la materia).57 Somewhat unusually, Zen actually described here the process of his substitution: how he updated the old to make it more legible and readable for a modern audience. Here, the drawing out of the map – trarre – is intended as both sketching and a pulling forward, out of the past. With the text, Zen expressed that his substitution was both the same (in content) and altered (in style), thereby allowing the document to comfortably coexist simultaneously, so to speak, in two different historical moments: in both the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. In effect, Zen followed in the wake of numerous authors who used pastiche and substitution to generate a document that they believed simply must have existed. It is possible to hypothesize, in fact, that Zen was moved to produce Dello scoprimento specifically by a knowledge of the contents of the second volume of Ramusio’s Navigazione e viaggi (1559), which included the Persian relazioni of Giosafat Barbaro and Ambrogio Contarini, but not the account of his ancestor Caterino Zen’s travels to Persia.58 It may have tugged on Zen the writer’s sense of family pride that Ramusio had included the Viaggio e naufragio di Pietro Quirino in his compilation, a travelogue that narrated the merchant’s Scandinavian travels in 1432, and not Zen the traveler’s account. Evidence suggests that Ramusio knew of the story of the Zen voyages to the North Atlantic but chose not to pursue them for inclusion in the first edition of his text. In a letter dated February 16, 1539, Girolamo Fracastoro told Ramusio about Zen’s story, writing that he had learned of a voyage to the New World, as well as “to Greenland and under the North Pole.”59 As Giorgio Padoan has pointed out, Nicolò Zen was in frequent contact with Ramusio, and the

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omission of both the Zen family travel accounts from Ramusio’s text – and the inclusion of Quirini’s – may have vexed Zen.60 Zen, however, had no text for Ramusio to publish, which could feasibly have incited Zen to produce one: again, to substitute a text that Zen may have believed once existed. Early modern writers would not have understood this textual production or substitution as fakery but as unproblematically producing anew a text – or a coin, inscription, or drawing – that had gone missing over time. All this is not to say that early modern historians and writers possessed a shoddy sense of what constituted reliable evidence from the past. Renaissance readers were sharp detectors of linguistic, material, geographical, and other errors in historical and antiquarian scholarship. Indeed, as any familiarity with the work of Lorenzo Valla suggests, Renaissance historians and literary scholars had precise mechanisms for evaluating the reliability of their sources; they were prudent and careful thinkers who paid particular attention to historical method.61 This method was simply not the same as that of modern scholars. As Nicholas Popper puts it, early modern methods of reconstructing historical events “prioritized conviction over textual remains” and “promoted a principle of empiricism that encouraged credulity, or the willingness to give credence to some elements of prima facie improbable texts and assertions.”62 That is to say, according to early modern historians even suspect texts merited consideration and publication in the process of building accurate histories, since even dubious accounts might ultimately supply good evidence. Each source or publication represented a collection of usable evidence that could be employed to gain insight into other sources. Rather than definitively accept or deny a given text, early modern scholars recognized that elements of texts of uncertain origins could still be used in the process of synthesis, to contrast with other materials and corroborate or deny the validity of other sources.63 To put it another way, the categories of true and false simply were not “appropriate terms for judging . . . pre-modern historiography.”64 Rather, it was plausibility that counted. As Christine Johnson asserts, “standards of credulity were crucially dependent on, but not defined by, categories of potential or plausible truth, because many lies were just as plausible as accepted truths.” Renaissance historians “were far more committed to expanding readers’ sense of the plausible than to emphasizing the need for skepticism,” and suspicious accounts often served the purpose of allowing writers to posit themselves as arbiters, judges, and experts in evaluating evidence.65 Surekha Davies has similarly argued that where dubious texts were concerned, Renaissance geographers and cartographers employed the strategy of providing all the information, from the credible to the incredible, and ultimately allowed readers to make up their own minds.66 Renaissance thinkers were not uncritical consumers of ideas and information: rather, the Renaissance historical mind was both skeptical and credulous and embraced uncertainty rather than reject it,

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helping to contextualize both the content and publication of Zen’s narrative about the New World. In compiling and substituting, Zen had to imagine the genre of the travelogue as it was composed, as well as how it would have sounded in the fourteenth century as well as in the sixteenth. The creation of a new work in an old and believable style is a sophisticated undertaking, one that Zen could have accomplished only with a refined historical consciousness. That is to say, it demonstrated his devotion to the functionality of the techniques and procedures of history, and his echoing the tactics of other texts such as those of Mandeville or Annius effectively added to the text’s credibility and verisimilitude. It is important to remember again that, at the time, no one seems to have questioned the veracity of his account. It was not until the turn of the nineteenth century that readers began to doubt his story in print, pointing to Zen’s masterful understanding of the genre of historical travel literature, as well as his audience’s inherent acceptance of it. In sum, Zen employed the textual strategies of pastiche, collage, temporal juggling, retroactivity, and substitution – as scores of early modern scholars had previously done, and as early modern audiences expected – as tools with which to insert the Venetians into an established canon of otherwise acknowledged authorities on travel to the New World. NICO LÒ ZEN ’S VENETIAN NEW WORLD

As suggested previously, Nicolò Zen the writer’s Dello scoprimento was a patriotic text, and a patriotic vision surely served as the impetus behind its writing and publication. This concept has received little attention, perhaps because it has not been able to compete with the dazzling array of debates about the truth behind the voyage itself.67 Zen’s patriotism and assertion of Venetian accomplishment at first might not appear obvious. His text was short – a mere thirteen folio pages. Antonio Zen, hardly an intrepid explorer, sighted America by coasting its shores but did not make landfall; Zen’s carta da navegar placed Estotiland, Icaria, and Drogeo – the New World – quietly and unobtrusively in the bottom left corner, devoid of any artistic description, and instead visually centered Frisland and Greenland. Yet Zen’s sense of civic pride forms one of the crucial building blocks underlying his text’s meaning and purpose. As the motivating force behind his work of pastiche, compilation, and substitution, his patriotism merits a closer look. On the most basic of levels, Zen’s account expressed a sense of family pride by focusing the reader on the admirable feats of exploration by his ancestors: a concept that needs little explanation. In addition, Zen’s sense of family pride was neatly linked to a sense of civic patriotism that emerges in the text of Dello scoprimento. Zen’s sense of Venetian patriotism was subtle rather than propagandistic, but nevertheless quietly wove its way through the

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narrative of Dello scoprimento. For instance, after Nicolò Zen the traveler had settled into life on Frisland, Zichmni requested that Zen lead Zichmni’s fleet in a battle against the king of Norway. The sea in which they were sailing was, so to speak, full of shoals and rocks, so that if Sir Nicolò had not been their pilot, with his Venetian mariners, all that fleet, in the judgment of all that were in it, would have been lost because of the little experience that Zichmni’s men had compared to ours, who were, so to say, born, bred and grown old in the art [of navigation]. (Questo mare da lor navigato era in maniera pieno di seccagne et di scogli, che se non fosse stato M. Nicolò il suo piloto, e i marinai venetiani, tutta quell’armata, per giudicio di quanti v’erano sù, si sarebbe perduta, per la poca pratica, che havevano quelli di Zichmni à comparatione de i nostri, che nell’arte erano si può dir nati, cresciuti, e invecchiati.)68

Clearly, Zen the writer expressed here a sense of Venetian honor and dignity. Not only did the Venetians know more about the sea than this other island population but Venetian maritime skills were so great as to trump the locals’ knowledge of their own seas as the deciding factor in Zichmni’s victory. In addition, Zen the writer several times pointed to distant historical connections between the Atlantic World, the New World, and Venice. Recounting the initial shipwreck of Nicolò Zen the traveler on Frisland: A prince [Zichmni] with an armed following happened to be there . . . He spoke in Latin, and demanded of what nation they were, and where they came from, and when he discovered that they came from Italy and were men of the same country, he was filled with the greatest joy. (Fosse trovato ivi vicino un prencipe con gente armata . . . [P]arlò in Latino, e dimandò, che genti erano, e di dove venivano, e saputo che venivano d’Italia, e che erano huomini del medesimo paese fu preso di grandissima allegrezza.)69

It was not so farfetched that Latin speakers could exist on the islands of the North Atlantic since there had been a great Icelandic production of Latin literature in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.70 However, by having the Latin-speaking Zichmni be so happy to see men from his homeland (huomini del medesimo paese), Zen implied that in some way, Zichmni had come from Italy, and since the word paese is ambiguous, meaning either country or town, even possibly from Venice. While this passage has been explained as a “blunder” of Nicolò Zen the writer’s editorial skills,71 a closer consideration of additional passages suggests its intentionality. Describing the inhabitants of Estotiland – again, purportedly the Americas – the fisherman who first brought news of these Western lands to Antonio Zen claimed that “those who live there are intelligent and possess all of the skills that we have. It is believed that in earlier times, they had commerce with us” (Quelli, che l’habitano sono

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ingeniosi, et hanno tutte le arti, come noi; et credesi, che in altri tempi, havessero commercio con i nostri).72 While this passage is similarly vague, if Estotiland had once traded with Frisland, it had, in turn, once traded with men of Italian or perhaps even Venetian descent. The fisherman then went on to claim that Estotiland “is a very large country, and almost a new world” (il paese essere grandissimo, et quasi un nuovo mondo): a turn of phrase historically used to indicate lands associated only with the Columbian discoveries and not with medieval travel, suggesting that the Venetian Antonio Zen had been the first European to learn of the Americas. By suggesting that these Atlantic people could have had historic connections to Venice, Nicolò Zen the writer participated in a larger tradition of asserting links between Venice and the Americas.73 In a similar vein, Sanudo had noted in his diary that on his first voyage to North America, John Cabot marked the New World with both English and Venetian flags; the 1508 Terra Nova map of Johannes Ruysch similarly indicates a “Cape of St. Mark,” perhaps because of Cabot’s presence there, and like Zen, places the Venetians in America.74 Zen’s text was also in dialogue with other significant Venetian texts about exploration. For instance, Dello scoprimento participated in the Venetian tradition of the isolario, and like Zorzi’s marginalia, saw the world in terms of islands, including islands to be conquered.75 Zen the writer drew heavily on the isolario of Benedetto Bordone for the content of his text. But beyond these particulars, Zen’s narrative – written in an island city that produced an abundance of texts about islands during his lifetime – focused on the wealth of islands in the Atlantic and in doing so represented a particularly Venetian way of seeing the world, much like the narratives of many Venetian cosmographers before him. Venetians had historically fought for islands in the Mediterranean, islands that became their longstanding ties, and Zen’s text depicted Venetian mariners fighting for islands in the North Atlantic, or embarking to discover new islands to the west. In this way, his account echoed and replicated this Venetian vision of an insular, colonial world, and more speculatively, had potentially prescriptive or didactic aims. While in general Zen’s text seemed to posit that the acquisition of knowledge was more important than the development of colonies, this aspect of his text at least implied that the Venetians, like the Spanish, could still be on the lookout for more islands to conquer, much as Ramusio had suggested as well. Dello scoprimento also subtly echoed Marco Polo’s Travels, additionally reflecting Zen’s sense of Venetian patriotism and once again confirming the centrality of Polo in the production of both Venetian travel literature and Venetian maps. Just as Marco Polo had lived and worked at the court of the Great Khan in China, Antonio and Nicolò Zen served as the retainers of Zichmni in the North Sea. Classical writers had largely ignored the North Atlantic, describing it as an uninhabitable frozen zone. While knowledge of the inhabitable world grew dramatically in early modern Europe, the North

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Atlantic continued to exist only on the periphery of geographic knowledge until the end of the sixteenth century.76 Given Spanish domination in Central and South America, Zen’s concentration on the north was not surprising. The relatively unknown geography of the North Atlantic in the middle of the sixteenth century allowed for the plausibility of the Zen text; it offered a blank canvas onto which Zen could loosely recast Polo’s story and paint a picture of Venetian authority in the Americas. In this way, Zen represented Venetians as global mediators at the edges of the world, whether it be on the coast of Africa or in Constantinople, China, or the North Atlantic. It is important to note that in the Venetian tradition, Dello scoprimento was a part of a compilation of travel literature. If Zen’s narrative imaginatively linked the Americas to Polo, the text’s position in a compilation similarly worked to link the New World to both Asia and the Mediterranean. The complete title of the compilation of the two relazioni that contained Zen’s narrative is De i commentarii del viaggio in Persia di M(esser) Caterino Zeno il K(avaliere) et delle guerre fatte nell’Imperio perisano, dal tempo di Ussuncassano in quà. Libri due. Et dello scoprimento dell’isole Frislanda, Eslanda, Engroveland, Estotilanda, et Icaria, fatto sotto il Polo Artico, da due fratelli Zeni, M(esser) Nicolò il K(avaliere) et M(esser) Antonio. Libro uno. Con un disegno particolare di tutte le dette parte di tramontana da lor scoperte. The first relazione in this collection recounted Caterino Zen’s 1472 embassy to the king of Persia, and the second, the Zen voyages in the North Atlantic. Once again, paratextually – here through textual grouping and organization – the compilation positioned the Zen family between East and West in the Age of Encounters by textually linking the family’s embassies to both Persia and the Atlantic. Other printed compilations did much the same. For instance, Lodovico Varthema’s Itinerario describing the Bolognese traveler’s voyage to Mecca, Persia, India, and Southeast Asia between 1502 and 1508 was often published together in a compilation with Juan Diaz’s account of the 1518 Juan di Grijalva expedition to the Yucatán.77 We cannot always argue with any certainty that publishers or printmen had any conscious ideological agenda in grouping texts in this way. While Ramusio’s large collection of texts did, publishers such as Matteo Pagano surely grouped texts about travel together in cases like this in order to be able to market them at a higher price. Nevertheless, these groupings of texts produced rhetorical results; here, in the case of the Zen compilation, by drawing a connection between East and West and implying the primacy of Venetian exploration in both. Once again, as in Ramusio’s Navigazioni, the Zen compilation implied that going to the Americas was an extension of the global voyages Venetians had already taken. Zen more openly revealed his Venetian allegiances and his sense of civic pride in his other writings. For instance, his text Dell’origine di Venetia et antiquissime memorie dei barbari, che distrussero per tutto’l mondo l’imperio di Roma, onde hebbe principio la città di Venetia (Marcolini, 1557) clearly represented a tribute to his

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beloved patria. For Zen, Venice was “the most glorious among cities”; its inhabitants were directly descended from Troy – not from Rome – specifically from Antenor, Priam’s most important counselor during the Trojan War, and Helenus, Priam’s son.78 When the Goths and Lombards invaded the Italian mainland, “just as God had saved Noah’s Ark from the flood, he saved this people of ancient lineage in the lagoon.”79 Dell’origine di Venetia included a discussion of Cassiodorus’s well-known sixth-century letter in praise of the nobility of the early inhabitants of the city, and extolled the valor of the Venetians in defending their liberty during the Frankish invasion of the lagoon in the ninth century. In his Storia della guerra veneto-turca (1535), Zen specifically betrayed his concerns about Habsburg expansion in the Americas and his mistrust of their assertions: “[the Spanish claim that] in the West, there are many countries, islands, and provinces, but they are bombastic by nature, and it is certain that they have found much less than what they claim.”80 He then immediately went on to note that in sixteenth-century Italy, “there are a few lords of little importance, the most significant of which are the Duke of Ferrara and the Duke of Mantua. There are a few others, but they are subject to the emperor – indeed slaves, to tell the truth.”81 While other European states had begun to build great monarchies and empires or had discovered sea routes to take them to the riches of Asia or to the New World, Zen doubted the truthfulness and the importance of these accomplishments. Instead, he continued to emphasize the importance of Venetian freedom and liberty rather than scrutinize the city’s failure to colonize the New World. Just as the city had remained historically free from both Roman and barbarian rule, it continued to maintain its freedom from Habsburg Spain, to which the rest of the Italian peninsula, as well as the New World, was subject by the mid-sixteenth century. As we have seen, subjection to Spain was a striking similarity between Amerindian peoples and Italians. While the Venetians may not have established an impressive New World empire, Zen called attention to the fact that the lagoon city was among the few that had not been enslaved by the Spanish: yet another reason for him to express his sense of patriotism and civic pride. FERDINAND COLOMBU S’S HISTORIE: A CODA

Thirteen years after the publication of Zen’s account, the publisher Francesco de’ Franceschi produced another text about the New World that in many ways represents an embodiment and culmination of sixteenth-century Venetian Americana: Ferdinand Columbus’s Historie del Ferdinand Colombo (1571), the first complete biography of Christopher Columbus (purported to be) by his second son Ferdinand.82 As recounted in the text’s preface by Ferdinand Columbus and its dedication by Giuseppe Moleto, a mathematician at the

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University of Padua, Columbus’s son Ferdinand composed a biography of his father based primarily on original family documents. The text was never published in Spain; instead, Ferdinand’s nephew Luis Colon (Christopher Columbus’s grandson through Diego Colon) inherited the manuscript. Luis had an established reputation for profligacy and, to make money, sold the manuscript to Baliano de Fornari, a wealthy Genoese physician. Fornari brought the manuscript to Venice, where it was translated by Alfonso dell’Ulloa and printed in 108 short chapters. As the story goes, the Spanish original was lost, perhaps dispersed with the rest of Ulloa’s notes after the translator died of a fever in June of 1570.83 Even though Ferdinand’s biography discussed events from eighty years ago, it nevertheless attracted the attention of European readers. Published in octavo format, it was aimed at a broad audience and piqued their interest in part because of its attribution to Columbus’s son, who had been a crew member on Columbus’s fourth voyage (1502–1504), when he was between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. It was reprinted in Venice six times until the end of the eighteenth century and was issued in nine Italian editions overall, as well as two Spanish translations (from the Italian original), two French editions, and one English translation.84 Moleto’s dedication strove to assure readers of the veracity of the account, echoing debates about the Zen narrative when he insisted: It cannot be doubted that this history is a true one, for it was written by his son, carefully following his father’s relations and letters. Nor can it be doubted that it was written by the hand of the aforesaid Don Ferdinand and that your Lordship [Fornari] had the authentic original, for it was given to you as such by your Lordship’s close friend, the illustrious Don Luis Columbus [Ferdinand’s nephew].85

In fact, at the time, it was by no means surprising that Columbus’s son Ferdinand might have composed such a text; he was a known scholarly figure, had a generous income and inheritance from his father, and had famously used much of it to amass a substantial library of more than 15,000 volumes in Seville, possibly the largest private collection in Europe at the time.86 In addition, his library included texts he had inherited from his father’s personal library, including copious information about Columbus, his history, and his explorations. All of this would have given Ferdinand the resources to compose his text, and helped to explain its provenance.87 Ferdinand Colombus’s Historie has much in common with Zen’s Dello scoprimento. The Historie eventually proved to be similarly enigmatic when over time – once again, not until the nineteenth century – studies began to note the heterogeneous, garbled, and disjointed nature of the text. Many began to argue that this was no straightforward biography; the text contained numerous factual mistakes, there appeared to be no clear or single author, and

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in the end the narrative appeared to be a compilation of a variety of other contemporary works.88 Generations of scholars have searched for “the truth” behind its authorship, sources, and the transmission of this biography, and in the process have turned up various results. For instance, the most elaborate dissection of the text to date posits that it was a compilation of the works of Peter Martyr, Oviedo, Las Casas, and López de Gómara, assembled by either Ferdinand Columbus or Luis Columbus, or entrusted by Luis to another compiler who had access to the Columbus family archives, with the goal of selling the manuscript to a wealthy buyer.89 Others attribute the core of the text to Ferdinand himself, or to Las Casas (as an earlier draft of his Historia de las Indias), or instead suggest that its contents could have been collaged together by its translator in Venice, Alfonso di Ulloa.90 As with Zen’s text, this discussion will not engage in these debates; rather, it will briefly consider the commonalities linking these texts, as well as ways in which Ferdinand’s biography represents an exemplar that wove together the many strands of textual production that had characterized the production of Venetian Americana since the beginning of the sixteenth century. As noted, Ferdinand’s text was a compendium aimed at spreading news and information about the New World, though couched as a biography rather than a group of letters. It has been labeled as “apocryphal,” “inauthentic,” “dishonest,” an “invention,” a “forgery,” or “a polluted text.”91 It recounts a colorful creation story, including a fable of its origins and transmission that involved forms of substitution (the Spanish original was “lost”) and pastiche. Venetian culture and history influenced its narrative of exploration and discovery. That is to say, much like the work of Trevisan, Ramusio, and Zen, the Historie brought together a variety of Spanish texts and put a Venetian spin on them. Since there exists no manuscript – it either has been lost or never existed to begin with – it remains impossible to trace the movement of this text from any Spanish original as it moved through the filters of the Venetian editorial world as in the case of the Libretto/Paesi. Nevertheless, the Venetian imprint on this text is clear. Not surprisingly, the Historie linked the Columbian voyages to Marco Polo, just as Zorzi, Ramusio, Gastaldi, and Zen had previously. Chapter 7, “The Second Reason that Encouraged the Admiral to Seek to Discover the Indies,” argues that Polo’s journeys to eastern lands implied that “India bordered on Africa and Spain,” confirming Columbus’s speculations about traveling west to go east and encouraging him to search for financiers and supporters for his voyage.92 Once again, Polo represented the touchstone for Venetian ideas about the New World, as well as the Venetian authority on travel and exploration that inspired Columbus. In addition, the Historie made reference to Zen’s Frisland, and went so far as to suggest that Columbus had traveled there. Chapter 4 includes an example of a letter from Columbus, in which Columbus argued for the navigability of all of the five zones of the earth: a fact that he knew of since he had once

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sailed to, and beyond, the island of Tile (also known as Thule, an island to the north of Britain, today often identified as Iceland or Greenland) in 1477. Following this letter, Ferdinand Columbus (the biographer/compiler) went on to note that “[t]he Tile (Iceland) of which Ptolemy speaks does in fact lie where the Admiral says it does; nowadays it is called Frisland.”93 The archives, in fact, link Zen’s Frisland to Ulloa. A 1557 document from the Riformatori dello Studio di Padova – a magistracy charged with overseeing print and censorship, first in Padua, and then eventually more broadly also in Venice – records the translator Ulloa approving the acceptability of and giving permission for the publication of Zen’s Dello scoprimento, indicating that Ulloa was familiar with this text, and maybe even had it in mind while working on Columbus’s biography.94 Most notably, the Venetian practices of translating Spanish texts into Italian and funneling their information to a larger audience while heroicizing Columbus and demonizing the Spanish in the process – trends that began with the Libretto/Paesi and grew with Ramusio – culminated in the Historie. As we have seen, Ulloa was an established translator of Spanish best sellers in sixteenthcentury Venice, including many related to travel and exploration.95 According to the fable of the text’s creation, the Spanish original had been lost in part out of sheer neglect, since it would have had little success with a Spanish public at the time. Columbus’s reputation in Spain was under duress and subject to attacks on the part of the crown, and Columbus passed into obscurity in Spain compared to Cortés and Pizarro.96 By contrast, Venetian print culture had long been celebrating Columbus, and the Historie did so unconditionally. Chapter 1 announces this by pointing out that “some . . . wish to dim [Columbus’s] fame”: an apprehension consonant with Venetian editorial production about the New World – indeed, a clear reprisal of Ramusio – and an intention the Historie aimed to counter. The text underscored its celebration of Columbus by consistently pointing to evidence of God’s partiality for the navigator. Columbus “carried the grace of the Holy Ghost to that New World he discovered.” Just as his namesake “St. Christopher . . . carried Christ over deep and dangerous waters,” Columbus “crossed over with his company that the Indian nations might become dwellers in the triumphant Church of Heaven,” in the first of many allusions to Columbus’s saintly qualities.97 Though the ship’s skipper offers to remove Columbus’s chains when he is returned to Spain at the end of his third voyage, Columbus refuses – in true ascetic fashion – stating that he would prefer to wear them until the Spanish sovereigns themselves could remove them, and that in fact, he later kept them in his bedroom as relics (per reliquie) until the end of his life.98 At the start of Columbus’s fourth voyage, the description of a hurricane on Hispaniola (which Ramusio had rendered in dramatic terms in order to heighten readers’ sense of Columbus’s courage) here shifts to illuminate the divine protection that governed Columbus’s every endeavor. During

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the course of the storm, “God was pleased to close the eyes and minds of all those men [Columbus’s enemies] so that they did not heed the Admiral’s good advice. I am certain,” the voice of Ferdinand remarked, “that this was Divine Providence.”99 In addition to insisting upon Columbus’s Christ-like qualities, the Historie regularly pits the navigator against a series of Spanish villains. In doing so, the text becomes part saint’s life – as Columbus faces repeated physical and moral challenges, much like those of St. Anthony of Egypt or St. Francis in the desert – and part epic struggle, of heroes and villains, including the eventual righteous triumph of Columbus, who as in the earliest Venetian compilations is referred to as “The Admiral” throughout. A seemingly endless cast of Spanish characters persecute the navigator, including Francisco Roldan, who revolted against Columbus and established a rival regime on Hispaniola; Juan Rodriguez de Fonseca, the archbishop of Seville and Queen Isabella’s personal chaplain, who eventually became president of the Council of the Indies, “neglected and mismanaged” the Spanish fleet, and developed a “mortal hatred” for Columbus that would eventually “cause him to lose the favor of the Catholic Sovereigns”;100 Nicolás de Ovando, the Spanish governor of Hispaniola (1502–1509), who replaced Columbus after he was accused of mismanaging his duties in that position, became best known for his cruel treatment of the native Taino, and unable to hide his aversion for the Genoese treated Columbus with particular hostility. The juxtaposition of Italian bravery with Spanish wickedness – much as in Benzoni’s Historia – emerges most poignantly in chapters 85–88, when the shady colonial administrator Francisco de Bobadilla arrives in the Americas in August of 1500 to succeed Columbus as the second governor of the Indies. The text describes Bobadilla as hostile to Columbus and his brothers from the beginning, since they were “foreigners from beyond the Alps” (stranieri e oltramontani), pointedly emphasizing tensions between Italy and Spain from the outset of their engagement.101 Accused of creating disorder and of concealing the true wealth of the Indies, Columbus and his brothers undergo a farcical inquest at the hands of the Spanish functionary. The trial involves “taking testimony from their open enemies and showing public favor to and even egging on all who wished to speak ill of the prisoners. From the wicked and shameless things these people said, one had to be blind not to see that they were guided by prejudice rather than the truth.”102 The Historie describes how Bobadilla “subverted justice to the . . . end of enriching himself,” and “permitted malcontents and rabble to shout innumerable insults at [the brothers] in public squares, to blow horns in the harbor when they were being taken aboard, and to post scandalous handbills about them on the streetcorners.”103 Bobadilla returns the navigator to Spain in chains, but soon after is killed in the

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hurricane that left Columbus unscathed, reflecting the punishment of Spanish treachery and divine protection of Italian valor.104 To be clear, Ferdinand’s Columbus was never entirely heroic; he maintained a seemingly low regard for the peoples of the New World as primitive, superstitious, and dangerous. Ferdinand’s account of the massacre on Hispaniola remains heartless and insensitive, even though he had elsewhere described these same people as sweet and gentle. Following the death of Indian captives who hanged themselves, Columbus remarks that “their death was no great loss.”105 None of the Indians in Columbus’s Historie ever appear as real people, but rather exist more as a formless mass, at first gentle, peaceful, and generous, but then, after not too long, as an object of open hostility, even though the reader could see that their hostile behavior was justified. In general, however, Ferdinand represents Columbus as a monument to honesty, piety, and hard work in comparison to the baseness and corruption of the Spanish regime. The text emphasizes from the outset Columbus’s nonviolent evangelization and a peaceful union of Amerindians with the church, intrinsically intended as a comparison to the violence of Spanish conquest and an indirect critique of Spanish brutality in the New World. The Historie’s condemnation of the entire class of Spanish administrators ultimately serves to cast blame on the Spanish monarchs themselves, responsible for having given such nefarious men so much power. The Historie points out, for example, that “all [that] Bobadilla did was with the approval and advice of the bishop [Fonseca]” and that the author “cannot absolve the Catholic Sovereigns of responsibility for selecting for the post of governor such a bad and ignorant man as Bobadilla,” insisting ultimately on the culpability of the crown for all that went wrong in the Indies.106 It was fitting that Bobadilla and his cronies died in the hurricane; “I am certain that this was divine providence,” the author writes, “for had they arrived in Castile, they would never had been punished as their crimes deserved; on the contrary, as protégés of Bishop Fonseca, they would have received many favors and thanks.”107 The Spanish monarchs, and Ferdinand in particular, are hypocritical, corrupt, and untrustworthy: “shameless wretches” easily influenced by a variety of nefarious personalities, compared to the heroic and saintly navigator.108 The closing passages of the Historie describe how the shortsighted king had always been “somewhat reserved and unsympathetic to [Columbus’s] projects.” Ferdinand “received him courteously and professed to be restoring all his rights and privileges, but it was his real design to take them all away,” despite the fact that “history knows of no man who ever did the like, wherefore the world will ever remember the first discoverer of the West Indies.”109 Ferdinand’s defense of his father was not surprising; he was surely affected by having spent ample time at the anti-Columbus Spanish court, as well as years

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entangled in lawsuits aimed to reestablish the privileges that had been stripped from his father. Las Casas’s History of the Indies also contained a detailed account of Columbus’s life; it similarly praised Columbus in glowing terms and depicted the royal functionaries from the Spanish court as his enemies, and indeed it is likely that both Las Casas and the compiler of the Historie relied on the same original sources. Las Casas’s work would not be published until 1875, however, making the Historie, translated and printed in Venice, the only significant biographical account of Columbus at the time; it became the basis for all future biographies of the navigator.110 Even though other accounts of Columbus’s life and voyages existed, including those of Peter Martyr, Oviedo, and others, the compiler of this Venetian text found that these accounts “had given too much attention to some matters and not enough to others or passed over in silence precisely what needed to be told in fullest detail”; meaning, other accounts had not valorized Columbus or criticized the Spanish enough.111 Columbus would soon become a popular protagonist in seventeenth-century Italian epic poetry, around the time when depictions of Columbus more generally tended to become more heroic.112 In the second half of the sixteenth century, however, the Historie stood out for its unconditional glorification of the navigator: a landmark among the European production of Americana, matched at the time only by the prefaces in Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi. Generations of scholars have noted how Italy was a latecomer to national unification, especially compared to Spain.113 Nevertheless, evidence from Venetian Americana points not only to an Italian national consciousness in the sixteenth century but to an assertion of its greatness, especially through the figure of Columbus as Venetian presses employed news and information from the New World to proclaim the importance of Italy. In the Historie’s dedication, Moleto remarks that “in ancient times, men not only would have enrolled [Columbus] among their gods, but also would have ranked him at their very head”; his labors, for Moleto, represented “the true glory of Italy.”114 Ramusio had similarly remarked that Columbus was “a great and famous Italian man.”115 Defending Columbus against López de Gómara’s assertion that Columbus had first learned about the New World from another sailor, Girolamo Benzoni responded in his History of the New World (Venice, 1565) that this was false, since “there were many who could not endure that a foreigner, and one from our Italy, should have acquired so much honor and so much glory, not only for the Spanish kingdom but also for other nations of the world.”116 Mobilizing these Italian sentiments associated with Columbus and the Age of Encounters, the Historie allowed Venetian presses to hurl insults of ineptitude, greed, and degeneracy at Spain and champion Italian valor, all the while being able to hide from such assertions behind the name of the navigator’s son. While Zen’s text depicted Venetian patricians as heroic explorers,

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additional Venetian publications proclaimed Columbus an Italian hero. By the 1570s, following the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, Venice was one of the only Italian cities still independent from Spanish domination that by then extended over the entire peninsula; it was one of the only Italian cities left that could stake such a claim for Italian greatness, as well as level such explicit criticisms against the Catholic monarchs. Whatever the Historie’s origins or provenance, the lagoon city was a natural site for its appearance; even though Ferdinand and Isabella had long been dead by the time of its publication, Venetian presses deployed its narrative to emphasize the treachery of Spain and the superiority of Italian civilization for centuries to come. In a story that is most likely apocryphal, a Venetian senator supposedly came to visit the Venetian mapmaker Fra Mauro on the island monastery of San Michele in the northern lagoon. Here, Fra Mauro was working on his fifteenth-century map of the known world: a map that, as one of its captions tells us, Fra Mauro was making “for the contemplation of this most illustrious signoria [of Venice].”117 The senator tried unsuccessfully to find Venice, and asked Fra Mauro where it was; Fra Mauro pointed to a dot on his yet unfinished map, which to the senator appeared tiny compared to the rest of the world. “Why so small?” the senator complained, “Venice should be bigger and the rest of the world smaller!”118 The senator’s disapproval of a seemingly undersized Venice would have been understandable; Venice had loomed large in global history and should have continued to do so even as Europeans’ knowledge of world geography expanded. Surely it did, which was precisely what Nicolò Zen’s Dello scoprimento argued. The discovery of the Americas served, for Zen, to tell a local history of the lagoon city and its historical greatness. It would, of course, be intriguing to unearth new evidence about the Zen voyages. To date, no one knows for certain if they really happened, or if so, where or how far they went; all that exists, at the end of the day, is Zen’s text. That is to say, there is little that is concretely knowable about these travels or whether they were truthfully undertaken by modern standards, but it is certain that Zen produced this narrative: a text that merits consideration on its own terms. The same can be said of Columbus’s Historie. Early modern audiences accepted Zen’s account in the way they had always accepted the plausible and the marvelous blended together in history, biography, and travel narratives. Building on this just a bit further, a final Zenian rhetorical strategy that further bolstered his text was a certain kind of tentativeness. It was as if Nicolò Zen the writer hoped to push the relationship between the credible and the implausible just as much as he could without going too far. He did not want to make assertions that would too easily be doubted. Compared to us moderns, his early modern audience looked primarily for a believable likeness to the past and was flexible where truth and fiction

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were concerned, but knowing this, he still did not want to press them beyond their capability for belief. Had Zen claimed to have converted natives, like Columbus, or to have conquered them in a historic battle, like Cortés, he might have overstretched their capacities. Zen produced a narrative that was gently, as opposed to aggressively, patriotic, using pastiche and temporal folding to imply that Venetian ambitions in relation to the New World were limited or undefined, but continued to exist. It is as if Dello scoprimento suggested that the Venetians could still build a New World empire if they chose to. They had the historical expertise, had had the opportunity in the past, and thus the door to colonial expansion remained open if they chose to walk through it. In the end, however, the Venetians chose to remain above this fray, since they had other, more important tasks at hand, namely, trade in the Levant, and the production of texts about the New World. As a part of a long tradition of travel writers and editors of collections about travel, Nicolò Zen knew that the Venetians were probably better at making books and maps about the New World than making colonies; nevertheless, he fashioned a text whose rhetoric depicted the Venetians as potentially expert in and surely capable of both. As we shall see in the final chapter, Venetian writers and printmakers who published isolarii and books of costumes did much the same, echoing and expanding upon Zen’s ideas regarding the continued centrality of Venice – in texts if not in practice – in the first age of globalization.

SIX

VENICE AS TENOCHTITLAN The Correspondence of the Old World and the New

V

enice left a powerful impression on all those who saw it, and many travelers – armchair and actual, Venetian and European – compared Venice to the New World. Examples of such comparisons are legion. During his 1499 voyage into what is now the Gulf of Venezuela, the Spanish explorer Alonso de Ojeda reported seeing the palafitte houses of the Wayuu people built over the water and supported on stilts made from tree trunks, prompting him to name the territory Venezuela or Little Venice.1 In a letter to his patron Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’Medici dated July 18, 1500, Amerigo Vespucci described the island of Aruba as having “a great population that had its houses founded on the sea like Venice.”2 The Venetian ambassador Pietro Pasqualigo reported to the senate on October 19, 1501 that while Amerindians traditionally did not have iron and instead made tools from stone, the New World peoples he saw in Lisbon had brought with them “a piece of a broken, golden sword, which was certainly made in Italy,” and a child from Labrador was wearing “two silver earrings, that without a doubt seem to have been made in Venice.”3 In his 1504 letter to Piero Soderini, Vespucci described a village in the West Indies with large houses built on piles, “over a lake, like Venice.”4 When Antonio Pigafetta accompanied Magellan around the globe between 1519 and 1521, he likened boats in the Pacific islands called chamorros to the gondolas that shuttled between Venice and mainland Fusine and compared certain exotic New World plants to flora from the Venetian countryside.5 In his history of Peru, Pedro de Cieza de León described Panama City as inhabited by merchants entering into contracts “as big as those in Venice.”6 173

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A chorus of travelers and chroniclers saw Venice in the New World, and this comparison also loomed large in Venetian printed images. As we have seen, Venetian printmen quickly seized upon the news of the discovery of America in narrative accounts, and Venetian engravers and printmakers developed a similar fascination, eagerly compiling, editing, and publishing illustrations of this new land. This chapter will explore the production of two Venetian genres, isolarii and costume books, and investigate how their authors forged visual connections between Venice and the Americas. As these printed books illustrate, Venetians understood the power of grouping text and image and capitalized on the dynamism of this combination. Much like Nicolò Zen, they cut, pasted, and collaged together a variety of images to create peaceful, sanitized, and familiar representations of an otherwise often violent and unfamiliar New World. The images they produced likened the Americas – and especially Tenochtitlan – to Venice, and in doing so at times worked to suggest that Venice could still become a colonial power, as other Venetian writers had similarly implied. Even more significantly, their depictions confirmed Venice’s own spectacularity by showing the city to be globally comparable to the most incredible discoveries found elsewhere around the world. The authors of isolarii and costume books often modified and revised images they obtained elsewhere. These edited images, taken from other printed texts and refashioned according to Venetian agendas, were far from simple copies; they were creative products that generated new knowledge. The process of their selection and reconfiguration was never neutral, and worked to construct a particular Venetian ideology of compatibility and sameness between the Old World and the New: a rhetoric that, compared to other Venetian publications, especially purely narrative ones, downplayed and even ignored Spanish cruelty and the rhetoric of the Black Legend. Though costume books and isolarii represent quite different kinds of texts, they employed printed images of the New World in similar ways. The texts under scrutiny here span the arc of the sixteenth century, and while they date from vastly different moments in the story of the Age of Encounters, each, in its own way, shaped how Venetians received and formed their notions of America through visual imagery. While Nicolò Zen had argued that Venetians had discovered America first, Ramusio had pointed to the valor of Venetian explorers, and Giacomo Gastaldi had suggested that Polo had traveled to the New World, Venetian printed images offered yet another spin on the Americas, one in which Venetians looked at America as if into a mirror and saw curious images of themselves reflected back across the Atlantic. VENICE AND TENOCHTITLAN IN VENETIAN ISOLARI I

On November 24, 1522, the Venetian ambassador to Spain, Gasparo Contarini, reported Cortés’s arrival in Tenochtitlan to doge Antonio Grimani.

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“Hernando Cortés conquered the great city of Tenochtitlan . . . [H]e sends back in ships a present for the emperor of pearls, jewels and other precious things from this land, which are worth 100,000 ducats,” adding that the New World “promises great things and revenue for the future.”7 He noted later in his relazione to the senate on November 16, 1525 that the lake water in Tenochtitlan “rises and falls every day as it does in Venice.”8 As we have seen, Alessandro Zorzi’s manuscript collection of travel accounts included a “Venetianized,” bird’s-eye view of Tenochtitlan, as if he saw the Mexican city through the lens of the Barbari map of Venice (Figure 14). Ramusio also remarked on the similarity between the lagoon cities, in particular by describing the lake around Mexico City as the Mexican “lagoon.”9 Venetian cartographers tended to highlight Tenochtitlan in their representations of the New World, seemingly more so than other European mapmakers. For instance, Battista Agnese’s manuscript maps emphasized the Mexican capital by showing the city in miniature surrounded by colored rings: a depiction reserved for no other place in the Americas (Figure 18).10 While other European manuscript maps also sometimes highlighted Tenochtitlan, this tradition was prominent in Venetian printed maps.11 The 1534 Ramusio map showed an exaggeratedly large image of Tenochtitlan (Figure 23, seen along the far left edge of the map). Giacomo Gastaldi’s 1548 edition of Ptolemy, in its maps of both the world and the New World, generically represented towns with a small sketch of a building but depicted the Aztec capital as a large city in the middle of a lake (Figure 20).12 Michele Tramezzino’s double-hemisphere world map (1554) (Figure 51) similarly emphasized the prominence of Tenochtitlan, as did Gastaldi’s Universale della parte del mondo nuovamente ritrovata (1556) (Figure 46) and Paolo Forlani’s Universale descrittione di tutta la terra conosciuta fin qui (1561) (Figure 52). As comparative examples, Sebastian Münster’s Tabula novarum insularum indicated the city only with the word “Temistitan,” no different from other toponyms on this map (Figure 25). His Typus universalus, from his 1545 edition of Ptolemy, did not indicate the city at all, nor (oddly) did Martin Cortés’s 1551 map Nuevo mondo. As Venetian maps that highlighted the Aztec capital traveled around Italy and Europe – as evidence very much shows they did – they focused viewers’ attention on the magnificence of Tenochtitlan as well as on Venice’s role in publicizing it, subtly but powerfully connecting these two island cities through Venetian cartographic production.13 With these maps, Venetian presses helped Europeans “discover” Mexico and America, and in particular the marvel of the Mexican capital, by emphasizing Tenochtitlan as the most significant city in the New World. Non-Venetian observers also regularly saw Venice in Tenochtitlan. The orderly government of the Aztec capital reminded Cortés of Venice.14

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51. Michele Tramezzino, detail of double-hemisphere world map. Venice, 1554. Copper engraving. With permission from the Newberry Library.

Francisco Cervantes de Salazar’s 1554 treatise on New Spain noted a foreign visitor to Tenochtitlan who exclaimed, “Look at the large number of skiffs there! How many cargo canoes, the best for bringing in merchandise! There is no reason for missing those of Venice.”15 The Spanish Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún observed that “the Mexicans built the city of Mexico, which is another Venice, and in their knowledge about governance they were as the

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52. Paolo Forlani, detail of Universale descrittione di tutta la terra conoscivta fin qui. Venice, c. 1565. Copper engraving. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Venetians.”16 The Neapolitan cosmographer Giovanni Lorenzo D’Anania likened the island cities in his cosmography L’universale fabrica del mondo (1582), as did López de Gómara in his History of the Discovery of New Spain (1553), Peter Martyr in his Decades (1530), and Paolo Giovio in his History (1530).17 Even the effigy on Cortés’s tomb made this connection.18 By the middle of the sixteenth century, for those familiar with global cosmography, Tenochtitlan had become the new Venice, and as Denis Cosgrove has suggested, “now [Venice] was to be imaged as a future Tenochtitlan, great city of the New World.”19 Though travel accounts and cosmographies of the Americas occasionally drew comparisons between the New World and other European cities, no other city seems to have so consistently appeared in the imaginations of travelers as did Venice.20

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While writers and cosmographers noted the similarities between these two island cities in their narrative accounts, the discovery of Tenochtitlan also prompted a significant wave of printed images of the city. Images of the Americas first emerged in fits and starts in Europe starting at the end of the fifteenth century. Crude woodcuts of Columbus encountering New World peoples, for instance, often illustrated the frontispieces of printed editions of Columbus’s letter to Sant’Angel, as early as 1493, and similarly introduced various versions of Vespucci’s letter to Soderini and his Mundus Novus letter.21 In the case of Venice, news of Cortés’s discovery and conquest of Tenochtitlan prompted the first significant wave of production of New World images, especially in Venetian isolarii, which regularly made visible the resemblance between Venice and the Mexican capital. Isolarii were encyclopedic texts that depicted world geography as a series of islands, often by showing an illustration and textual description of an island on each page. They represented a kind of smaller-scale precursor to the atlas. Both chorographic and geographic, they emphasized history, topographical description, and culture rather than nautical or maritime knowledge, and became popular in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, at exactly the same time that Europeans’ knowledge of the world was expanding. Texts such as Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s Liber insularum archipelagi (1420), Bartolomeo da li Sonetti’s Isolario (1485), Benedetto Bordone’s Libro di Benedetto Bordone (1528), and Tommaso Porcacchi’s L’isole piu famose del mondo (1572), among others, allowed readers to comprehend expanding global frontiers through the format of islands.22 In this way, islands became a means of connecting the New World seamlessly to the old and the world of antiquity to the world of modernity, since the medium of islands allowed geographers to describe newfound lands using a vocabulary with which they were thoroughly familiar. As one indicator of this phenomenon, the titles of many New World texts included the word “islands.”23 Scholars have long acknowledged that isolarii were a Venetian genre. A product of the cultural industry of the Serenissima, much like compilations of travel literature, they revealed a particularly Venetian way of seeing the world, here through the matrix of islands, perhaps because they were so often produced in this city of islands.24 As we have seen, the Venetian Alessandro Zorzi sketched extensive and elaborate groups of islands in the marginalia of his manuscripts about the New World.25 Venetians had historically gone to war over islands in the Mediterranean, islands that then became their longstanding colonies, and Nicolò Zen’s Dello scoprimento depicted Venetian mariners fighting for islands in the North Atlantic or embarking to discover new islands to the west. As late as 1696, the Venetian cartographer Vincenzo Coronelli went so far as to note in his isolario that “all the world is divided up into islands” (tutta la terra [è] divisa in isole), attesting to this long-standing

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Venetian vision that emphasized islands as the fundamental rubric of geographical knowledge.26 In short, insularity neatly embodied, reflected, and constructed notions of empire, real and imagined, in early modern Venice, and historic colonial epistemologies were fundamentally embedded in Venetian ways of seeing.27 Where the New World was concerned, the miniaturist Benedetto Bordone’s isolario, his Libro di tutte le isole del mondo (Venice, 1528), emphatically likened Venice to “Temistitam” in both text and image.28 Bordone was a miniaturist, woodcutter, cartographer, and illuminator of manuscripts active in Venice in the first quarter of the sixteenth century.29 His isolario was significant in several respects. Compared to da li Sonetti’s isolario, for instance, where portolan-style maps depicted the major islands of the Aegean, Bordone’s text was no longer aimed at navigators and sailors. It was encyclopedic, descriptive more than cartographic, and clearly geared toward a cultivated public of armchair travelers interested in learning about the wider world. In addition, his was the first isolario to include islands from the Americas, and even more significantly, the 1534 edition of his isolario contained the earliest European printed account of Pizzaro’s conquest of Peru, once again reflecting the capacious Venetian appetite for news from the Americas. His discussion of the New World conferred on his text “a level of renown it might otherwise not have enjoyed,” and like much Venetian Americana, was incredibly popular; his isolario was reprinted in four editions between 1528 and 1548.30 The full title, “Book of Benedetto Bordone, in Which Are Considered All the Islands of the World” (Libro di Benedetto Bordone, nel qual si ragiona de tutte l’isole del mondo), points to a global gaze that looked beyond Venice, Italy, or the Mediterranean to the world as a whole. Bordone divided his isolario into three books. The first contained twentyone woodcut maps and accompanying descriptions of islands in the Atlantic and the New World, the second described seventy-four islands in the Mediterranean, and the third depicted eight islands in Asia. For his book on the Americas, there is little scholarly consensus regarding his sources. For instance, he perhaps drew on portolan charts by the Genoese cartographer Vesconte Maggiolo, or the 1516 Carta Marina of Martin Waldseemüller (specifically for his map of Cuba). Curiously, Bordone’s map of Jamaica bears a striking similarity to the island of iava maior on Johannes Ruysch’s 1508 Universalior Cogniti Orbis Tabula, and Roberto Almagià suggested that since Columbus, when hearing the name Jamaica, first identified this island with Java, Bordone could have made this cartographic connection as well.31 Like Ramusio, Gastaldi, and Zen, Bordone surely drew on the great variety of cartographic materials in circulation in Venice at the time, bringing together different sources to create his own Venetian compilation of the islands of the New World.

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53. Hernán Cortés, “Tenochtitlan,” in Praeclara Ferdina[n]di Cortesii de nova maris oceani Hyspania narratio e. Nuremberg, 1524. Woodcut. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

The provenance of Bordone’s map of Tenochtitlan, however, is clear; it derived from the printed edition of Hernán Cortés’s second letter, originally written to Charles V on October 30, 1520 and published in a Latin edition, Praeclara Ferdina[n]di Cortesii de noua maris oceani Hyspania narratio . . . (Nuremberg: Fridericus Peypus, 1524), which included a plan of Tenochtitlan, perhaps based on a sketch sent by Cortés in the early 1520s (Figure 53).32 Historians have argued that Cortés’s map may have been a copy of an indigenous plan of Tenochtitlan that Cortés had received from Montezuma: a pre-existing, Amerindian prototype that wound its way from Mexico to Spain, and eventually to Nuremberg and Venice.33 Among the 112 woodcut images in Bordone’s isolario, his maps of Venice and “Temistitan” stand out as the only two island cities, and the only illustrations he developed beyond a crude sketch (Figures 54 and 55). Elaborately and densely illustrated cityscapes, they both show textured images of urban life, including groups of smaller islands connected by wooden bridges and waterways, clusters of buildings that give a sense of the swarming populations of both cities, and detailed representations of European-style buildings that, in the case of Tenochtitlan, were surely unlike anything the Aztecs might have

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54. Benedetto Bordone, “Venice,” in Libro di Benedetto Bordone. Venice, 1528, 29v–30r. Woodcut. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

inhabited. The Venice plan is positioned over two folios and the Tenochtitlan plan over most of one. Most other illustrations in the text were much smaller; they occupied only part of a page, were in ichnographic views with simple, stark outlines, and made only occasional nods to topographical details such as landscape or architecture (Figure 56). In these ways, Bordone’s depictions of Venice and Tenochtitlan resonate with each other and stand out in their size and development. Bordone also likened these two cities by reworking the central plaza of Cortés’s Tenochtitlan and removing its signs of violence and barbarity (Figures 53 and 55). Tenochtitlan’s Templo Mayor depicted Coatepec, or Serpent Mountain, where captive enemies reenacted a cosmic battle against Huitzilopochtli, the Mesoamerican deity of war and patron of Tenochtitlan. The temple supported two shrines on its summit, dedicated to Huitzilopochtli and the rain god Tlaloc, and the map depicts stairways that gave access to these shrines. Latin glosses on the Cortés plan identify the main buildings of this compound, including the place where the Aztecs offered sacrifices (“templum ubi sacrificant”) and the tzompantli or skull racks (“capita sacrificatorum”) on the bottom and in the top left of the square. At its center, the Cortés plan showed a colossal,

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55. Benedetto Bordone, “Temistitan,” in Libro di Benedetto Bordone. Venice, 1528, 10r. Woodcut. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

headless nude (perhaps a statue of Coatlicue, the mother of the Aztec gods), with its arms extended at its sides, appearing to hold serpents and clearly identified as an idol (“idol lapideum”). Bordone’s less crowded temple platform rid itself of this evidence of idolatry and human sacrifice by removing the skull racks and replacing the headless figure with something akin to a Leonardoesque Vitruvian man. The buildings in Bordone’s much quieter central square of Tenochtitlan appear less like sacrificial platforms and more like European castles. By remaking the center of the Mexican capital in this way, Bordone made it easier to relate

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56. Benedetto Bordone, “Cuba,” in Libro di Benedetto Bordone. Venice, 1528, 13v. Woodcut. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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these cities as similarly civilized and peaceful, and a comparison of the ceremonial centers of Venice and Tenochtitlan confirms this desire (Figures 54 and 55). Although the Piazza San Marco is somewhat de-emphasized in his map of Venice with only the campanile vaguely standing out as a Venetian monument, he has inscribed the word “piazza” into the right-hand side of the Plaza Mayor, equating the two city centers. The shrines of the temples dedicated to the agricultural and water god Tlaloc and the tribal deity Huitzilopochtli on the bottom half of the central plaza of Tenochtitlan have been turned right side up, almost as if to recall the columns of the piazzetta of San Marco (though the columns are indeed barely visible just below the campanile in Bordone’s image of Venice). The Bordone image rids the Cortés map of some of its flat, pattern qualities perhaps derived from the (potentially) indigenous map, most notably in the way Bordone’s representation of Mexican architecture develops a sense of depth and perspective in its roofs and overlapping buildings, as he does in his image of Venice. In addition, the defined religious centers of these maps – the 1524 Nuremberg original, Bordone’s copy, and his map of Venice – all resonated with the long tradition of European mappae mundi that placed Jerusalem at the center of the world, perhaps explaining the traction of Cortés’s original map to begin with. All these city views shared this sense of a moralized geography, long known to viewers of medieval maps, who would have recognized the concept of the sacred city at the center of civilization.34 Besides the image of Santo Domingo that accompanied Columbus’s first letter, the 1524 Cortés map represented Europe’s first glimpse of an American city, and this map and copies of it, somewhat remarkably, would remain the only image of the city that Europeans saw for almost two centuries.35 Bordone’s image of Tenochtitlan represented the first printed reproduction after the 1524 Nuremberg original, and his image appeared, with only slight alterations, in a great number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century atlases and books of travel.36 That is to say, numerous and significant European collections of cosmographic and travel literature copied and recycled Bordone’s less violent and more Europeanized image of the city, choosing his version over Cortés’s original. Bordone demonstrated his shrewd Venetian bookman’s editorial and marketing sensibilities by quickly realizing the map’s significance, refashioning it to make it more palatable and familiar to European audiences, and promptly publishing it in his isolario. Notably, Bordone opted not to emblematize Mexico with negative imagery, demonstrating how it was not a given that mapmakers necessarily selected the goriest elements to describe an exotic space in order to appeal to audiences’ taste for the sensational.37 The familiar, notably, could be as intriguing as the foreign. Where Bordone’s narrative text was concerned, he reduced Cortés’s lengthy chronicle of the conquest of Montezuma’s kingdom to a short, topographical account of the city, a summary that related the appearance, infrastructure, and

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daily life of Tenochtitlan and produced results similar to his printed image.38 While Cortés’s original letter offered lengthy descriptions of the violence that accompanied the conquest of Tenochtitlan, Bordone extracted only passages from Cortés’s text that concerned the geography of the region, the appearance of the city, and the workings of daily life in the city.39 Bordone drew most heavily and directly from the middle section of Cortés’s account, where Cortés describes Tenochtitlan’s physical layout and appearance, including the road into the city, its doors, the lake’s rising and falling tides, and Tenochtitlan’s streets paved of stone. His editing of Cortés’s letter resulted in a peaceful description of urban life that removed any indication of conquest and destruction. Perhaps to offer his readers at least one taste of the exotic,” Bordone did include one of Cortés’s more gruesome passages depicting Aztec human sacrifice: specifically, the Aztec extraction of blood from the still beating hearts of executed children that was used to soak grains and form a paste to make idols.40 Otherwise, however, Bordone left out any and all descriptions of violence, either among the Aztecs or between the Aztecs and the Spanish. He emphasized instead Cortés’s depiction of Tenochtitlan and its architecture, including Cortés’s comparison of the Mexican capital to other European cities, such as Granada, Seville, and Salamanca.41 Bordone finished drawing on Cortés’s letter exactly where Cortés’s account began to describe the final conquest of the city, including Spanish fighting with the Indians, the battle for Tenochtitlan, the brutal massacre of the inhabitants of the city, the cutting off of their hands, the burning of their houses, and the death of Montezuma, none of which Bordone included in his isolario. Bordone’s cutting and pasting – what he took from Cortés’s letter and what he consciously omitted – removed the urgency of Cortés’s firsthand account and left no evidence of the Spanish treatment of the native population. Bordone instead stressed the existence of a hitherto unknown city deserving of the attention of cultivated European readers interested in geography and global exploration. It was, of course, to be expected that Bordone would choose description over narrative for an isolario or book of cosmography, and would highlight Cortés’s long digression at the center of the Segunda carta that described the city’s streets, buildings, markets, and topography instead of the violent acts associated with European conquest. Nonetheless, Bordone’s editorial process resulted in a vision of civic order and tranquility, and a vision of the Mexican capital as peaceful, industrious, and orderly. That is to say, he produced an image of Tenochtitlan that was similar to Venice.42 Not unlike Nicolò Zen’s collaging of texts to create a Venetian narrative about the discovery of the New World, Bordone’s editing worked to clean up and aestheticize the Aztec capital and in doing so Venetianized it, especially since the comparison was already so prevalent. Both had bridges, canals, gates, and rising and falling tides, and Tenochtitlan possessed “many other things that make this city like Venice.”43 In addition, though he made no direct comment about Marco Polo per se, Bordone may

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have been pleased to see that Cortés was fascinated with non-European ceremonies, customs, and wealth, since there could easily have existed an implicit similarity for both Bordone and his readers between Cortés at the court of Montezuma and Polo at the court of the Great Khan. For early modern audiences, the sparkling cities of Mexico surely resembled the Asian cities visited by Polo and implied that the opposite could also be true. In addition to describing Tenochtitlan, the first book of Bordone’s isolario also considered Labrador, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Cuba and the Lesser Antilles, Guadalupe, Martinique, and the coast of Central America. While Bordone drew on classical and medieval sources for Books 2 and 3 of his text, the narrative component of Book 1 on the New World and the Atlantic relied primarily on the Libretto de tutta la navigazione de Re di Spagna and the Paesi nuovamente retrovati, once again indicating the legacy and continuing importance of these seminal Venetian compilations. Much as in his discussion of the Aztec capital, his textual descriptions of New World islands emphasized local life, recording the presence of bears and fish, men dressed in animal skins on the Terra de Lavoratore, the dazzling body piercings of the inhabitants of the Terra di Sancta Croce, and the pearls and gold of Paria (an inlet in the Caribbean Sea between Venezuela and Trinidad). While he mentioned that Columbus had built numerous fortifications on Hispaniola, one of which was named after Queen Isabella, his description of the island focused on the root-based diet of its indigenous inhabitants and its population of rabbits and green parrots. Similarly, while he noted briefly that the island of Guadalupe was populated with cannibals “deprived of all humanity,” he did not expand on this and concentrated instead on village topography. As with his longer account of Tenochtitlan, Bordone’s portrayal of the other islands of the New World detailed their flora, fauna, and natural life, offering essentially a superficial overview of American life.44 Like Bordone’s isolario, other books of islands connected Venice and Mexico, both visually and textually. Giulio Ballino’s De’disegni delle più illustri città et fortezze del mondo (1569) also indicated the similarities between Venice and Tenochtitlan. Ballino, an editor and humanist who lived and worked in Venice, described and illustrated fifty cities, most of which were located in Italy and Europe, as well as some in the Near East and Africa. Ballino placed Venice first in his book and Tenochtitlan last, suggesting once again in terms of the text’s ordering that it was these two cities, mirrors of one another, that framed urban existence. He noted that both cities employed similar systems of wells and water vendors.45 His maps of Venice and Tenochtitlan reinforced the cities’ likenesses (Figures 57 and 58). While the houses in his Tenochtitlan have flattened “Aztec” roofs rather than pointed Venetian ones and its piazza is framed by an Amerindian pattern, signifying perhaps a more nuanced knowledge of the city by this time, Ballino depicted gondolier-type boatmen, standing up and rowing from the back of the boat, navigating the waterways of both cities. The center of Ballino’s map of

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57. Giulio Ballino, “Venice,” in De’disegni delle più illustri città et fortezze del mondo. Venice, 1569. Copper engraving. With permission from the Newberry Library.

Tenochtitlan notably mixed Bordone’s headed (rather than decapitated) figure along with the skull racks from Cortés’s original letter, thereby offering, in this case, a more varied view of the city by 1569. Finally, in his L’isole piu famose del mondo (1576), Thomaso Porcacchi, who worked in the world of mid-Cinquecento Venetian poligrafi or professional writers employed at vernacular presses in the city, proclaimed that in Temistitan, “not without marvel, we see another Venice in the world.”46 The city’s streets “are either of earthen brick, or water, by which way (as in Venice, one travels by canal in lovely gondolas) they go by canoe.”47 Porcacchi added that there was an island village near Tenochtitlan, once called Cuetavaca but now called Venetiola or little Venice.48 Illustrated with images of cities and islands and engraved by Girolamo Porro, Porcacchi’s text depicted both Venice and Tenochtitlan as island cities surrounded by an oval frame of land: a format not used in any of Porro’s other plates (Figures 59 and 60). Though Tenochtitlan was founded by pagans, Porcacchi believed that “not without marvel, we see another Venice, founded by blessed God . . . by his very own hand.”49 Porcacchi began his account with an image and description of “the island city of Venice” and then went on to illustrate a host of Mediterranean and Atlantic islands in twenty-seven additional chapters, using the medium of islands and

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58. Giulio Ballino, “Timistitan,” in De’disegni delle più illustri città et fortezze del mondo. Venice, 1569. Copper engraving. With permission from the Newberry Library.

the model of Venice to link the Atlantic World to the Mediterranean. As in Bordone’s isolario, Porcacchi’s discussion of the other islands of the New World, including Santa Croce, Hispaniola, Cuba, and Jamaica, remained terse and descriptive, drawing on Cortés, Oviedo, and Peter Martyr to depict the houses, nude men, animals, diet, and customs of New World peoples.50 Porcacchi noted only briefly and in passing how the indigenous cultures and practices he depicted “describe the inhabitants that existed before the arrival of the Spanish, since now the country is inhabited by Europeans and they live by Spanish customs and with the Christian religion.”51 In sum, Venetian isolarii tended to offer little indication of either the potentially unsettling otherness of Amerindian cultures or the often gruesome realities of the Spanish presence in the New World. More importantly, with their regular pairing of Venice and Tenochtitlan, authors of Venetian books of islands constructed cosmopolitan civilization globally as an island phenomenon. The presence of a “second Venice” in the New World offered evidence to seal such an interpretation. If Venice had long been historically recognized as an industrious and dynamic city and if Tenochtitlan appeared to be similarly so, these two cities mutually reinforced each other’s status and prestige. That is

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59. Thomaso Porcacchi, “Venice,” in L’isole piu famose del mondo. Venice, 1576, 105. Copper engraving. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

to say, the larger implications of making the New World more familiar and agreeable and of depicting Tenochtitlan as similar to and commensurate with Venice were that representations of these two mirror cities could then underpin ideas about each other’s urban, cultural superiority. For Venetian printmen, the greatest and wealthiest city in the New World was not different or unique but instead like Venice. Significantly, such comparisons did not exist merely on the level of superficial description or symbolic rhetoric; evidence suggests that they were occasionally taken seriously, for instance, by Venetian engineers in debates about the state of the Venetian lagoon that were prominent in the middle of the century. Around 1550, the Paduan physician, scientist, and scholar Girolamo Fracastoro wrote to Alvise Cornaro, a Venetian patrician expert on dikes, land reclamation, and water management, contemplating the Venetian system of canals, including their cleaning and drainage, and proposed that one way to keep water in the lagoon in good circulation would be “to widen all the . . . canals between their banks, and in doing so return Venice once again to a lagoon, but a lagoon of fresh water, like Themistitan.”52 Fracastoro understood the American island city as a potential model for Venice. In his Oriental

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6 0. Thomaso Porcacchi, “Temistitan,” in L’isole piu famose del mondo. Venice, 1576, 65. Copper engraving. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Despotism, Karl Wittfogel argued that rulers who had successfully undertaken massive feats of environmental engineering were “uniquely prepared to wield supreme political power,” and early modern Venetians may have made similar calculations as they compared the unusual watery environment of these two cities.53 Historians have long emphasized the hybrid character of isolarii; they were texts that existed between the Middle Ages and modernity; that shifted cartography from cosmography to ethnography; that demonstrated a new “spatialization” of the world in the Renaissance; and that resulted from the collaboration of many authors in linked networks of knowledge.54 Like the collections, compilations, and adaptations of information from various genres in the work of Alessandro Zorzi, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, and Nicolò Zen, isolarii were also forms of pastiche about the New World, or as the historian of cartography Frank Lestringant puts it, represented “the art of bricolage in all its forms.”55 What has been less scrutinized, however, is the fundamentally didactic nature of these texts. On the surface, isolarii appear as encyclopedias offering the curious reader a knowledge of the geography of the world as it expanded, but prophetic and persuasive motivations also underlay their function. Among their many purposes, they used text and image to suggest the

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possibilities of early modern European expansion, not so much documenting history as conditioning the reader, with a clear political cadence, to the possibilities inherent in the future. David Harley, for instance, has underscored the fact that Bordone’s New World islands were stylized European scenes that depicted “wooded hills . . . more reminiscent of Tuscany than a tropical island” (Figure 56). As Harley puts it, “making the unknown seem familiar, may have been a factor encouraging European colonization.”56 While this remains a somewhat speculative reading, there is no doubt that isolarii contained a whiff of colonialism and, as Harley posited, reinforced the idea that America belonged to Europe, if not to Venice. It is hard to miss the colonial eye of the authors of isolarii as they listed the natural wealth of New World islands, including their gold and silver mines, varied wildlife, fertile lands, and safe harbors.57 Of course, such suggestions remained subtle; Marco Polo also listed the resources and riches of Asia, and his was not clearly a colonial text. Nevertheless, it was probably not accidental that in addition to his images of Venice and Temistitam, Bordone also enlarged his images of Crete, Euboea, and Cyprus with respect to all the other images in his text, reminding readers of the particular political and commercial significance of these islands to Venice, and in turn implying such possibilities for the Mexican capital or other American territories, either already known or as yet undiscovered.58 By linking islands in the Mediterranean – and prominently depicting those that were once Venetian colonies – seamlessly with islands in the New World, Venetian isolarii connected historic colonialism and authority in the Mediterranean to a potential for continued Venetian leadership in the wider world, including the Americas. To be clear, while the Florentines seriously considered colonial settlements in Brazil, there is no evidence of any lasting or serious Venetian intention to become a colonial power in the Atlantic World.59 By underscoring the similarity of islands around the world, this insular, Venetian model of world geography, much like printed maps or Nicolò Zen’s Dello scoprimento, worked more to make an argument for continued Venetian relevance, though primarily as armchair or textual colonialists. On the one hand, the fact that Tenochtitlan fulfilled a set of basic urbanistic requirements, including beauty, complexity, and wealth, implied the city’s suitability as a place for Venetian or European settlement. On the other hand, noting the remarkable urban sophistication of the island city of Tenochtitlan served more generally to mirror and confirm the greatness of the lagoon city in the Adriatic. A curious repercussion of this descriptive and often sanitizing approach that isolarii took toward the New World was that by avoiding any substantive discussion of the effects of the Spanish presence, isolarii tended to depict the Americas as timeless and unchanging. For instance, drawing on Cortés’s account, Bordone provided long lists of the types of animals and goods found

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in Tenochtitlan, the workings of local religion and justice, and the social customs and political practices of Montezuma and his courtiers. He recounted how the Aztecs paid tolls and taxes to Montezuma, who “is aware of everything.”60 “Both those who are far away and those who are in his presence fear and obey him . . . [and] no lord in the world commands as much respect as he does.”61 Bordone described how five or six hundred servants came to work in the court of Montezuma every day, three hundred of whom were employed in Montezuma’s kitchen.62 He went so far as to change the verbs in Cortés’s account from the past tense to the present, describing Tenochtitlan almost as if the Spanish, their violence, and their reforming religious practices had never arrived in the city.63 Indeed, it was somewhat remarkable for Bordone to write in 1528 that “[i]t would be a difficult thing to know just how large the kingdom of Montezuma is . . . his dominion is as large as that of Spain,” when Venetian ambassadors such as Gasparo Contarini had long ago brought home the news that Cortés had destroyed the city.64 Ballino’s isolario did acknowledge in the last sentence of his paragraph on Tenochtitlan that the Mexican capital had changed since the arrival of Cortés; the indigenous population had been largely destroyed, lost its original customs, and been remade into civilized Christians.65 Nevertheless, like Bordone, Ballino otherwise depicted the pre-Spanish city in the present tense: the markets, buildings, urban planning, and customs of the Aztecs under Montezuma as if they still existed. “They offer the hearts of men to their statues placed in chapels, and anoint their faces with the blood that comes out . . . They obey their king with much humility and obey him readily and practice infinite ceremonies in serving him”: all practices that had not gone on for nearly fifty years by the time Ballino published his text.66 Porcacchi also described the jewelry, long hair, and feathered clothing of the Aztecs – their temples, palaces, and customs – as if nothing had changed since 1520, mentioning only briefly at the end of his description that “these people later changed their barbarous, inhuman customs and became gracious and human,” dramatically understating the effects of the Spanish conquest in the city.67 Though published in 1528, 1569, and 1572, each of these isolarii described the city of Tenochtitlan and its inhabitants as they had existed on the eve of the conquests, marveling at Montezuma’s palace, gardens, and servants long after they had ceased to exist. By the time of their respective publications, the city as these authors depicted it in text and image no longer existed. As Cortés described in his third letter to Charles V on May 15, 1522, “considering that Temixtitan itself had once been so renowned and of such importance, we decided to settle in it and also to rebuild it, for it was completely destroyed.”68 Tenochtitlan had already begun to be transformed by August of 1521. The static images of the city presented by Venetian writers of isolarii ignored the reality of canals that were being filled in, temples that were being razed and

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recycled to build private residences and churches of European design, and work on a new cathedral and residential palaces occupying the Aztec’s main site of worship in the Plaza Mayor. Between1520 and 1560, Spanish policy that legislated the urban layout of New World cities resulted in the burial of the Aztec world under the viceregal capital of Mexico City.69 VENETIAN COSTUME BOO KS AND TH E NEW WORLD

This tendency to depict the Americas as if frozen in an idealized, utopian past – a past devoid not only of a Spanish presence but similarly of its African, mestizo, and mulatto inhabitants – culminated in Venetian costume books produced toward the end of the sixteenth century.70 Pietro Bertelli’s Diversarum nationum habitus (1589–1596) and Alessandro Fabri’s Diversarum nationum ornatus cum suis iconibus (1593) both illustrated clothed and adorned figures from the New World. Bertelli’s 1589 volume portrayed the clothing from an array of civilizations such as those of the Romans, Arabs, and Persians, and included two Americans: the last Inca king of independent Peru, decorated with feathers and armed with a bow and arrows, and his noble female counterpart, adorned with a skirt, mantle, and hat of feathers (Figure 61).71 Bertelli’s second edition in 1592 added two images of Algonquians, and these images in turn were later adapted by Fabri.72 Later, the twelfth book of the second edition of Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti antichi et moderni (1598) included twenty incisions and

61. Pietro Bertelli, “Atahualpa” and “A Noblewoman from America,” in Diversarum nationum habitus. Venice, 1589, 65–66. Engraving. Courtesy of the Beinecke Library.

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descriptions of the costumes of Algonquians, Timucuans, Mexicans, and Peruvians.73 To be clear, the Venetians by no means invented illustrated costume books, which had emerged earlier, for example, in François Despres’s Recueil de la diversité des habits qui sont de present en usage tant es pays d’Europe, Asie, Affrique et Illes Sauvages (Paris, 1562), which contained images of Brazilians, and Nicolas de Nicolay’s Discours et histoire veritable des navigations, peregrinations, et voyages faicts en la Turquie (Antwerp, 1586).74 Building on the genre, Bertelli’s, Fabri’s, and Vecellio’s books continued to familiarize learned Italians with images of peoples from a variety of new worlds, including the Americas. For their prints of Virginians and Floridians, Bertelli and Vecellio both drew on the first two parts of Theodor De Bry’s engravings and narratives in his America occidentalis (Frankfurt, 1590–1598). For part 1 of this collection (entitled Admiranda narration fida tamen, de commodis et incolarum ritibus Virginiae), De Bry – who, like Venetian editors, never himself traveled to the Americas – commissioned a Latin translation based on Thomas Harriot’s account of Virginia, A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, which had been published in English in London in 1588.75 For the Pars secunda americae (entitled Brevis narratio eorum quae in Florida Americae provincia Gallis acciderunt), De Bry used a Latin translation of four accounts of Jacques le Moyne de Morgues and René de Laudonnière’s stay among the Timucua Indians of Florida. Where illustrating the New World was concerned, the size, number, and quality of De Bry’s engravings were unprecedented, and “almost overnight, the De Bry collection became indispensable for Europeans who wanted to have a state-of-the-art iconography of the overseas world.”76 Vecellio based his 1598 woodcuts of indigenous people from Virginia and Florida on figures in De Bry’s engravings.77 He accompanied these images with brief Italian commentaries, all offering a window onto the complex provenance, movement, and recycling of representations of the Americas between the New World and the Old, as well as between Northern and Southern Europe. Just as Bordone had edited Cortés’s letter to produce a more palatable image of Tenochtitlan, Vecellio similarly aimed to familiarize New World peoples to European audiences by selecting carefully among De Bry’s complex scenes of New World warfare, ceremonies, and customs and revising them according to his own purposes.78 For instance, Vecellio’s “Habito delle Donne dell’Isola Virginia” copied De Bry’s engraving of an Algonquian woman carrying her child whom De Bry had depicted from the front and back (Figures 62 and 63).79 Vecellio centered the single figure of this mother and isolated it in his frame, removed from De Bry’s background where men row boats on a river. Similarly, in De Bry’s print, the “Queen of Florida” stands in a crowd of people, presenting a branch to her husband while attendants stand behind both of them. In Vecellio’s version, the queen is separated from her entourage and turns to offer a piece of fruit to the viewer (Figures 64 and 65).80 Vecellio’s image of an

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62. Theodor De Bry, “Algonquian Woman and Child,” in Les grands voyages, vol. 1, plate 10. Frankfurt, 1590. Engraving. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Algonquian woman with a gourd similarly reduces De Bry’s more detailed ethnographic depiction of indigenous Roanoke culture and colonial exchange. In De Bry’s plate “A Chief Lady of Pomeiooc,” a daughter, to the right of her mother, holds an English doll; in Vecellio’s rendition, a single woman alone looks out of the frame (Figures 66 and 67).81 When Vecellio separated De Bry’s figures out from their backgrounds in this ahistorical fashion, he often eliminated the violence otherwise found in De Bry’s scenes. For instance, Vecellio’s “Floridian page” drew on De Bry’s images of Timucuan warfare (Figures 68 and 69), but removed entirely the social context of De Bry’s image in which women appealed to the Florida chief because their husbands had died in battle with Europeans, depicted in armor and with weapons in the upper right of De Bry’s image.82 Similarly, Vecellio’s plate representing Algonquian “Centurions,” “who wear certain skins of birds on their heads, with their beaks and feet through their ears . . . to look more terrifying,” copied De Bry’s image of phalanxes of Timucuan archers and warriors, but extracted this single figure from De Bry’s otherwise densely peopled scene of preparations for warfare (Figures 70 and 71).83 Indeed, De Bry’s America occidentalis often depicted violence in the New World quite graphically, including images of cannibalism. For instance, De Bry famously portrayed Brazilians enthusiastically roasting human arms, legs, and ribs, and

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63. Cesare Vecellio, “Algonquian Woman and Child,” in Habiti antichi et moderni. Venice, 1598, 503v. Woodcut. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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64. Theodor De Bry, “The King and Queen of Florida Taking a Stroll,” in Les grands voyages, vol. 2, plate 39. Frankfurt, 1591. Engraving. With permission from the Newberry Library.

included scenes such as “How sentinels are punished for sleeping at their posts,” the “Murder of the Frenchman Pierre Gambié,” “How Outina’s Men Treated the Slain of the Enemy,” and the Floridians’ “Sacrifice of First Born Children,” yet Vecellio never copied figures from the most violent of De Bry’s images of indigenous life. He systematically avoided these and instead chose among De Bry’s more placid scenes, such as that of the king and queen of Florida “taking a stroll” (Figure 64).84 While readers on the Italian peninsula were offered these archaic and serene images of the New World, De Bry’s American iconography, “a printed monument against Spanish tyranny” as it was disseminated in the Protestant north, was, to say the least, clearly “much less reassuring.”85 While De Bry’s work became one of the linchpins of Black Legend propaganda in Northern Europe, much like Bordone, Vecellio used De Bry to relate the strangeness of the New World – including Amerindian nudity, tattoos, eagle headdresses, and fur capes trimmed with hanging animal tails – without discussing the violent events that had taken place there. The textual descriptions that accompanied Vecellio’s framed figures were similarly brief and simplistic. He hoped to offer a sense of the fascination of the unknown while keeping it generally agreeable to European readers, presenting images of the Americas that were at once intriguing and reassuring, exotic and pacific.86 Venetian narrative

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65. Cesare Vecellio, “The Queen of Florida,” in Habiti antichi et moderni. Venice, 1598, 497v. Woodcut. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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6 6. Theodor De Bry, “A Chief Lady of Pomeiooc,” in Les grands voyages, vol. 1, plate 8. Frankfurt, 1590. Engraving. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

accounts such as Ferdinand Columbus’s Historie and Benzoni’s Historia more readily demonized the Spanish, but printed images appeared to work in the opposite direction and to ignore Spanish violence. Perhaps this is not surprising, since it was not the main purpose of isolarii or costume books as genres to address violence; the costume book was not a particularly warlike genre. Nevertheless, these texts decidedly avoided any commentary on or analysis of violence in the Americas. Considering the practice of scientific collecting – indeed, Vecellio’s text has much in common with a curiosity cabinet – Claudia Swan has noted that Vecellio’s sequenced woodcuts work to frame each American with little change in format or perspective. “The grid or tabular model of organization is artificial and schematic,” she argues, “but it is not necessarily hierarchical. It is, rather, serial.”87 Bronwen Wilson has argued that Vecellio’s framing produced two results: it both encouraged readers to notice differences in figures’ clothing and prompted them to understand his characters as resembling one another. “In the wake of discoveries of worlds unknown to Europeans, and in striking contrast to the regional variations in flora and fauna, the contours of the human body unexpectedly . . . appeared to be universal.”88 Such reflections allow us to place Vecellio’s opus into the broader context of the Venetian production of New World knowledge. Indeed, all of the peoples in Vecellio’s text from various parts

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67. Cesare Vecellio, “A Married Woman from Virginia,” in Habiti antichi et moderni. Venice, 1598, 500v. Woodcut. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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6 8. Theodor De Bry, “Timucuan Warfare,” in Les grands voyages, vol. 2, plate 18. Frankfurt, 1591. Engraving. With permission from the Newberry Library.

of the world (and in fact, in other non-Venetian costume books as well) have been displayed in isolation in this way; this was not something particular to his American figures, which were but a fraction of the ethno-racial types featured in his album of costumes. These were not portraits but a schematic of essences and a harvesting of diversity, all equally incorporated to a Venetian world view of assimilating information. Much like compendia of travel literature or Venetian cartographic production, Vecellio’s text represented an assertion of a Venetian global mentality focused on collecting knowledge from around the world and integrating the Americas into this world view. In doing so, Vecellio, much like the Augsburg printmakers Hans Burgkmair and Jörg Breu, “suggested systematic comparisons of the sort that would later underwrite taxonomy, and other protoscientific gestures like ethnography.”89 In most other instances, the sources for Vecellio’s images are relatively unknown. He assembled his knowledge over a long period of time during the 1570s and 1580s and drew on living people, direct observation, paintings, drawings, architectural decoration, and other costume books.90 Vecellio’s links to De Bry are clear, but the pre-existing contexts of Vecellio’s other prints are

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69. Cesare Vecellio, “A Floridian Page,” in Habiti antichi et moderni. Venice, 1598, 499v. Woodcut. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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70. Theodor De Bry, “Timucuan Warriors,” in Les grands voyages, vol. 2, plate 14. Frankfurt, 1591. Engraving. With permission from the Newberry Library.

unclear. It remains difficult to trace them to specific images or compare their relative origins to Vecellio’s final products with an eye to ascertaining whether Vecellio decontextualized some representations more than others. What is clear, however, is that essentializing these figures and assimilating them all equally functioned as yet another example of Venetians wielding control over the knowledge of the world around them, including the Americas. While Vecellio occasionally pointed to the inferiority of Amerindians (“they do not know how to manage grapevines, so they do not drink wine”), on the whole he expressed a deep respect for New World peoples.91 He noted that Peruvians were “very skillful in battle” and called the Virginian mother’s way of holding her child “fine.”92 Where admiration was concerned, however, Vecellio, Venetian print culture more broadly, and Venetian observations of the New World at large all tended to focus their praise on the aesthetic qualities of American products, with special attention to indigenous crafts and beautiful objects, arguably more so than Vecellio’s predecessor François Deserps.93 Vecellio praised the glorious feather clothing of the New World as “very elegant” and “beautiful,” admired how Mexican women spun cloth and the kings of Florida “carry tall staffs in their hands, made very elegantly with feathers and tassels at the top,” and noted how the women of Virginia painted

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71. Cesare Vecellio, “A Centurion from Virginia,” in Habiti antichi et moderni. Venice, 1598, 501v. Woodcut. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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themselves “in a marvelous way.”94 As we have seen, Bordone focused much of his text on the appearance of Tenochtitlan, especially the city’s bridges, canals, streets, and buildings. Aztec temples were “beautifully adorned” (“ottimamente acconcie”), Mexican palaces were “beautiful,” and their “beautiful gardens full of every sort of fruit and flower.”95 Bordone included long lists and descriptions of the beautiful goods that could be purchased in the city, including a variety of arts and crafts such as precious stone, metal, and featherwork, noting that the inhabitants were “skilled in everything.”96 He remarked that “they use an incredible diligence when making their idols; they are all of gold or silver, and they still make them with feathers and precious stones, and these are of such excellence that it would be impossible for any other people to make them so perfectly in this way.”97 In his reworking of Cortés’s letter, Bordone retained some of the more particular aesthetic details from Cortés’s description of life at Montezuma’s court, including, for instance, the fact that Montezuma ate his meals “on a leather cushion crafted with much artifice” (“sopra un cossino di cuoio, con molto artificio lavorato”).98 All these observations consistently emphasized the beauty and skill of New World craftsmanship. The contemporary remarks of Venetian ambassadors neatly reflected these interests in aesthetics. Ambassadorial dispatches from Spain were usually surprisingly devoid of ethnographic information about the New World. When they did take note of indigenous culture however, it was often to remark upon Amerindians’ skills as craftspeople. For instance, on March 4, 1520, the ambassador to Spain Francesco Corner described being invited to the palace of Charles V in Valladolid, who showed him a series of novelties that had just arrived from the Yucatán, together with a group of Indian envoys themselves. Corner was struck most by the Indians’ golden lip-plugs and tattoos, gold and silver idols, headdresses, animal heads sculpted in gold and adorned with feathers, and mosaic work, all of which “truly show that in those parts there are persons of skill.”99 Other ambassadors returning from Spain to Venice often expressed having been dazzled by New World featherwork.100 In his diaries, Sanudo included a copy of a private letter from Tomaso Contarini, for instance, dated July 10, 1523 from Valladolid, that mentioned ships arriving with clothing and adornments all made of feathers that are so well and finely crafted that you have never seen any embroidery either of silk or gold that one could compare to this. It has a natural luster that is so beautiful [and] changes color according to your position. It is really a marvelous thing. Of the other things, although they are beautiful, I don’t remember them, since this seemed to me the most marvelous.101

A letter dated September 6, 1524 from Carlo Contarini, ambassador to the Archduke of Austria Ferdinand in Vienna, similarly took note of “a priest’s

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vestment all carefully worked in quills and feathers of different, natural colors, but above all beautiful, that for my faith, I don’t know if one can find anything more beautiful in the world.”102 The correspondence of Gasparo Contarini in particular, ambassador to Charles V (1521–1525), offered some of the lengthiest and most detailed descriptions of the New World among all ambassadorial reports in sixteenthcentury Venice, including descriptions of the epic conquests of Cortés and the fall of Tenochtitlan. He sent a lengthy letter to Venice from Valladolid on September 24, 1522 describing Cortés’s arrival in the city, where “the inhabitants are very civilized . . . Their dwellings are comfortable and well decorated, they dress themselves and adorn their houses with cloths made of cotton. They have an abundance of gold, but they do not use it for money; they value it highly and use it in various ornaments.”103 Like Corner before him, Contarini expressed amazement and admiration for the cultures of the New World, including and especially that of Tenochtitlan, a “marvelous” city “posted in the middle of a salt water lake . . . like Venice.” Even though its inhabitants were idolatrous cannibals, They are industrious in work, and I saw some gold vases, and others from there [that were] beautiful and well crafted. They don’t have iron, but they use stone in its place. I also saw mirrors made from stone. They also undertake miraculous featherwork. I have certainly never seen in other parts any embroidery, nor other work so subtle as some of these featherworks, which have another beauty, since they shift in color according to the light, as do the feathers on the neck of a dove.104

Such descriptions of objects and materiality that placed a notable emphasis on artistry and workmanship – as seen in both Venetian printed texts and ambassadorial reports – implied, on the one hand, indigenous ingegeno, or natural abilities, skill, and intelligence. In addition, they suggested a nascent Amerindian ability to participate in a market economy.105 New World peoples, with their highly developed talents in craft manufacturing and their demonstrated capacity to produce and appreciate beautiful and well-crafted objects, echoed and reflected mentalities of commodity exchange deeply embedded in Venice and Europe in the early modern period. Such emphasis – the effect and purpose of this aestheticizing presentation – once again underscored the compatibility of New World peoples with those of the Old. Bordone aestheticized Tenochtitlan, and Vecellio aestheticized Amerindians, we must note, not simply for the sake of emphasizing their beauty but to convey and represent certain ideologies, namely, one of commensurability. Here, constructing likeness with the New World perhaps alluded to the possibilities of contracts of exchange. Parties to a contractual relationship must be comparable, so creating images of New World peoples and places that were aesthetically similar to Venetians, or placed similar

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values on aesthetic principles, perhaps suggested Venetian musings about doing business with indigenous Americans. Venetians’ lived experience of trade and exchange was deeply rooted. If Venetian writers and cosmographers fashioned images of America and New World peoples that were commensurate with Venice, it would not be surprising if, in seeing the world historically through the lens of commerce and exchange, Venetians implied or at least wondered about the possibilities of commercial partnership in the construction of such images. That is to say, Venetian images of America at times reflected more of a mercantile or commercial gaze than a colonial one. On the one hand, Vecellio’s prints seem to reflect quite simply a Renaissance gaze. He often classicized his figures as if they were Greco-Roman statues in contrapposto and placed them in frames with Romanizing cornices and columns, in this way making them more familiar to a European audience than they were in De Bry’s otherwise more complex narrative scenes. Indeed, this aestheticizing, classicizing impulse aligns neatly with much of what historians such as John Elliott have long noted about representations of the Americas, namely, that Europeans understood the New World through the lens of classical antiquity.106 On the other hand, however, Margaret Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones have argued that by removing these figures from De Bry’s detailed environments and landscapes, Vecellio’s main purpose was not so much to classicize them as it was to efface their cultural roots entirely.107 In doing so, Vecellio’s prints of New World peoples – blocked off, removed from crowds, and separated out from their social and natural activities – offered images of indigenous Americans that were sterile, culturally isolated, and detached. While these are costume books, and indeed all of these figures wear some kind of clothing or adornment, many of them wear very little clothing at all. The elders of Virginia “cover their private parts with animal skins, but otherwise they go naked” (506r); the pages of Florida – those who preceded the king with fans and protected him from the sun – “go naked and cover their private parts with animal skins” (500r); and most soldiers in Florida “go into battle nude” (499r). As Jill Burke has argued, “these people were figuratively naked even if they wore some clothes,” since nakedness or near nakedness “implied the lack of an entire social system.” Compilers of images of global costume in the early modern era suggested that if clothing defined a social place, near nakedness could imply the complete loss of social identity.108 That is to say, the aestheticizing compulsion of these texts, while not erasing indigenous cultures entirely, came quite close, by turning the people in their pages into objects of aesthetic consumption. Indeed, New World peoples seem most frequently portrayed as producers of aesthetic objects or as aesthetic objects themselves rather than as the subjects or objects of violence. Or, it was as if the authors of costume books seemed to say that if there were one thing worthy of preservation in

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Amerindian cultures, it was New World craftsmanship and indigenous skill in making beautiful objects. In the end, it remains difficult to isolate any single motive behind the editorial work of Bordone or Vecellio; they manipulated images of the New World to produce their own Venetian versions that were classicizing, cleansing, ordering, made safe, aestheticized, less violent, more European, commercially appealing, and dehistoricized. While there is no one way to pin down the intentions or results (let alone the reception) of these Venetian printed books, it is certain that the processes of selecting and editing are productive acts, aimed at generating a particular effect, and for a reason. Again, while it would remain too simplistic to assert any particular goal or purpose behind the work of these Venetian editors and printmakers, they tended to depict a New World that was pacific and beautiful. Their images operated as a kind of cultural glide path between the New World and the Old, and perhaps even as visual and textual bridges between America and Venice itself. These printmakers employed a variety of editorial processes, including the mechanisms of editing and reconfiguration, to produce texts and images that worked together to impart an ideology of likeness, harmony, and congruency, especially by emphasizing Amerindian aesthetic appearance, practices, and skill. Like isolarii, costume books also represented indigenous people in a timeless manner that barely reflected their catastrophic engagement with the Spanish. For instance, Vecellio euphemistically remarked that the Peruvians “have adopted Spanish religion and have taken on a better way of life, and now that they are Catholic, they have given up their idols and worship the real God.”109 Mexican women also “by now obey the church.”110 Many of Vecellio’s figures appear proud in an almost childlike way of the gifts given to them by the Spanish: the mirror held by the Mexican youth, or the Spanish textiles that they model for the viewer (Figures 72 and 73). Noblemen of Cuzco, he reports, are “delighted by any shirt the Spanish might give them,” while Mexicans carry mirrors “which they think of as jewels; these are brought to them from Europe by the Spanish.”111 Of course, we must acknowledge, this is a costume book, where Vecellio naturally focuses on shirts and textiles. Nevertheless, it is intriguingly through objects and clothing that the Spanish occupy and conquer Vecellio’s New World. Once again, aesthetics were central, as conquest for Vecellio was achieved through beautiful objects as much as warfare. Vecellio depicted indigenous Americans in a sympathetic, if not benevolently condescending (or as Ann Rosalind Jones puts it, “melancholic”), fashion; the innocent, docile, simple natives who people his pages lived blessedly among the flowers, perfume, birds, and animals of the New World, “adoring the sun and the moon.”112 Like Bordone, Vecellio used the present tense, offering an inaccurate and ahistorical sense of the relatively seamless continuation of Amerindian cultures.

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72. Cesare Vecellio, “A Mexican Youth,” in Habiti antichi et moderni. Venice, 1598, 492v. Woodcut. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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73. Cesare Vecellio, “A Woman from Peru,” in Habiti antichi et moderni. Venice, 1598, 491v. Woodcut. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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Virginians, for instance, when their princes died, “take out their intestines and put them in the sun and dry them; then they wrap them in certain mats and set them on the highest level of their temples, and the priests care for them constantly.”113 Against the massive demographic collapse that occurred in the Americas in this period, the indigenous nobles that did survive retained some degree of their status, identity, and material culture, at least among their own kin lines, until well into the eighteenth century. Amerindian cultures declined dramatically, but were never extinguished completely, and in this way, such representations were not entirely inaccurate. Nevertheless, like isolarii, costume books illustrated a past that either was almost dead or no longer existed. They depicted a time when the humble and poor but dignified Inca princes dressed in skins were the only real lords of their land and not, as was long the case by the time these texts were published, an ousted nobility that was slowly being absorbed into the race of the Spanish conquerors. There was an irony to this, since Vecellio himself noted in his opening “To the Reader” that fashion and the discovery of the New World had in common the fact that new discoveries brought new clothes, and “styles are constantly changing.”114 While styles may have been on the move, the history of the New World according to these Venetian printmen was not. Venetian isolarii and costume books offered no indication of the spectacular persecutions and demographic collapse that occurred in the New World between 1525 and 1540, after which many aspects of indigenous culture sank into obscurity forever. Instead, these printmen, archaeologists more than ethnographers, fixed in their pages a last glimpse of a culture that had by then disappeared long ago. THE VENETIAN NEW WORLD: MARVEL AND CORRESPONDENCE

By the sixteenth century, especially following the publication of Las Casas’s Brevísima relación, the “noble savage” had already appeared as a standard trope in the depiction of New World peoples; its emergence in Venetian texts such as isolarii and costume books was therefore predictable.115 Nor is it entirely surprising that Venetians manipulated material to help them classify new information, or that visual and verbal images of Tenochtitlan remained static. Richard Kagan has shown that the Cortés/Bordone map of Tenochtitlan was essentially the only image of Mexico City that Europeans saw for two centuries, possibly because it was cheaper for publishers to recycle old images or because of “early modern Europe’s well-known distrust for novelty and change.”116 These unchanging images and associated refusal to “see” Mexico City as it evolved become more intriguing, however, when we consider that they were printed in a city that functioned as one of Europe’s leading centers of information and communication, on the cutting edge of knowledge about

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travel and the New World.117 Why would otherwise precocious Venetian printmen produce and continue to publish these outdated images? They did so perhaps because these static, utopian images of the New World had specific and self-referential meaning in Venetian culture, where they evoked similarities between America before the conquests and Venice in the noble days of its foundation. Such equivalencies rested in part, once again, on the idea of the island itself, the defining geographical medium of both the Venetian lagoon and the New World. The idea of the island dominated the Venetian past, as the city was mythically founded when its first settlers inhabited the islands of the lagoon in large numbers in the sixth century, eventually leading to the development of its capital on the islands of the Rialto. Venetian merchants had long traded with, lived on, and colonized the islands of the Mediterranean, which provided the basis of Venetian wealth and prosperity. As we have seen, it was no accident that cosmographers such as Bordone and Porcacchi depicted the changing world of the sixteenth century through the organizing concept of the island, which allowed them to order systematically and comprehensibly the New World together with the old. The space of the island fundamentally provided a type of continuity between the known and the new where connections were often otherwise hard to find. Not incidentally, isolarii referred to the “island” of Santa Croce or the northern part of South America, Vecellio portrayed figures from the “island of Florida,” and both Bertelli and Vecellio referred to the “island of Virginia.”118 Though Virginia had been discovered only in 1587 and its geography still remained unclear, it had long been known that Florida was terra firma, suggesting that Vecellio’s “island of Florida” represented yet another outdated, Venetian vision of the New World. Venetian descriptions of the New World shared many similarities with Venetian depictions of Venice’s earliest lagoon community, and there exists an almost eerie echo between these two mythologized, picturesque, by then extinct societies. Venetian writers idealized the early inhabitants of their lagoon as serene, simple, pure, and uncorrupted. Humanist histories of the sixteenth century regularly included accounts of the primitive but virtuous and utopian life in the lagoon in the time of late antiquity, drawn especially from the letters of Cassiodorus (485–585), who portrayed the first Venetians as navigating the waters of a vast, deserted lagoon with their small wooden boats, hunting, fishing, and bartering salt in “permanent tranquil security.”119 Though these people were poor, they were free and lived in harmony and equality. “One kind of food refreshes all; the same sort of dwelling shelters everyone; no one can envy his neighbor’s home; and living in this moderate style they escape that vice [of envy] to which all the rest of the world is liable.”120 The Germanic invasions in the sixth century later encouraged a wave of migration to the lagoon and inaugurated an even greater golden age of peace, piety,

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industry, and a culture without thefts, homicide, or violence. Incorporating Cassiodorus’s imagery, Francesco Sansovino idealized the early lagoon settlement in his sixteenth-century history of the city as “perfect” in the way that rich and poor lived together in peace and concord.121 Venetians perhaps saw shades of their own lost island paradise recalled in images of the newly found islands of America and could equate their own sense of nobility with that of New World peoples. Nicolò Zen’s 1558 text Dello scoprimento, for instance, described the inhabitants of the New World as “living on wildfowl and fish . . . [of which] they catch an almost infinite number”; without trouble or expense, these “industrious workmen . . . have whatever they wish.”122 There were no scythes or plows on the islands of the Atlantic, Caribbean, or early Adriatic, no tools to cultivate the land, only boats and fishing gear to exploit the riches of the water. Vecellio described the Floridians as “taking great delight in hunting and fishing.” He noted that “the inhabitants do not know how to cultivate the vine, so they do not drink wine”; nevertheless, “they are robust men who do not lead soft lives and therefore live for a long time.”123 According to Ballino, the people of Tenochtitlan were “incredibly industrious, and of subtle intelligence,” like the original inhabitants of the Venetian lagoon in Cassiodorus’s and Sansovino’s histories.124 To a certain degree, New World peoples embodied the obscure, earliest origins of Europeans at large. Ethnographic treatises depicting Amerindians as the lost tribes of Israel or as examples of apostolic Christian communities functioned as generic manuals of European archaeology, as the Dominican friar Diego Durán demonstrated in the Historia de las Indias (1576–1581), his detailed account of the pre-Columbian world and the history and culture of the Aztecs. For José de Acosta, New World peoples had descended from the Jews; for Francisco López de Gómara, the New World represented Plato’s lost Atlantis. Perhaps Europeans’ own earliest forefathers went naked, were ignorant of the arts of the forge or the rules of marriage, and preferred the shelter of caves.125 Indeed, it was a commonplace of early modern thought that the New World was “in almost everything . . . like that of the first and Golden Age.”126 If this was the case, it was especially so in Venice. Peter Martyr, for instance, described the Taino on Hispaniola in precisely this way. “Without weights and measures, without in sum deadly money, living in a golden age, without laws, without false dealing judges, without books, they pass their lives content with nature, hardly troubled about the future. . . . Theirs is a golden age: they do not hedge their estates with ditches [or] walls,” passages that could easily describe Venice, including the watery city’s peculiar topography.127 It was surely not accidental that Vecellio mistranslated Le Moyne’s commentary (in Latin in De Bry’s text) through the lens of Genesis to underscore Venetian views of the New World as a lost paradise when he suggested that Floridians covered

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themselves not with dye leaves but with fig leaves, as had Adam and Eve.128 Though it would be impossible to prove a direct connection, it is hard not to notice how in copying De Bry’s queen of Florida, Vecellio subtly transformed her into a likeness of Botticelli’s Venus: a long-standing Venetian symbol of purity and freedom, born from the sea.129 On the one hand, the idea that the Venetians saw a similarity between the earliest inhabitants of their own lagoon and the peoples of the New World might appear no more than a speculation; nevertheless, such connections become more legible and make more sense in light of the many other ways in which Venetian editors, cosmographers, and printmakers so regularly likened the New World, its cities, and inhabitants to Venice. Just as Venetians asserted their cartographic knowledge of the Americas in the moment just before their commercial and cultural centrality was eclipsed by Northern Europe, static images of the Americas and a Venetian linking of New World peoples to the first Venetians suggest a nostalgic attachment to the past, as well as a resistance to change and an unwillingness to confront it, or perhaps a Venetian illusion of immunity to historical change, embodied in “the imagination of a happy time, of a calm period when everything elsewhere appears engulfed in change.”130 The mechanisms at work in creating this ideology of commensurability between New World peoples, the Americas, and the inhabitants of the Venetian lagoon, on the one hand, once again quietly but potentially represented the Americas as a territory for Venetian appropriation. The larger implications behind the creation of this equivalency were that if indigenous Americans were like the first inhabitants of the Venetian lagoon, and if the New World was like Venice, then surely Venetians could inhabit a land with a population so similar to their own. They shared a certain industriousness, a peaceful nature (as constructed through the process of selection and editing), and a rootedness in an urban, island setting. The productive work of creating geographies and environments of equivalency opened the door to colonialism, whether it be actual or, as was more often the case for Venetians, textual, or a colonialism of knowledge and expertise. On the other hand, such comparisons hinted that if New World peoples were comparable to the earliest settlers of the Venetian lagoon, perhaps Venetians saw these newly encountered peoples as having the same kind of great potential that their ancestors did. It would be no wonder that they built such a magnificent city, since like Venetians, they had a similar character, and similarly admirable attributes. Venetian history, and the rhetoric of the industriousness and nobility of the city’s ancestors, echoed and reinforced Mexican values. Bordone and Vecellio, as well as Alessandro Zorzi, Giacomo Gastaldi, and a range of Venetian ambassadors, often noted the exoticism of New World peoples in their prints, texts, maps, and ambassadorial reports, including their nudity, cannibalism, tattoos, sexual practices, diet, and extravagant wealth.

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As Bronwen Wilson has argued, costume books contributed to identity formation through differentiation as Venetians and Europeans, seeing such images, began to see themselves as images. Through this process, she posits, costume books “may have fostered a new kind of subject, as both an object and an ‘I myself.’”131 This sense of equivalency between Venice and the New World demonstrates that Venetians did not understand the peoples of the New World only or always through an oppositional frame of self and exotic “other,” as Edward Said’s canonical reading of European colonialism would suggest they should have. Instead, they also regularly likened New World peoples to themselves and their own history, pointing to a regular tension or balance, in many if not most Venetian accounts and representations of the New World, between estrangement and normalization. As Vanita Seth has argued, “it was not otherness but similitude that underwrote Renaissance epistemology. It was not radical difference but commensurability mediated through the familiar that rendered the New World knowable.”132 Michael Wintroub’s study of the construction of a Brazilian village in 1550 Rouen for the royal entry of King Henry II of France similarly notes that the visual rhetoric of this ritual entry did not emphasize the differences between the Brazilians and the French, but rather, their similarity, in this case because France’s old nobility, rooted in ideas of chivalry and military virtuosity, likened the newly encountered militaristic barbarians of the Americas to knights in France.133 Italian chroniclers such as Peter Martyr compared Amerindian books and writing to European texts, and Giovanni Ruffo da Forlì – a friend of Peter Martyr’s – likened Amerindian pictographs and drawings to innovations fashionable in early modern European printshops, where printmen inserted images or “plates which represent the protagonists in the story,” also suggesting the commensurability of these cultures.134 Stephanie Leitch has posited that things that had never been seen before inspired new ways of recording such experiences, including organizational devices such as costume books and wunderkammern, devices that fused empirical observations with new representative strategies. Prints, and ethnographic prints in particular, she suggests, “reside in exactly [the] liminal space between the normative and the descriptive.”135 Along these lines, printmakers such as Bordone and Vecellio noted alterity, but also depicted other cultures, including the New World, in a way that was comfortable and familiar to European readers, translating the Americas to their audiences not only through a medium of otherness but also by weaving the New World into the fabric of existing knowledge, including a knowledge of aesthetic values, urban cosmopolitanism, and the nobility of primitive island life, through a logic of resemblance and equivalency.136 Neither take on the Americas, to be clear, was blameless; one effaced difference, while the other exaggerated or romanticized it. Venetian printed images seemed to balance both, simultaneously encouraging a sense of both awe and recognition.

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Most of the authors of sixteenth-century isolarii and costume books were armchair travelers who never visited either the Eastern Mediterranean (which they also wrote copiously about) or the New World. They nevertheless published extensively on these subjects by participating in networks of communication that gave them information about the expanding world from a variety of sources in and around the urban landscape of Venice, including administrators, military officials, colonial subjects, pilots, travelers, ambassadors, and other observers and witnesses, allowing them to produce texts for other armchair travelers. As Girolamo Porro put it in his dedication to Porcacchi’s L’isole più famose del mondo: There is no doubt, my illustrious lord, that prudence is the biggest gift on earth that men possess, since with this, everyone can predict what good or bad things will result from different actions. This, in the experience of great men (since they have more prudence than others), is acquired through the continuous frequenting that they have with people of various states and countries. Others, not desiring such a life, being full of honors, and also full of miseries, instead travel the world and with their eyes come to understand the diversity of places [at home] . . . But there are still many who do not want to or cannot take either of these two paths, and instead give themselves over to reading books, and in doing so come to understand everything that they could have through the other two ways, and with greater consolation and less effort. No help is needed for the first two ways, since these [individuals] have the will and the means to satisfy their appetites. This third group [however] deserves to be assisted in every possible way.137

Venetian editors and printmen such as Porro demonstrated a clear consciousness of their role in early modern world-making and in feeding an audience of stay-at-home travelers the ever-expanding knowledge of the globe, a knowledge that a Venetian perspective often permeated and shaped. Printed books were the product of relationships between an often complex set of collaborators, not only for the collection and construction of their ideas but also for their physical production, including printers, writers, editors, cosmographers, artists, and engravers; in this way, they were the result of often vast networks of information and communities of knowledge.138 If Venice was the great European center of information and communication, as historians have long demonstrated that it was, these networks in turn enabled a large and prolific community of armchair travelers to write and publish profusely about the New World, whether it be in the form of single sheet maps, edited collections of travelogues, narrative texts, or books of islands or costumes. It was no accident that armchair travelers existed in such plentiful numbers in Venice since the extensive and complex information community of the lagoon city drove the production of these texts and their Venetian visions of the New

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World. Authors of isolarii, on the one hand, stressed the primacy of witnessing and of empirical forms of knowledge. Bordone, for instance, emphasized in the preface of his isolario that many modern explorers had suffered and died to gain a firsthand knowledge of the globe that would allow them to “investigate the many errors that the ancients [who had not traveled the world] had left behind,” and Porcacchi similarly expressed reservation about using Pliny and Apollodorus as sources of geographical information and favored direct experience over the authority of classical authors.139 On the other hand, this emphasis on direct observation where geography and travel were concerned was perplexing in Venice since these Venetian authors never accumulated any firsthand experience themselves, but rather collected, collated, edited, organized, and marketed the travels of others for an Italian and European audience of armchair travelers, drawing on Venetian networks of information more than direct experience. A common rhetorical convention of travel literature is that words can never adequately describe the strangeness of the foreign; to counter this tendency, visual images arguably depicted the Americas in ways that augmented written language. If we follow such logic, the Venetian case confirms how printed images functioned as formative elements in the production of ethnographic knowledge. As Anastasia Stouraiti and Bronwen Wilson have pointed out, Venetians capitalized on the power of images; they understood their power to bridge the near and the far or fill the gap between the experience of travel and its textual description in a printed book. As the printer and publisher Giacomo Franco explained in his dedication to Rosaccio’s Viaggio da Venetia a Costantinopoli, images were “useful and delightful to describe and represent [the Viaggio] beyond all expression in words, also in copper engravings of all the cities, islands and notable locations . . . so that not only could one learn through reading, but almost in fact see with his own eyes.”140 Venetian printmen understood the importance of the visual documentation of knowledge and the ways in which images offered an immediacy that transcended the textual. But to push the role of images even further, the work of Bordone and Vecellio demonstrates that those who worked in the world of Venetian print culture also understood how to use images to liken seemingly disparate places. Images not only visualized the other but could have the dynamic and productive effects of subtly but consistently encouraging specific ideological and political agendas. While the question of reception, of course, is another matter entirely – and as is often the case, more difficult to measure – in terms of production, this was clearly one of the intentions of these texts, to encourage a sense of likeness between these two cultures and in doing so to remind readers of Venice’s continued place in the world, to cause readers to wonder about the possibilities of commercial or contractual relations with the New World, and

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to affirm the superiority of Venice itself. These too were ways of reacting against Habsburg global hegemony. In the New World, Venetians found confirmation of their continuing global relevance. The Age of Encounters reaffirmed the spectacular nature of the lagoon city, without its inhabitants having to take recourse to Iberian-style repressive violence. The city’s printmen realized that Venetians could eschew conquest and colonization since, as knowledge of the Americas arrived over the course of the sixteenth century, it mirrored and validated the cultural imperium of their city. Venetians saw in the discovery of the Americas, and especially Tenochtitlan, confirmation of the greatness of their own world. They needed not travel any further – indeed, they needed not travel at all – to appreciate that their model of an insular, urban, cosmopolitan culture, born from primitive but noble roots, was in fact a timeless, global ideal.

CONCLUSION

F

ollowing the corridors of the first floor or piano nobile of the Ducal Palace in Venice, one soon arrives in the map room, the Sala dello Scudo, so named since this apartment traditionally exhibited the heraldic family shield of the reigning doge. Here, doges received audiences and met with guests of the state, occasionally hosting banquets for them in this hall. It is decorated from end to end with painted maps illustrating the historic territorial possessions of the Venetian republic as well as the distant lands explored by Venetian travelers. The four large maps that span the breadth of the room, depicting Asia and America, North Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Near East, originally dated to the sixteenth century and were first designed by Giovanni Battista Ramusio and Giacomo Gastaldi. They were replaced in 1762 by Francesco Griselini (1717–1787), who at the request of the doge at the time, Marco Foscarini, also added a series of smaller maps to the room depicting the journeys of the most celebrated Venetian explorers. These smaller maps, inserted over the doors in the corners of the room, illustrate the travels of the Zen brothers in the North Atlantic, of Pietro Querini shipwrecked in the fjords of Norway, of Nicolò dei Conti to India and Southeast Asia, and of Alvise Cadamosto along the coast of Africa and the Cape Verde islands. In a stirring recognition of their contributions to Venice’s place in the first global age, Griselini also painted the figures of Ramusio and Antonio Manutio, publicly commemorating these editors of travel anthologies in the Ducal Palace.1 219

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74. Francesco Grisselini, “Map of Asia and America,” Sala dello Scudo, Palazzo Ducale, Venice. 1762. With permission of Cameraphoto Arte, Venice/Art Resource, NY.

No certain connection can be drawn between Griselini’s maps and those of the sixteenth century.2 Whether or not he adhered to the original designs, his map of Asia and America remains the most striking of the bunch (Figure 74). Showing the south on top, as was common for many late medieval maps, it depicts a large, detailed, and geographically precise Asia next to a smaller and perplexingly less accurate North America. Griselini’s New World is a clumsy portrayal of the Baha Peninsula, the Sea of Cortez, and central Mexico, as well as an unpopulated Canada, marked only by chains of green mountains. Entirely underdeveloped with respect to sixteenth-century, let alone eighteenth-century cosmographic knowledge, it cut the New World off at its center, excluding the Caribbean, South America, and the entire eastern coast of the continent. Not surprisingly, however, reflecting a long tradition of Venetian mapping of the Americas, it nevertheless included one significant and easily noticeable detail: Tenochtitlan and an oversized Lake Texcoco. Despite the map’s limited compass, it allowed for enough space to allude once again to the watery connections between Venice and the Mexican capital. This map, and indeed all the maps in the hall, impressed upon visiting dignitaries that while the Spanish may have colonized the New World, the significance of these conquests paled in comparison to Venetian exploration and in particular the travels of Marco Polo, whose voyages had resulted in the first substantial European knowledge of the East, to which all Western powers continued to strive to gain access, up through and indeed beyond the eighteenth century. Compared to the treatment of America, here, Griselini has spared no detail. Indeed, if one looks up close, one can see a yellow line run across Griselini’s map of Asia, indicating Polo’s route through the deserts of the East.

CONCLUSION

The three other large maps in the room also depict traditional zones of Venetian economic engagement. Hewing closely to previous models and perpetuating Venetian perspectives well into the eighteenth century, Griselini suppressed his knowledge of global geography in favor of an urge to express the primacy of Venetian achievements. He used these maps in the Sala dello Scudo to forward a clear and specific visual program aimed at awing viewers with images of Venetian exploration, as well as shifting their minds away from Iberian conquest and back into the Venetian spaces of the Mediterranean and the East. By the eighteenth century, during the life of Griselini, the New World had taken on new meanings in Venice. It had passed, for instance, into the realm of aestheticization, embodied in Vivaldi’s opera Motezuma (1733), as well as in a series of theatrical performances concerning the Americas, including Carlo Goldoni’s La peruviana (1754) and La bella selvaggia (1758), Giuseppe Canziani’s L’Americana (1778), Pietro Chirari’s Il Colombo (1754), La donna che non si trova (1762), L’America raminga (1763), and La corsara francese delle guerra presente (1780), as well as Nunziato Porta’s L’Americana in Olanda (1778), L’Americano (1779), and Selvagio generoso (1794).3 In the world of commerce, Venetian merchants had come to admire the efficiency and productivity of the British Empire and understood it as a modern incarnation of what Venice used to be. In a 1768 dispatch, for instance, the Venetian residente or highest-ranking diplomat in London Cesare Vignola expressed profound admiration for English commercial life. “Among the noble institutions that bloom with great success in this illustrious capital, one certainly is the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts of Manufacturing and Commerce, which was founded in 1753. The recognition and certification that it bestows daily, in view of its overall progress towards national industry, is infinite.”4 Other Venetians began to see America through the eyes of the Enlightenment. According to this interpretation, the New World embodied a sense of liberty and independence that threatened to undermine the very foundation of the Venetian political system, especially following news of the American and French revolutions.5 Amid these changing Venetian approaches to the New World, Griselini’s maps continued to reiterate what Venetians had been asserting since the sixteenth century: that Venice was the center of the world. Countless others had already expressed similar beliefs, concluding that any and all New Worlds were but pale reflections of Venice itself. Describing the Panamanian city of El Nombre de Dios, Girolamo Benzoni declared in his History of the New World: Some say that the features of [Panama] are almost as grand as those of Venice; though I think that these authors cannot have seen the more than magnificent and most illustrious Venice; a city so exalted, both as regards its power, its imperial majesty, its commerce and riches, and also its distinguished virtue and justice, as not to be inferior to any that

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the sun shines upon. And undoubtedly, ten Venetian merchants would suffice to buy up all the merchandise that is brought here, as well as the town itself.6

Why go to the Indies, many wondered, when all the luxuries, exoticisms, and wonders of the world were already on display in Venice? For the election of doge Lorenzo Priuli in 1556, the orator Luigi Groto mused, “It is difficult to tell whether Venice is in the world, or the world is in Venice. The Canaries with its birds, the New World with its riches and spices, are here.” It was Venice – not America – that should have been an object of marvel, as people “should travel to look for us, and not expect that we should come look for them.”7 In his dialogue Il gentilhuomo (1575), the poet and courtier Girolamo Muzio agreed.

Nobleman : Of every city, one can say that if you have seen one, you have seen them all. But there is no other city like Venice. Eugenio : I have heard that in the New World there is a similar example called, if I remember well, Temistitan. Nobleman : People tell lots of stories about that New World. I am talking to you about this old world, in which I have never heard, in my whole life, of having seen another miracle like [Venice].8 The English traveler Thomas Coryat similarly praised the Piazza San Marco as a little world unto itself.9 Even though Venetian economic networks in the Mediterranean had declined by the end of the sixteenth century, many still claimed that the cosmopolitan city enveloped and represented the known world. The final page of Giovanni Nicolò Doglioni’s La città di Venetia con l’origine e governo di quella (1614) proclaims, “He who sees Venice admires seeing the whole world collected there in its small space.”10 Vecellio echoed Doglioni’s sentiment that Venice encompassed and embodied the globe. Unlike any other city, the illustrious city of Venice, because of its location, size and magnificence, is one of the miracles of the world . . . For the use of the city and its commerce, approximately eight thousand boats sail forth, supplying abundant quantities of every . . . kind of food and clothing. Altogether . . . it is . . . the home of good men, a shelter for the industrious, and a warehouse for the whole world of merchandise of all kinds.11

In the introduction to her The Worth of Women (1600), even the proto-feminist Venetian writer Moderata Fonte made a point of asserting that “there are people of every nationality in the city, and, just as all the limbs and arteries of our body are connected to the heart, so all the cities and parts of the world are connected to Venice.”12 Venetian perceptions clearly differed from global realities.13 Nevertheless, according to these writers, voyages to remote lands were nothing but empty wandering and a waste of time compared to a simple, efficient trip to Venice.

CONCLUSION

One final text at the end of the sixteenth century placed Venice at the center of innovative, printed knowledge about the Americas. In 1597, the Jesuit encyclopedist and bibliophile Antonio Possevino (1553–1611) published his Apparatus ad omnium gentium historiam, which included a list of thirty book titles concerning the Indies: in other words, the first published list of printed works relating to America.14 Even as the height of the city’s editorial production was passing, Venetian printmen remained precocious where the New World was concerned, generating the first printed bibliography of Americana and beginning what would become a long bibliographic tradition that would later culminate in the likes of Henry Harisse’s Bibliotheca americana vetustissima (1866) and Joseph Sabin’s A Dictionary of Books Relating to America (1868–1936), which numbered twenty-nine volumes and contained more than 150,000 entries. In addition, the Venetian press of Marco Ginammi produced one final but significant flourish of printed Americana, entirely focused on the work of Las Casas and the perpetuation of the Black Legend.15 Ginammi printed three Italian editions of Las Casas’s Istoria o brevissima relatione della distruttione dell’Indie Occidentali in 1626, 1630, and 1643, translated by Giacomo Castellani, a priest from Treviso.16 In the Venetian tradition of the polemical preface, the 1626 edition offered a poignant ode to the friendship between the Venetian patricians Marco Trevisan and Nicolò Barbarigo, where Castellani noted that only the goodness emanating from a “heroic friendship” such as theirs could work to counter the “dissentions, persecutions, ruin, massacres, slaughter, fires, violence and deaths, all abhorred by nature, hated by man, detested by laws, and condemned by God,” undertaken by the Spanish.17 In his prologue entitled “On the Usefulness of This History,” Castellani went on to note that the destruction of the Indies was “the most tragic and horrible history that, in the great scheme of the world, had ever been seen by human eyes.”18 The Venetian cleric Paolo Sarpi remarked that “even the Turks were not as evil as the Spanish,”19 and Castellani appears to have been influenced by Sarpi’s anti-papal rhetoric when he encouraged the papacy to read Las Casas’s work so that they would be aware of the evil uses to which the Spanish had put the territorial concessions of Pope Alexander VI. “The papacy will see how under the pretext of just concessions made by their predecessors to the King of Castille, so that the Spanish could convert the Indians to Christianity . . . the Spanish [instead] brought millions of souls to the abyss of hell.”20 More importantly, in one final comparison between the Italians and the peoples of the New World, Castellani pointed out that “even if the subjects of Spain find themselves unhappy, they will at least console themselves with the fact that they will never be as badly treated as the Indians.”21 While the Aragonese Inquisition banned Las Casas’s History in l659, it enjoyed a lively readership in seventeenth-century Italy. In 1636 and 1657, Ginammi went on to print the Lascasian pamphlet Sobre los indios que se han hecho esclavos, under the title Il supplice schiavo indiano, and in

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1640 and 1645 published his L’octavo remedio para la reformación de las Indias under the Italian title La libertà pretesa dal supplice schiavo indiano. In 1644 and 1645, he printed Domingo de Soto’s account of the controversy between Las Casas and Ginés de Sepulveda, Disputa o controversia entre el Obispo Bart. De las Casas y el Doctor Hines de Sepulveda sobre las conquistas de las Indias, as Conquista dell’Indie Occidentali.22 Ginammi also published an Italian edition of the essays of Montaigne, famous for their hostility to Spain.23 In this final moment of the great age of Venetian print, Marco Ginammi mobilized his editorial forces to diffuse the ideas of Las Casas in Italian translation, in protest of Spanish imperialism in the New World, and implicitly in Italy as well. Unlike anything from the sixteenth century, Ginammi’s texts were page-facing translations that placed the Spanish original next to the Italian. Posing in this way as a philological exercise, his format could claim Venetian innocence in continuing to publish the works of Las Casas, as if to say that Ginammi had not personally spun any criticism of Spain but had merely translated Las Casas’s work. Yet his concentrated efforts also suggested that on some level, at the tail end of the city’s long tradition of publications on the New World, Venetians had cast aside any hesitation where criticizing the Spanish was concerned. Las Casas found no Italian translator in the sixteenth century, so Ginammi’s 1626 edition came after a surprising seventy-four-year lag behind its first Spanish publication in Seville in 1552. It remains difficult to understand why this translation was so long in the making. On the one hand, after the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis (1559), the Spanish exercised either direct or indirect control over every part of Italy except the Venetian republic and the Duchy of Savoy. In the 1560s, the Spanish prohibited the printing of books on the Indies in all its subject cities, making the publication of Las Casas risky or impossible in most of Italy.24 On the other hand, Venice had long maintained an antiSpanish attitude in both its ambassadorial and print cultures, so why it took them so long to publish Las Casas remains mysterious. Perhaps Venetians began to fear the Spanish less after the turn of the seventeenth century. In the course of the sixteenth century, Venetian senators had been anxious about the loss of the spice trade to the Portuguese and had yet to understand the global economic significance of Spanish exploration in the Americas. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, Spain seemed less threatening. As the Venetian ambassador to Spain Francesco Vendramin reported in 1595, despite the presence of seemingly innumerable mines, Indian labor, and the great quantity of gold that the Spanish wrought from the New World, the Catholic king should be the richest of all the princes, and his state should be more plentiful and abundant than all the others. Nevertheless . . . Spain is relatively poor . . . so it is not without reason that the Spanish say that this gold that comes from the Indies to Spain has the same effect as rain on the roofs of houses, which even though it falls on them, it then all descends to the ground, without benefitting anyone.25

CONCLUSION

The Spanish – incapable of collecting and mobilizing their riches effectively – were clearly not the threat they may once have seemed, and Venetian anti-Spanish sentiment blossomed openly both during the crisis of the Interdict (1606–1607) as well as during the so-called Spanish Conspiracy (1618), when Venetians, fearful of being attacked by Spanish forces, expressed the opposition of an independent, republican Venice to an intolerant and tyrannical Spain. One early seventeenth-century Venetian pamphleteer attacked Spain by flaunting the values of civic liberty, praising Venice as “a free city, metropolis of a great republic, which is patron of kingdoms and of provinces, glorious for illustrious and lofty deeds” and condemning the Spanish as “born liege and dependent, slaves to the will of another, on whom, as if by a thread your life and all your fortunes depend.”26 By this time, in any case, Venice no longer retained its singular position as a European center of print culture after 1600, especially once most of the city’s engravers began to move to Rome. The city’s production by no means ended, however, and the imperial dimensions of Venetian print and cartographic culture continued to produce representations of foreign lands well into the eighteenth century.27 The history of globalization has traditionally implied a consideration of commodities, disease, or forms of political exchange, including both ambassadorial relationships and warfare, across and between different parts of the world as they became increasingly integrated after 1492. It is naturally associated with the process of worldwide economic incorporation and an emerging global consumer culture. Globalization, however, is by no means limited to the exchange of goods, products, microbes, and people; it also includes ideas and culture. As the historian Patrick O’Brien put it, “Everything has its history, and nearly everything has a global history as well.”28 The early modern Italian, and in particular the Venetian encounter with the expanding horizons of the globe, was overwhelmingly embodied by the experience of a dramatic burst of knowledge and information. This is not to say that Italians did not have any direct or material exchanges with the Americas, but rather that the vast majority of their encounters with the New World in the early modern period were virtual.29 This rush of knowledge flooded over and ran up against Venetian efforts to maintain their long-established hegemonic world view. As Zorzi, Ramusio, Gastaldi, Zen, Vecellio, and even Griselini revealed, Venetians had a clear conception of the world that was based on Venetian history. The Age of Encounters directly defied that vision, and Venetians struggled mightily, discursively and rhetorically, to contain this challenge to their position as one of the centers of the global order. However, as Federico Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan who was deeply interested in the Americas, remarked about globalization in a collection of his annotations in 1594, “With their greatness, the voyages of Columbus, Cortés, and Magellan to foreign and strange lands have made the world smaller.”30 All of the varied and valiant Venetian approaches to the New World – downplaying or ignoring its

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significance, emphasizing Venetian–American commensurability, inserting Venetians into the process of “discovery,” or demonizing the Spanish – would eventually give way in the face of changing global economic realities. During the sixteenth century, Antwerp emerged as the center of the European spice trade, and in 1605, the inventory of the ship Hercules contained the first mention of pepper imported into Venice by Netherlandish merchants: a cargo that had famously, for centuries, entered Europe exclusively on Venetian vessels.31 The voyage of the Hercules gave concrete, material expression to the reconfiguration of the Venetian world order. While the Venetian imagination had effectively connected the Mediterranean and the Atlantic worlds for much of the sixteenth century, merchants from Northern Europe – rather than Venetian editors, printmen, cosmographers, or mapmakers – became essential to Venetian commercial viability and developed to become the primary link between Venice and the Atlantic World by the century’s close. Indeed, “the only way for the Venetians to remain linked to the Atlantic trading world was to create a working relationship with the Netherlandish merchants.”32 By the seventeenth century, merchandise that had traditionally passed through Venice such as Cypriot sugar and Mediterranean kermes had to compete with Atlantic imports controlled by the Iberians, such as sugar from Madeira and Brazil and American cochineal. While editors such as Ginammi could continue to promote the Black Legend and painters such as Griselini could carry on producing representations of Venetian greatness – indeed, Venetian economic decline was slow, at times almost imperceptible, in part because of a shift to local and regional markets – the fiction of Venetian global supremacy had undeniably begun to unravel. Even as its position in the global order was on the wane, Venice’s connection to the New World through its prolific print culture helped maintain its relevance, as the rhetoric of its printed books and maps continued to represent the lagoon city to be as great as anything discovered elsewhere around the globe. As the mantle of Spanish dominance descended upon much of Italy, Europe, and the world, Venetian books and maps functioned as a means of managing this phenomenon, as the city’s printmen developed ways of looking at the world that resisted Habsburg hegemony. Venetian cultural production worked to erect a strong narrative of Venetian worldliness, cosmopolitanism, prodigiousness, and exemplarity that fed and sustained the Myth of Venice. Venetians used knowledge of the Americas to assert that they had long been out in the wider world, had global expertise, and indeed embodied the world, as it always had. In this way, Venetians managed to assimilate the global rise of Spanish power into something they could cope with in the impending decades and centuries of the city’s decline.

NOTES

Chapter 1

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On Sansovino’s façade of San Guiliano, see Deborah Howard, Jacopo Sansovino: Architecture and Patronage in Renaissance Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 81–87; Manuela Moriesi, Jacopo Sansovino (Milan: Electa, 2000), 297–304; Allison Sherman, “‘Soli Deo honor et gloria ’? Cittadino Lay Procurator Patronage and the Art of Identity Formation in Renaissance Venice,” in Architecture, Art and Identity in Venice and Its Territories, 1450–1750, ed. Nebahat Avcioğlu and Emma Jones (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 15–32. See Giovanni Astegiano, “Su la vita e le opere di Tommaso da Ravenna,” Bollettino del Museo Civico di Padova 1:18 (1925): 49–70 and 236–260, at 243–244, 255. See Robert S. Munger, “Guaiacum, the Holy Wood from the New World,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 4 (1949): 196–229. Rangone had originally requested that his funeral monument be a standing figure on the façade of San Geminiano, the church that at the time faced the façade of San Marco in the piazza itself. The Venetian Collegio rejected Rangone’s petition, since only Venetian nobles had the right to such a memorial, and usually only doges and military heroes at that. Custom also dictated that no monuments to individuals could appear in the piazza. It agreed instead to his seated image on the nearby façade of San Giuliano. Rangone went on to specify in his will that a model of San Giuliano would be carried in his funeral procession. See Moriesi, Jacopo Sansovino, 299–300. See Deborah Howard, Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture, 1100–1500 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Rosamund E. Mack, Bazaar to Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300–1600

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(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Stefano Carboni, ed., Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 44, 60, 117. Anton Francesco Doni, I Marmi, ed. Ezio Chiòrboli, 2 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1928), 1:165–167. Marcantonio Sabellico, De latinae linguae reparation, ed. Guglielmo Bottari (Messina: Università degli Studi di Messina, 1999), 85–86. Desiderius Erasmus, The Adages of Erasmus, ed. William Barker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 144. I thank Adam Hooks for this citation. For an overview of the Venetian book trade, see Angela Nuovo, The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Leiden: Brill, 2013). See Thomas R. Adams, “Some Bibliographical Observations on and Questions about the Relationship between the Discovery of America and the Invention of Printing,” in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiappelli, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 2:529–536, and Ann M. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 11. For a seminal study on Venice, early modern globalization, and print, see Bronwen Wilson, The World in Venice: Print, the City, and Early Modern Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). Rosa Salzberg, Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 4. See Giarcarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 197–198.

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14 See Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 260–261. 15 Paul Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540–1605 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), xvii, 6; Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, 254–255; Bruno Migliorini, Storia della lingua italiana (Florence: Sansoni, 1961), 295. 16 Gaetano Foresta, Il nuovo mondo nella voce di cronisti tradotti in italiano (Rome: Bulzoni, 1988), 247. 17 David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), v. 18 Rosario Romeo, Le scoperte americane nella coscienza italiana del Cinquecento (Rome: Laterza, 1989), 15; Henry Harisse, The Discovery of North America: A Critical, Documentary, and Historic Investigation (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1969), 270. 19 Peter Burke, “Early Modern Venice as a Center of Information and Communication,” in Venice Reconsidered: The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State (1297–1797), ed. John Martin and Dennis Romano (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 389–419, at 390. A German student in Padua in 1567 called Venice a “metropolis of the news”; see Biagio Brugi, Gli scolari dello studio di Padova nel Cinquecento, 2nd ed. (Verona: Fratelli, 1905), 27. See also Mario Infelise, Prima dei giornali (Rome: Laterza, 2002); Hans-Georg Beck, Manoussos Manoussacas, and Agostino Pertusi, eds., Venezia, centro di mediazione tra Oriente e Occidente (secoli XV-XVI). Aspetti e problem, 2 vols. (Florence: Olschki, 1977); Kate Lowe, “Africa in the News in Renaissance Italy: News Extracts from Portugal about Western Africa Circulating in Northern and Central Italy in the 1480s and 1490s,” Italian Studies 65 (2010): 310–328, at 311. 20 Theodore J. Cachey, “Italy and the Invention of America,” The New Centennial Review 2 (2002): 17–31, at 22. 21 See Carlo Dionisotti, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), 170–171; Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Instructions for Travelers: Teaching the Eye to See,” History and Anthropology 9 (1996): 139–190, at 153. 22 The earliest printed European publications about the New World were copies and translations of Columbus’s letters announcing his discoveries to Luis de Santángel, the secretary

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of King Ferdinand. These include his Epistola de su gran descubrimiento (Barcelona, 1493), Epistola Christofori Colom . . . de insulis Indie supra Gangem nuper inve[n]tis . . . ad . . . D[omi]n[u]m Gabrielem Sanchis . . . missa (Rome: S. Plannck, 1493), L’Epistola de insulis repertis de novo (Paris: Impressa Parisius in campo gaillardi, 1493), Epistula de insulis nuper inventis (Basel, 1493), and La lettera dell’isole che ha trovato nuovamente il Re di Spagna (Florence, 1493). These were followed soon after by the Roman publications of Giuliano Dati (Lettera delle isole nuovamente trovate, 1493; Questa e la hystoria della inventione delle diese isole di Cannaria Indiane, 1493), and the Milanese Nicolò Scillacio’s De insulis meridiani atque indici marius sub auspiciis (Pavia, 1494). The first Venetian publication about the New World was Jacopo Filippo Foresti da Bergamo’s Novissime historiarum (Venice: Albertino Vercellese da Lisona, 1503), which dedicated a chapter to the “four large islands” discovered by Columbus; see Chapter 2. See Thomas Suárez, Shedding the Veil: Mapping the European Discovery of America and the World (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 1992), 66. See Chapter 2. The first European image of cocoa appeared in Girolamo Benzoni, La historia del Mondo Nuovo (Venice: Francesco Rampazzetto, 1565), 102. On the earliest appearances of the tomato in print, see Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Di pedacio dioscoride anazarbeo libri cinque (Venice: N. De Bascarini, 1544), and Idem, Commentarii in libro sex pedacii dioscoridis anazarbei, de medica material (Venice: Vincentium Valgrisium, 1554), 479. On Canada on Paolo Forlani’s 1542 world map, see Coolie Verner and Basil StuartStubbs, The Northpart of America (Toronto: Academic Press Canada Limited, 1979), 6. A Venetian map by Geronimo Marini (1512) was perhaps the first to use the toponym of Brazil. See Silvio Castro, “L’immagine del Brasile nella Venezia del primo Cinquecento,” in L’impatto della scoperta dell’America nella cultura veneziana, ed. Angela Carraciolo Aricò (Rome: Bulzoni, 1990), 35–44, at 41–42. This was Francisco Pizarro’s secretary Pedro Sancho’s “Relatione per sua maesta di quel che nel conquisto & pacificatione di queste provincie della nuova Castiglia,” which was first published in Volume Three of Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi. See Michael J. Schreffler,

NOTES TO PAGES 6–10

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“Inca Architecture from the Andes to the Adriatic: Pedro Sancho’s Description of Cuzco,” Renaissance Quarterly 67 (2014): 1191–1223. See Ugo Tucci, “Mercanti, viaggiatori, pellegrini nel quattrocento,” in Storia della cultura veneta, vol. 3:2, Dal primo Quattrocento al Concilio di Trento, ed. Girolamo Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore Stocchi (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1980), 317–353. “Grandissima parte de questa . . . saria incognita, se la mercadantia et marinarezza de’ Veneziani non l’havesse aperta,” Laurence Lockhart, Raimondo Morozzo della Rocca, and Maria Francesca Tiepolo, eds., I viaggi in Persia degli ambasciatori veneti Barbaro e Contarini (Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1973), 67. On travelers from Venice and the Veneto in the medieval Indies, see Marianne O’Doherty, The Indies and the Medieval West: Thought, Report, Imagination (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 54–59. “In Asia i Veneziani si sono trovati di fronte ad una gamma di usi e costumi estremamente ricca in ogni senso, tanto che gli Iberici o gli altri Occidentali non rinvennero nelle Americhe alcunché di sostanzialmente nuovo. La scoperta e l’illustrazione antropologiche erano da loro già state esaurientemente realizzate prima che si approdasse alle rive del Nuovo Mondo,” Alberto Tenenti, “L’unità dell’umano attraverso le scoperte veneziane (Secoli XIV-XVI),” in L’epopea delle scoperte, ed. Renzo Zorzi (Florence: Olschki, 1994), 1–16, at 12. “Tutte quelle regioni facevano parte di un mondo unico ed i loro abitanti di una unica umanità,” Ibid, 13. Although most of this territory was later recovered, the trauma of the loss endured, perhaps resulting in decline over time rather than sudden, cataclysmic change. See Elisabeth G. Gleason, “Confronting New Realities: Venice and the Peace of Bologna, 1530,” in Venice Reconsidered, ed. Martin and Romano, 168–184. This idea of sixteenth-century Venetian economic decline is exemplified in Richard Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy 1300–1600 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). By comparison, see, for instance, Ugo Tucci, “I viaggi di scoperta e la nuova geografia dei traffici,” in L’epopea delle scoperte, ed. Zorzi, 163–181, and Liz Horodowich, “The

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New Venice: Historians and Historiography in the 21st Century Lagoon,” History Compass 2 (2004): 1–27, at 4–6. See Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 9. See also n. 41. Felipe Fernández-Armésto, Millennium: A History of Our Last Thousand Years (London: Black Swan, 1996), 155. See also Caroline Finkel, “‘The Treacherous Cleverness of Hindsight’: Myths of Ottoman Decay,” in ReOrienting the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East, ed. Gerald MacLean (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 148–174, at 168–169, and Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration. Eviatar Zerubavel, Terra Cognita: The Mental Discovery of America (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2003). As Nicolás Wey Gómez has recently argued, for instance, Columbus aimed to travel south more than west, reframing our traditional conceptions about the direction of his voyages. See Nicolás Wey Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008). See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Atlantic in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4–6. Even John Elliot, who famously argued that the impact of the Columbian voyages upon European thought was ambiguous, noted the Venetian reaction. See John Huxtable Elliott, The Old World and the New (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 9–14. See, for instance, Anna Roosevelt, ed., Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present: Anthropological Perspectives (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1994); Marcy Norton, “The Chicken or the Iegue: Human-Animal Relationships and the Columbian Exchange,” The American Historical Review 120 (2015): 28–60; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Benjamin Breen, “Hybrid Atlantics: Future Directions for the History of the Atlantic World,” History Compass 11 (2013): 597–609. Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ricardo Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature and Empire in Early Modern

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Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 29. Michael Householder, ed., Inventing Americans in the Age of Discovery: Narratives of Encounter (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011); David B. Quinn, England and the Discovery of America, 1481–1620 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974). Michael A. McDonnell, “Paths Not Yet Taken, Voices Not Yet Heard: Rethinking Atlantic History,” in Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, ed. Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (Canberra: Australia National University Press, 2005), 46–62, cited in Cañizares-Esguerra and Breen, “Hybrid Atlantics,” 599, n. 10. The literature on Iberian conquest and colonialism in the Americas is extensive. For an introduction to the Portuguese empire, see Anthony R. Disney, A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto, eds., Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). On the Spanish empire, see John Huxtable Elliott, Spain, Europe, and the Wider World, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Hugh Thomas, Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire, from Columbus to Magellan (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003); Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492–1763 (London: Harper Collins, 2003). Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Michael Wintroub, A Savage Mirror: Power, Identity, and Knowledge in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); Christine R. Johnson, The German Discovery of the World: Renaissance Encounters with the Strange and Marvelous (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2009); Carina L. Johnson, Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). On France, see also James Pritchard, In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Stephanie Leitch, Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II,

vol. 1 (London: Collins, 1971), 66, cited in Brian Brege, “The Empire That Wasn’t: The Grand Duchy of Tuscany and Empire, 1574–1609” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2014), 344. 49 Peter Burke, “America and the Rewriting of World History,” in America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750, ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 33–50, at 45. No contributor to Kupperman’s seminal conference and volume on the reception of the New World in Europe considered Italian sources. 50 As just a few examples, Benjamin Keen devotes only a few pages to the Italian textual response in Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1971), 139–144. Similarly, Italy does not enter into the work of Patricia Seed; see Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession: Europe’s Conquest of the New World 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Italy does not appear substantially in the canonical discussions of Elliott, Grafton, Greenblatt, or Pagden. Art historians and historians of collecting have more regularly explored Italy’s engagement with the Americas. See, for instance, Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975); Jay A. Levenson, ed., Circa 1492, Art in the Age of Exploration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Rachel Doggett, ed., New World of Wonders: European Images of the Americas, 1492–1700, exh. cat., The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C., October 8, 1992– March 6, 1993 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992); Claire Farago, ed., Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). 51 For Anglophone scholarship, see Elizabeth Horodowich and Lia Markey, eds., Italy and the New World, 1492–1750 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Lia Markey, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016); Elizabeth Horodowich, “Venetians in America: Nicolò Zen and the Virtual Exploration of the New World,” Renaissance Quarterly 67 (2014): 841–877; Andrea Moudarres and Christiana Purdy Moudarres, eds., New Worlds and the

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Italian Renaissance: Contributions to the History of European Intellectual Culture (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Liz Horodowich, “Armchair Travelers and the Venetian Discovery of the New World,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 36 (2005): 1039–1062. For Italian scholarship, see, for instance, Marisa Vannini de Gerulewicz, L’America agli occhi dei primi scopritori, Atti del III Convegno di Studi Colombiani (Genoa: Civico Istituto Colombiano, 1979); Samuel Hough, ed., Gli italiani e la creazione dell’America, 1440–1809 (Providence: John Carter Brown Library, 1981); Federica Ambrosini, Paesei e mari ignoti: America e colonialismo europeo nella cultura veneziana (secoli XVI-XVII) (Venice: Deputazione Editrice, 1982); Egidio Ortona, ed., Le Americhe: Storie di viaggiatori italiani (Milan: Electa, 1987); Aricò, ed., L’impatto della scoperta dell’America; Aldo Albònico, ed., Libri, idee, uomini tra l’America iberica, l’Italia e la Sicilia: Atti del convegno di Messina (Rome: Bulzoni, 1993); Antonio Melis, ed., Uomini dell’altro mondo: L’incontro con i popoli americani nella cultura italiana ed europea (Rome: Bulzoni, 1993); Giuseppe Bellini, “La scoperta del Nuovo Mondo e la cultura italiana del Cinquecento,” in Atti del convegno internazionale sulla scoperta colombiana e la cultura europea contemporanea, Erice 22–27 aprile 1992 (Palermo: Accademia Nazionale di Scienze Lettere e Arti di Palermo, 1993): 85–99; Adriano Prosperi and Wolfgang Reinhard, eds., Il Nuovo Mondo nella coscienza italiana e tedesca del Cinquecento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992); Angela Caracciolo Aricò, ed., Il letterato tra miti e realtà del nuovo mondo: Venezia, il mondo iberico e l’Italia (Rome: Bulzoni, 1994); Gabriella Airaldi and Luciano Formisano, eds., La scoperta nelle relazioni sincrone degli italiani (Rome: Istituto Poligrafo dello stato, 1996); Daria Perocco, “Viaggiare verso le Americhe: Reazioni [e relazioni] italiane nel primo secolo dopo la scoperta,” in Antonio Pigafetta e la letteratura di viaggio nel Cinquecento, ed. Adriano Chemello (Verona: Cierre, 1996): 81–102; Massimo Donattini, Spazio e modernità: Libri, carte, isolari nell’età delle scoperte (Bologna: CLUEB, 2000); Francesco Surdich, Verso il nuovo mondo: L’immaginario europeo e la scoperta dell’America (Florence: Giunti, 2002); Maria Matilde Benzoni, La cultura italiana e il Messico: Storia di un’immagine da Temistitan all’indipendenza (1519–1821) (Milan: Unicopli, 2004); Michela Catto and Gianvittorio Signorotto,

231 eds., Milano, l’Ambrosiana e la conoscenza dei nuovi mondi (secoli XLII-XVIII) (Milan: Bulzoni, 2015). For an excellent overview of this literature, see Gino Benzoni, “Venezia, l’occhio del mondo,” in Portolano disegnato da Giambatista Agnesi genovese nel sec. XVI: Saggi e commenti, ed. Battista Agnese (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2008), 85–138, at 127–138. There also exist numerous and significant modern editions of early modern sources pertaining to Italy and the New World. See Guglielmo Berchet, ed., Fonti italiane per la storia della scoperta del nuovo mondo, 2 vols. (Rome: Il ministero della pubblica istruzione, 1892); Giuseppe Fumagalli and Pietro Amat di S. Filippo, eds., Bibliografia degli scritti italiani o stampati in Italia sopra Cristoforo Colombo, la scoperta del Nuovo Mondo e i viaggi degli italiani in America (Rome: Il ministero della pubblica istruzione,1893); Terre d’America e archivi d’Italia (Milan: Fratelli Treves Editori, 1926); Mario Farina, ed., I navigatori: La scoperta dell’America nelle lettere di Colombo de Cuneo, Vespucci, Verazzano (Turin: Loescher editore, 1971); Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, ed. Marica Milanesi, 6 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1978); Pino Cimò, Il nuovo mondo: La scoperta dell’America nel racconto dei grandi navigatori italiani del Cinquecento (Milan: Mondadori, 1991); Paolo Collo and Pier Luigi Crovetto, eds., Nuovo mondo, gli italiani 1492–1565 (Turin: Einaudi, 1991); Angelo Trevisan, Lettere sul nuovo mondo: Granada 1501, ed. Angela Caracciolo Aricò (Venice: Albrizzi editore, 1993); Geoffrey Symcox, ed., Italian Reports on America 1493–1522: Letters, Dispatches and Papal Bulls, Repertorium Columbianum 10 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001); Idem, ed., Italian Reports on America 1493–1522: Accounts by Contemporary Observers, Repertorium Columbianum 12 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002). 52 See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 8. 53 Some sixteenth-century observers, however, explicitly did note the existence of Italy. Giovanni Battista Ramusio, for instance, often referred to “Italy” and “Italians,” and described Columbus as “an Italian man.” See Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 5:102. 54 See Giuseppe Marcocci, “L’Italia nella prima età globale (ca. 1300–1700),” Storica 30 (2014): 7–50, at 11. For a discussion of the concepts of nation, state, and patria in sixteenth-century

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Italy, see, for instance, Federico Chabod, “Alcune questioni di terminologia: Stato, nazione, patria nel linguaggio del Cinquecento” (1957), reprinted in Idem, Scritti sul Rinascimento (Turin: Einaudi, 1967), 625–649. See Horodowich and Markey, Italy and the New World. See John O’Malley, “The Discovery of America and Reform Thought at the Papal Court in the Early Cinquecento,” in First Images of America, ed. Chiappelli, 1:185–200. Raphael studied and depicted the exotic New World animals that had been brought to the papal court. See André Chastel, “Masques mexicains à la Renaissance,” Arte de France 1 (1961): 299, and Charles Colbert, “‘They Are Our Brothers’: Raphael and the American Indian,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 16 (1985): 181–190. See Farida Simonetti and Gianluca Zanelli, eds., Cristoforo Colombo nella Genova del Seicento: Gli argenti del doge Agostino Pallavicino e la cultura del suo tempo (Genoa: San Giorgio Editrice, 2005); Andaleeb Banta, “A Commission Gone Awry: Bernardo Strozzi’s Frescoes in the Palazzo Lomellino, Genoa,” in Art in Spain and the Hispanic World, Essays in Honor of Jonathan Brown, ed. Sarah Schroth (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2010), 236–265. Markey, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence. On Florence and the New World, see also Detlef Heikamp, Mexico and the Medici (Florence: Editrice Edam, 1972), and Giuliano Pinto, Leonardo Rombai, and Claudia Tripodi, eds., Vespucci, Firenze e le Americhe, Atti del convegno di studi, Firenze 22–24 Novembre 2012 (Florence: Olschki, 2014). See Lia Markey, “The New World in Renaissance Italy: A Vicarious Conquest of Art and Nature at the Medici Court” (Ph.D. diss., The University of Chicago, 2008), 91. Though a French rather than an Italian example, a festival held in Rouen in 1550 for the royal entry of King Henry II (r. 1547–1559) re-created an entire Brazilian village along the banks of the Seine; see Wintroub, A Savage Mirror. On Venetian mariners on the voyages of Columbus and Cortés, see Luisa D’Arienzo, “La presenza dei veneziani in Andalusia all’epoca de Cristoforo Colombo,” in Il letterato, ed. Aricò, 203–230, at 224–225. On Columbus approaching the Italians first, see Carlo Antonio Marin, Storia civile e politica del commercio dei Veneziani, 9 vols. (Venice: Coleti, 1798),

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7:236, and Luigi Bossi, Vita di Cristoforo Colombo (Milan: Tipografia di Vincenzo Ferrario, 1818), 10, cited in Guglelmo Berchet, Cristoforo Colombo e Venezia (Rome: Tipografia della Camera dei Deputati, 1890), 3–15. On tentative or failed Venetian attempts to pursue trade and exploration in the Americas, see Chapter 2, n. 111–112. Jeb J. Card, “The Ceramics of Colonial Ciudad Vieja, El Salvador: Culture Contact and Social Change in Mesoamerica” (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 2007), 267–270. William R. Fitzgerald, Dean H. Knight, and Allison Bain, “Untanglers of Matters Temporal and Cultural: Glass Beads and the Early Contact Period Huron Ball Site,” Canadian Journal of Archaeology / Journal Canadien d’Archéologie 19 (1995): 117–138, at 121–122; Janet D. Spector, “The Interpretive Potential of Glass Trade Beads in Historic Archæology,” Historical Archaeology 10 (1976): 17–27, at 20. Venetian beads have also been found at the colonial Maya site of Lamanai, Belize; see David M. Pendergast, Grant D. Jones, and Elizabeth Graham, “Locating Maya Lowlands Spanish Colonial Towns: A Case Study from Belize,” Latin American Antiquity 4 (1993): 59–73, at 67. I thank Davide Domenici for these citations. “Questo menoe con sì uno re saracino, o per dir meglio beretino di Canaria, di quelle ysole nuovamente trovate per il re di Spagna, el qual li fo donato da ditto re che lo apresentasse a la Signoria,” Marin Sanudo, I diarii di Marin Sanudo, ed. Rinaldo Fulin et al., 58 vols. (Venice: Fratelli Visentini, 1879–1903), 1:628–629. See Elizabeth Horodowich, “The Wider World: Foreigners, Travel, and Geography,” in Italian Renaissance Diplomacy: Texts in Translation, ed. Isabella Lazzarini and Monica Azzolini (Toronto: Durham Mediaeval and Renaissance Texts / Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2017), 190–213, at 207–209. See Federica Ambrosini, “Rappresentazioni allegoriche dell’America nel Veneto del Cinque e Seicento,” Artibus et Historiae 1 (1980): 63–78; Lina Padoan Urban, “Teatri e ‘teatri del mondo’ nella Venezia del Cinquecento,” Arte Veneta 20 (1966): 137–146; and Idem, “Apparati iconografici nelle feste veneziane cinquecentesche,” Arte Veneta 23 (1969): 145–155. On frescoes of corn and tobacco in the Palazzo Grimani, see Annalisa Bristot, “Di un affresco restaurato in Palazzo Grimani a Venezia,” in

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Bollettino della soprintendenza per i bene ambientali e architettonici di Venezia, vol. 1, Restauri, ricerche (Venice: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, 1993), 44–54, and Michele Fassina, “Il mais nel Veneto nel Cinquecento: Testimonianze iconografiche e prime esperienze colturali,” in L’impatto della scoperta dell’America, ed. Aricò, 85–92. On New World collecting in Bologna, see Giuseppe Olmi, “‘Things of Nature’ from the New World in Early Modern Bologna,” in Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe, 1400–1700, ed. Alessandra Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and Diane Fane (Munich: Hirmer, 2015), 229–239. On New World collecting and collections in Venice, see Irene Favaretto, “Una lucertola sive altro animale dell’America parte del mondo novamente ritrovata: Il fascino di terre lontane nelle collezioni venete tra XVI e XVIII secolo,” in Il letterato, ed. Aricò, 265–271; Bernard Aikema, Rosella Lauber, and Max Seidel, eds., Il collezionismo a Venezia e nel Veneto ai tempi della Serenissima (Venice: Marsilio, 2005); Detlef Heikamp, “American Objects in Italian Collections,” in First Images of America, ed. Chiappelli, 1:455–482. There is some suggestion that the Spanish ambassador to the city Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza maintained a collection of New World objects in his palazzo on the Grand Canal at San Barnaba. See Erika Spivakovsy, Son of the Alhambra: Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, 1504–1575 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1970), 73. On cochineal in Venice, see Blake de Maria, Becoming Venetian: Immigrants and the Arts in Early Modern Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 45–47. On pearls in Venice, see Nicholas J. Saunders, “Biographies of Brilliance: Pearls, Transformations of Matter and Being, c. AD 1492,” World Archaeology 31 (1999): 243–257, at 253. On the Calle, Ponte, and Sottoportego del Mondo Novo near the church of Santa Maria Formosa, so named most likely after an eponymous 1590 wine shop, see Giuseppe Tassini, Curiosità veneziane (Venice: Filippi, 1970), 426–427. “Are We All Global Historians Now? An Interview with David Armitage,” Itinerario 36 (2012): 7–28. On the pitfalls of global history, see, for instance, Wu Xiaqun, “Do We Really Need a ‘Global View of History’?” Chinese Studies in History 42 (2009): 45–50.

233 70 Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Knopf, 2011); Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital: Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2013); Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2002); Idem, The Eagle and the Dragon: Globalization and European Dreams of Conquest in China and America in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2014); Inés Zupanov, Missionary Tropics: The Catholic Frontier in India (16th–17th Centuries) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005); Jean-Michel Sallmann, Géopolitique du XVIe siècle (1490–1618) (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2003); Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2008); Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism 15th– 18th Century, vol. 2, The Wheels of Commerce (London: William Collins, 1982); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, From Tagus to the Ganges: Explorations in Connected History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 71 Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 137. 72 For examples of this scholarship, see Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972); Jerry H. Bentley, “Hemispheric Integration, 500–1000 CE,” Journal of World History 9 (1988): 237–254; Idem, Old World Encounters: Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City: Doubleday/ Anchor, 1976); John McNeill and William McNeill, The Human Web. A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (New York: Norton, 2004). Atlantic World scholarship is vast; for an introduction, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Jeremy Adelman, Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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73 For a useful summary, see Francesca Trivellato, “Renaissance Italy and the Muslim Mediterranean in Recent Historical Work,” The Journal of Modern History 82 (2010): 127–155. For examples of this scholarship, see Hans Belting, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011); Howard, Venice and the East; Brian Curran, The Egyptian Renaissance: The Afterlife of Ancient Egypt in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Sean Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Mack, Bazaar to Piazza; Anna Contadini and Claire Norton, eds., The Renaissance and the Ottoman World (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013); Carboni, Venice and the Islamic World; Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000); Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1996); Eric Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); James Harper, ed., The Turk and Islam in the Western Eye, 1450–1750 (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011); Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). 74 For an overview of this concept, see Mimi Yiengpruksawan, Alexander Nagel, Christopher Wood, Eugene Wang, Alessandra Russo, David Joselit, and Barry Flood, “Roundtable: The Global Before Globalization,” October 133 (2010): 3–19. See also Antonello Gerbi, La disputa del nuovo mondo: Storia di una polemica, 1750–1900 (Milan: Ricciardi, 1950); Peter Mason, Deconstructing America: Representing the Other (New York: Routledge, 1990); José Rabasa, Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993); Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 75 On early modern Italy and globalization, see Marcocci, “L’Italia nella prima età globale,”

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and Idem, “Renaissance Italy Meets South Asia: Florentines and Venetians in a Cosmopolitan World,” in Cosmopolitismes en Asie du Sud. Sources, itinéraires, langues (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle), vol. 33, ed. Corinne Lefèvre, Ines G. Županov, and Jorge Flores (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Purusa¯rtha, 2015), 45–69. _ The historiography on the Mediterranean world is vast; for the most recent summary and bibliography, see Monique O’Connell and Eric Dursteler, The Mediterranean World: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Napoleon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). For studies that consider Mediterranean–Atlantic interaction, see, for instance, Claire Schen, “Piracy in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean,” in The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000, ed. Jorge CañizaresEsguerra and Erik R. Seeman (Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2007), 149–162; David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); and Marcocci, “L’Italia nella prima eta globale,” 16. See, for instance, Carlo M. Cipolla, ed., The Economic Decline of Empires (London: Methuen, 1970), 196–214, and Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson, “The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change and Economic Growth,” The American Economic Review 95 (2005): 546–579. Stephanie Leitch, for instance, has noted how modern scholarship has anachronistically tended to artificially separate the Americas from Asia and consider the discovery of India, Asia, and America as discrete events. “In reality, these lines and continental divides were negotiable for quite a while afterwards”; see Leitch, Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany, 12. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 20. Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1–2. This is true for both European and non-European observers, both of whom developed ethnographies of the other derived from self-conception. See the essays by Wyatt Macgaffey, Anthony Reid, Chandra Richard de Silva, and Ronald P. Toby in this same volume.

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81 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 7. 82 Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 5, 24. The relationship between geography, space, imagination, and power – their “changing constellations” – is a recurrent motif in the work of Edward Said. See Edward Said, Orientalism (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978), 215. Along similar lines, see also Aleida Assman, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Jan Assman, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 83 See Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Harbsmeier, introduction to Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of the Cannibal Captivity in Brazil, ed. Neil L. Whitehead and Michael Harbsmeier (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), xiv–civ. 84 See Martin W. Lewis and Kären Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1997). 85 Gruzinski, The Eagle and the Dragon, 59. 86 See also Geoffrey C. Gunn, First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange, 1500–1800 (Lanham: Rowan and Littlefield, 2003), and more broadly, John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 87 Ayesha Ramachandran, The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 88 On the processes of bringing distances up close, part and parcel of the workings of globalization, see Vicente L. Rafael, The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Chapter 2

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Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili (Milan: Mondadori, 2002), 88. For an overview of the primary sources in European travel literature, see Edward Godfrey Cox, A Reference Guide to the Literature of Travel, 3 vols. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1938); Peter Hulme and Tim Young, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Peter

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C. Mancall, ed., Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Scholarship on the literature of travel is vast; as a sampling, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992); Jas Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés, eds., Voyages and Visions: Towards a Cultural History of Travel (London: Reaktion Books, 1999); Peter Whitfield, Travel: A Literary History (Oxford: The Bodleian Library, 2011); Tim Youngs and Charles Forsdick, eds., Travel Writing: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, 4 vols. (London: Routledge, 2012); Schwartz, Implicit Understandings. On the heterogeneous character of travel literature, see Tim Youngs and Charles Forsdick, introduction to Travel Writing, ed. Youngs and Forsdick, 1:1–24. Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Travel Writing as a Genre: Facts, Fictions and the Invention of a Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe,” Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing 1 (2000): 5–35, at 7. That is to say, the description of a voyage need not have a first-person protagonist, and the voyage need not be a physical endeavor, or even a “real” voyage. On medieval travel literature, see Kim M. Phillips, “Travel, Writing, and the Global Middle Ages,” History Compass 14 (2016): 81–92; Shirin A. Khanmohamadi, In Light of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Kim M. Phillips, Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245–1510 (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Suzanne Conklin Akbari, ed., Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2008); Jennifer R. Goodman, Chivalry and Exploration, 1298–1630 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1998); Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Boies Penrose, Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance, 1420–1620 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). See also Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

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On the innovations of early modern travel literature, see Joan-Pau Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Idem, Travellers and Cosmographers: Studies in the History of Early Modern Travel and Ethnography (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007); Peter C. Mancall, ed., Travel Writing in the Early Modern World, special edition of the Huntington Library Quarterly 70 (2007): 1–201; Justin Stagl, “The Methodising of Travel in the Sixteenth Century,” History and Anthropology 4 (1990): 303–338. See also Jyotsna G. Singh, ed., A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2009). Antonio Pigafetta, Le voyage et navigation faict par les Espaignolz es isles de Mollucques (Paris, 1525). Venetian editions followed in 1536 and 1550; the preface to the 1536 edition notes that its first publication was in Rome but that it was lost in the Sack of Rome. See Antonio Pigafetta, The First Voyage around the World, 1519–1522: An Account of Magellan’s Expedition, ed. Theodor J. Cachey Jr. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), xlvii–xlviii. German reactions to the Age of Encounters offer a useful counterpoint to Venetian ones. As Christine Johnson has shown, there existed many similarities, including German and Venetian shared interest in publishing accounts of exploration, especially from the perspective of merchant elites. Their reactions differed, however, in that German traders became interested and active in New World trade. See Johnson, The German Discovery of the World. For instance, Bordone’s isolario was reprinted four times in twenty years; at least six editions of Pedro de Cieza de León’s Chrónica de Perú were printed between 1555 and 1576; López de Gómara’s Historia delle Nuove Indie Occidentali was reprinted five times in five years and a total of twelve times before the end of the century. See Massimo Donattini, “Orrizonti geografici dell’editoria italiana (1493–1560),” in Il Nuovo Mondo nella coscienza italiana e tedesca, ed. Prosperi and Reinhard, 78–154, at 98–99; Foresta, Il nuovo mondo, 291–304; Burke, “Early Modern Venice as a Center of Information and Communication,” 402–403; Donatello Ferro, “Traduzioni di opere spagnole sulla scoperta dell’America nell’editoria veneziana del

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cinquecento,” in L’impatto della scoperta, ed. Aricò, 93–105, at 99–101. See Ferro, “Traduzioni di opere spagnole,” in L’impatto della scoperta, ed. Aricò, 93–105. On the movement of early modern texts across boundaries of state and language in the process of translation, see Anne E. B. Coldiron, Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), and Carmine G. Di Biase, ed., Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006). See Eric Dursteler, “Speaking in Tongues: Language and Communication in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” Past and Present 217 (2012): 47–77, at 68–72. See also Lucia Binotti, “Cultural Identity and the Ideologies of Translation in Sixteenth-Century Europe: Italian Prologues to Spanish Chronicles of the New World,” History of European Ideas 14 (1992): 769–788, at 784, n. 5. See William H. Sherman, “Bringing the World to England: The Politics of Translation in the Age of Hakluyt,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 14 (2004): 199–207. Peter Burke, “The Renaissance Translator as Go-Between,” in Renaissance Go-Betweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, ed. Andreas Höfele and Werner von Koppenfels (Berlin: Spectrum, 2005), 17–31. Theodore J. Cachey, “An Italian Literary History of Travel,” Annali d’italianistica 14 (1996): 55–64, at 64. See Annamaria Gallina, “L’attività editoriale di due spagnoli a Venezia nella prima metà del ‘500,” in Studi ispanici, 1 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962), 69–91. On Ulloa in particular, see Annamaria Gallina, “Un intermediario fra la cultura italiana e spagnola nel secolo XVI: Alfonso De Ulloa,” Quaderni ibero-americani 17 (1955): 194–209; Lucia Binotti, “Alfonso de Ulloa’s Editorial Project: Translating, Writing and Marketing Spanish Best Sellers in Venice,” Allegorica 17 (1996): 7–34; Antonio Rumeo de Armas, Alfonso de Ulloa, introductor de la cultura española en Italia (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1973); Filippo Bareggi, Il mestiere di scrivere: Lavoro intellettuale e mercato librario a Venezia nel Cinquecento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1988), 36, 81–84. On ambassadorial practices in Venice, see Donald E. Queller, “The Development of Ambassadorial Relazioni,” in Renaissance Venice,

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ed. John R. Hale (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 174–196; Filippo de Vivo, “How to Read Venetian Relazioni,” Renaissance and Reformation 34 (2011): 25–59. On Italian diplomacy more generally, see Michael Mallett, “Ambassadors and Their Audiences in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Studies 8 (1994): 229–243; Isabella Lazzarini, Communication and Conflict: Italian Diplomacy in the Early Renaissance, 1350–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also Tracey A. Sowerby, “Early Modern Diplomatic History,” History Compass 14 (2016): 441–456, and John-Paul Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). See, for instance, Lucette Valensi, The Birth of the Despot: Venice and the Sublime Porte (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Robert Mantran, “Venise, centre d’informations sur les Turcs,” in Venezia centro di mediazione tra Oriente e Occidente (secoli XV-XVI), ed. HansGeorg Beck, Manoussos Manoussacas, and Agostino Pertussi (Florence: Olschki, 1977), 111–116; Horodowich, “The Wider World.” For a complete list of Venetian embassies to Spain and Portugal and their functionaries between 1493 and 1531, see Berchet, Fonti italiane, 1:39–40. See Burke, “Early Modern Venice as a Center of Information,” in Venice Reconsidered, ed. Martin and Romano. On the collaborative nature of Venetian print culture, see Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text, 1470–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See Allan Cameron, “Doni’s Satirical Utopia,” Renaissance Studies 10 (1996): 462–473; Chrisian Rivoletti, Le metamorfosi dell’utopia: Anton Francesco Doni e l’immaginario utopico di metà Cinquecento (Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 2003); Paul F. Grendler, Critics of the Italian World, 1530–60: Anton Francesco Doni, Nicolò Franco (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 162–177. Pietro Bembo, Rerum Venetarum Historiae, Libri XII (Venice: Apud Aldi Pilios, 1551), Book 6, 125–128, and Book 7, 111–112; Idem, Dell’istoria viniziana (Venice: Gualtiero Scoto, 1552), 72–75 and 99. See Daria Perocco, “‘Un male non pensato’: Pietro Bembo e la scoperta

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dell’America,” in L’Impatto della scoperta dell’America, ed. Aricò, 279–293; and Erin McCarthy-King, “The Voyage of Columbus as a ‘Non Pensato Male’: The Search for Boundaries, Grammar, and Authority in the Aftermath of the New World Discoveries,” in New Worlds and the Italian Renaissance, ed. Moudarres and Moudarres, 25–44. Paolo Giovio (1486–1552) and Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) also included discussions of the New World in their histories: Giovio in Book 34 of his Historiae sui temporis (1550–1552) (published in an Italian translation in Venice in Paolo Giovio, La seconda parte dell’istorie del suo tempo di Monsignor Paolo Giovio da Como, Vescovo di Nocera, tradotta per M. Ludovico Domeniche et novissimamente restampata et corretta (Venice: Domenico de’ Farri, 1555), 392–397) and Guicciardini in Book 2 Chapter 13 and Book 6 Chapter 9 of his Storia d’Italia (1561). On Italian histories that discussed the New World, see Cecil H. Clough and Paul Edward Hedley Hair, eds., The European Outthrust and Encounter (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994), 309–314. Pietro Bembo, History of Venice, ed. and trans. Robert W. Ulery Jr., 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 2:87. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid, 100–101. Ibid, 94–95. See Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Randall Anderson, “The Rhetoric of Paratext in Early Printed Books,” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 4, 1557–1695, ed. John Barnard and Donald Francis McKenzie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 636–644; Helen Smith and Louise Wilson, Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Andrea Rizzi, Vernacular Translators in Quattrocento Italy: Scribal Culture, Authority, and Agency (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 23–29. For an overview of prefaces and dedications to early modern Italian publications on the New World, see Foresta, Il nuovo mondo, 247–278. “Accioche vostra Serenita intenda le cose maravigliose che novamente nelle parte delle nove Indie, remote da queste bande,

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che erano innote, sono ritrovate, lequale saranno tradutte, ne piu ne manco senza aggiungere ne levar cosa alcuna si come lo authore Spagnolo le ha scritte. Anchora che son certo non saranno cose troppo nove per vostra Serenita cosi perche penso ne havera gia havuto piena relatione da molti, come per essere quella andata e havere visto gran parte di questo mondo, havendo cavalcato e dimorato in l’Asia, etiam per la Europa e esser cosi ben informato della Africa, dove la sua serenissima persona si e ritrovata molte fiate in fatti dimmortal memoria e havera visto occullarmente e inteso molte cose non dimanco qualita e ammiratione di queste,” Francisco de Xeres, Libro primo de la conquista del Perù et provincia del Cuzco de le Indie Occidentali (Venice: Maestro Stephano da Sabio, 1535), preface. In the dedication to his 1556 translation of Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia de las Indias (1552), the Roman translator Agostino de Cravaliz similarly dedicated his translation to Duke Cosimo I de Medici, claiming that Cosimo already knew more about the Indies than the translator; see Markey, Imagining the Americas, 29. 30 Orations to the doge in the second half of the century made similar claims about Venetian worldliness where the expansion of global geography was concerned. See Conclusion. 31 “Detti Spagniuoli havendo navigato cerca tre anni, et un mese, et la maggior parte di loro. . .notato giorno per giorno di ciascun mese, come giunsero in Spagna trovarono haverne perduto uno, cioè che il giunger loro al porto di Sibilia, che fu adi 7 di Setembre, per lo conto tenuto per loro era alli 6. Et questa particularita havendola il prefato Don Pietro narrata adu uno eccellente, e raro huomo, il quale allhora si trovava per la sua republica ambasciadore appresso la Maesta del Imperadore, et domandandoli come questo potesse essere, costui che

era grandissimo philosopho, et dotto nelle lettere greche, et latine, in tanto che per la sua singular dottrina, et rara bonta è stato alzato à maggior grado, gli dimostro che cio non poteva essere altrimente, havendo navigato costore tre anni continui sempre accompagnando il sole, che andava in Ponente,” Massimiliano Transilvano, Il viaggio fatto da gli spagniuoli a torno a’l mondo (Venice: Lucantonio Giunti, 1536), preface. This translation is anonymous but often attributed to Ramusio, and Ramusio would later repeat this anecdote; see Donattini, “Orrizonti geografici,” 102. While Ramusio never names Contarini, he was the Spanish ambassador to Charles V who would have been present at the time. See Daria Perocco, “Le parole di un cartografo: Giacomo Gastaldi e la Univerale descrittione del mondo,” Annali d’italianistica 14 (1996): 218–229, at 228. 32 “Primo scopritore della Nuova Spagna et della grande città di Messico, detta nuova Venetia, con la quale nel sito, edificatione et ricchezza ha molta simiglianza . . . quel signor che a imitatione di Giulio Cesare scrisse i suoi propri fatti nelle guerre che egli si trovò,” López de Gómara, Historia dello scoprimento della Nuova Spagna et della grande et magnifica Città di Messico (Venice: Giordano Ziletti, 1566), dedication. Numerous other texts compared Venice to Tenochtitlan; see Chapter 6. 33 Ibid. 34 “Calando in Italia il Re Carlo VIII di Francia alla conquista del Regno di Napoli, havendo gelosie il Catolico Re della sua isola di Sicilia, mandò con il gran capitano sussidio di gente per guardarla, e aiutare il Re di Napoli suo parente, la qual cosa fu pirincipio di far venire le cose d’Italia a I termini che hoggidi si ritrovano, con ruina . . . [Q]uasi nel medesimo tempo per permissione divina, e per la patientissima fatica e constantia del glorioso Christofano Colombo nativo di Savona, et guidato da Iddio, si fece da i

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Spagnuoli il gloriosissimo viaggio, che fu principio di acquistare quel nuovo mondo,” Pedro de Cieza de León, Cronica del gran regno del Perù (Venice: Camillo Franceschini, 1576), preface. 35

“Et noi sappiamo che avanti i tempi di Don Alfonso d’Aragona Re di Napoli, non era ne anco la natione Spagnuola nominata in Italia, e in progresso di tempo poi, per prencipati grandissimi occupati, e per il nuovo mondo scoperto e venuta a tanta grandezza, che passa di honore tutte le altre, che siano hoggi al mondo, grande argomento, che tutte le cose mondane sogliono per le influenze de’corpi celesti hora montare, hora discendere al basso, e alto della ruota della fortuna,”

Pedro Mexía, Selva di varia lettioni (Venice: Giorgio de’Cavalli, 1566), dedication. 36 See Binotti, “Cultural Identity and the Ideologies of Translation.” 37 “[M]entre il sovradetto Capitano Ferdinando Cortése s’attruova all’impresa delle predette provincie e citadi, per la mediocrita del suo comporre di tempo in tempo, ze particolarmente con lettere in lingua hispagniuola dettate, avisava la Sacra Cesarea Maesta,” Hernán Cortés, La preclara narratione della Nuova Hispagna del mare oceano (Venice: Bernardino de Viano de Lexona Vercellese, 1524), prologue. Liburnio’s prologue is reprinted in Berchet, Fonti italiane, 2:329–330. By comparison, Andrea Arrivabene noted similarly, but more gently, in his preface to the 1557 edition of Pedro de Cieza de León’s La prima parte dell’istorie del Perù (Venice: Giordano Ziletti, 1557) that “even though you could have easily understood it in its original language . . . nevertheless I have no doubt that it would be much more dear to you in our own language” (“Se ben ella per se stessa l’havrebbe pienamente inteso nella stessa lingua . . . tutavia io non sono in dubbio, ch’ella non sia per haverlo molto più caro nella propria lingua nostra”). 38 See David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011), 202–216;

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Michael Cronin, Translation and Globalization (London: Routledge, 2003), 161–164; Douglas Robinson, Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 1997), 31–32. “[S]e li prelibati geographi e cosmografi . . . dalli sepolcri loro potessino risuscitare, haverebbono a render gratie alla potente natura delle cose, che alla giornata porge miracolosamente in luce, e preparebbono il stile in addornar col eloquenza loro la Nuova Hispagna del Mar Oceano pocavanti truovata,” Cortés, La preclara narratione, prologue. Forging connections between the New World and the ancient world was a commonism among early modern writers; see Elliott, The Old World and the New, and Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992). For instance, where Cortés said, “When night fell I crept very silently up to the shore just opposite where the ships were anchored, and there I lay hidden . . . thinking the captain or pilot would come ashore and that I might discover from them what they had done,” Liburnio glossed, “Cortés’ sagacity.” Similarly, where Cortés described, “On hearing the confessions of these miscreants, I punished them according to the law and as, in the circumstances, I judged would do your Magesty greatest service,” Liburnio summarized “Cortés’ virtues are envied.” See Binotti, “Cultural Identity and the Ideologies of Translation,” 786, n. 26. Hernán Cortés, Letters from Mexico, ed. and trans. Anthony Pagden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 48; Cortés, La preclara narratione, n.p. See Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism: 15th–18th Century, vol. 3, The Perspective of the World, trans. Sian Reynolds (New York: Harper Collins, 1985), 116–138. “La quale [the text] siendo capitata a Vinegia, et intesa da molti nobili et giudiciosi huomini la materia, m’assalirono con preghiere . . . translatare la narratione del presente libro,” Cortés, La preclara narratione, preface. Comparisons between Italy and America were common in Spanish literature; see Binotti, “Cultural Identity and the Ideologies of Translation,” 786, n. 42. The Dutch also drew such

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comparisons between themselves and the peoples of the New World; see Schmidt, Innocence Abroad. On the growth of Spanish power in Italy, see Thomas James Dandelet and John A. Marino, eds., Spain in Italy: Politics, Society, and Religion, 1500–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2007). Binotti, “Cultural Identity and the Ideologies of Translation,” 770. See Seth Lerer, “Medieval English Literature and the Idea of the Anthology,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 118 (2003): 1251–1267; Alexandra Gillespie, “Poets, Printers, and Early English Sammelbände,” Huntington Library Quarterly 67 (2004): 189–214; Blair, Too Much to Know, 1–46, 175. See Jeffrey Todd Knight, Bound to Read: Compilations, Collections, and the Making of Renaissance Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). While none of the texts discussed here used the words “compendia” or “compilation” in their titles, and were instead called The Little Book (Libretto), The Lands (Paesi), or Navigations and Travels (Navigazioni e viaggi), they are anthologies of primary sources, and in this way fit the description of a compendium. On printed collections of travel literature, both Venetian and more generally, see Giuliano Lucchetta, “Viaggiatori e racconti di viaggi nel Cinquecento,” in Storia della cultura veneta, ed. Arnaldi and Stocchi, 433–489; Paolo Mildonian, “La conquista dello spazio americano nelle prime raccolte venete,” in L’impatto della scoperta dell’America, ed. Aricò, 115–133; Surdich, Verso il nuovo mondo, 77–86; Marica Milanesi, Tolomeo sostituito: Studi di storia delle conoscenze geografiche nel XVI secolo (Milan: Unicopli 1984), 37–40; Joan-Pau Rubiés, “From the ‘History of Travayle’ to the History of Travel Collections: The Rise of an Early Modern Genre,” in Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing in Early Modern Europe, ed. Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 25–41. For a translation and transcription of the Libretto, see Symcox, Italian Reports on America, 81–106, 207–231. For a modern facsimile, see Libretto de tutta la navigatione (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1929). The manuscript of these letters is preserved in the Library of Congress (Mss. Med. and Ren. N. 26). For a transcription, see Trevisan, Lettere sul nuovo mondo, and Berchet, Fonti italiane, 1:46–82. See also Angela Caracciolo Aricò,

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“L’immagine dell’indio nel Cinquecento veneziano,” in Uomini dell’altro mondo, ed. Melis, 209–217. “Desdita, mal in gratia de questi Re et con pochi danari,” Trevisan, Lettere, 27–28. Lawrence C. Wroth, introduction to Libretto de tutta la navigatione, 3. One printed Portuguese anthology by the Moravian printer Valentím Fernandes in Lisbon preceded this Venetian tradition; focused on Venetian travels, it contained the accounts of Marco Polo and Niccolò Conti, with an appendix of the travels of the Genoese merchant Gerolamo di Santo Stefano to the Far East. This compilation, however, contained entirely historical accounts and no contemporary ones. See Marco Polo, Livro de Marco Paulo, ed. Valentim Fernandes (Lisbon, 1502). Richard Eden, The decades of the newe worlde or west India, conteynyng the navigations and conquests of the Spanyardes (London: W. Powell, 1555). The story of Libretto’s transformation from manuscript to print and the relationship between Martyr’s manuscript, Trevisan’s letters, the Libretto, and the later publication of Martyr’s Decades is complex and involved a great variety of selection and editing as the narrative content of these voyages moved between these texts. As just a few examples, Trevisan’s second letter and the related books 9–12 of the Libretto contain significantly less material than Martyr’s Decade 1.2 later would, and the Libretto eliminated significant passages from Trevisan’s letters focused on the customs, superstitions, and religious practices of Hispaniola. The Libretto was incorporated into the third book of the Paesi novamente retrovati, as well as into the work of Alessandro Zorzi, in both his Raccolta Alberico and Ferrara manuscripts. For a description of the provenance and movement of these texts, see Airaldi and Formisano, La scoperta nelle relazioni sincrone degli italiani, 281–285. “El Columbo se mete in ordere per andar a discoprir, et dice voler far novo viazo più bello et de mazor utilità che alcuno altro l’habita facto. Credo partirà a tempo novo,” Trevisan, Lettere, 50. The Libretto chapters 1–8 cover Columbus’s first voyage, chapters 9–12 his second voyage, chapters 13–25 his third voyage, chapters 26–28 the voyage of Pedro Alonzo Niño, and chapters 29–31 the voyage of Vincente Yanez Pinzón.

NOTES TO PAGES 33–37

58 Henry Harisse, Bibliotheca americana vetustissima (New York: George P. Philes, 1866), 76. One copy remains in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Venice, and another in the John Carter Brown Library in Providence. 59 On Montalboddo, see Giuseppe Bruzzo, “Di Fracanzio da Montalboddo e della sua raccota di viaggi,” Rivista geografica italiana 12 (1905): 284–290. 60 Book 6 included letters from Giovanni Maria Cretico, Pietro Pasqualigo, Francis de la Saita, the King of Portugal to Pope Julius II, and an account of India by Joseph of Cranganor, the Indian Christian that Cabral brought back from India in 1501. It remains unclear who joined all of these documents together to form this single manuscript. On the provenance of the accounts in the Paesi, see Eric Dursteler, “Reverberations of the Voyages of Discovery in Venice, Ca. 1501: The Trevisan Manuscript in the Library of Congress,” Mediterranean Studies 9 (2000): 43–64. For a modern facsimile, see Paesi novamente retrovati et Novo Mondo da Alberico Vesputio Florentino intitulato (1508) (reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1916). 61 Donattini, “Orrizonti geografici,” 98; Idem, “Giovanni Battista Ramusio e le sue Navigationi: Appunti per una biografia,” Critica Storica 17 (1980): 55–100, at 73. On German editions, see Johnson, The German Discovery of the World, 19–46. King Henry II of France owned a copy in his library; see Ernest Quentin-Bauchart, La bibliothèque de Fontainebleau et les livres des derniers Valois à la bibliothèque nationale (1515–1589) (Paris: E. Paul, Huard et Guillemin, 1891), 127, n. 248. 62 See Blair, Too Much to Know, 186. 63 See Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), and Guido Beltramini, Aldo Manuzio: Il rinascimento di Venezia (Venice: Marsilio, 2016). 64 On the effects of the compendium, see Nandini Das, “Richard Hakluyt’s Two Indias: Textual sparagmos and Editorial Practice,” in Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing, ed. Carey and Jowitt, 119–128. For further discussion of the meaning of textual collection, see Chapter 5. 65 “Essendo Io Alovise da Ca da mosto stato el primo che de la nation de la nobel Cita de

241 Venesia sia dimosso a navigare el mare occeano di fori del stretto de Zibeltera,” Paesi novamente retrovati, 1:1. 66 Maps and prints similarly enabled viewers to understand distant peoples comparatively. See Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), and Leitch, Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany. 67 In fact, reading “comparatively” through a volume in this way – reading “across” texts – was very much “rooted in concrete, everyday ways of engaging with books” in the Renaissance. Meaning: where the modern reader might see texts bound together in early modern compilations as having nothing in common, early modern readers did not perceive this, or perceived it less. “Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century compilations . . . were subject to a degree of contingency and reader intervention that is alien to modern norms of textual order.” See Knight, Bound to Read, 9, 68–69. 68 “Cristophoro Colombo Zenovese homo de alta et procera statura, rosso, de grande ingegno e faza longa, seguito molto tempo li serenissimi Re de Spagna in qualunque parte andavano, procurando lo aiutassero ad armare qualche navilio: che se offeriva attovare per ponente insule finitime de la India, dove è copia de pietre preciose, et specie, et oro, che facilmente se porriano conseguire. Per molto tempo el Re et la Regina et tutti li Primati de Spagna de zo ne pigliavano zocho, et finaliter dapo sette anni, et dapo molti travagli, compiacetteno a sua voluntà, et li armarno una nave e do caravelle, con le quale circa alli primi zorni de septembrio 1492 se partì da li liti spani et incominzò el suo viazo,” Libretto, ch. 1 (Paesi, 4:84), in Italian Reports on America, ed. Symcox, 81–82, 207. 69

“Christophorus colonus quidam, ligur vir, fernando et helisabethae

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regibus catholicis proposuit et suasit se ab occidente nostro finitimas indiae insulas inuenturum, si navigiis et rebus ad navigationem attinentibus instruerent, a quibus augeri christiana religio; margaritarum, aromatum atque auri inopinata copia haberi facile posset. Instanti ex regio fisco destinata sunt tria navigia, unum onerarium caueatum, alia duo mercatoria levia sine caueis, quae ab hispanis carauelae uocantur. His habitis, ab hispanis littoriubs circiter kal. Semtembris anni secundi et noagesimi supra quadringentesimum et millesimum a nostra salute iter institutum cum uiris hispanis circiter ccxx colonus coepit,”

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71

72 73

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Martyr, Decade, 1.1.2, in Selections from Peter Martyr, ed. Geoffrey Symcox and Geoffrey Eatough, Repertorium Columbianum 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), 43, 129. “Dapoi che lo admirante Colombo vegnuto a tal contumacia, molti suoi peoti et muchieri che seco continue erano stati a le supradicte navigatione, fecero intra loro deliberatione andare per l’oceano a discoprire nuove isole,” Libretto, ch. 26 (Paesi, 4:109), in Italian Reports on America, ed. Symcox, 101, 226. This compares to Martyr’s Decade, 1.8.1–2, which simply begins, “The rich ocean which lay hidden in time past until now when it was discovered by Christopher Columbus”; in Selections from Peter Martyr, ed. Symcox and Eatough, 94. “El Columbo se mete in ordene per andar a discoprir, et dice voler far unto viazo più bello et de mazor utilità che alcuno altro l’habia facto . . . Cun luj [sic] va molti mei amici, che al suo ritorno me farano participe del tuto,” Trevisan, Lettere, 50. Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, 282. “Como Colombo fo chiamato Admirante del Mare,” Paesi, 4:91. Alessandro Zorzi similarly repeatedly glossed the word “Admirante” into the margins of his manuscript compilations. See, for instance, Alessandro Zorzi, Raccolta Alberico (Florence: Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, B.R. 234), 24r. For a similar analysis of the subtleties of Hakluyt’s compendium, see Julia Schleck, “Forming the Captivity of Thomas Saunders:

75

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77

78

79

80 81

Hakluyt’s Editorial Practices and their Ideological Effects,” in Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing, ed. Carey and Jowitt, 129–138. See, for instance, Copia de una letera mandata dalla cesarea maesta de l’imperator al christianissimo re di Francia de le cose grande e nove ritrovate nella provincia de Peru (Venice (?): n.p., 1535) (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (hereafter BNM) Misc.2190.3), and Copia delle lettere del prefetto della India la Nuova Spagna detta, alla Cesarea Maesta rescritte (Venice (?): n.p., 1534 (?)) (BNM Rari.770.3). See also Davide Domenici, “The Descrittione dell’India occidentale, a Sixteenth-Century Source on the Italian Reception of Mesoamerican Material Culture,” Ethnohistory 64 (2017): 497–527. See Suzanne Karr Schmidt and Kimberly Nichols, Altered and Adorned: Using Renaissance Prints in Daily Life (New Haven: Yale University Press and the Art Institute of Chicago, 2011), 9, and Salzberg, Ephemeral City. For instance, despite the interests of learned audiences in the New World, no European presses printed the accounts of the Cabots, Verrazano, or Ponce de Leon between 1493 and 1532, either indicating that these texts were lost, or demonstrating gaps in readership, interest, or the availability of information. Christopher Columbus, Letters from America: Columbus’s First Accounts of the 1492 Voyage, ed. and trans. B. W. Ife (London: King’s College London, 1992), 7. The letter appeared in twelve editions in 1493 alone, in Spanish, Latin, Catalan, and Italian, and was printed across Europe thereafter, though only one known copy of the first edition, published by Pedro Posa, survives. For the initial publishing history of this letter, see Mauricio Obregón, The Columbus Papers: The Barcelona Letter of 1493, The Landfall Controversy, and the Indian Guides (New York: Macmillan, 1991), 6–8. John Huxtable Elliott, “Renaissance Europe and America: A Blunted Impact,” in First Images of America, ed. Chiappelli, 1:1–23, at 14; “Una della principali fonti in Europea per la conoscenza di nuovi mondi,” Marica Milanesi, “Giovanni Battista Ramusio e le Navigazioni e Viaggi (1550–1559),” in L’epopea delle scoperte, ed. Zorzi, 75–101, at 86. Knight, Bound to Read, 2. See Matthew McLean, The Cosmographia of Sebastian Münster: Describing the World in the Reformation (Burlington: Ashgate, 2007), 235,

NOTES TO PAGES 42–43

82

83

84

85

and Johnson, The German Discovery of the New World, 19–26, 44. On Desceliers’s and Vopel’s use of the Novus orbis, see Chet Van Duzer, The World for a King: Pierre Desceliers’ Map of 1550 (London: The British Library, 2015), 51. The Zorzi family were a Venetian family with patrician and non-patrician lines. Some sources suggest Alessandro commanded a galley, though such information does not appear in his manuscripts and probably regards an eponymous Zorzi, since two Alessandro Zorzis exist in the genealogical pages from the early sixteenth century. Alessandro Zorzi the editor married into the Vendramin family in Venice, and both of the Alessandro Zorzis listed in Venetian genealogies were unmarried, so the identity of the editor Alessandro Zorzi remains obscure. Some have debated whether Zorzi could have been the go-between linking Trevisan and the printer of the Libretto, or if he played a role in the production of the Paesi. See Roberto Almagià, “Intorno a quattro codici fiorentini e ad uno ferrarese dell’erudito veneziano Alessandro Zorzi,” La Bibliofilia 38 (1936): 313–347; Plinio Freire Gomes, “Alessandro Zorzi e l’invenzione dei tropici,” in La cartografia europea tra primo rinascimento e fine dell’illuminismo, ed. Diogo Ramada Curto, Angelo Cattaneo, and André Ferrand Almeida (Florence: Olschki, 2003), 109–132; Mildonian, “La conquista dello spazio americano,” in L’impatto della scoperta dell’America, ed. Aricò, 127–130. Zorzi names himself as the author “Jo Alex. Zorzi li noterò” in Zorzi, Raccolta Alberico, vol. 234 (hereafter Raccolta Alberico, vol. 2), 31v, and similarly “Jo Alex” in vol. 233, 136v. On Zorzi as the author of both of these manuscripts and their marginalia, see Almagià, “Intorno a quattro codici,” 322. See n. 86. On his intention to publish these materials, see Almagià, “Intorno a quattro codici,” 347, and Laura Laurencich-Minelli, introduction to Un “giornale” del Cinquecento sulla scoperta dell’America: Il manoscritto di Ferrara, ed. Laura Laurencich-Minelli (Milan: Cisalpino– Goliardica, 1985), 17–19. For a somewhat comparable, anonymous Venetian manuscript compendium of travel literature dating c. 1518–1520, see BNM It.6.208 (5881). Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, Ferrara (Ms. cl. II. 10), hereafter “Ferrara Codex.” For a transcription of the Ferrara Codex, see LaurencichMinelli, Un “giornale” del Cinquecento.

243 86 The complete set of four volumes are numbered B.R. 233–236, and were previously numbered 80, 81, 83 (sic), and 84. 87 Book 1 contains the contents of the Libretto, the first four pages copied by hand and the remaining printed, taken from the 1507 printed edition; Book 2 comprises four letters, from Simone del Verde to Marco Cini (Cadiz, January 2, 1498), a piece of a letter from Bartholomew Columbus, a “Description of the Superstitious Practices on Hispaniola,” and a “Description of Castiglian findings”; Book 3 includes Vespucci’s Mundus Novus letter and Columbus’s letter from Jamaica; Book 4 contains a collection of seven manuscript letters concerning the New World, unsigned or dated, but including portions of Columbus’s letter from Jamaica; Book 5 comprises an account of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, taken from the Latin letter of Massimiliano Transilvano, secretary to Charles V, as well as four additional letters pertaining to Magellan, two manuscript and two printed, as well as a copy of the Libro ultimo del summario delle cose de le Indie Occidentali; Book 6 contains the printed account of Magellan’s voyage in the Viaggio fatto da li Spagniuoli a torno al mondo (Venice, 1536), Massimiliano Transilvano’s account of the voyage, Pigafetta’s account, and a letter from Seville to the Spanish ambassador in Venice, Don López, dated February 8, 1538 that discusses the pacification of Peru. For a more detailed description of the varied contents of the second volume of the Raccolta Alberico, see Almagià, “Intorno a quattro codici,” 317–319, 341–342. 88 On cutting and pasting from other printed books, see Blair, Too Much to Know, 213–229. 89 This sketch is found in Raccolta Alberico, vol. 2, 60v. See Sebastiano Crinò, “Schizzi cartografici inediti dei primi anni della scoperta dell’America,” Rivista marittima 9 (1930): 5–73; Raleigh A. Skelton, Explorers’ Maps: Chapters in the Cartographic Record of Geographical Discovery (London: Spring Books, 1958), 56, 71; George E. Nunn, “The Three Maplets Attributed to Bartholomew Columbus,” Imago Mundi 9 (1952): 12–22. For a similar sketch that illustrates Benedetto Bordone grappling with global geography at this time, see BNCF Mag. XIII.52, 67r, partially reproduced in Berchet, Fonti italiane, 2:360. 90 Ferrara Codex, 16v, 19r, 19v.

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See, for instance, Raccolta Alberico, vol. 2, 4v. Raccolta Alberico, vol. 2, 5r; Ferrara Codex, 7r. Ibid, 12v. See n. 40, and Chapter 6, n. 106. See, for instance, the Ferrara Codex, 9v, 29r. “Le canoe, zoè barchè sue, sono di un solo legno cavato con pietre acutissime, longe ma strette, molti afermono havevono vedute de 80 remi l’una,” Ferrara Codex, 3r. Marin Sanudo included an ambassadorial letter from Geronimo Vianelo in Burgos, dated December 23, 1506, that expressed a similar Venetian interest in canoes when he reflected on Vespucci’s travels in the New World. “Sescontrono in una chanoa de indiani, chea nostro mofo è come un zopollo de un pezo de legno cavada,” Sanudo, I diarii, 6:540. 96 Raccolta Alberico, vol. 2, 11v–12r, copied from Trevisan, Libretto, ch. 15, in Italian Reports on America, ed. Symcox, 93. See also the Ferrara Codex, 21v. 97 See, for example, the Ferrara Codex, 9v, 10v, 11r, 20r, 21; Raccolta Alberico, vol. 2, 7r, 25r. On islands and isolarii, see Chapter 6. 98 “Papa Pio in l’Asia dice che Sir Nicolo di Conti tal serpenti esser optimi a magnar. Marcho Polo parla di tal serpenti in la presentia di Can Grande et sono optimi a mangiar e il fiel e medicinal. Dice haver a pie una ungia sola simile al falcon,” Raccolta Alberico, vol. 2, 11r. See also Ferrara Codex, 20v. Here, Zorzi perhaps refers to Pope Pius III, who was pope for one month in the fall of 1503. 99 See I viaggi di Marco Polo, in Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 3:207, Marco Polo, The Description of the World, trans. Sharon Kinoshita (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2016), 104–106. 100 Ferrara Codex, “Cipangi,” 17v, “Spezie,” 18v, “Marco Polo parla di tali serpenti in la provintia di Caragia, optimi a mangiar,” 20v. Raccolta Alberico, vol. 2, 11r, 13v, 33v. 101 The gloss reads, “Coblai Kan imperatore, del 1257 mandò i fioli di Marco Polo. Catajo”; Zorzi’s text, transcribing Columbus's letter from the fourth voyage, reads, “Lo imperatore del Catajo, zà molti anni, domandò et fece gran cosa, per havere homeni intelligenti, gli insegnasino in la fede de Christo,” Ferrara Codex, 71r. 102 For instance, two comparative manuscript examples from the Dieppe school, the Vallard atlas (1547) and Pierre Desceliers’s world map (1550), also contained artistic illustrations of Tenochtitlan; both rendered the city from a 91 92 93 94 95

lateral view. See, for example, Van Duzer, The World for a King, 106–107. 103 On marginalia as mnemonic, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 242–257. 104 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 13, 23. 105 “Io lodo veramente queste fatiche, et lodo coloro che non essendo dotati dalla natura di far libri di loro invention . . . s’affatichino in queste et simili virtuose imprese,” Anton Francesco Doni, Libraria (Venice: Gioliti, 1550), 19v–20r. 106 See Vincenzo Fera, Giacomo Ferraù, and Silvia Rizzo, eds., Talking to the Text: Marginalia from Papyri to Print (Messina: Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi Umanistici, 2002); Michel de Certeau, “Reading as Poaching,” in Readers and Reading, ed. Andrew Bennett (London: Longman, 1995), 150–163; William W. E. Slights, “The Edifying Margins of Renaissance English Books,” Renaissance Quarterly 42 (1989): 682–716; Heather J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 107 Anthony Grafton, “Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise? Guillaume Budé and His Books,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 91 (1997): 139–157, at 156–157. 108 Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 256. 109 Most famously, see Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 113–138. Amid the vast literature on authorship, see Harold Love, Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Margaret J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 110 “E par probabile che, come poi fece il Ramusio, lo Zorzi si proponesse di accompagnare la raccolta con carte geografiche illustrative e con commenti personali,” “Le note critiche dello Zorzi fanno poi supporre che egli volesse accompagnare la sua raccolta di viaggi da commenti,” Almagià, “Intorno a quattro codici,” 343, 345.

NOTES TO PAGES 58–62

111 See Contarini’s letter from Valladolid, BNM It.7.1009 (7447), December 13, 1522, c.281r– 283r, and BNM It.11.143, c. 16–17. See also Dispacci di Andrea Navagero Ambasciatore alla Corte di Spagna, Correr Cod. Cic. 2792; Archivio di Stato, Venice (hereafter ASV), Capi del consiglio di X, Filze, Lettere, b. 23, September 27, 1522 and April 28, 1523, fol. 82; Gasparo Contarini, Lettere scritte al senato nella sua ambasciata a Carlo V Imperator dal 29 Marxo 1521 al 25 luglio 1525, BNM Cod.Marciano.7. 1009, fol. 278–283. For a list of archival documents regarding Sebastian Cabot’s negotiations with the Venetian state, see Navigatori veneti del qattrocento e del cinquecento: Celebrazioni in onore di Alvise Da Mosto, Venezia, mag-giu. 1957 (Venice: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, 1957), 73–76. For transcriptions of many of the documents relative to this exchange, see Francesco Tarducci, Di Giovanni e Sebastiano Caboto. Memorie raccolte e documentate (Venice: Fratelli Visentini, 1892), and Berchet, Fonti italiane, 1:107–110. When he was in the service of the king of England twenty-five years later, Cabot again entered into discussions with Venice about the search for a northwest passage, this time through the Venetian ambassador to England Giacomo Soranzo. It does not appear that he ever came to Venice. See Massimo Donattini, “Giovanni Battista Ramusio e le sue Navigationi: Appunti per una biografia,” Critica Storica 17 (1980): 55–100, at 78–79. 112 Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Cod. Misc. S 99 sup. See Donattini, “Giovanni Battista Ramusio e le sue Navigationi,” 85, 95, and Surdich, Verso il nuovo mondo, 81–82. 113 See, for instance, Fumagalli and Amat di S. Filippo, Bibliografia degli scritti italiani; Mario Sartor, “Venezia e il nuovo mondo nei primi decenni del ‘500,” in “Renovatio Urbis”: Venezia nell’età di Andrea Gritti (1523–1538), ed. Manfredo Tafuri (Rome: Officina, 1984), 335–343; Giuseppe Bellini, “La Scoperta del Nuovo Mondo”; Angela Carraciolo Aricò, “L’editoria veneziana del Cinquecento di fronte alla scoperta dell’America,” in Temi Colombiani, 1 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1988), 15–30. 114 Donattini, “Orizzonti geografici,” 88–99; reprinted in Donattini, Spazio e modernità, 95–105. 115 Rudolf Hirsch, “Printed Reports on the Early Discoveries and Their Reception,” in First

245 Images of America, ed. Chiappelli, 1:537–562. The most important European centers of print, overall, included Paris, Lyon, Antwerp, Venice, Basel, Frankfurt, and Nuremburg. See Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, 269. 116 John Alden and Denis C. Landis, eds., European Americana: A Chronological Guide to Works Printed in Europe Relating to the Americas, vol. I, 1493–1600 (New York: Readex Microprint Corporation, 1980), 300–314. 117 Jacopo Filippo Foresti da Bergamo, Supplementum supplementi chronicarum (Venice: Albertino da Lisona Vercellese, 1503), 441v–442v. Foresti’s book was first published in 1483, and the 1503 edition added news of the Columbian voyages in Book 16. An anonymous Venetian manuscript chronicle that dates to 1528 discussed, in a similar tone, that the Spanish “had found islands” (“Hanno trovato ysole”). See BNM It.cl.7. 323 (8646), 213v. 118 This translation was particularly significant since the Spanish original was lost soon after Rusconi’s publication. This text was republished five more times in Venice during the sixteenth century and was often bound together with the account of Ludovico de Varthema’s travels to the Near East. See Lucovico de Varthema and Juan Diaz, Itinerario de Ludovico de Varthema Bolognese ne lo Egypto ne la Suria nella Arabia deserta, & felice, nella Persia, nella India, & nela Ethyopia: El sede el vivere, & costume delle prefate provincie. Et al presente agiontovi alcune isole novamente ritrovate (Giorgio de Rusconi, 1520); see also Chapter 5, n. 77. 119 For the publication histories and provenance of Ramusio’s accounts, see Milanesi’s preface to each text in Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi. 120 On the successive reprintings of these texts, see n. 9. 121 See Daniela Bleichmar, “Books, Bodies, and Fields: Sixteenth-Century Transatlantic Encounters with the New World: Materia Medica,” in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, ed. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 83–99. 122 The Venetian patrician and botanist Pietro Antonio Michiel (1510–1576), a great observer of plants, assisted in the foundation of the botanical garden in Padua in the 1550s and kept his own garden in the Venetian lagoon on the island of San Trovaso. His manuscript herbal discussed potatoes and tomatoes. See David

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Gentilcore, “The Impact of New World Plants, 1500–1800: The Americas in Italy,” in Italy and the New World, ed. Horodowich and Markey, 190–205. 123 See Giuseppe Olmi, “Magnus campus”: I naturalisti italiani di fronte all’America nel secolo XVI,” in Il Nuovo Mondo nella coscienza italiana e tedesca, ed. Prosperi and Reinhard, 351–400. The literature on early modern science and exploration is immense; as a sampling, see Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2002); Daniela Bleichmar, “Painting as Exploration: Visualizing Nature in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Science,” Colonial Latin American Review 15 (2006): 81–104; Marwa Elshakry, “When Science Became Western: Historiographical Reflections,” Isis 101 (2010): 98–109; Schiebinger and Swan, Colonial Botany; Michael F. Robinson, “Science and Exploration,” in Reinterpreting Exploration: The West in the World, ed. Dane Kennedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 21–37; James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, eds., Science and the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2008); Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

5

6

Chapter 3

1

2

3

4

“[N]on avesse fatto piú bisogno leggere né Tolomeo né Strabone né Plinio né alcun altro degli antichi scrittori intorno alle cose di geografia,” Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 1:8. See, for instance, Pagden, European Encounters with the New World, and Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts. Pietro Martire di Anghiera and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Summario de la generale historia de l’Indie Occidentali cavato da libri scritti dal signor Don Pietro Martyre del Consiglio delle Indie della Maesta de l’imperadore, et da molte altre particulari relationi (Venice: Eredi di L. Giunti (?), 1534). See Donattini, “Orrizonti geografici,” 122–124. It was likely published by Zoppino; see Aricò, “L’editoria veneziana,” 19, n. 8. For the most thorough biographical treatment of Ramusio, see Antonio del Piero, “Della vita

7

e degli studi di Giovanni Battista Ramusio,” Nuovo archivio veneto 3–4 (1902): 5–112. Compared to the Libretto, this 1534 translation would have been undertaken from Martyr’s final printed Latin text – not a manuscript – since Martyr’s Decades had been published successively in 1511, 1516, and 1530. There exists some debate as to whether Ramusio or Navagero undertook this translation. See Massimo Donattini, “Giovanni Battista Ramusio e le sue Navigationi,” 74–75. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557) entered the service of Alphonso of Aragon, the second Duke of Villahermosa, where he met Columbus and became interested in the exploration of the Americas. In 1513 he joined an expedition to the New World. Drawing on his experience, Oviedo submitted a brief report to Charles V in 1525, printed in Toledo in 1526 as his Sumario of the flora and fauna of the Indies, which Navagero translated and published in Book 2 of Ramusio’s 1534 Summario in Venice. Oviedo corresponded regularly with Pietro Bembo, Giovanni Battista Ramusio, and Girolamo Fracastoro in Venice. Following the death of Peter Martyr, Charles V commissioned him to write a history of the New World, and Oviedo became its official chronicler in 1530. He returned to Spain in 1534 and published the first part of his longer history, La historia general y natural de las Indias, which began to appear in 1535. See Antonello Gerbi, Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985). Andrea Navagero brought the published texts of both Martyr and Oviedo to Venice, and mentioned during his embassy in Spain that he would collect and send these publications. See, for instance, his letter to Ramusio dated May 31, 1526 from Granada, in Lettere di XIII huomini illustri (Venice: Francesco Lorenzini da Turino, 1560), 686–706. The Libro ultimo was published separately in October of 1534, before the December publication of the first two books. While likely intended as part of this collection, the Libro ultimo is bound with the other two in only one extant copy. It otherwise exists as a single publication, produced several months ahead of Gaztelu’s longer translation of Xerex (1535). On the Summario, see Mildonian, “La

NOTES TO PAGES 65–67

8

9

conquista dello spazio americano,” in L’impatto della scoperta dell’America, ed. Aricò, 123–124, n. 24, and 131–132, and Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 6:675–676. The “Ramusio map” was intended to be attached to this text; on this map, see Chapter 4. “Essendo di grande ingegno . . . in pochi anni divenne il piu praticho et sicuro capitano di navi, che fusse al suo tempo,” “osservato con diligentia che in certi tempi dell’anno, soffiavano da ponente alcuni venti,” Summario, 2r. Navagero and Ramusio added this passage, which is in neither the Libretto, nor the Paesi, nor Martyr’s first Decade. “Tre giorni Avanti che scoprissero terra, dormendo Colombo, gli apparve una mirabil vision, tale che destatosi pieno di allegrezza chiamati à se li compagni disse loro, che in breve tempo vedrebbon terra. Et una mattina al far del giorno buttato lo scandaglio in mare, et veduta certa sorte di terreno del fondo di quello, conobbe non esser molto lontan da quella,”

Summario, 3r. Compare to Martyr, Decade, 1.1.4, in Selections from Peter Martyr, ed. Symcox and Eatough, 44. 10 “Impetuoso turbine,” “mosse le pietre da le cime de monti le faceva andare abasso con incredibil ruina,” “ognun pensava che il fin del mondo fusse venuto,” Summario, 16r-v. Compare to Martyr, Decade, 1.4.11, in Selections from Peter Martyr, ed. Symcox and Eatough, 74. 11 “Guardava il governatore molto amorosamente, parendoli il piu bello huomo che gia mai havesse veduto,” Summario, 19r-v. Compare to Martyr, Decade, 1.5.10–11, in Selections from Peter Martyr, ed. Symcox and Eatough, 79–80. 12 On Martyr, see Antonello Gerbi, Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985), 50–75. Angela Carraciolo Aricò argued that in their Summario, Ramusio and Navagero employed a much more positive rhetorical tone than Martyr had; see Idem, “Gli storiografi delle Indie,” in Le Americhe: Storie di viaggiatori italiani, ed. Egidio Ortona (Milan: Electa, 1987), 54–61, at 57–58.

247 13 See Stefano Briguglio, “Due visioni della religiosità dei popoli del nuovo mondo: Pietro Martire D’Anghiera e Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo,” in Il letterato, ed. Aricò, 99–116. 14 Another Venetian compendium around this same time, Il viaggio fatto da gli Spagniuoli intorno a’l mondo (1536) – a series of documents related to Magellan’s voyage, also perhaps edited by Ramusio – represents a similar publication. For additional examples of the Venetian travel compendia in the middle of the sixteenth century, see Antonio Manutius’s travel anthology Viaggi fatti da Vinetia alla Tana, in Persia, in India et in Costantinopoli (Venice: Manutius, 1543), and Diversi avisi particolari dall’Indie di Portogallo ricevuti dall’anno 1551 sino al 1558 (Venice: Neum iomo lein sisa, 1558). 15 For an overview of the text, see Marica Milanesi, introduction to Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 1:x–xlii, and Donattini, “Giovanni Battista Ramusio e le sue Navigationi.” 16 See Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology, 6, 85–124. 17 “Come novo Strabone, o Tolomeo di questo secolo,” Francesco Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima et singolare (Venice: Iacomo Sansonvino, 1581), 272v. 18 On its publication history, see Milanesi, “Nota Bibliografica,” in Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 1:xxxvii. 19 See, for instance, Milanesi, Tolomeo Sostituito; Fabio Romanini, Se fussero più ordinate, e meglio scritte: Giovanni Battista Ramusio correttore ed editore delle Navigationi et viaggi (Rome: Viella, 2007); Massimo Donattini, “Ombre imperiali. Le Navigationi et viaggi di G. B. Ramusio e l’immagine di Venezia,” in L’Europa divisa e i nuovi mondi: Per Adriano Prosperi, ed. Massimo Donattini, Giuseppe Marcocci, and Stefania Pastore, 2 vols. (Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2011), 2:33–44. Scholarly attention has also focused on Ramusio’s relationship to the cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi, who produced the maps of America for Ramusio’s third volume, as well as on the relationship between text and image in Ramusio’s collections. See Margaret Small, “Displacing Ptolemy? The Textual Geographies of Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi,” in Mapping the Medieval World: Geographic Encounters in the Latin World and Beyond, 300–1600, ed. Keith Lilley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 152–172, and José Pardo Tomás, “Le immagini delle piante americane nell’opera di Gonzalo Fernández de

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Oviedo (1478–1557),” in Natura-Cultura: L’interpretazione del mondo fisico nei testi e immagini, ed. Giuseppe Olmi, Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, and Attilio Zanca (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2000), 163–188. Deborah Howard, “The Status of the Oriental Traveller in Renaissance Venice,” in ReOrienting the Renaissance, ed. Maclean, 29–49, at 37. See also Marica Milanesi, “Giovanni Battista Ramusio e le Navigazioni e viaggi (1550–1559),” in L’epopea delle scoperte, ed. Zorzi, 81–82; Margaret Small, “A World Seen through Another’s Eyes,” in Richard Hakluyt and Travel Writing, ed. Cary and Jowitt, 45–55, at 48. All three volumes were originally published anonymously, until the publisher Giunti added a tribute to Ramusio in the foreword to Volume 1 in 1563. He seems to have planned a fourth volume on South America, but it was never carried out. See Surdich, Verso il nuovo mondo, 79. On Ramusio’s organization, see Milanesi, introduction to Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 1:xxvi, and Donattini, “Giovanni Battista Ramusio e le sue Navigationi,” 99. Ricardo Padrón has demonstrated the various ways in which Spanish cosmographers, for instance, depicted the Pacific as much smaller than they knew it was, collapsed the East and West Indies, and likened the Moluccas and the Caribbean in order to undergird Habsburg global hegemony. See Ricardo Padrón, “(Un) Inventing America: The Transpacific Indies in Oviedo and Gómara,” Colonial Latin American Review 25 (2016): 16–34, and Idem, “The Indies of the West or, The Tale of How an Imaginary Geography Circumnavigated the Globe,” in Western Visions of the Far East in a Transpacific Age (1522–1657), ed. Christina H. Lee (Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 19–41. Along similar lines, the sevenfold system of American continental geography did not fully emerge until the twentieth century. See Lewis and Wigen, The Myth of the Continents. While Ramusio’s Navigazioni asserted the primacy of Venice and Iberia in the globalization of trade and knowledge, the practitioners of global history and historians of Asia more specifically have long argued that neither played such a definitive role in the early modern world. Europe as a whole lagged far behind Asia in terms of cross-cultural material

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exchanges, as well as global knowledge and awareness. While this scholarship is vast, most fundamentally, see Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization; Alexander Statman, “Fusand: The Enlightenment Story of the Chinese Discovery of America,” Isis 107 (2016): 1–25. “Era molto conosciuta e frequentata, e forse piú ch’ella non è al presente,” Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 2:968. Ibid, 3:365. “Nel qual luogo non sono ancora centocinquanta anni che andavano le galere e navi veneziane e genovesi a comprar dette spezie e gioie,” Ibid, 2:976–977. “Essendo padroni di tutti i mari, sí che alcuno non può navigar senza loro licenza,” Ibid, 2:978. Pietro Bembo expressed similar sentiments about the tragedy of the loss of Italian trade. See Pietro Bembo, Opere, 4 vols. (Venice: Francesco Hertzhauser, 1729), 1:143. “Far venire in luce questa metà del mondo, stata tanti secoli come sepolta e in tenebre,” “La qual essendo stata la piú maravigliosa e la piú grande che già infiniti secoli sia stata fatta,” Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 5:12–13. “Favola veramente e invenzione ridicolosa,” Ibid, 5:13. The theory of the unknown pilot’s prior discovery of America was suggested by Las Casas, Oviedo, and López de Gómara; see n. 37. In his History of the New World, Girolamo Benzoni also included López de Gómara’s account of an anonymous pilot returning from the other side of the Atlantic and telling Columbus about newly discovered lands. He agreed with Ramusio that “Gómara allowed himself to confuse the truth with many inventions, and that he had a wish to diminish the immortal fame of Christopher Columbus” (“Gómara si mettesse à confonder con molte inventioni la verità e che havesse animo di diminuire la immortal fama di Christofano Colombo”). See Benzoni, La historia, 9v–12r. “L’auttore di tanti tesori e grandezze aggiunte a quei regni,” Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 5:15. Similarly, Girolamo Benzoni argued that while the Spanish were unable to appreciate Columbus’s achievements, “if he had lived in the time of the Greeks or of the Romans, or of any other liberal nations, they would have

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erected a statue of him and they would have worshipoped [him] in a temple like a deity” (“il quale se fosse stato al tempo de’Greci, ò de’ Romani, overamente di qualunque altra liberal natione, gli havrebbono meritamente drizzato una statua, e in un tempio, come un Dio adorato”), Benzoni, La historia, 24v. 33 See, for instance, Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 5:25–26. 34 “Spe munerum ab almiranto Colono promissorum iamaicenses laeti revertuntur. Ipse pedes ad sanctum dominicum urbem primariam metropolitanam proficiscitur. Due nostratia comparat navigia, dominum adit. Invalidi omnes et egestate rerum extenuati veniunt ad Hispaniolam. Quid inde illis successerit non intellexi,” Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, De orbe nove decades (Alcalà: Arnaldi Guillelmi, 1516), 48v. 35 “Uomo veramente che se fosse stato appresso gli antichi, per l’admirabile et stupenda impresa d’haver trovato un mondo nuovo, oltra li tempii et statue, gli averian dedicato qualche stella ne’ segni celesti, coe ad Hercole et a Baccho, et la età nostra si puol tener gloriosa d’aver havuto in suo tempo un uomo italiano cosí grande et cosí famoso,” Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 5:102, italics mine. 36 Ibid, 5:15. 37 This occurs, for instance, in chapter 2, Book 2, of the 1535 edition of Oviedo’s Historia general y natural; see Jesús Carillo, ed., Oviedo on Columbus, Repertorium Columbianum 9 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 17, 44. 38 On the reception of Columbus, see Benjamin Keen, “Introduction: Christopher Columbus in History: Images of the Man and His Work, 1492–1992,” in Ferdinand Columbus, The Life of the Admiral Christopher Columbus by His Son Ferdinand (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), xxi–lxviii; Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); Giuseppe Bellini and Dario G. Martini, Colombo e la scoperta nelle grandi opere letterarie (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1992); Pagden, European Encounters with the New World, 89–115.

249 39 Charles V conferred upon Duke Alfonso d’Avalos (1542–1546) the investiture of Modena and Reggio as fiefs of the Habsburg Empire, and Alfonso became Ariosto’s patron, perhaps pointing to Ariosto’s motivations to praise Cortés. Ariosto remembered Columbus only anonymously as he who “del sole imitando il camin tondo,” found “nuove terre e nuovo mondo” (Orlando furioso, XV, 18–36). See Angela Carraciolo Aricò, “Da Cortés a Colombo, da Arioso al Tasso,” in Il letterato, ed. Aricò, 131–139. 40 Tasso symmetrically celebrated Columbus in the same canto XV in which Ariosto had ignored him in his Orlando furioso, thereby returning the fame that Ariosto had denied him. On Tasso’s unfinished poem, see Nathalie Hester, Literature and Identity in Italian Baroque Travel Writing (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 14. Paolo Giovio similarly confirmed Columbus’s historic stature in his collection of biographical sketches of famous men, Elogia virorum illustrium (1551). 41 “Christoforo Colombo Genovese, persona di conto per la sua peritia, e huomo molto eccellente nelle cose del mare, havendo in Genova lungamente tentato con la sua republica, che gli fosse dato modo di navigar ne mari incogniti per trovar nuovi paesi, e essendo da tutti sobernito, e riputato come pazzo, andatosene in Spagna a trovar Ferdinando, e Isabella, per il nome grande che havevano i predetti Re, d’abbracciare i valent’huomini in ogni professione . . . [F]u con tutto ciò esso Christoforo mal trattato. Perciòche venuto in disgratia del Re, e messo prigione si morì con poca satisfattione di quel premio ch’un tant’huomo meritava per opera tanto segnalata come fu quella. Mostrando col suo esempio, che la gratitudine si trova poche volte ne prencipi che ricevono beneficio dall’altrui cure, e fatiche,” Giacopo Filippo da Bergamo, Sopplimento delle croniche universali del mondo, di F. Giacopo Filippo da Bergamo. Tradotto nuovamente da M. Francesco

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Sansovino; Nel quale si contengono tutte le cose avvenute nel mondo, dalla creatione d'Adamo, fino a quest'anno presente 1581 (Venice: Altobello Salicato, 1581), 2v–3r. 42 “D’età 22 anni passò fino al porto della scussa nella Ethiopia inferior, al cui essempio mosso il Colombo, ritrovò il mondo nuovo,” Francesco Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima et singolare (Venice: Iacomo Sansonvino, 1581), 249v. Giosafat Barbaro similarly noted in his Viaggi fatti da Vinetia alla Tana . . . (1543) that “a great part of the world would be unknown if Venetian merchants had not first discovered it” (“saria incognita se la mercanzia e la marinarezza per quanto è stato il poter de’Veneziani non l’avesse aperta”), Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 3:485. 43 For the most recent critical edition of and bibliography on the Ramusio edition of Polo, see Giovanni Battista Ramusio: Dei viaggi di Messer Marco Polo veneziano («Navigationi et viaggi», II, 1559). Edizione critica digitale progettata e coordinata da Eugenio Burgio, Marina Buzzoni, Antonella Ghersett, ed. Eugenio Burgio and Samuela Simion, accessed October 29, 2017, http://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/it/edizioni/libri/ 978–88-6969–00-06/. 44 “Il libro del quale, per cause de infinite scorrezioni ed errori, è stato molte decine d’anni riputato favola, e che i nomi delle città e provincie fussero tutte fizioni e imaginazioni senza fondamento alcuno, e per di meglio sogni. Ma da cento anni in qua si è cominciato, da quelli che han praticato nella Persia, pur a riconoscere la provicia del Cataio; poi la navigazione de’ Portoghesi, oltra l’Aurea Chersoneso, verso greco han discoperto prima molte città e provincie dell’India e molte isole, con i medesimi nomi che’l detto autor gli chiama . . . Or veduto che tante particularità al tempo nostro di quella parte del mondo si scuoprono della qual ha scritto il predetto messer Marco, cosa ragionevole ho giudicato di far venire in luce il suo ibro, col mezzo di diversi esemplari scritti già piú di dugento anni, a mio

giudicio perfettamente corretto e di gran lunga molto piú fedele di quello che fin ora si è letto, acciò ch’il mondo non perdesse quell frutto che da tanta diligenzia e industria intorno cosí onorata scienzia si può raccogliere . . . E benché in questo libro siano scritte molte cose che pareno fabulose e incredibili, non si deve però prestagli minor fede nell’altre ch’egli narra, che sono vere, né imputargli per cosí grande errore, percioché riferisce quello che gli veniva detto,” Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 3:22–23. The voyages of the Venetian Niccolò di Conti and the Portuguese traveler João de Barros similarly testified to the veracity of Polo’s account; see Ibid, 2:786 and 981. Arabic texts that Ramusio had received from Guillaume Postel at the time also confirmed Polo’s narrative; see Donattini, “Ombre imperiali,” 40. 45 Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 3:23. 46 See Toni Veneri, “Il riscatto geografico di Marco Polo,” Quaderni Veneti 1 (2012): 33–57, and Surekha Davies, “The Wondrous East in the Renaissance Geographical Imagination: Marco Polo, Fra Mauro, and Giovanni Battista Ramusio,” History and Anthropology 23 (2012): 215–234, at 225–226. Ramusio’s Italian edition of Marco Polo’s Travels is still considered, to date, the fullest and most complete version of this text. On the Ramusio edition and its relationship to previous editions, see Ronald Latham, introduction to The Travels of Marco Polo (New York: Penguin, 1979), 25; Marica Milanesi, “I viaggi di Marco Polo, gentiluomo veneziano,” in Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 3:15–16; John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 58, 161–162. 47 Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 3:29. 48 “E molte volte ho fra me stesso pensato, sopra il viaggio fatto per terra da questi nostri gentiluomini veneziani, e quello fatto per mare per il predetto signor don Cristoforo, qual di questi due sia piú maraviglioso: e se l’affezione della

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patria non m’inganna, mi pare che per ragion probabile si possa affermare che questo fatto per terra debba esser anteposto a quello di mare, dovendosi considerare una tanta grandezza di animo con la quale cosí difficile impresa fu operata e condotta a fine, per una cosí disperata lunghezza e asprezza di cammino, nel qual, per mancamento del vivere, non di giorni ma di mesi, era loro necessario di portar seco vettovaglia per loro e per gli animali che conducevano,” Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 3:23. 49 “Col vento pervenne là dove disegnava,” Ibid. 50 See Luigi Giovannini, ed., Il milione: Con le postille di Cristoforo Colombo (Rome: Edizioni Paoline, 1985), and Valerie Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 46, 64–67. 51 “Fu gran causa che tutti quelli serenissimi re s’infiammassero a voler far scoprir l’India orientale,” Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 2:15. 52 “Si comprende di quanto momento e credito fossero i viaggi di questi duoi Veneziani appresso quel serenissimo re,” Ibid, 2:786. 53 “Sia piú difficile l’andar al Cataio ch’al Mondo Nuovo, e piú pericoloso e lungo,” “L’anno sequente che si scopersero queste Indie occidentali, immediate vi ritornarono molte navi, e ogni giorno al presente ne vanno infinite ordinariamente; e sono fatte quelle parti cosí note, e con tanto commerzio, che maggior non è quello ch’è ora fra l’Italia, Spagna, e Inghilterra,” Ibid, 3:23–24. 54 “Giudicandola esser conforme a quanto è narrato nel libro del detto messer Marco,” Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 3:304. See also the account of Ussuncassan, the King of Persia; Ibid, 3:366. 55 Larner, Marco Polo, 161. 56 Marco Polo, Il milione, ed. Luigi Foscolo Benedetto (Florence, 1928), ccx–ccxi, cited in Larner, Marco Polo, 70. 57 See Chapter 4. 58 Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 2:979–990. While perhaps a simple literary device, this anonymous figure was perhaps a secret emissary of Sebastian Cabot who was in contact with Ramusio and planned to come to Venice

251 in 1551 to propose a new route to the Indies. See Giuliano Lucchetta, “Viaggiatori e racconti di viaggi nel Cinquecento,” 488–489. 59

“Volessero metter qualche poco d’industria e diligenza, e che non sapeva imaginarsi navigazione alcuna di tanta utilità e profitto a tutta la cristianità quanto saria questa, cioè che per questa via si potesse penetrar nell’India, e che si trovasse il paese del Cataio che fu discoperto già ducento anni per messer Marco Polo. E tolta la balla in mano dimonstrava che’l viaggio saria molto piú breve di quello che fanno ora li Portoghesi, e anco di quello che si dice che porriano far li Casigliani, all’isole Molucche,”

Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 2:981. 60 Ibid, 2:984. 61 “Intendeva l’arte del navigare piú ch’alcuno altro,” “Non sapete, a questo proposito d’andare a trova l’Indie pel vento di maestro, quel che fece già un vostro cittadino veneziano, ch’è cosí valente e pratico delle cose pertinnti alla navigazione e alla cosmografia ch’in Spagna al presente non v’è un suo pari, e la sua virtú l’ha fatto preporre a tutti li pilotti che navigano all’Indie occidentali, che senza sua licenza non possono far quell’esercizio, e per questo lo chiamano pilotto maggiore,” Ibid, 2:986. Ramusio later stated that Sebastian Cabot would surely have found one of these more profitable, alternative routes had his men not forced him to turn back; Ibid, 5:12. The idea of reaching Asia by sailing west had been suggested by the Florentine astronomer Toscanelli as early as 1474 – a fact that Ramusio surely knew. See Harisse, The Discovery of North America, 2–3. 62 “Per il mio piccol giudicio che non potrà durar longamente, e che alla fine sarà forza di lasciarlo, non tanto per la spesa grande che si fa di continuo di tener armate nell’Indie per cagione di quello, quanto per esser lungo e pericoloso . . . si possano aver spezie per

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cammino piú breve e facile,” Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 2:987. “Iddio forse riserba ancora lo scoprir di questo viaggio al Cataio per questa via, il qual per condur le spezie sarebbe piú facile e piú breve di tutti gli altri fin ad ora trovati,” Ibid, 5:12. Fracastoro had responded to Ramusio’s idea about the possible existence of an alternative route to the Indies in a letter to Ramusio dated January 25, 1548; see Lettere di XIII huomini illustri, 725. Such speculation had at least some basis in reality, since on various occasions (1504, 1530, 1586), the Venetians had considered collaborating with the Ottomans to construct a canal between the Mediterranean and Red seas; see Rinaldo Fulin, “Il Canale di Suez e la Repubblica di Venezia (1504),” Archivio Veneto 2 (1871): 175–213. Ramusio also wondered about such possibilities in his preface to the account of the voyage of Francesco Alvarez in Ethiopia; see Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 2:80. See also Domenico Sella, “L’economia,” in Storia di Venezia, vol. 6, Dal rinascimento al barocco, ed. Gaetano Cozzi and Paolo Prodi (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1994), 651–669. Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 2:837–838. “Il primo fu Omero, che non seppe con altra forma di parole esprimer un uomo perfetto e pieno di sapienzia che dicendo ch’egli era andato in diverse parti del mondo e aveva veduto molte città e costui de’popoli,” Ibid, 3:21. Ibid, 3:28. Ibid, 5:5–6. Gerolamo Garimberti, Problemi naturali e morali (Venice: Bottega di Erasmo di Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1549), 121–122. Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 5:5–6. Ibid, 5:11. Ibid, 5:10. “Molti Maestri, pilotti e marinari di Spagna, parendo loro in questa cosa esser tocchi pur troppo adentro nell’onore, essendo palese al mondo che ad un uomo forestiero e genovese era bastato l’animo di far quello che essi non avevano mai saputo né tentato di fare,” Ibid, 5:13. Building on the preface of the 1536 translation of Il viaggio fatto da gli spagniuoli a torno al mondo, Ramusio again included in his introduction to this text the detail that when Magellan’s Vittoria returned to Seville, it took the maritime skills of a Venetian, Gasparo

Contarini – then ambassador to Spain – to explain to the Spanish court how Magellan’s ship had lost a calendar day; Ibid, 2:837. Aricò suggested that Ramusio advocated for New World peoples by neutralizing Peter Martyr’s negative rhetoric about them. See Aricò, “Gli storiografi delle Indie,” 60. 74 See Benzoni, La cultura italiana e il Messico, 148, n. 35. 75 See John Jeffires Martin, “The Venetian Territorial State: Constructing Boundaries in the Shadow of Spain,” in Spain in Italy, ed. Dandelet and Marino, 227–248, at 230. 76 “Solevano essere, quando furono ritrovate da Colombo, un million d’anime e più, ora per li crudeli trattamenti de’Spagnoli, li quali sì per le grandi fatiche che hanno dato a quelli poveri uomini insueti, in farli cavar l’oro, sì per li morti da disperazione, la quale è stata così grande cosa, che s’hanno trovate delle madri, le quali hanno ucciso li propri figlioli, sono mancati quasi tutti, talmente che ora nell’isola Spagnola non sono 7 mila anime,” Luigi Firpo, ed., Relazioni di ambasciatori veneti al senato, vol. 2, Germania (1506–1554) (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1970), 126. See also the letter from Giacomo Suardino, the Mantuan ambassador in Spain, dated October 27, 1525, that Sanudo included in his chronicle. “Quelli spagnuoli usano tante crudeltà in quelle Indie, che hanno posto tal disperation in quelle gente, che nascendo li filioli le madri li amazano, dicendo non voler che vivano perchè non habbino a tollerare la servitù de spagnuoli,” Sanudo, I diarii, 40:416. 77 See Ambrosini, Paesi e mari ignoti, 96–97. The short and anonymous but unusually outspoken octavo printed pamphlet, Copia de una lettera mandata dalla cesarea maesta de l’imperator al christianissimo re di Francia de le cosse grande e nove retrovate nella provincial del Peru, detto el mondo novo (Venice (?): n.p., 1535), described the atrocities committed by the Spanish in Peru. See Berchet, Fonti italiane, 2:423. 78 “Se non fosse queste Indie, Sibilia saria niente et la Spagna, qual luce per tal comerchio, le merze si traze di le Indie oltra l’oro et perle, di

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le qual soleva venir assà, hor ne vengono poche,” Sanudo, I diarii, 58:678. I thank Linda Carroll for her help in translating this passage. “Infiniti huomini vilissimi et di bassissima conditione infami nella Spagna si sono transferiti in que’luochi, et sono in spatio di pochissimo tempo ritornati richissimi, et hanno comprato molte possessioni, et si sono maritati in donne nobili con grandissimo sdegno et dispiacere di tutti i nobili,” Firpo, Relazioni, 2:298. “His majesty no longer wants to take from others” (“Sua Maestà non voglia più metter la mano sopra quel d’altri”). Here, Tiepolo infers that Phillip II had been taking more gold than he should have from the Spanish working in Peru. See ASV, Senato, Dispacci Spagna, file 4, no. 21, Toledo, April 26, 1560. For criticism of Phillip II, see also the dispatches and relazioni of Sigismondo Cavalli (ambassador to Philip II, 1567–1570), and Leonardo Donà (ambassador to Philip II, 1569–1573), in Relazioni di ambasciatori veneti al senato, vol. 8, Spagna (1497–1598), ed. Luigi Firpo (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1981), 488, 654. “Le repubbliche sono odiate da’ principi, perché essendo quelle governate per il più con la ragione e con le leggi, e volendo i principi governar con il senso, facendo legge della propria loro volontà, vengono ad esser queste con il loro paragone rimprovero della ingiustizia di questi,” Giovan Francesco Morosini (ambassador to Philip II, 1578–1581), in Relazioni, ed. Firpo, 8:777. On the natural incompatibility of republics and princedoms, see also Bernardo Navagero (ambassador to Charles V, 1543–1546), in Relazioni, ed. Firpo, 2:507, and Giovanni Soranzo (ambassador to Philip II, 1562–1564), in Relazioni, ed. Firpo, 8:435. “Ogn’uno corre volentieri in quelle parti per la speranza dell’arichirsi,” ASV, Senato, Dispacci Spagna, f. 5, n. 87, Madrid, April 11, 1565. For additional Venetian commentary on demographic shifts in Spain, see Ambrosini, Paesi e mari ignoti, 86. “Quelli che vanno in quelle parti sono quasi tutti o uomini falliti e disperati, o fuggiti dale forze della giustizia; e di simil uomini è da temer molto,” Firpo, Relazioni, 8:343–344. “Quasi tutti appaiono impazienti alla fatica, dati all’ozio, al sonno, alla vanità, senza industria e diliganza alcuna,” Ibid, 8:341–342 and 353–361.

253 85

“Due maschere vestite e accompagnate alla Indiana, per similitudine di due di quei re soggiogati e fatti tributari di Sua Maesta Cattolica, come in segno di trofei e di trionfo, diedero a noi altri esterni spettatori segno di quanto sia grande la potenza di Castiglia, poichè a paesi e a regni tanto lontani ha potuto imponere e le leggi e il freno,”

Ibid, 8:665. 86 Along these lines, Venetian hatred of Spain fueled a vigorous local republicanism that grew in the shadow of growing Spanish power in Italy. See Martin, “The Venetian Territorial State,” 231. 87 “Non ardiscono però di tentar cosa nessuna, ma stanno senz’armi timidi come galline,” Firpo, Relazioni, 8:666. Leonardo Donà possessed an extensive library that included copious literature on travel, exploration, and the New World, as well as an inventory of his books that he personally annotated in the 1570s. His library included some of the first printed Venetian texts about the New World, including Columbus’s 1493 letter to Santangel, the letters of Vespucci, the Paesi novamente retrovati, and the first three Decades of Peter Martyr. See Biblioteca Correr, Venice (hereafter BCV), ms. Donà della Rose 447/11, c. 24, and BCV, ms. Donà della Rose, Leonardo Donà, Bibliotheca historicorum et geographorum, c. 16r–17r. 88 See Ambrosini, Paesi e mari ignoti, 117–121. 89 “O cervelluzzi veramente da babbuini. Questi sarebbon buoni da mandare per ambasciadori alle Indie nuove, perche hanno maggior conformità con le genti di quel paese, che con gli huomini di questo,” Tommaso Garzoni, Il theatro de’ vari e diversi cervelli mondani (Venice: Paulo Zanfretti, 1583), 40r. 90 Girolamo Benzoni, La historia del Mondo Nuovo (Venice: Pietro and Francesco Tini, 1572), 103v. 91 On Venetian ambassadorial depictions of Spain, see Federica Ambrosini, “Venetian Diplomacy, Spanish Gold, and the New World in the Sixteenth Century,” in Italy and the New World, ed. Horodowich and Markey, 47–60, and Benzoni, La cultura italiana e il Messico, 79–87.

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92 See Benjamin Keen, “The Black Legend Revisited: Assumptions and Realities,” Hispanic American Historical Review 49 (1969): 703–719, at 714–715. 93 “Non v’era pulzella che non fosse stata violata da i predatori,” Benzoni, La historia, 6v. 94 “Questa provincia di Panama soleva essere habitato da molti popoli Indiani, e per tutti quei fiumi v’era abondanza d’oro; ma gli Spagnuoli hanno consumato ogni cosa,” Ibid, 81v. 95 “Quegli, che pigliavano vivi, spetialmente i capitani, legategli le mani e i piedi, gettatigli in terra, colavano loro dell’oro in bocca, dicendo mangia mangia oro Cristiano,” Ibid, 49v. See Thomas Cummins, “The Golden Calf in America,” in The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World, ed. Michael W. Cole and Rebecca Zorach (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 77–104, at 99. 96 “Però molti come disperati se ne andavano à i boschi, e là s’impiccavano, havendo però prima i figliuoli uccisi, dicendo che assai meglio era loro il morire, che vivere cosi miseramente, servendo à tali, e tanti pessimi ladroni e tirani ferocissimi. Le femine con un certo sugo d’erbe disperdevano le lor gravidanze per non partorire le creature, e poi seguitavano i vestigi de’mariti loro impiccandosi. Chi si gettava giù da uno alto monte in un precipitio, chi si lanciava in mare, tal ne’fiumi scagliandosi, e tale si lasciava perire di fame; hora s’ammazzavano con i coltelli di pietra focaia, chi si passava il petto con legni apuntati, e i fianchi, e finalmente di due milioni d’Indiani che vi erano à questa isola, tra ammazzati da se stessi, e dalle fatiche oppressi, e con le crudeltà de gli Spagnuoli finiti; al presente non se ne ritrouvano cento cinquanta e questo è stato il modo di fargli Cristiani . . . In somma io dico, che dove gli Spagnuoli hanno spiegate le sue bandiere, vi hanno lasciato di grandissima crudeltà, segno di odio perpetuo à i paesani,”

Benzoni, La historia, 52v–53r. For similar passages, see also 38r, 101v, 154r-v. 97 “Dopo il fatto ciascuno sà fare,” Ibid, 12v. 98 “Si truovano de gli Spagnuoli in questi paesi, tanto vanaglorosi, che mai non si satiano di lodarsi, spetialmente di quelli, che sono stati in Italia,” Ibid, 80r. 99 “Uno Spagnuolo vale per quattro Alemanii, e tre Francesi, due Italiani, e cinquecento di loro, senza alcun dubbio, basteriano à pigliar Venetia dipinta, come s’ella fosse qualche casale di paglia, ò di legnami, di venticinque, ò trenta case, come sono una buona parte delle città da loro edificate, nell’India,” Ibid, 80r-v. 100 “O Montanese, quando tu volessi accettare il combattere à corpo, à corpo, e con arme pari, io ti vorrei far conoscere, che non si truova soldato alcuno forastiero: nè migliore, nè più valente, che uno Italiano,” Ibid, 80r. 101 “Il Tiracoscia da Castello, piacevolmente, e amorevolmente da lui invitato, à onore, e gloria del sangue Italiano,” Ibid, 81r. 102 “Concorse . . . quasi tutta Toscana,” “fu dottamente, e gloriosamente cantata da’poeti, de i quali vi hebbe sempre grandissima copia la Toscana,” Ibid. 103 “Dicono, che sono della stirpe de’Gotti . . . e trovatosi poi la verità, veggiamo, che in Ispagna saranno stati qualche porcari, ò pecorari,” Ibid, 80v. 104 On Ferdinand Columbus, see Chapter 5. 105 John Larner has argued that the 1614 Milanese edition of Benzoni’s text functioned as a panegyric of Genoa. See John Larner, “Fernando Colón. Historie del Sig. don Fernanco Colombo,” in I Found It at the JCB: Scholars and Sources (Providence: The John Carter Brown Library, 1996), 36–37. 106 See Henry Keazor, “Theodore De Bry’s Images for America,” Print Quarterly 15 (1998): 131–149, and Angela Enders, “An Italian in the New World: Girolamo Benzoni’s Historia del mondo nuovo,” Dispositio 17 (1992): 21–35, at 33. See also Chapter 6, n. 77. 107 See Enders, “An Italian in the New World,” 32. 108 The first French translastion of Las Casas, Fleming Jacques de Miggrode’s Tyrannies et cruatez des espagnols, perpetrees ès Indes Occidentales, was published in Antwerp in 1578, and the first English translation, The Spanish Colonie, in 1583. A variety of scholars have located the origins of the Black Legend in late

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medieval and early modern Italian culture; see Sverker Arnoldsson, La leyenda negra, estudios sobre sus orígenes (Gothenburg: Alquist and Wiksell, 1960), 11–77; Pierre Chaunu, “La légende noire antihispanique. Des Marranes aux Lumières. De la Méditerranée à l’Amérique. Contribution à une psychologie régressive des peuples,” Revue de psychologie des peuples 19 (1964): 188–223, at 197; Benzoni, La cultura italiana e il Messico, 137. On Italian translations of Las Casas and the development and promotion of the Black Legend in Venice in the seventeenth century, see Conclusion. 109 In Florence, a number of manuscript collections of travel were compiled around the beginning of the sixteenth century, including, for instance, the Codice Vaglienti (Biblioteca Riccardiana ms. 1910). See Iddio ci dia buon viaggio e guadagno (Codice Vaglienti), ed. Luciano Formisano (Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 2006). See also Rubiés, “From the ‘History of Travayle’,” 28. 110 Antonio Manutius notes, for instance, that he published his collection of travel literature in the hope that it would assist Venetian merchants. See Manutius, Viaggi fatti da Vinetia, alla Tana, preface. 111 See, for instance, Stefano Grande, “Le relazioni geografiche fra P. Bembo, G. Fracastoro, G.B. Ramusio, G. Gastaldi,” Memorie della società geografica italiana 12 (1905): 93–197; George Bruner Parks, “The Contents and Sources of Ramusio’s Navigationi,” in Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigationi et viaggi, ed. George Bruner Parks and Raleigh Ashlin Skelton, 3 vols. (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1970), 1:1–37; Idem, “Ramusio’s Literary History,” Studies in Philology 52 (1955): 127–148; Christopher J. Pastore, “Expanding Antiquity: Andrea Navagero and Villa Culture in the Cinquecento Veneto” (Ph.D. diss., The University of Pennsylvania, 2003); Toni Veneri, “Giovanni Battista Ramusio, molto più di uno spettatore. Le quinte delle Navigationi et viaggi,” Italica 89 (2012): 162–201; Andrea del Ben, Giovanni Battista Ramusio: Cancelliere e umanista (Trieste: Edizioni Goliardiche, 2005); Donattini, “Giovanni Battista Ramusio e le sue Navigationi,” 74–91; Luca Marcozzi, “L’esotismo d’occidente e il fascino delle scoperte in Bembo, Fracastoro e Navagero,” in Viajes y caminos: Relaciones interculturales entre Italia y España, ed. Xosé A. Neira Cruz (Santiago de

255 Compostella: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 2016), 107–123. 112 Alessandro Zorzi, for example, noted in his manuscript anthology of travel literature that Bartolomé Colon had given a map to a certain friar in Rome, a drawing of the shores of new lands with a description of the customs and habits of the New World. When that friar came to Venice, being Zorzi’s friend, he gave Zorzi the drawing and description. See Zorzi, Raccolta alberico, 2:31r–v. Similarly, in the preface to his isolario, Porcacchi describes “the friends and gentlemen that I find I have in various parts, who send me written information in many languages . . . I still have many in this most happy city of Venice, where they have collected for me, by mouth or in writing, many things that I did not know about” (“gli amici, e i signori che in diverse parti mi trovo havere, i quali m’hanno mandato informationi a penna, tratte da piu lingue . . . Molti ve ne ha anchora in questa felicissima città di Vinetia, che a bocca, et per scritture m’hanno ragguagliato di molti particolari, ch’io non sapeva”), Tommaso Porcacchi, L’isole piu famose del mondo (Venice: Simon Galignani, 1572), preface. 113 On the Giunti family and its branches in Venice and Spain, see William Pettas, A History and Bibliography of the Giunti (Junta) Printing Family in Spain, 1526–1628 (Newcastle: Oak Knoll Press, 2005), 1–90, esp. 88; Nuovo, The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance, 51–71; Donattini, “Orrizonti geografici,” 131. 114 The Accademia Venetiana della Fama was founded by the Venetian patrician Federigo Badoer in 1557, and was born out of the predecessors of the Aldine Neacademia and the Accademia degli Uniti. It was designed to continue the education of Venetian statesmen with the goal of promoting the republic’s reputation abroad as a site of learnedness, including in the fields of geography and cosmography. Members met at Badoer’s house to hear lectures, and at its height in 1560 numbered about one hundred members until its dissolution in 1561. Its members included the likes of Giacomo Gastaldi, Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s son Paolo Ramusio, Nicolò Zen, Livio Sanuto, Giuseppe Moleto, Girolamo Ruscelli, and Paolo Gallucci. Its founding document lists a knowledge of cosmography as one of its goals. See Federico Badoer, Atto di fondazione

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(Venice: n.p., 1560), 3r, 9r; Lina Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria: Modelli letterati e iconografici nell’età della stampa (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), 3–25; Paul L. Rose, “The Accademia Venetiana: Science and Culture in Renaissance Venice,” Studi veneziani 11 (1969): 191–242. 115 On the mechanics of the movement of information in early modern Europe, in particular as it happened through personal encounters, see Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities. 116 Milan and Rome were also cosmopolitan centers of information about global travel and exploration. See Maria Matilde Benzoni, “Federico Borromeo and the New World in Early Modern Milan,” and Katherine McAllen, “Jesuit Martyrdom Imagery between Mexico and Rome,” in Italy and the New World, ed. Horodowich and Markey, 103–117 and 143–166. 117 See Surdich, Verso il nuovo mondo, 82. 118 See Marica Milanesi, “Giovanni Battista Ramusio e i cosmografi portoghesi,” in Il Portogallo e i mari: Un incontro tra culture (Napoli, 15–17 dicembre 1994), ed. Maria Luisa Cusati (Naples: Liguori, 1997), 231–248, at 231. On the figure of the secretary, see Rosanna Gorris Camos, ed., Il segretario è come un angelo: Trattati, raccolte epistolari, vite paradigmatiche, ovvero come essere un buon segretario nel Rinascimento (Fasano: Schena, 2008); Marcello Simonetta, Rinascimento secreto. Il mondo del segretario da Petrarca a Machiavelli (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004); Douglas Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 119 In his will, Ramusio called himself “a most affectionate servant and slave” of the state. See Donattini, “Giovanni Battista Ramusio e le sue Navigationi,” 97. 120 Massimo Donattini has similarly suggested that Ramusio’s Navigazioni served largely to glorify Venice. As he puts it, it was “a programmatic work of glorification of the Serenissima” (“un’opera programmatica di glorificazione della Serenissima”); see Donattini, “Orrizonti geografici,” 133. The materials from Ramusio’s three volumes were used for political ends when they supplied Giacomo Gastaldi with the necessary geographic information to paint maps of the world in the Sala dello Scudo of the Ducal Palace: maps that clearly reified Venetian prominence in global exploration. See Conclusion. On the political and patriotic

elements of Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi, see Romain Descendre, “Dall’occhio della storia all’occhio della politica: Sulla nascita della geografia politica nel Cinquecento (Ramusio e Botero),” in Nascita della storiografia e organizzazione dei saperi, ed. Enrico Mattioda (Florence: Olschki, 2010), 155–179; Jerome Randall Barnes, “Giovanni Battisa Ramusio and the History of Discoveries: An Analysis of Ramusio’s Commentary, Cartography, and Imagery in Delle navigationi et viaggi ” (Ph.D. diss., The University of Texas at Arlington, 2007); Donattini, “Ombre imperiali.” 121 “Ma che dico io del piacere che ne aranno li dotti e studiosi? Chi è che colui che possa dubitare che ancor molti dei signori e principi non si abbiano a dilettare di cosí fatta lezione?” Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 1:5. 122 See Johnson, The German Discovery of the World, 24–46. 123 See Giuseppe Di Stefano, Elena Fasano Guarini, and Alessandro Martinengo, eds., Italia non spagnola e monarchia spagnola tra ‘500 e ‘600: Politica, cultura e letteratura (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2009), and Dandelet and Marino, Spain in Italy. 124 See Pierfrancesco Giambullari, Apparato et feste nelle nozze dello illustrissimo signor duca di Firenze (1539), 13–14, cited in Benzoni, La cultura italiana e il Messico, 46–47, n. 197. 125 The relazione of Michele Suriano, for instance, read to the senate in 1559, by this time leaves no doubts about the significance of the Americas and the deployment of Spanish power in them. See Firpo, Relazioni, 8:255–258. 126 “El mondo è mutado,” Sanuto, I diarii, 27:456–457. 127 “The Italian cultural elite felt an urgent need to remind the world of its existence precisely because it was the national elite of a nation which did not exist,” Claudio Donati, L’idea di nobiltà in Italia, secoli XIV–XVIII (Rome: Laterza, 1988), 29. See also Virginia Cox, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 25; and Hester, Literature and Identity in Italian Baroque Travel Writing, 3–25. 128 In a similar process, Dutch presses produced a veritable flood of geographic literature, selfconsciously focused on global exoticism, in a burst of publishing activity around 1700 that coincided with a reduction of the republic’s

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activities abroad. As Benjamin Schmidt puts it, the Dutch consciously chose “to market a world which it had a contracting stake in governing.” See Idem, “Inventing Exoticism: The Project of Dutch Geography and the Marketing of the World, circa 1700,” in Merchants and Marvels, ed. Smith and Findlen, 347–369, at 349. 129 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 174. 130 See Stanley Chojnacki, review of Paesi et mari ignoti by Federica Ambrosini, The American Historical Review 88 (1983): 1017–1018. 131 See Ambrosini, Paesi et mari ignoti, 3–49; Donattini, “Orizzonti geografici,” 79–82; Hirsch, “Printed Reports,” in First Images of America, ed. Chiappelli, 1:550. 132 To name just a few of the compilations that most immediately followed the Venetian tradition in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: Richard Eden, Treatise of the newe India (1553), and The Decades of the newe worlde or west India (1555); Richard Willes, The History of a Travayle in the West and East Indies (1577); John Florio, A shorte and breife narration of the two navigations and discoveries to the northweast partes called Newe France (London, 1580); Richard Hakluyt, Divers voyages touching the discoverie of America and the islands adjacents unto the same (1582); Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes: Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Land Travells by Englishmen and Others (1625); Theodore de Bry, America occidentalis (1590–1598). On Ramusio as a model for the travelogue and his legacy, see David Armitage, “The New World and British Historical Thought: From Richard Hakluyt to William Robertson,” in America in European Consciousness, ed. Kupperman, 52–75, at 54; Rubiés, “From the ‘History of Travayle’”; Small, “A World Seen through Another’s Eyes.” On the later evolution of the travelogue in Holland, see Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). 133 David B. Quinn, Alison M. Quinn, and Susan Hillier, eds., New American World: A Documentary History of America to 1612, 5 vols. (New York: Arno Press, 1979), 1:337–339. 134 Florio copied passages from Ramusio’s Discorso sopra li viaggi delle spetterie and Discorso sopra la

257 Nuova Francia; see John Florio, “Epistle Dedicatorie,” in Jacques Cartier, Navigations to Newe France, trans. John Florio (London, 1580), preface. On Ramusio and Hakluyt, see Small, “A World Seen through Another’s Eyes,” 52–55; Donald F. Lach, “Hakluyt’s Use of the Materials Available to Him: The Far East,” in The Hakluyt Handbook, ed. David B. Quinn, 2 vols. (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 1:214–222; Alison M. Quinn and David B. Quinn, “Contents and Sources of the Three Major Works,” in The Hakluyt Handbook, ed. Quinn, 2:333–460, at 338–339. 135 See Thomas D. Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks and the New World: A Study of Tarih-I Hind-I Garbi and Sixteenth Century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1990), 1–35. 136 Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes: Contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Land Travells by Englishmen and Others, 4 vols. (London: Henrie Fetherstone, 1625), 2:187, 306. 137 Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965–1993), 1:208. 138 Markey, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence, 159. 139 Blair, Too Much to Know, 64. 140 On this conception of the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds as distinct, see, for instance, Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, “The Rise of Europe,” and Carlo Cipolla, Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, 1000–1700 (New York: Norton, 1976). I thank Anne Ruderman for these citations. Chapter 4

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“A metà del Cinquecento, si trova ad essere il più importante centro . . . cartografico d’Europa,” Daria Perocco, “Le parole di un cartografo: Giacomo Gastaldi e la Universale descrittione del mondo,” Annali d’italianistica 14 (1996): 218–229, at 219. See also Robert W. Karrow, “Centers of Map Publishing in Europe, 1472–1600,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 3, Cartography in the European Renaissance, ed. David Woodward, 2 parts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) (hereafter HoC), 1:619. See Philip D. Burden, The Mapping of North America (Hong Kong: Raleigh Publications, 1996), v, 3–168.

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David Woodward, “The Italian Map Trade, 1480–1650,” in HoC, 1:787. The Contarini-Rosselli map exists in one copy in the British Library. See Giovanni Matteo Contarini, A Map of the World Designed by Giovanni Matteo Contarini, Engraved by Franesco Rosselli, 1506 (London: The British Museum, 1926), 6. Rosselli was most likely in Venice at the time this map was made; see Lilian Armstrong, “Benedetto Bordon: ‘Miniator’, and Cartography in Early Sixteenth-Century Venice,” Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 65–92, at 73–76. In their working relationship, Contarini was the cartographer and scholar and Rosselli more the skilled technician. Indeed, Patrick Gautier Dalché goes so far as to say that Rosselli’s two 1508 oval world maps, while engraved and printed in Florence, were “Venetian works produced by a Florentine.” See Patrick Gautier Dalché, “The Reception of Ptolemy’s Geography (End of the Fourteenth to Beginning of the Sixteenth Century),” in HoC, 3:1:344. The name of Canada was perhaps first printed on Paolo Forlani’s Universale descrittione di tutta la terra conosciuta fin qui (1560). See Verner and Stuart-Stubbs, The Northpart of America, 4. Previously labeled Terra di Santa Cruz or Mundo Novo, the name “Brasil” potentially first appeared on a Venetian map by Geronimo Marini. See Silvio Castro, “L’immagine del Brasile nella Venezia del primo Cinquecento,” in L’impatto della scoperta, ed. Aricò, 35–44, at 41–42. Ronald Vere Tooley, Maps and Map-Makers (New York: Crown, 1978), 112. See also Robert W. Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century and Their Maps (Chicago: Speculum Orbis Press, 1993), 216–249. See Denis Cosgrove, “Mapping New Worlds: Culture and Cartography in SixteenthCentury Venice,” Imago Mundi 44 (1992): 65–89. Cartographers often did both, including Mercator and Ortelius. See Pauline Moffitt Watts, “The European Religious Worldview and Its Influence on Mapping,” in HoC, 3:1:382–400. Scholarship on the history of early modern cartography is extensive. For some of the most fundamental studies on topics such as these, see, for instance, David Woodward, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance: Makers, Distributors, and Consumers (London: The British Library, 1995); Christian Jacob, The Sovereign

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Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); John Brian Harley, The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); and the wide-ranging essays in The History of Cartography. John Brian Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” in The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representations, Design, and Use of Past Environments, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 277–311. This was particularly the case for painted cycles of wall maps; see Mark Rosen, The Mapping of Power in Renaissance Italy: Painted Cartographic Cycles in Social and Intellectual Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), and Francesca Fiorani, The Marvel of Maps: Art, Cartography, and Power in Renaissance Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). See Davies, Renaissance Ethnography; Genevieve Carlton, Worldly Consumers: The Demand for Maps in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). See Rhonda Lemke Sanford, Maps and Memory in Early Modern England: A Sense of Place (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Michael Biggs, “Putting the State on the Map: Cartography, Territory, and European State Formation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41 (1999): 374–405; Sean Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World. See John Brian Harley, “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe,” Imago Mundi 40 (1988): 57–76; Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power.” For a discussion of the ways in which maps were a tool by which people and states made a claim of entitlement to lands and peoples, see the essays in James R. Akerman, ed., The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Benjamin Schmidt, ‘‘Mapping an Empire: Cartographic and Colonial Rivalry in Seventeenth-Century Dutch and English North America,’’ William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 549–578. For general overviews of European maps of the New World and the world, see Burden, The Mapping of North America, and Rodney W. Shirley, The Mapping of the World: Early

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Printed World Maps, 1472–1700 (London: The Holland Press, 1983). Jacob, The Sovereign Map, xiv, 30. Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe, Print Publishing in Sixteenth-Century Rome: Growth and Expansion, Rivalry and Murder (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 2008), 6. Chandra Mukerji has similarly argued that prints were the first mass-produced goods for popular consumption that led to the rise of a culture of consumerism in early modern Europe; see Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). For a definitive study of the history of the early modern print, see Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, as well as Michael Bury, The Print in Italy, 1550–1620 (London: The British Museum Press, 2001). Schmidt and Nichols, Altered and Adorned, 9. Woodward, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance, 1–5. On German map production in the first half of the sixteenth century, see Johnson, The German Discovery of the World, 47–87. Paul D. A. Harvey, The History of Topographical Maps: Symbols, Pictures and Surveys (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 80–83. See also Emmanuela Casti Moreschi, “Cartografia e politica territoriale nella repubblica di Venezia (secoli XIV-XVIII),” in La cartografia italiana (Cicle de conferències sobre Història de la Cartografia. Tercer curs, 1991) (Barcelona: Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya, 1993), 81–101; John Marino, “Administrative Mapping in the Italian States,” in Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps, ed. David Buisseret (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 5–25, at 6–10; Vladimiro Valerio, Cartografi veneti: Mappe, uomini e istituzioni per l’immagine e il governo del territorio (Padua: Editoriale Programma, 2007). See Ugo Tucci, “La carta nautica,” in Carte da navigar: Portolani e carte nautiche del museo correr, 1318–1732, ed. Susanna Biadene (Venice: Marsilio, 1990), 9–19; Leo Bagrow, History of Cartography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 105–106, 118; Corradino Astengo, “The Renassance Chart Tradition in the Mediterranean,” in HoC, 1:212–219. Sansovino, Venetia, città nobilissima, 134r. See also Roberto Cessi and Annibale Alberti, Rialto: L’Iisola, il ponte, il mercato (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli Editore, 1934), 39, 67, 259, 317–318, and Patricia Fortini Brown, Venetian

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Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 261, 268. Sanudo, I diarii, 8:247. See Juergen Schulz, “Cristoforo Sorte and the Ducal Palace of Venice,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 10 (1962): 193–208. For an overview of early modern Venetian cartography from its earliest origins to the eighteenth century, see Eugenia Bevilacqua, “Geografi e cosmografi,” in Storia della cultura veneta, ed. Arnaldi and Stocchi, 355–374. Casti Moreschi, “Cartografia e politica territorial,” 85; Marica Milanesi, “La cartografia italiana nel medioevo e nel rinascimento,” in La cartografia italiana, 15–80, at 37. See also Ugo Tucci, “Mercanti, viaggiatori, pellegrini nel Quattrocento,” in Storia della cultura veneta, ed. Arnaldi and Stocchi, 317–353. See, for instance, Nate Probasco, “Cartography as a Tool of Colonization: Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s 1583 Voyage to North America,” Renaissance Quarterly 67 (2014): 425–472. While this chapter remains focused on printed maps, there exist numerous and often significant Venetian manuscript maps of the world and the Americas. Venetian cartographers produced two particularly notable manuscript world maps in the fifteenth century: the world map of Giovanni Leardo (1452), and the world map by Fra Mauro (c. 1450), considered one of the most significant cartographical works in late medieval Western Europe. Several manuscript maps and atlases similarly depict global geography and the New World in the sixteenth century, including Alessandro Zorzi’s sketch maps of the world in his Raccolta Alberico (see Chapter 2); Benedetto Bordone’s sketch map of the world located at the end of the 1526 manuscript version of his isolario (BNCF Cod. Magliabecchiano XIII, 10, 52); Pietro Coppo’s manuscript atlas De toto orbe (1520) (Bologna Archiginnasio Ms. A. 117 (16. b.1)); the numerous manuscript atlases of Battista Agnese, which circulated widely in Europe; and the maps of Antonio Millo and Giorgio Sideri (also known as Callapoda). On Agnese and other Venetian manuscript maps, see Angelo Cattaneo, “L’atlante nautico di Battista Agnese,” in Battista Agnese, Atlante nautico (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 2008), 139–161. John M. Headley, “The Sixteenth-Century Venetian Celebration of the Earth’s Total

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Habitability: The Issue of the Fully Habitable World for Renaissance Europe,” Journal of World History 8 (1997): 1–27, at 1–2. See also Tooley, Maps and Map-Makers, 20. Ramachandran, The Worldmakers, 6–7. Ruscelli’s translation, published by Vincenzo Valgrisi, was published four more times, as well as in an additional Latin translation (a total of six editions), before the end of the sixteenth century. See Charles E. Armstrong, “Copies of Ptolemy’s Geography in American Libraries,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 66 (1962): 105–113, and Dario Tessicini, “Definitions of ‘Cosmography’ and ‘Geography’ in the Wake of Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Translations and Editions of Ptolemy’s Geography,” in Ptolemy’s Geography in the Renaissance, ed. Zur Shalev and Charles Burnett (London: The Warburg Institute and Nino Arango Editore, 2011), 31–49, at 46–48. For a pre-1492 Venetian manuscript edition of Ptolemy, see BNM It.6.24 (6111). Bagrow, History of Cartography, 133–135; and Dalché, “The Reception of Ptolemy’s Geography,” 343. Fernando Lepori, “Canal, Paolo,” in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1960), 17:688–73. See Armstrong, “Benedetto Bordon,” 73–76. The Venetian printer Giovan Andrea Vavassore produced another Ptolemaic world map c. 1522 that closely followed that of Sylvanus, with a larger “Terra Sanctae Crucis” or South America. See Roberto Almagià, “Il mappamondo di G.A. Vavassore,” Rivista Geografica Italiana 27 (1920): 17–30. Conor Fahy, “The Venetian Ptolemy of 1548,” in The Italian Book, 1465–1800, ed. Denis V. Reidy (London: The British Library, 1993), 89–115, at 92. See Burden, The Mapping of North America, xxviii. See Chapter 5. Venetian isolarii or books of islands also presented entirely new and more comprehensive ways of understanding and viewing the world. On Venetian isolarii, see Chapter 6. See Francesco Relaño, “Cartography and Discoveries: The Re-Definition of the Ptolemaic Model in the First Quarter of the Sixteenth Century,” in La cartografia europea tra primo rinascimento e fine del illuminismo, ed. Diogo Ramada Curto, Angelo Cattaneo, and André

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Ferrand Almeida (Florence: Olschki, 2003), 49–61, at 50. Patrick Gautier Dalché by contrast vigorously disputes the importance of Ptolemy as a driver for cartographic innovation; see Idem, La géographie de Ptolémée en occident (IVe-XVIe siècle) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009). See also Shalev and Burnett, Ptolemy’s Geography in the Renaissance. See Davies, Renaissance Ethnography, 47–52. Astengo, “The Renaissance Chart Tradition,” 213. For instance, a 1561 edition of Ferdinando Bertelli’s Universale descrittione is signed by both Bertelli and Paolo Forlani in the bottom lefthand corner. See Woodward, Maps as Prints, 22, 45; David Woodward, “Paolo Forlani: Compiler, Printer, Engraver, or Publisher?” Imago Mundi 44 (1992): 45–64. Other scholars have made similar arguments about printed books and print culture at large. See Brian Richardson, Printing, Writers, and Readers in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 13–20, and Witcombe, Print Publishing in Sixteenth-Century Rome, 7–10. See Thomas Suárez, Shedding the Veil: Mapping the European Discovery of America and the World (Singapore: World Scientific,1992), 101–103; Burden, The Mapping of North America, 40–41; Woodward, “Paolo Forlani: Compiler?,” 46; David Woodward, “The Forlani Map of North America,” Imago Mundi 46 (1994): 29–40. The title of Forlani’s map of North America (Figure 21), for instance, described this map as depicting the discovery of New France, “which has been lately discovered by the newest navigation.” On cartographic novelty, see Carlton, Worldly Consumers, 100–117. See Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 112. Suárez, Shedding the Veil, 75. Similarly, in 1558 the Venetian printer Andrea Vavassore copied and printed the 1545 wall map Nova et integra universalisque orbis totius . . ., originally designed by the German cosmographer Caspar Vopel. See Rodolfo Gallo, “Antonio Florian and His Mappemonde,” Imago Mundi 6 (1949): 34–38; Suárez, Shedding the Veil, 78. See Chapter 5.

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50 No single city ever emerged as a dominant force in Spanish publishing in the sixteenth century, and Spain always remained heavily dependent on imported texts, especially from Venice and Rome, and especially for scholarly works. See Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, 260–261. 51 Maria Fernanda Alegria et al., ‘Portuguese Cartography in the Renaissance’, in HoC 3:1:975–1068, at 1003–1005. 52 See David Buisseret, “Early European Cartography of the New World,” in La cartografia europea, ed. Curto, Cattaneo, and Almeida, 95–107; David Buisseret, “Spanish Colonial Cartography, 1450–1700,” in HoC, 3:1:1143–1171; Maria Portuondo, Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Alison Sandman, “Mirroring the World: Sea Charts, Navigation, and Territorial Claims in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” in Merchants and Marvels, ed. Smith and Findlen, 83–108; Alison Sandman, “An Apologia for the Pilots’ Charts: Politics, Projections and Pilots’ Reports in Early Modern Spain,” Imago Mundi 56 (2004): 7–22 at 7–10; Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). 53 See Alison Sandman, “Controlling Knowledge: Navigation, Cartography, and Secrecy in the Early Modern Spanish Atlantic,” in Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, ed. James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (New York: Routledge, 2007), 31–51, at 34. As a result, well into the nineteenth century, maps printed in other countries tended to be much more accurate than those printed in Spain. See David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 55. 54 Angelo Trevisan recounted in his first letter to Domenico Malipiero in 1501 his attempts to obtain maps of the first Columbian voyage in Granada and Palos. With Columbus’s help, he was having a map made, but he was concerned about how he would send this map to Venice. In addition, he noted that where America was concerned, “Regarding maps from that voyage, it is not possible to have them, since the king would execute anyone who gave them away,” (“De carta de quell viazo non è possibele haverne, ch’l Re ha messo pena la vita a chi le dà fora,”) Trevisan, Lettere, 28.

261 55 See Burden, The Mapping of North America, 3–168. In addition, the Spanish did not publish books of geography; see Sandman, “Controlling Knowledge,” 39. 56 On the Summario, see Chapter 3. 57 “Cavata da due carte da’navicare fatte in Sibilia da li piloti della Maiesta Cesarea.” “Per dichiaration delli quali libri è stata fatta una tavola universale del paese di tutte le Indie occidental, insieme con le tavloe particulari cavate da due carte da navicare di Spagnuoli, delle quali una fu di Don Pietro Martire Consigliero del real consiglio delle dette indie, et fu fatta per il Piloto e maestro di carte da navicar, Niño Carzia de Loreno in Sibilia. L’altra fu fatta similmente per un piloto della maesta del imperadore, in Siblila.”

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Garciá Torreño had also prepared the charts for the voyage of Magellan. Ribeiro worked in Spain and eventually became cosmógrafo mayor at the Casa de la Contratacíon in 1523 under Emperor Charles V. He had helped prepare the maps for Magellan’s voyage, and also worked closely with Nuño Garciá Torreño. It was among the first to show Estéban Gómez’s exploration, as well as to label the Pacific Ocean (Mare del Sur) and the Straits of Magellan (Stretto Demagallanes). See Burden, The Mapping of North America, 13–14; John Brian Harley, Maps and the Columbian Encounter: An Interpretive Guide (Milwaukee: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 87. “Fifty years later, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of Abraham Ortelius would include a map of the Americas which gave a much less satisfactory delineation of almost all the areas covered by the Ramusio map,” Arthur Holzheimer and David Buisseret, eds., The “Ramusio” Map of 1534: A Facsimile Edition (Chicago: The Newberry Library, 1992), 27. Paolo Forlani’s La descrittione di tutto il Peru (c. 1562) similarly presented detailed information about the interior of South America. See Holzheimer and Buisseret, The “Ramusio” Map of 1534, 16. See also Milanesi, Tolomeo sostituito, 213–216. David Buisseret points out, for instance, how the map collection of Alonso de Santa Cruz,

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named royal cosmographer in Seville in 1536, contained about one hundred manuscript maps of different parts of the world but perished in a fire in the Escorial in 1671. See Buisseret, “Spanish Colonial Cartography,” 1144. Five manuscript maps from the Casa de la Contratacíon survive from this period, all of which are attributed to Diogo Ribeiro and are similar in both style and content to the Ramusio map. See Holzheimer and Buisseret, The “Ramusio” Map, 15. 62 For example, the Contarini–Rosselli map (1506) (Figure 16) was derived from a great variety of Iberian manuscript maps, including the map made by Juan de la Cosa (1500), a sailor and cartographer from the Andalusian port city of Puerto de Santa María, the Cantino planisphere (1502), brought secretly from Lisbon to Ferrara, and the Caverio map (1504), which was either made in Lisbon or copied by the mapmaker Canveri from a Portuguese map in Genoa. The nautical world maps of Battista Agnese also drew from Iberian maps, including and especially the Diogo Ribeiro planisphere (1529). They testify to the rapid arrival in Venice of maps and information from Spanish pilots, since Agnese’s maps depicted Giovanni da Verrazzano’s explorations of the Atlantic coast in 1524, Francisco de Ulloa’s voyage up the west coast of Mexico in 1539, and Sebastian Cabot’s explorations along the Rio de la Plata in 1524–1527. Antonio Florianus’s projection of the polar hemispheres (1555) was copied from a manuscript world map of Alonso de Santa Cruz, a cartographer who assisted at the padrón real under Charles V. Paolo Forlani stated in the legend on his 1570 map of the Americas that he prepared it following a map given to him by “Don Diego Hermano of Toledo, a gentleman of noble quality.” Giacomo Gastaldi also studied closely the maps of Verrazzano and Estéban Gómez, and his influential 1546 Universale (Figure 30) resembled Sebastian Cabot’s oval world map as well as the manuscript world maps of Battista Agnese – who had himself drawn on Spanish sources – especially for the overall shape of the continent and northwest coast of America. See Woodward, “The Italian Map Trade,” 782. 63 See Davies, Renaissance Ethnography, 95; Van Duzer, The World for a King, 16, 59. 64 On the Cantino map see, for instance, Alberto Cantino, La carta del Cantino e la rappresentazione

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della terra nei codici e nei libri a stampa della Biblioteca Estense e Universitaria, ed. Ernesto Milano (Modena: Il Bulino, 1991), and Joaquim Alves Gaspar, “Blunders, Errors, and Entanglements: Scrutinizing the Cantino Planisphere with a Cartometric Eye,” Imago Mundi 64 (2012): 181–200. See Chapter 2, n. 111. See Milanesi, “La cartografia italiana,” 40. See, for instance, Sonja Brentjes, “Giacomo Gastaldi’s Maps of Anatolia: The Evolution of a Shared Venetian-Ottoman Cultural Space?,” in The Renaissance and the Ottoman World, ed. Contadini and Norton, 123–141. On Rosaccio’s map in his Teatro del cielo, see Burden, The Mapping of North America, 114–115. For similar examples of small, rudimentary maps of the New World in Venetian printed books (including various editions of Ptolemy, not listed here), see Giovanni Paolo Gallucci, Theatrum mundi et temporis (Venice: Apud Ioannem Baptistam Somascum, 1588), 43; Pietro da Medina, Arte da navegar (Venice: Gioanbattista Pedrezano, 1564), cxxvii; Lodovico Dolce, Le trasformationi (Venice: Gabriel Giolito de Ferrari, 1555), 3. By the early seventeenth century, there existed a large market for them in Northern Europe. See Davies, Renaissance Ethnography, 54, 281–294. On large-scale prints, see Larry Silver and Elizabeth Wyckoff, eds., Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Dürer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). A growing knowledge of the vast space of the Pacific Ocean during the sixteenth century in particular had the side effect of generating more space on world maps for longer texts of descriptive cosmography. See Cosgrove, “Mapping New Worlds,” 76, n. 99. As one example of this phenomenon, Giovanni Vavassore’s 1558 copy of Caspar Vopel’s Nova et integra universalisque orbis totius . . . descriptio (1545), in twelve sheets, contains eleven legends describing exploration, geography, and ethnography in the space of the Pacific Ocean. See Woodward, Maps as Prints, 27; David Woodward, “The Four Parts of the World: Giovanni Francesco Camocio’s Wall Maps,” The James Ford Bell Lectures, vol. 34 (Minneapolis: The Associates of the James Ford Bell Library, 1997), 5; and Idem, “Techniques of Map Engraving, Printing, and Coloring in the

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European Renaissance,” in HoC, 3:1:591–610 at 592, 596. Gastaldi was an astronomer and cartographer, originally from Piedmont, who began his career working as an engineer in the service of the Venetian state. In the 1540s, he turned to producing maps professionally, making his first map of Spain in 1544, earning the official title of cosmographer to the Republic of Venice, and producing more than a hundred additional maps over the course of the rest of his career, with a special attention to the New World. See Woodward, “The Italian Map Trade,” 781–787. Gastaldi’s Universale della parte del mondo nuovamente ritrovata, printed in the third volume of Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi (1556), was the first printed map to show the voyages of Cabrillo and Coronado. Similarly, Gastaldi’s La terra de Hochelaga nella Nova Francia, also printed in Ramusio, represented the first published plan of a European settlement in North America, based on Cartier’s description of Hochelaga or Montreal, from his 1535–1536 visit. See Burden, The Mapping of North America, xxix. See Conclusion. British Library, Maps C.18.n.1. See Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 122–123; Roberto Almagià, “Intorno ad un grande mappemondo perduto di Giacomo Gastaldi (1561),” La Bibliofilia 41 (1939): 259–266; Woodward, “The Italian Map Trade,” 784–786. Correr cartella 32/70, Bertelli–Camocio, “Carta del Nuovo Mondo in 9 Pezzi.” The individual sheets of these maps were later bound into atlases, perhaps in an attempt to compete with the work of Ortelius. Camocio’s map copied fairly directly from the world maps of Gastaldi (including Gastaldi’s world map of 1561). His legends all drew on Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi. Gastaldi perhaps began this map but left it unfinished at the time of his death. A production glitch resulted in the New World map being printed on nine sheets instead of twelve, when the engraver possibly realized too late that the map was meant to consist of three (not two) sheets across, and then had to cosmetically repair his mistake by adding on three irregularly sized narrow sheets to form the right column of the map. In addition, the columns on the left do not line up. On Camocio and his map, see Giuseppe Caraci Tabulae geographica vestustiores in Italia adservatae

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(Florence: Otto Lange, 1926–32), 37–48; Idem, “La prima raccolta moderna di grandi carte murali rappresentanti i ‘quattro continenti’,” in Atti del XVIII congresso geografico italiano, 3 vols. (Trieste: Istituto di Geografia dell’Università, 1962), 2:49–60; Rodolfo Gallo, “Gioan Francesco Camocio and His Large Map of Europe,” Imago Mundi 7 (1950): 93–102; Burden, The Mapping of North America, 45–47; Roberto Almagià, “Su alcuni importanti cimeli cartografici conservati a Venezia,” in Atti del VIII congresso geografico italiano, 2 vols. (Florence: Alinari, 1922–23), 2:295–302; Woodward, “The Italian Map Trade,” 786–787. Woodward, “The Four Parts,” 5. The example considered here is from the Houghton Library at Harvard University. See Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 222–224; Rodolfo Gallo, “Some Maps in the Correr Museum in Venice,” Imago Mundi 15 (1960): 45–51; Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 299; Roberto Almagià, “Un grande planisfero di Giuseppe Rosaccio,” Rivista Geografica Italiana 31 (1924): 264–269. A consideration of sixteenth-century printed Venetian wall maps could also include the 1559 Haggi Ahmed map, as well as Giovanni Vavassore’s 1558 copy of 1545 Caspar Vopel’s 1545 map, Nova et integra universalisque orbis totius . . . descriptio. The Haggi Ahmed map is in Arabic, and Vavassore’s map is a direct copy of Vopel’s German original, and for these reasons I have not considered them here as examples of Venetian map production. Additional surviving examples of large-scale printed world maps include Sebastian Cabot’s 1544 printed world map in eight sheets, and Gerardus Mercator’s Nova et Aucta Orbis Terrae Descriptio ad Usum Navigantium Emendate Accommodata (Duisberg, 1569). Francesco Petrarca, Seniles, 9.2, translated and cited in Theodore Cachey, “Maps and Literature in Renaissance Italy,” in HoC, 3:1:450– 460 at 450. Ariosto later echoed the thought. “Let him wander who desires to wander . . . Without ever making vows when the heavens flash with lightning, I will go bounding over all the seas, more secure aboard my maps than aboard ships,” cited in Cachey, Ibid. Following long tradition, stretching back to the earliest topographical views of cities, many maps

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inserted a traveler in the foreground to mark his presence as a witness to the site. See Lucia Nuti, “The Mapped Views by Georg Hoefnagel: The Merchant’s Eye, the Humanists’s Eye,” Word and Image 4 (1988): 545–570, at 552–554. See Contarini, A Map of the World, 8. In the introduction to his 1482 edition of Ptolemy’s Geographia, the Florentine geographer Francesco Berlinghieri made similar claims about the otherworldly authority to be gleaned from the discipline of geography. He argued that the world map “offers divine intellect to human genius, as if it were by nature celestial, demonstrating how with true discipline, we can leap up within ourselves, without the aid of wings, so that we may view the earth through an image marked on a parchment.” See Francesco Berlinghieri, Geographia (1482; reprint, Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1966), preface. “Con lequali tavole, il lettor si puo informare di tutto questo mondo nuovo luogho per luogho, come se lui medesimo vi fusse stato.” See Astengo, “The Renaissance Chart Tradition,” 212ff. “Ai Lettori Sopra le Tavole,” Giuseppe Rosaccio, Il mondo e sue parti cioe Europa, Affrica, Asia et America (Verona: Francesco dalle Donne and Scipione Vargano, 1596). While space will not permit a complete discussion of all the toponyms on these maps, on Ulloa, see Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 6:547–548, 560; on Marcos de Niza, see Ibid, 6:595–600; on Coronado, see Burden, The Mapping of North America, 22, and Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 6:575, n. 2, 577–578. Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 6:496. See Ibid, 6:969, 947, 6:931–936. Burden, The Mapping of North America, xvii; Suárez, Shedding the Veil, 67. Arcadia was named for the beauty of the trees around Kitty Hawk; Norumbega’s origins are the Abnaki or Algonquian Indian word for “a stretch of quiet water between two falls or rapids.” See Burden, The Mapping of North America, 21–22; Suárez, Shedding the Veil, 88. This is the name that de Soto used to refer to the Mississippi; however, Burden says de Soto was not mapped until 1584 by Ortelius. See Burden, The Mapping of North America, xxviii, xxix, 71. The accounts of many of these explorers were first collected, edited, and published by Ramusio in his Navigazione e viaggi,

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and Gastaldi surely benefited from his close working relationship with Ramusio for information for his maps. The first map to record and name the colony at Roanoke was Giovanni Battista Mazza’s map of America (c. 1590), indicating a continued Venetian precociousness in geographical news even toward the end of the sixteenth century. See Richard Casten and Thomas Suárez, “A Revised Chronology for the Mapping of America in the Late Sixteenth Century: Hogenberg, Mazza, Ortelius,” The Map Collector 70 (1995): 26–30. Wilson, The World in Venice, 3. Indians in the Southwest spoke of a Cibola, and the Spanish searched for the Seven Cities in Zuni territory. See Suárez, Shedding the Veil, 43–44, 98–100. Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 6:604–605. De Niza implied its wealth by comparing it to Tenochtitlan and Cuzco, reporting that “there was much news of Cevola, as there was of Temistitan in New Spain and Cusco in Peru” (“era tanta notizia di Cevola come nella Nuova Spagna di Temistitan e nel Perú di Cusco”), Ibid, 6:598. Ibid, 6:575, n. 2, 577–578. For instance, both the Copia de una letera mandata dalla cesarea maesta de l’imperator al christianissimo re di Francia de le cose grande e nove ritrovate nella provincia de Peru and Copia delle lettere del prefetto della India la Nuova Spagna detta, alla Cesarea Maesta rescritte focused the bulk of their narratives on the wealth of Peru. See Chapter 2, n. 75. The Neapolitan cosmographer Giovanni Lorenzo D’Anania also noted the quantity of sable in Canada. See Giovanni Lorenzo D’Anania, L’universale fabrica del mondo (Venice: Muschio, 1582), 363. Indeed, many of the toponyms listed on all of these maps, including some of the more obscure ones, such as the Desert of Zubican in the middle of North America, are found in D’Anania’s text, leading to speculation as to whether his text and its list of New World locales were the source or reflection of many sixteenth-century maps. Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 6:997. Camocio also discusses the Kingdom of Saguenay, noting at the end of a long legend located just under the northeast coast that this kingdom was wealthy in a great quantity of copper, which they used like gold.

NOTES TO PAGES 120–130

99 On the allegories of the continents in Venice, see Ambrosini, “Rappresentazioni allegoriche.” 100 Gastaldi’s 1560 woodcut map Dell’universale (BL Maps C.7.c.17) has a legend in its top left that states that in Peru, “one finds a lot of gold” (“si trovano oro assai”), that women wear dresses “embroidered with gold” (“lavorate d’oro tirade”), and he names the northern part of Latin America, unusually, with the toponym “Castiglia dell’oro” and says that here as well, “one finds a great quantity of gold, all in 18 carat” (“si trova gran quantità di oro, tutto di xviii caratti”). 101 Many of the legends of the Camocio map, for instance, focus on the natural wealth of the New World. Bertelli’s and Forlani’s maps of the islands of the Caribbean similarly emphasize their fertility and abundance. See Carlton, Worldly Consumers, 134–141. 102 See Campbell, The Witness and the Other World. 103 Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 6:997. 104 Ibid, 6:931–935. 105 Ibid, 6:982–983. 106 On depictions of cannibalism in early modern European maps, see Davies, Renaissance Ethnography, 65–108. 107 On this balance between difference and compatibility, see Chapter 6, n. 132–136. 108 BL Maps K.Top.4.3. 109 Numerous other European mapmakers, including Mercator and Ortelius, also included these apocryphal Venetian islands on their maps. See Chapter 5. 110 See Zerubavel, Terra Cognita. 111 Alessandro Zorzi’s early sixteenth-century manuscript sketch map of Central America conceived of Asia and America as connected by a land bridge across the south, making South America an enormous southern outswelling of Asia. See Chapter 2, Figure 3. 112 This was the type of argument that José de Acosta still made at the end of the sixteenth century in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Venice, 1595). Debates about the origins of New World peoples have been wide ranging. See, for example, Giuliano Gliozzi, Adamo e il nuovo mondo. La nascita dell’antropologia come ideologia coloniale: Dalle genealogie bibliche alle teorie razziali (1500–1700) (Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1977), and Lee Eldridge Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967).

265 113 See Chapter 3, n. 23. 114 The maps of Stobnicza (1512), Solinus (1538), Münster (1540), Antonio Salamanca (1550), and Tramezzino (1554) also separated America and Asia. Pierre Desceliers also believed the continents should be separated; see Van Duzer, The World for a King, 165. For a more complete list, see Zerubavel, Terra Cognita, 41. While Waldseemüller’s 1507 map notably separated Asia and America, less known is the fact that Waldseemüller emended his findings in later maps in 1513 and 1516, for instance, in his Carta marina (1516), where North America is named Cuba (not America) and is joined with Asia. 115 See Edward Luther Stevenson, Terrestrial and Celestial Globes Volume 1: Their History and Construction Including a Consideration of Their Value as Aids in the Study of Geography and Astronomy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), 94–145. 116 Gastaldi’s 1561 wall map was long thought to be lost, making Paolo Forlani’s Il Disegno del discoperto della Nova Franza (1565), for many generations, the first map to depict clearly the Strait of Anian, until Roberto Almagià rediscovered Gastaldi’s wall map in 1939. On the Strait of Anian, see Christian Sandler, “Die Anian-Strasse und Marco Polo,” Zietschrift der Gesellschaft für Erdkunde 29 (1894): 401–408; Olinto Marinelli, “Lo stretto di Anian e Giacomo Gastaldi,” Rivista geografica italiana 24 (1917): 39–49; George Emra Nunn, Origin of the Strait of Anian Concept (Philadelphia: G.H. Beans, 1929); Marica Milanesi, “Arsarot o Anian? Identità e separazione tra Asia e Nuovo Mondo nella cartografia del Cinquecento (1500–1570),” in Il Nuovo Mondo nella coscienza italiana, ed. Prosperi and Reinhard, 19–78; Zerubavel, Terra Cognita, 104–107; Milanesi, “La cartografia italiana,” 39–43. 117 “Ha i suoi confine verso Levante, benchè nel detto mapamondo pare che sia verso Ponente; il stretto detto Anian, et si distende con una linea per il golfo Cheinan, e passa nel mare Oceano de Mangi . . . Questo sarà il confin dell’Asia verso Levante dal Mondo novo,” Giacomo Gastaldi, La universale descrittione del mondo (Venice: Mattheo Pagano, 1561), 7v. A full transcription of Gastaldi’s text can be found in Giuseppe Caraci, “Note critiche sui mappamondi gastaldini,” Rivista geografica italiana 43 (1936): 202–237, at 224–237. 118 On theories behind the origins of the name “Anian” and its appearance in the middle of

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the sixteenth century, see Nunn, Origin of the Strait of Anian, 22–36; Erroll Wayne Stevens, “The Asian-American Connection: The Rise and Fall of a Cartographic Idea,” Terrae Incognitae 22–24 (1988–1992): 27–39; John Reinhold Forster, History of the Voyages and Discoveries Made in the North (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1786), 460. Ramusio published his new edition of Marco Polo’s Travels in the second volume of his Navigazioni e viaggi (1559), and had written the preface to this edition in 1553, indicating that he worked on it for some time. In Gastaldi’s maps of Asia from the 1560s, his nomenclature and orthography copied Ramusio’s exactly, demonstrating either that Gastaldi was extremely familiar with Ramusio’s text or that both Ramusio and Gastaldi had consulted the same earlier text of Polo. See Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, “Intorno alla influenza dei ‘Viaggi di Marco Polo’ sulle carte dell’Asia di Giacomo Gastaldo,” Rivista Geografica Italiana 8 (1901): 496–511. On Ramusio’s edition of Polo, see Chapter 3. 119

“Partendosi dal porto di Zaitum, si naviga per ponente alquanto verso garbin mille e cinquecento miglia, passando un colfo nominato Cheinan, il qual colfo dura di longhezza per il spazio di due mesi, navigando verso la parte di tramontane, il qual per tutto confina verso scirocco con la provincia di Mangi, e dall’altra parte con Ania e Toloman e molte altre provincie . . . Questo colfo è tanto grande, e tante genti abitano in quello, che par quasi un altro mondo.”

See Polo, volume 2, book 3, chapter 5, in Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 3:256. 120 While Ramusio’s edition of Marco Polo (commonly called the R text) is the longest, fullest, and most detailed, the Franco-Italian version, the Devisement du monde (called the F text), the manuscript Paris BNF f. Fr. 1116 (c. 1310), is often considered to be closest to the original. Anian is noted in two separate passages in both the R and F texts, but this second passage in the R text, including these details about Anian’s location and about it being like “another world,” is not in the F text; the details

were added by Ramusio. See, for instance, this section in the translation of the F text in Polo, The Description of the World, 147–148. On the differences between Polo manuscripts, their provenance, and the evolution of his text, see Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World. 121 Book 2, chapter 48; see Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 3:218. 122 Paul Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1959), 1:39–40, 43, 2:857–858. Ronald Latham placed both Anian and Toloman east of Burma; see Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, 187. 123 George Nunn noted a general eastern movement of medieval cartography into American geography, such as the movement of Mangi and Cathay (Tangut) into Canada on maps that connected Asia and America; see Nunn, Origin of the Strait of Anian, 26–28. 124 Gastaldi’s 1550/1555 Dell’universale (BL Maps C.7.c.17) also places elephants across much of Canada. Polo reported seeing many elephants in China, and in particular in the Kingdom of Vochan (modern Yunnan Province), where they were used in battle. Oddly, Camocio’s wall map places Coronado’s Tuchano on the Asian side of the strait (Figure 34), illuminating the flexibility of the idea of an Amerasian continent across which Eastern and Western toponyms could move in either direction. 125 For a similar example, see Mike A. Zuber, “The Armchair Discovery of the Unknown Southern Continent: Gerardus Mercator, Philosophical Pretensions and a Competitive Trade,” Early Science and Medicine 16 (2011): 505–541. 126 See Veneri, “Il riscatto geografico di Marco Polo.” 127 “Trovò novi paesi avanti al Colombo, ma non ebbe la fede che si doveva della sua narrazione,” Tommaso Garzoni, La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, ed. Paolo Cherchi and Beatrice Collina, 2 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1996), 1:575. 128 When he was piloto mayor for the Spanish crown, Sebastian Cabot similarly consulted Rodrigo de Santaella’s Spanish translation of Polo’s text (1503) (of a Venetian edition of Il milione) to produce a world map; see Juan Gil, ed., El libro de Marco Polo anotado por Cirstóbal Colón. El libro de Marco Polo, versión de Rodrigo de Santaella (Madrid: Alianza, 1988), lxiii. Mercator and Ortelius continued to rely on the

NOTES TO PAGES 133–136

testimony of Polo, and as late as 1611, Jodocus Hondius the Younger’s 1611 world map consulted Polo to establish the location of Java Minor, indicating a preference for citing Polo as a source of geographic knowledge well into the seventeenth century. See Davies, “The Wondrous East,” 226–228. 129 Pierre Desceliers’s 1550 world map, for instance, marked this part of the world with the toponyms of Tangut and Cambalu. See Van Duzer, The World for a King, 92, 106. By contrast, Sebastian Cabot’s printed world map of 1544 did not make any allusions to Asia in his depiction of North America. 130 Van Duzer, The World for a King, 54, 73. 131 See Richard W. Unger, Ships on Maps: Pictures of Power in Renaissance Europe (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). 132 Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power,” 312. 133 Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism, 362. 134 Household inventories demonstrate their fairly regular presence, especially in Venice. See Federica Ambrosini, “Descrittioni del mondo nelle case venete dei secoli XVI e XVII,” Archivio Veneto 117 (1981): 67–99; Catherine DelanoSmith, “Map Ownership in SixteenthCentury Cambridge: The Evidence of Probate Inventories,” Imago Mundi 47 (1995): 67–93; Isabella Palumbo-Fossati, “L’interno della casa dell’artigiano e dell’artista nella Venezia del Cinquecento,” Studi Veneziani 8 (1984): 109–153; George Tolias, “Maps in Renaissance Libraries and Collections,” in HoC, 3:1:637– 660 at 649; Rosen, The Mapping of Power, 66–67; Cosgrove, “Mapping New Worlds,” 65–89. On the increasingly intimate relationships between prints and their owners in the early modern world, see Schmidt and Nichols, Altered and Adorned, 14–15. On sixteenthcentury map consumption more generally, see Davies, Renaissance Ethnography, 52–64, and Carlton, Worldly Consumers. 135 See Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Visual culture, including paintings and maps, directly undergirded European imperialism and the functioning of hegemonic and imperial power; see Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy, eds., Empires of Vision: A Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 136 Renata Ago, Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome, translated

267 by Bradford Bouley and Corey Tazzara with Paula Findlen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 222. In 1511, the chronicler Marin Sanudo reported having a wall map in his home that visitors came to see in precisely this way; see Sanudo, I diarii, 13:293. 137 Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance, 313. 138 For instance, see Jordana Dym and Karl Offen, eds., Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Patricia Seed argued that “Spanish colonialism produced the census, and British colonialism the map.” See Idem, “Taking Possession of Overseas Empires,” William and Mary Quarterly 49 (1992): 183–209, at 206–207. See also Karl W. Butzer, “From Columbus to Acosta: Science, Geography, and the New World,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992): 543–565. 139 Many scholars have demonstrated that the Venetian economy as a whole did not necessarily decline in the sixteenth century but instead shifted from being international or Mediterranean centered toward being more locally or regionally oriented, without losing any of its vitality in the process, since many local products and their markets, such as silk, proved to be resilient. See Horodowich, “The New Venice,” 4–6. 140 See Günter Schilder, “The Cartographical Relationship between Italy and the Low Countries in the Sixteenth Century,” in Imago et mensura mundi: Atti del IX congress internazionale di storia della cartografia, ed. Carla Clivio Marzoli, Giacomo Corna Pellegrini, and Gaetano Ferro, 3 vols. (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1985), 1:265–277. 141 See Leo Bagrow, “A Page from the History of the Distribution of Maps,” Imago Mundi 5 (1948): 53–62. Venetian publications represented three-quarters of the titles sent to Frankfurt by all Italian publishers. See Pettegree, The Book in The Renaissance, 255; Nuovo, The Book Trade in the Italian Renaissance, 293–295. Venice was also “the main, if not practically the only, supplier of Western cartographical items to the Ottoman Empire,” and Gastaldi played a leading role in these exchanges. See Luca Berardi, “The Sixteenth-Century Muhit Atlası: From a Venetian Globe to an Ottoman Atlas?,” Imago Mundi 69 (2016): 37–51, at 43. 142 See James Akerman, “From Books with Maps to Books as Maps: The Editor in the Creation of the Atlas Idea,” in Editing Early Historical

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Atlases, ed. Joan Winearls (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 3–48. See also Bagrow, History of Cartography, 179; Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, 2:3:460–467; Ramachandran, The Worldmakers, 47; Peter van der Krogt, “The Theatrum Orbis Terrarum: The First Atlas?,” in Abraham Ortelius and the First Atlas: Essays Commemorating the Quadricentennial of his Death, 1598–1998, ed. Marcel van den Broecke, Peter van der Krogt, and Peter Meurer (Utrecht: Hes Publishers, 1998), 55–78; Unger, Ships on Maps, 67. For an overview of the historical development of the atlas, see James Akerman, “On the Shoulders of a Titan: Viewing the World of the Past in Atlas Structure” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1991). As previously noted, Dalché is skeptical about the influential relationship of Ptolemy on the developing form of the atlas; see n. 39. 143 “Le provincie et lochi de tutta la terra in cerco,” Pietro Coppo, De toto orbe (1520), Bologna, Archiginnasio Cod.A.117. Maps three and thirteen depict the New World, and c. 76v–81v discuss the Americas. A similar manuscript atlas of Coppo’s exists in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris (il Lat. 9663), however, with no painted maps. Coppo also produced a small printed portolan, De summa totius orbis (Venice: Augustino di Bindoni, 1528), whose third book describes Columbus’s voyages and whose oval world map shows the New World (Figure 2.6). On Pietro Coppo, see Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century, 119–124, and Attilio Degrassi, “Di Pietro Coppo e delle sue opere,” Archeografo triestino 3:11 (1924): 318–387. 144 Roberto Almagià, “The Atlas of Pietro Coppo, 1520,” Imago Mundi 7 (1950): 48–50, at 50. 145 See Casti Moreschi, “Cartografia e politica territorial,” 99; and Verner and Stuart-Stubbs, The Northpart of America, 16. 146 Mercator’s atlas was the first publication to use the word that has become synonymous with “a collection of maps,” but it was Lafreri who first placed the figure of Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders on the covers of his books. See Bagrow, History of Cartography, 179; Akerman, “From Books with Maps,” 19. 147 Venetian presses produced twice as many composite atlases and Roman ones. See Jean-Marc Besse, “The Birth of the Modern Atlas: Rome, Lafreri, Ortelius,” in Conflicting Duties, ed.

Maria Pia Donato and Kill Krayne (London: The Warburg Institute, 2009), 63–85, at 68. 148 See Albert Ganado, “Description of an Early Venetian Sixteenth Century Collection of Maps at the Casanatense Library in Rome,” Imago Mundi 34 (1982): 26–47, esp. 43. See also Jacob, The Sovereign Map, 68; Woodward, “The Italian Map Trade,” 788. The standard list of all sixteenth-century Italian maps bound in atlases is found in Ronald Vere Tooley, “Maps in Italian Atlases of the Sixteenth Century, Being a Comparative List of the Italian Maps Issued by Lafreri, Forlani, Duchetti, Bertelli, and Others, Found in Atlases,” Imago Mundi 3 (1939): 12–47. 149 Richard Unger, for instance, counts sixty-nine bound collections of maps before 1500; see Unger, Ships on Maps, 66. 150 Jean Rotz, The Maps and Text of the Boke of Idrography Presented by Jean Rotz to Henry VIII, Now in the British Library, ed. David Eccles and Helen Wallis (Oxford: Printed for Presentation to the Members of the Roxburghe Club, 1981), 14. 151 See Schilder, “The Cartographical Relationship,” 277. 152 Tooley, Maps and Map-Makers, 112. Significantly, this map shows up as map 49 (Orbis totius descriptio) on Georg Willer’s 1573 catalogue. See Bagrow, “A Page from the History,” 57. 153 See Guglielmo Cavallo, ed., Cristoforo Colombo e l’apertura degli spazi: Mostra storico-cartografica, 2 vols. (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1992), 2:853; Cornelis Koeman, Günter Schilder, Marco van Egmond, and Peter van der Krogt, “Commercial Cartography and Map Production in the Low Countries, 1500ca.1672,” in HoC, 3:2:1296–1383 at 1301; Verner and Stuart-Stubbs, The Northpart of America, 4. 154 In the Catalogus auctorum of his Theatrum, Ortelius included Benedetto Bordone, Giacomo Gastaldi, Matteo Pagano, Girolamo Ruscelli, Vincenzo Valgrisi, as well as a variety of other maps printed in Venice. Ortelius’s 1564 map Ortelius Nova totius terrarum orbis also reprinted Ramusio’s map of Cuzco. On Ortelius’s study of Venetian maps and their use of an oval projection, see Rodney Shirley, “The World Maps in the Theatrum,” in Abraham Ortelius and the First Atlas, ed. van den Broecke, van der Krogt, and Meurer, 171–184. 155 Tooley, Maps and Map-Makers, 112. See Hans Wolff, ed., America: Early Maps of the New

NOTES TO PAGES 138–144

World (Munich: Prestel, 1992), 79–81 and 168–171. 156 See Woodward, “The Italian Map Trade,” 781; Bagrow, History of Cartography, 136; Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth Century, 248–9. 157 Milanesi, “La cartografia italiana,” 43, 77. Sonja Brentjes similarly demonstrates how Gastaldi’s maps influenced a host of Northern European mapmakers, so much so that “it is no exaggeration to claim that Gastaldi’s maps. . .shaped Western European geographic views. . .far into the eighteenth century.” See Brentjes, “Giacomo Gastaldi’s Maps of Anatolia,” 123. 158 Maps that depicted the toponyms Anian, Tolm, and/or Agama, and often all three – most of which were modeled on the maps of Ortelius – include, but are not limited to, Jan Huyghen van Linschoten’s Itinerario (1596), Petrus Plancius’s Orbus terrarum typus de integro (1590), Cornelis de Jode’s Speculum (1593), Arnold van Langren’s Typus orbis terrarum (1594), Jodocus Hondius’s Typus totius orbis terrarum (1597), William J. Blaeu’s Nova totius terrarum orbis (1606), João Teixeira’s chart of the North Pacific (1630), and Antonio Saches’s Idrographisiae nova descriptio (1641). 159 See also Ortelius and Jan Baptist Vrients’s Epitome theatric Orteliani (1601) and Fernando de Solis’s Tipus orbis terarum [sic] (1603), in Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 247, 258. 160 This map is in his atlas Descriptionis Ptolemaicae augmentum (1597). See Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 132. 161 Shirley, Mapping the World, 139. For a list of world maps derived directly from Ortelius’s oval world maps, see Shirley, “The World Maps in the Theatrum,” 184. 162 Shirley, The Mapping of the World, 158. 163 See Zerubavel, Terra Cognita, 84.

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Chapter 5

1

Nicolò Zen’s Dello scoprimento is the second part of a two-part compilation whose full title is De i commentarii del viaggio in Persia di M(esser) Caterino Zeno il K(avaliere) et delle guerre fatte nell’imperio perisano, dal tempo di Ussuncassano in quà. Libri due. Et dello scoprimento dell’isole Frislanda, Eslanda, Engroveland, Estotilanda, et Icaria, fatto sotto il Polo Artico, da due fratelli Zeni, M(esser) Nicolò il K(avaliere) et M(esser) Antonio. Libro uno. Con un disegno particolare di tutte le

3

dette parte di tramontana da lor scoperte (Venice: Francesco Marcolini, 1558). For a facsimile of Zen’s text and map and an English translation of the text, see Frederick W. Lucas, The Annals of the Voyages of the Brothers Nicolò and Antonio Zeno (London: Henry Stevens Son and Stiles, 1898), 3–23, 161–178, and plate 11. Since this chapter focuses on the second of the two relazioni contained in this compilation, it refers to the text under scrutiny here as Dello scoprimento. The list of writers and mapmakers who accepted Dello scoprimento as authentic and reprinted its contents in their own subsequent texts and maps is lengthy. Girolamo Ruscelli issued a version of Zen’s map in his 1561 edition of Ptolemy, as did many other subsequent sixteenth-century quarto editions of Ptolemy. Gerardus Mercator showed the Zenian territories, including Estotiland on the North American continent, on his 1569 world map, and included an inset map of Frisland on his map of the North Pole. Abraham Ortelius similarly produced a map of the North Sea in 1570 in his Theatrum orbis terrarum that was a somewhat augmented version of the Zeno map, also clearly labeling Estotiland as part of the American continent. He stated that while Columbus had discovered America, “the north part thereof, called Estotiland, which most of all extendeth towards our Europe and the islands of the same, was long ago found out by certain fishers of the Isle of Frisland, driven by tempest on the shore, and was afterwards, about the year 1390, discovered anew by one Antonio Zeno, a gentleman of Venice”; see Charles Elton, The Career of Columbus (London: Cassell and Company, 1892), 162–163. A German woodcut map by Sebastian Petri in 1588, made after Ortelius, included the Zenian islands in the introduction to Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia, where Frisland and Icaria are shown near Iceland, and further west Estotiland is once again clearly shown as a part of North America. Frisland shows up in numerous sixteenth-century Lafreri atlases, and the Zen voyages are mentioned in the work of cosmographers and geographers such as Lorenzo D’Anania, Giuseppe Rosaccio, Richard Hakluyt, John Dee, and others. For a complete list of early modern authors who accepted Zen’s account, see Lucas, The Annals of the Voyages, 212–224, and Karrow, Mapmakers of the Sixteenth-Century, 600–602. See Verner and Stuart-Stubbs, The Northpart of America, 16.

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Christian Zahrtmann, “Remarks on the Voyages to the Northern Hemisphere Ascribed to the Zenis of Venice,” The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 5 (1835):102–128, at 109; Richard Henry Major, The Voyages of the Venetian Brothers, Nicolò and Antonio Zeno, to the Northern Seas, in the XIVth Century (London: The Hakluyt Society,1873), iii; Lucas, The Annals of the Voyages, 143. 5 For an overview of the most significant contributions, see John Reinhold Forster, History of the Voyages and Discoveries Made in the North (Dublin: Luke White and Patrick Byrne, 1786); Placido Zurla, Dissertazione intorno ai viaggi e scoperte settentrionali di Nicolò ed Antonio fratelli Zeno (Venice: Zerletti, 1808); Elton, The Career of Columbus, 154–168; William H. Babcock, Legendary Islands of the Atlantic: A Study in Medieval Geography (1922; reprint, Plainview: Books for Libraries Press, 1975), 124–143; Alvise Da Mosto, I navigatori Nicolò e Antonio Zen, in Ad Alessandro Luzio, gli archivi di stato italiano. Miscellanea di studi storici, 2 vols. (Florence: F. le Monnier, 1933), 1:293–308. 6 Giorgio Padoan, “Sulla relazione cinquecentesca dei viaggi nord-atlantici di Nicolò e Antonio Zen (1383–1403),” Quaderni Veneti 9 (1989): 7–104, at 61, 68, 71. 7 Di Robilant’s popularizing study, for instance, regularly uses words such as “forgery,” “prank,” “fake,” “fraud,” and “authenticity” to query the Zen account; see Andrea Di Robilant, Irresistible North: From Venice to Greenland on the Trail of the Zen Brothers (New York: Random House, 2011), 6–7. See Padoan and Di Robilant for the most complete bibliographies of Zen scholarship. 8 For instance, many have noted Nicolò Zen’s remarkably accurate description of Greenland, and have argued that in the mid-sixteenth century, a description so precise could have come only from direct experience. See William Herbert Hobbs, “The Fourteenth-Century Discovery of America by Antonio Zeno,” Scientific Monthly 72 (1951): 24–31. 9 Eugenio Musatti, Storia di Venezia, 2 vols. (Venice: Filippi Editore, 1968), 2:365. 10 Vivaro Capellari, Campidoglio Veneto, BNM It.7.18 (8307), 4: ff. 215v.–227v, esp. 217r– 218v; Marco Barbaro, Discendenze patrizie, BNM It.7.928 (8597), f. 222; Giacomo Zabarella, Trasea Peto overo origine della Serenissima famiglia Zeno di Venetia (Padua: Crivellari,

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1646), 22. The eighteenth-century genealogist Capellari lists various Nicolò Zens alive at the end of the fourteenth century, making it unclear which one could have potentially undertaken this voyage. Nicolò Zen the traveler is typically identified as Nicolò Draconis, or “son of the Dragon,” because his father, Pietro, an admiral, had a dragon on his shield that he supposedly wrested from a Genoese captain in hand-to hand combat. On the Zen family history and genealogy, see Emmanuele Bolognesi, “Nicolò Zeno (1515–1565): Dalla storia contemporanea alla storia delle origini” (Tesi di Laurea, Università degli Studi di Ferrara, 1995), 200–203; Padoan, “Sulla relazione cinquecentesca,” 31ff.; Orietta Pinessi, Nicolò Zen tra Tiziano e Tintoretto: Storia di un riconoscimento (Treviolo: Ikonos, 2011), 7–23; Navigatori veneti del quattrocento e del cinquecento, 53–58. Zen was Savio di Terraferma in 1548 or legal advisor for the mainland territories, working to reclaim vast tracts of marsh and manage the hydraulic equilibrium of the lagoon and the Grand Canal; Savio sopra le Acque or water commissioner in 1554; Provveditore sopra i Beni Inculti in 1558, directing mainland agrarian reform; a member of the Council of Ten – Venice’s most important security council – in 1563; and the Provveditore all’Arsenale in 1565, at which time he oversaw the structural reorganization of the Venetian shipyards. He was a member of Venice’s delegation to Emperor Charles V in 1545, and was one of the fortyone electors of doge Girolamo Priuli in 1559. For a complete list of his offices held and political accomplishments, see Pinessi, Nicolò Zen, 25–48; Padoan, “Sulla relazione cinquecentesca,” 18–20. This painting was lost in a fire in 1577. See Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima, 132v. BNM ms. It.7.2053 (7920). Pietro Aretino, Libro de le lettere di M. Pietro Aretino al sacratissimo re d’Inghilterra, 6 vols. (Paris: Matteo il Maestro, 1609), 3:249; Giuseppe Moleto, Facil modo di tirar le linee parallele alle vedute, di misurar le distanze et di mettere in disegno (Padua: n.p., 1581), 92; Girolamo Ruscelli, Geografia di Tolomeo tradotta (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1561), dedication. See Charles Hope, Jennifer Fletcher, Jill Dunkerton, et. al., eds., Titian (London: National Gallery London, 2003), 33, 170–1; Sandro Sponza, “Un dipinto di Tiziano riconsosciuto:

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Il ritratto di Nicolò a Kingston Lacy,” in Pittura veneziana: Dal Quattrocento al Settecento: Studi di storia dell’arte in onore di Egidio Martini, ed. Egidio Martini, Bernard Aikema, and Giuseppe Maria Pilo (Venice: Arsenale,1999), 57–61. Tintoretto also perhaps painted him; see Pinessi, Nicolò Zen, 51–103, and Mariano Sartor, I ritratti di Nicolò Zen di Tiziano e Tintoretto: La “vera storia” del riconoscimento (Treviso: Terra Ferma, 2015). I thank Allison Sherman for these citations. Pinessi, Nicolò Zen, 27–8. “A/NICOLO E ANTONIO ZENO/NEL SECOLO DECIMUOQUARTO NAVIGATORI SAPIENTEMENTE ARDITI/NEI MARI NORDICI/PER DECRETO DEL COMUNE/1881.” Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Futility in the New World: Narratives of Travel in Sixteenth-Century America,” in Elsner and Rubiés, Voyages and Visions, 74–100, at 75. Today, nearly one hundred different Latin versions alone of his account still survive, and countless medieval and early modern maps represent his empire. See Simon Berthon and Andrew Robinson, The Shape of the World (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1991), 64; John Noble Wilford, The Mapmakers (New York: Knopf, 1981), 48–49; Skelton, Explorers’ Maps, 47. See Iain Maclod Higgins, Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Rubiés, “Travel Writing as a Genre.” Gwyn A. Williams, Madoc: The Making of a Myth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 43. See Eve M. Duffy and Alida C. Metcalf, eds., The Return of Hans Staden: A Go-Between in the Atlantic World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). See David Fausett, Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of the Great Southern Land (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1994), 79–97; Lucas, The Annals of the Voyages, 146–148. “Cavaliere fatto per il re di Dacia, della nostra nazione, il qual abitava in uno suo castello nel regno di Svezia,” Pietro Querini, Viaggio e naufragio di Piero Quirino, gentiluomo viniziano, in Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 4:72. Nicolò Zen, Dell’origine di Venetia et antiquissime memorie dei barbari, che distrussero per tutto’l

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mondo l’imperio di Roma, onde hebbe principio la città di Venetia, libri undici (Venice: Francesco Marcolini, 1558), 42v. Rubiés, “Travel Writing as a Genre,” 10. See also Piotr Salwa, “L’esperienza del nuovo: La relazione di viaggio come strumento didascalico,” Annali d’italianistica 21 (2003): 301–317. See Christine R. Johnson, “Buying Stories: Ancient Tales, Renaissance Travelers, and the Market for the Marvelous,” Journal of Early Modern History 11 (2007): 405–446; Zweder von Martels, ed., Travel Fact and Travel Fiction: Studies on Fiction, Literary Tradition, Scholarly Discovery and Observation in Travel Writing (Leiden: Brill, 1994). Zen, Dello scoprimento, 57v–58r. I thank Alessandra Russo for her insights into this passage. Zen, Dello scoprimento, 52r; Francisco López de Gómara, Historia de la conquista de Mexico, ed. Jorge Guerria Lacroix (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1979), 26. Peter Martyr also recounted similar passages about Aguilar’s story in his Decades (4.30). Zen, Dello scoprimento, 53v; López de Gómara, Historia, 25–26. Zen, Dello scoprimento, 52r; Benedetto Bordone, Libro di Benedetto Bordone (Venice: Nicolò d’Aristotile detto Zoppino, 1528), xiir. Zen, Dello scoprimento, 52v; Bordone, Libro, ixr. Zen, Dello scoprimento, 52v; Bordone, Libro, xir. See Major, The Voyages of the Venetian Brothers, 126. Zen, Dello scoprimento, 53r; Bordone, Libro, xiir. Zen, Dello scoprimento, 53r; Bordone, Libro, viiiv. Zen, Dello scoprimento. 53r; Bordone, Libro, xr. Or, “Il quale novo mondo chiamare ne stato licitio,” Paesi novamente retrovati (reprint, 1916), 133. Zen, Dello scoprimento, 53r. Amerigo Vespucci, The First Four Voyages of Amerigo Vespucci: Reprinted in Facsimile and Translated from the Rare Original Edition (Florence, 1505–6) (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893), iii, v. These passages are also similar to Paesi novamente retrovati (1508), 137, and to Bordone, Libro, xir. See Lucas, The Annals of the Voyages, 78–84, 209–211. Ibid, 98–124, 195–200. The author integrated up to three dozen texts about travel into a comprehensive narrative cosmography including, most significantly,

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the Itinerarius of the German William of Boldensele, Prince Hayton’s Fleurs des histoires d’orient, William of Tripoli’s De satu Saracenorum, Friar Odoric of Pordenone’s account of his visit to China, Brunetto Latini’s Livre dou trésor, and Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale and Speculum natural. See Higgins, Writing East, 9; Rubiés, “Travel Writing as a Genre,” 14. Higgins, Writing East, vii, 12. See Paul Barolsky, “What Are We Reading When We Read Vasari?,” Source: Notes in the History of Art 22 (2002): 33–35; Patricia Lee Rubin, Giorgio Vasari: Art and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 4–5. On the culture of chronicling in Venice, see Patricia Fortini Brown, “Painting and History in Renaissance Venice,” Art History 7 (1984): 263–294. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 31, 289. See Rona Goffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 74. See Ingrid D. Rowland, The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). On cartographic forgery, see Alfred Hiatt, The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in FifteenthCentury England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 283. See also Christopher S. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Artists’ goals were similarly often not to achieve a mimetic representation or appearance in exacting detail but rather to make images that emphasized verisimilitude and represented a reasonable semblance to the original. As Jessica Maier puts it, “True likeness was a rich and flexible concept, as was accuracy, in the early modern period.” Jessica Maier, “A ‘True Likeness’: The Renaissance City Portrait,” Renaissance Quarterly 65 (2012): 711–752, at 747. This manuscript treatise was later published as Giovanni Nanni, Commentaria super opera diversorum auctorum de antiquitatibus loquentium (Rome: Eucharius Silber, 1498). Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science,

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1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 76–103, esp. 80, 101. Nicholas Popper, “An Ocean of Lies: The Problem of Historical Evidence in the Sixteenth Century,” Huntington Library Quarterly 74 (2011): 375–400, at 380. Frederic C. Lane, Venice: A Maritime Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 194–195. Zen, Dello scoprimento, 46v–47r. Ibid, 51v. The second volume of Ramusio’s Navigazioni was scheduled to be published earlier but was delayed because its original manuscript was destroyed in a fire. Zen’s Dello scoprimento was therefore published before Ramusio but potentially with a knowledge that it would not be included in Ramusio’s collection. Dello scoprimento was eventually included in the 1574 edition of Navigazioni e viaggi, reedited by Giovanni Batista Ramusio’s son Paolo Ramusio, who probably paid more attention to Zen’s text after Mercator published Zen’s map in his 1569 world map. “Certo a caso si poteva attribuire, che voi haveste ritrovato comercio con uno nel Mondo Nuovo, che mi desse notitia di tante cose, che si fan di là, et non altramente ne foste instrutto, che se abitaste in quel mondo, ma che poi immediate venisse un’altro d’Engrovelant, et di sotto il Polo Artico, che vi aprisse ciò che si fa là et facesse tavole di quelle regioni, io non so, come possiamo dire, che etiam questo sia caso, ma concediamo ancora questo esser stato caso,” Lettere di XIII huomini illustri, 717. The language used by Fracastoro, “under the North Pole,” directly repeated the title of Dello scoprimento . . . fatto sotto il Polo Artico, suggesting that Zen told Fracastoro, who told Ramusio. Padoan, “Sulla relazione cinquecentesca,” 24–25. Anthony Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Popper, “An Ocean of Lies,” 379, 376. Sir Walter Ralegh conceived of his History of the World in a fashion similar to Zen by

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collecting a trove of sources and recombining them into a new narrative. See Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Gerhard Wolf, Von der Chronik zum Weltbuch: Sinn und Anspruch südwestdeutscher Hauschroniken am Ausgang des Mittelalters (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2002), 10–11, 21. Johnson, “Buying Stories,” 415, 432–434. Davies, “The Wondrous East,” 228. For instance, Giorgio Padoan claimed that patriotism was not a motivating factor for Zen; see Padoan, “Sulla relazione cinquecentesca,” 23. Zen, Dello scoprimento, 47v. Zen, Dello scoprimento, 46v. See Margaret Clunies Ross, ed., Old Icelandic Literature and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). See Major, The Voyages of the Venetian Brothers, 5. Zen, Dello scoprimento, 51r. See Chapter 3, n. 41–42. Sanudo, I diarii, 1:806–807; Harisse, The Discovery of North America, 317. On Venetian isolarii and the New World, see Chapter 6. See Margaret Small, “From Jellied Seas to Open Waterways: Redefining the Northern Limit of the Knowable World,” Renaissance Studies 21 (2007): 315–339. See Varthema and Diaz, Itinerario. Subsequent editions were published in 1522, 1526, 1535, and 1550. Zen, Dell’origine di Venetia, 1r–2v. “Come Dio salvò dal diluvio nell’arca Noè con i suoi, cosi salvò questo popolo de seme antico in queste lagune,” Ibid, 7v–8r. “Principiando da ponente alcune parti, che si chiamano il mondo novo, nel quale si contiene molti paesi, insule, et provincie, come narrano spagnoli, benche per esser la lor natura parabolana è cosa certa ritrovarsi meno assai di quello, che dicono,” Zen, Storia della guerra veneto-turca, BNM, Ms. It.7.2053 (7920), 3r. “In Italia sono alcuni signori di poca importanza, il maggior il duca di Ferrara, poi il duca di Mantova. Sono poi alcuni altri, ma soggieti all’imperator, anzi schiavi per dir meglio il suo vero epifeto,” Ibid, 5r. Ferdinand Columbus, Historie del Ferdinand Colombo; Nelle quali s’ha particular, e vera relatione della vita, e de’ fatti dell’Ammiraglio Don

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Christoforo Colombo, suo padre: Et dello scoprimento, ch’egli fece dell’Indie Occidentali, dette Mondo Nuovo, hora possedute dal Serenissimo Re Catolico, nuovamente di lingua spagnuola tradotte nell’italiana dal S. Alonso Ulloa (Venice: Francesco de’ Franceschi Sanese, 1571). He was being held in the Valier prison in Venice at the time, condemned to death by the Council of Ten for having published a book without the government’s permission. See Bareggi, Il mestiere di scrivere, 206, 258, and Ilaria Caraci Luzzana, introduction to The History of the Life and Deeds of the Admiral Don Christopher Columbus, ed. Ilaria Caraci Luzzana, Repertorium Columbianum 8 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 23. Rinaldo Caddeo, “Edizioni delle Historie,” in Ferdinand Columbus, Le historie della vita e dei fatti di Cristoforo Colombo, 2 vols. (Milan: Edizioni Alpes, 1930), 1:lxxi–lxxv. “Ne è da dubitare, che l’historia non sia vera; poiche dal figliuolo, per relatione e lettere, è stata con molta prudenza scritta. Ne è ancora da dubitare, che non sia scritta di man del sudetto illustrissimo Don Ernando, e che questo che vostra serenità fu dato per tale dall’Illustrissimo Don Luigi Colombo,” Columbus, Historie, dedication. Historians of the book have long been interested in the inventory of Ferdinand’s library, which recorded the date, place of purchase, and price for each volume he acquired. He also employed full-time librarians who lived on the premise of the library itself. See Mark P. McDonald, “The Life and Work of Ferdinand Columbus,” in The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus (1488–1539): A Renaissance Collector in Seville, ed. Mark. P. McDonald, 2 vols. (London: The British Museum Press, 2004), 1: 18–57, and “The Biblioteca Hernandina and the Early Modern Book World: Towards a New Cartography of Knowledge,” accessed November 4, 2017, www .english.cam.ac.uk/research/hernandocolon/ home/. Incidentally – though perhaps not entirely – part of Ferdinand’s collection included maps, and he owned six views of Venice, more than any of any other city in his collection, which otherwise included only two maps depicting his father’s discoveries, five views of Jerusalem, and four of Rome. See Peter Barber, “The Maps. Town-Views and Historical Prints in

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the Columbus Inventory,” in The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus, ed. McDonald, 1:246–262, at 254–255. Ferdinand spent seven months in Venice, between May and December 1521, during which time he bought 1,600 books and a large number of prints; see McDonald, “The Life and Works of Ferdinand Columbus,” 41. The text asserts various claims about Columbus that many contemporary scholars question, for instance, that Columbus was of noble blood, that he had attended the University of Pavia, and that he first arrived in Portugal after being shipwrecked in a daring sea battle against the Venetians. See Ilaria Luzzana Caraci, Colombo vero e falso: La costruzione delle Historie fernandine (Genoa: Sagep Editrice, 1989). See Columbus, Le historie, xix–lviii; Valeria Bertolucci Pizzorusso, “Ferdinand Colombo,” in Nuovo mondo: Gli italiani, ed. Collo and Crovetto, 133–143; Rumeo de Armas, Alfonso de Ulloa; Elisa Vittoria Liberatori Prati, “Nuove ricerche su Cristoforo Colombo nella Venezia del tardo Cinquecento: Le Historie di Don Ferdinand,” in L’epopea della scoperte, ed. Zorzi, 135–161. For overviews of the historiography of the Historie, see Paolo Emilio Taviani, “Schede di commenti alle Historie,” in Ferdinand Columbus, Le historie della vita e dei fatti dell’Ammiraglio don Cristoforo Colombo, ed. Paolo Emilio Taviani and Ilaria Caraci Luzzana (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1990), ii, and Caraci Luzzana, introduction to The History of the Life and Deeds of the Admiral Don Christopher Columbus. See, for instance, Caraci Luzzana, introduction to The History of the Life and Deeds of the Admiral Don Christopher Columbus, 3. “Sia vicina detta India all’Africa, e alla Spagna,” Columbus, Historie, 15r. “È bene il vero, che Tile, quella, di cui Tolomeo fa mentione, giace dove egli dice; e questa da’ moderni è chiamata Frislanda,” Ibid, 9r. The island of Tile is indicated on Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina (1539), one of the sources for Zen’s map. See Prati, “Nuove ricerche,” 143. In addition, Alfonso di Ulloa’s other published texts, including his lives of the emperors Charles V and Ferdinand, directly point to Ulloa’s propensity for compiling various texts without attributing the authorship of all of his sources,

and he had also been accused of “falsifying” other historical texts. See Ibid, 154–155, and Giuseppe Bellini, introduction to Ferdinand Columbus, Historie del S.D. Ferdinand Colombo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1992), 15. 95 See Chapter 2. 96 Prati, “Nuove ricerche,” 140, n. 20, 153. 97 “Alcuni . . . pensano oscurare la sua fama,” “portò la gratia dello spirit santo a quell Nuovo Mondo che egli scoprì,” “San Christoforo . . . passava Christo per le profondità delle acque con tanto pericolo,” “passò lui e i suoi ministri accioche facessero quelle genti indiane coloni, e habitatori della chiesa trionfante de’cieli,” Columbus, Historie, 2v–3v. The text similarly recounts that Columbus “was so strict in matters of religion that for fasting and saying prayers he might have been taken for a member of a religious order” (“Delle cose della religion fu tanto osservante, che in digiuni, e in dir tutto l’officio canonico poteva essere stimato professo nella religione”), Ibid, 7r. When Columbus first sighted land, the text states that he had “seen the light amid the darkness, signifying the spiritual light with which he was to illuminate those parts” (“havea veduta la luce nel mezzo alle tenebre, dinotando la luce spiritual, che da lui in quelle tenebre era introdotta”), Ibid, 50v. 98 Ibid, 191v. 99 “A quali tutti piacque à Dio di acciecar gli occhi, e l’intelletto, accioche non admettessero il buon consiglio, loro dato dall’Ammiraglio. Et io ho per certo, che ciò fu providenza divina,” Ibid, 196r. For a comparison to Ramusio’s description of this hurricane, see Chapter 3, n. 10. 100 “Per colpa, e mal governo,” “portò continuatamente mortale odio all’Ammiraglio . . . che lo metteano in disgratia à Re Catolici,” Columbus, Historie, 151r. 101 Ibid, 188v. 102 “Admettendo per testimonii I sollevati suoi nimici, e favorendo, e provocando publicamente quelle, che venivano a dir mal di loro. I quali nelle lor deposition dicevano tante malvagità, e tristitie, che sarebbe stato più che cieco colui, che non havesse conosciuto, quelle esser dette con passione, e senza verità,” Ibid, 190v. 103 “Le quai cose oltra ch’ei cosi faceva, non dirizzava appresso ad altro fine le cose di giustitia, ne havea altro rispetto, che di farsi ricco,”

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“consentendo, che i tristi, e i popolari dicessro di loro mille ingiurie per le piazza, suonando con corni presso al porto, ov’essi erano stati imbarcati; oltra l’essere stati piantati per li cantoni molti libelli infamatorii,” Ibid, 191r. 104 Girolamo Benzoni’s narrative of Columbus’s life and voyages shares many similarities with that of Ferdinand; see Benzoni, Historia, 12r–30r. 105 “Cotal perdito loro non fosse di gran danno,” Columbus, Historie, 226r. 106 “Col cui favore, e consiglio, si tenea per certo, che egli facesse quell, che faceva,” “Con tutte le quai cose io non debbo però incolpar meno i Re Catolici, ch’elessero per quell carico un’huomo maligno, e di si poco sapere,” Columbus, Historie, 191v–192r. 107 “Et io ho per certo, che ciò fu providenza divina; percioche, se arrivavano costoro in Castiglia, non sarebbono mai stati castigati, so come i lor delitti meritavano; anzi, per che erano favoreggiati dal vescovo, havrebbono ricevuti molti favori, e gratie,” Ibid, 196r. 108 “Uomini senza vergogna,” Ibid, 189r. 109 “Sempre trovato il Re alquanto secco, e contrario a’suoi negocii,” “ancor che in apparenza gli facesse buon volto, simulò il rimetterlo nel suo stato; e havea volontà di totalmente privarnelo,” “percioche non si legge, che mai fra gli antichi, ò moderni habbia alcuno ciò fatto. Et però resterà perpetua memoria nel mondo, ch’egli sia stat oilpromo scopritore dll’Indie Occidentali,” Ibid, 246r–247r. 110 See Caraci Luzzana, introduction to The History of the Life and Deeds of the Admiral Don Christopher Columbus, 1. On the various theories regarding the complex relationship between Columbus’s original written records and their transmission to Las Casas and the Colon family, see Francesca Lardicci, introduction to Christopher Columbus, A Synoptic Edition of the Log of Columbus’s First Voyage, ed. Francesca Lardicci, Repertorium Columbianum 6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 3–34, and Anthony Pagden, introduction to Las Casas on Columbus: Background and the Second and Fourth Voyages, ed. Nigel Griffin, Repertorium Columbianum 7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), 3–19. 111 “Leggendo io adunque le sue opre [sic], vi trovai quello, che nella maggior parte de gl’historici suole avvenire, cioè, che aggrandiscono alcune cose, o le diminuiscono, o taciono quello, che gisutamente dovevano scrivere con molta particolarità,” Columbus, Historie, 1v.

275 112 For instance, Girolamo Graziani depicted Columbus in his Il conquisto di Granata (1650) returning to Spain from his first voyage to the Americas (in presumably very early 1493) in time to fight the Moors and play a decisive role in their defeat. Graziani creatively refashioned Columbus as a central protagonist of the reconquista, and as a prophetic, larger-than-life figure that directly linked reconquest and conquest and affirmed Italian participation in European imperialism. See Nathalie Hester, “Baroque Italian Epic from Granada to the New World: Columbus Conquers the Moors,” in Italy and the New World, ed. Horodowich and Markey, 270–287. By the seventeenth century, Columbus more definitively became the hero-explorer around Europe at large; see Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts, 64, and Pagden, European Encounters with the New World, 89–115. On heroic depictions of Columbus in eighteenth-century Venetian poetry, see Piero Del Negro, “Cristoforo Colombo nella cultura veneziana del settecento,” in L’impatto della scoperta dell’America, ed. Arico, 73–84. 113 See Chapter 1. 114 “L’havrebbono annoverato, e messo nel numero de gli Dei, ma ancora fatto principe di quelli,” “valoroso huomo, honore veramente dell Italia,” Columbus, Historie, dedication. 115 “Un uomo italiano cosí grande et cosí famoso,” Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 5:102, italics mine. 116 “Non potendo sopportar molti, che un forestiero, e della nostra Italia, habbita conquistatato tanto honore, e tanta Gloria, non solamente fra la natione Spagnuola, ma ancora fra tutte l’altre del mondo,” Benzoni, Historia, 12r. 117 “Questa opera, fata a contemplation de questa illustrissima signoria.” See Piero Falchetta, Fra Mauro’s World Map (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 699. 118 Berthon and Robinson, The Shape of the World, 73–74. Chapter 6

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“Arriban al golfo de Coquibacoa, que Ojeda llama de Venecia y hoy se conoce como de Venezuela, por parte de los habitantes de este país. En él encuentra los palafitos en que la gente vive sobre el agua, en casas construidas

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en el océano,” Álvaro Paredes Ferrer, Alonso de Ojeda: El descubridor de Colombia (Bogotá: Planeta, 2006), 137; “Hojeda named it the Gulf of Venice, from its similarity to that famous city in Italy. The Indians called it the Gulf of Coquibacoa [the Gulf of Maracaibo], and we know it now as the Gulf of Venezuela,” Clements R. Markham, ed., The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci, and Other Documents Illustrative of His Career (New York: Burt Franklin, 1894), xxviii, 33. See also Ilaria Luzzana Caraci, Scopritori e viaggiatori del cinquecento e del seicento (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1991), 240, n. 5. Luzzana Caraci, Scopritori e viaggiatori, 240. Sanudo, I diarii, 7:232. Markham, The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci, 12. Lucchetta, “Viaggiatori e racconti di viaggi nel Cinquecento,” 475, 480; Thomas Suárez, Early Mapping of the Pacific (Singapore: Periplus, 2004), 49. Cieza de León, La prima parte dell’historie del Perù, 5r. For additional comparisons between Venice and the Far East, in particular those noted by Gasparo Balbi on the city of Pegù, see Luzzana Caraci, Scopritori e viaggiatori, 816–817, 821–822, 824, 850–851, 954–956, 969–970. On his 1550 world map, Pierre Desceliers likened Venice to Quinsai (modern Hangzhou); see Van Duzer, The World for a King, 90–91. Sanudo, I diarii, 33:557. Ibid, 40:191. “La laguna del Messico,” Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 5:10. See Gerald Roe Crone, “A Manuscript Atlas by Battista Agnese in the Society’s Collection,” The Geographical Journal 108 (1946): 72–80, at 77. See also Chapter 2, n. 102. Giovanni Antonio Magini’s editions of Ptolemy at the end of the sixteenth century, engraved by Girolamo Porro, continued to compare Venice and Tenochtitlan and to enlarge Mexico City and its surrounding lake. See Giovanni Antonio Magini, Geografia (Venice: Giovanni Battista & Giorgio Galignani, 1597–1598), 204r. On the movement of Venetian maps, see Chapter 4, n. 140–141. Cortés, Letters from Mexico, 68. Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, Life in the Imperial and Loyal City of Mexico in New Spain and the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico,

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ed. and trans. Minnie Shepard and Carols Castaneda (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1953), 57. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España: Y fundada en la documentacion en lengua mexicana recogida por Ios mismos naturales, ed. Garibay Kintana and Ángel María, 4 vols. (Mexico City: Editorial Porrua, 1956), 1:29–30. D’Anania, L’universale fabrica, 366–367; López de Gómara, Historia dello scoprimento della nuova Spagna, dedication of October 12, 1565, 129r; Peter Martyr, De orbe novo decades, letter of March 7, 1521, in Fonti italiane, ed. Berchet, 2:64; Paolo Giovio, Historiam su temporis, 1530, in Fonti italiane, ed. Berchet, 2:379. See also Diego Lupi, letter of April 20, 1522, in Fonti italiane, ed. Berchet, 2:312–317; Bernardo Segni, Storie Fiorentine, 1527–1555, in Fonti italiane, ed. Berchet, 2:361. On this association, see Federica Ambrosini, “Echi della conquista del Messico nella Venezia del Cinquecento,” in L’impatto della scoperta, ed. Aricò, 15–16. “Ita scilicet consulente Cortésio, ut amplificatis viribus ascitisque secum amplioribus auxiliis, adversus Mutezumam pontentissimem inter Mexicanos regem, et in Temistitana urbe, Venete urbis in modum undique pernavigabili, regnantem mature contenderet,” Berchet, Fonti italiane, 2:386. Cosgrove, “Mapping New Worlds,” 83. The Venetian writer Diego Lupi, for instance, compared the size of Mexico City and its abundant flow of fresh water to Seville; see Berchet, Fonti italiane, 2:312–317. In his Memorial de las historias del Nuevo Mundo, Pirú, Fra Buenaventura de Salinas y Córdova compared Lima to Rome, Genoa, Florence, Salamanca, and Venice alike for its various merits; see David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creolo Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 317. In addition, it has long been suggested that Tenochtitlan served as Dürer’s model for the ideal city in his Etliche underricht zur febestigung der Strett, Schloss un Flecken. See Edwin W. Palm, “Tenochtitlan y la ciudad ideal de Dürer,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 40 (1951): 59–66. I thank Giovanni Fara for this reference. For surveys of these images, see Honour, The New Golden Land, 3–27, and William C. Sturtevant, “First Visual Images of Native

NOTES TO PAGES 178–180

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America,” in First Images of America, ed. Chiappelli, 1:417–454. On isolarii, see Tom Conley, “Virtual Reality and the Isolario,” Annali d’Italianistica 14 (1996): 121–130; Frank Lestringant, Le livre des îles: Atlas et récits insulaires, de la Genèse à Jules Verne (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2002); Giorgio Mangani, Cartografia morale: Geografia, persuasione, identità (Modena: Cosimo Panini, 2006), 159–170; Anastasia Stouraiti, “Talk, Script and Print: The Making of Island Books in Early Modern Venice,” Historical Research 86 (2013): 207–229; George Tolias, “Isolarii, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Century,” in HoC, 3:1:263–284; Bronwen Wilson, “Francesco Lupazzolo’s Isolario of 1638: The Aegean Archipelago and Early Modern Historical Anthropology,” in Reflections on Renaissance Venice: A Celebration of Patricia Fortini Brown, ed. Blake De Maria and Mary E. Frank (Milan: Five Continents, 2012), 186–199. On the malleable and movable nature of islands as a means of understanding the constantly changing frontiers of early modern global geography, see also Padrón, “The Indies of the West.” For instance, Columbus’s L’epistola de insulis Indiae supra Gangem inventis, Massimiliano Transilvano’s De Moluccis insulis epistula, Peter Martyr’s De nuper . . . repertis insulis, and Nicolò Zen’s Dello scoprimento dell’isole. Donattini, Spazio e modernità, 183. See also Marziano Guglielminetti, “Il ‘mondo nuovo’ come un’isola: Benedetto Bordon e Tommaso Porcacchi,” in L’epopea delle scoperte, ed. Zorzi, 103–120; Camillo Tonini and Piero Lucchi, eds., Navigare e descrivere: Isolari e portolani del Museo Correr di Venezia: XV-XVIII secolo (Venice: Marsilio and Musei Civici Veneziani, 2001). See Chapter 2, n. 97. Vincenzo Coronelli, Isolario dell’atlante veneto (Venice: A spese dell’autore, 1696), 4. Islands had also long been considered in literary culture, from the time of Marco Polo, as a site of the fantastical, mysterious, and marvelous. See Leonardo Olschki, Storia letteraria delle scoperte geografiche (Florence: Olschki, 1937), 39–40. Bordone, Libro, 7v, 10r, 29v–30r. On Bordone and his isolario, see Roberto Almagià, “Intorno alle carte e figurazioni annesse all’Isolario di Benedetto Bordone,” Maso finiguerra 2 (1937): 170–186; Armstrong,

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“Benedetto Bordone”; Massimo Donattini, introduction to Benedetto Bordone, Isolario (Modena: Edizioni Aldine, 1983), 7–18; Idem, Spazio e modernità, 239–264; Guglielminetti, “Il ‘mondo nuovo’ come un’isola”; Idem, “Il Messico a Venezia nel 1528: Benedetto Bordon e Hernán Cortés,” in L’impatto della scoperta, ed. Aricò, 111–112. For a manuscript version of Bordone’s isolario, see BNCF, Mag.XIII.52. Armstrong, ““Benedetto Bordone,” 82. Almagià, “Intorno alle carte,” 185. Cortés sent a total of five “letters of relation” to Charles V between 1519 and 1526, all of which circulated widely and attracted the attention of European printers. See Gruzinski, The Eagle and the Dragon, 54–55. Cortés’s second and third letters were first printed in Seville in 1522 and 1523; in March of 1524 they were published in Nuremburg in a Latin translation by the Friulian Pietro Savorgnan, followed closely by Niccolò Liburnio’s translation from Latin into Italian in 1524, which he dedicated to Marino Grimani, the patriarch of Aquileia. Savorgnan, who dedicated his Latin translation to Pope Clement VII, had lived in Habsburg lands for many years as secretary to the bishop of Vienna Giovanni de Revelles. The text was also copied in the manuscript “Giornale di fatte d’arme avvenuti nel 1521 nel Yucatan (Messico) per parte degli Spagnuoli” (BNM It. Cl.11.184 (7414)). The Nuremberg publication of Cortés’s second letter was immediately followed by Liburnio’s Italian edition, La preclara narratione di Ferdinando Cortése, which included Cortés’s original map. See Chapter 2. On the map and its transmission, see Richard Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 64–67; Barbara E. Mundy, “Mapping the Aztec Capital: The 1524 Map of Tenochtitlan, Its Sources and Meanings,” Imago Mundi 50 (1998): 11–33; Elizabeth Hill Boone, “This New World Now Revealed: Hernán Cortés and the Presentation of Mexico in Europe,” Word & Image 27 (2011): 31–46; Diantha Steinhilper, “An Emperor’s Heraldry, a Pope’s Portrait, and the Cortés Map of Tenochtitlan: The Praeclara Ferdinadi Cortesii as an Evangelical Announcement,” Sixteenth Century Journal 47 (2016): 371–399. See also Thomas B. F. Cummins, “Toward a New World’s Laocoön: Thoughts on Seeing Aztec Sculpture through Spanish Eyes,” in Altera Roma: Art and

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Empire from Mérida to Mexico, ed. John M. D. Pohl and Claire L. Lyons (Los Angeles: The UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2016), 215–255. See Steinhilper, “An Emperor’s Heraldry,” 389–390. See n. 116. Other “sanitized” versions that copied Bordone’s Tenochtitlan appeared in Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographia (1550), Volume 3 of Ramusio’s Navigazione et viaggi (1556), Antoine du Pinet’s Plantz, pourtraitz et descriptions de plusieures villes et fortresses (1564), Abraham Ortelius’s Nova totius terrarum orbis (1564), Braun and Hogenberg’s Civitates orbis terrarum (1572), Tomasso Porccachi’s L’isole piu famose del mondo (1572), Belle-Forest’s La cosmographie universelle de tout le monde (1575), and Gerard de Jode’s Speculum orbin terrarum (1578). Giacomo Gastaldi’s map of Cuzco, printed in Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi, did much the same, similarly depicting Peru as a large, walled, and symmetrical city: an icon of civilization. Like Bordone’s map of Tenochtitlan, Gastaldi’s map of Cuzco was also regularly copied by editors in Northern Europe such as Pinet, Ortelius, Braun and Hogenberg, De Bry, and Blaeu. See Davies, Renaissance Ethnography, 232–246; Kagan, Urban Images, 67–70, 95–101; Schreffler, “Inca Architecture from the Andes to the Adriatic.” The Venetian version of the Cortés letter that I will use here to compare the contents of the two texts, La preclara narratione, has no pagination, but counting from the first page of text that begins with “Allo altissimo” and counting single pages rather than recto and verso, the sections Bordone drew from are found on 42–45 and 69–81. For instance, Bordone copied Cortés’s passages about local landscapes (Cortés, La preclara narratione, 8–9; Bordone, Libro, 7r), the fertility and irrigation of the land (Cortés, La preclara narratione, 32–33; Bordone, Libro, 7r), and a description of the fish and birds in the city of Iztapalapa (Cortés, La preclara narratione, 42–43; Bordone, Libro, 7v). Cortés, La preclara narratione, 74; Bordone, Libro, 8v. Cortés, La preclara narratione, 68–69, 72–73; Bordone, Libro, 7v–8r. In a similar process, in his 1596 translation of Jose de Acosta’s Historia naturale, the translator

43

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48 49

50 51

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Giovanni Paolo Galluci da Salò removed chapters 25–30 of Acosta’s text, where Acosta discussed the religious beliefs, rites, and sacrificial practices of New World peoples, and where Acosta noted the similarities between Indian and Catholic rituals. See Ferro, “Traduzioni di opere spagnole,” in L’impatto della scoperta, ed. Aricò, 104–105, and Donatella Ferro, “Sospetti e censure nella prima traduzione italiana della historia natural y moral de las Indias di José de Acosta,” in Il letterato, ed. Aricò, 273–282. “Ce ne sono anchora di molti altri per esser la citta come Venetia,” Bordone, Libro, 7v–8r. On Bordone, Venice, and Tenochtitlan, see David Kim, “Uneasy Reflections: Images of Venice and Tenochtitlan in Bendetto Bordone’s Isolario,” RES: Anthropologie and Aesthetics 49 (2006): 80–91. Bordone, Libro, 6v–15r. Giulio Ballino, De’disegni delle più illustri città et fortezze del mondo (Venice: Bolognini Zalterii, 1569), “Timistitano” (no pagination). “Non senza maraviglia vediamo un’altra Vinetia nel mondo,” Tommaso Porcacchi, L’isole piu famose del mondo (Venice: Appresso Simon Galignani & Girolamo Porro, 1576), 157. “Alcune sono in terra mattonate, et alcune in acqua, per le quali (come a Vinetia si va per canale con le vaghe gondolette) vanno nelle lor canoe,” Ibid, 158. Ibid. “Non senza maraviglia vediamo un’altra Vinetia nel mondo, fondata da Dio benedetto . . . con la sua santissima mano,” Ibid, 157. Ibid, 156–176. “Queste usanze s’intendono solamente di quelli habitatori, ch’erano avanti all’arrivo de gli Spagnuoli, percioche hora essendo il paese habitato dalle nationi, che di ponente andate vi sono, vivesi al costume di Spagna e con la religion Christiana,” Ibid, 164. “[A]llagar tutte le valli . . . tra li argini, e così ridur Vinegia un’altra volta in laguna, ma laguna di acque dolce, come è Themistitan,” Girolamo Fracastoro, Lettera sulle lagune di Venezia (Venice: Tipografia di Alvisopoli, 1815), 9–10; Biblioteca Correr ms. P.D. 233c, fol. 29v. See Manfredo Tafuri, “Alvise Cornaro, Palladio e Leonardo Donà: Un dibattito sul bacino marciano,” in Palladio e Venezia, ed. Lionello Puppi (Florence: Sansoni, 1982), 9–27, at 12, and Idem, Venice and the Renaissance, trans. Jessica Levine (Cambridge,

NOTES TO PAGES 190–192

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54

55 56

57

MA: MIT Press, 1995), 152–153. Bordone’s map of Tenochtitlan instructed viewers on the flow and control of water in the city by depicting aqueducts and lagunar banks, including explanatory text such as “from this river they bring water to the city” (“da questo fiume conducono lacqua nella citta”) (Figure 55). While speculative, it is possible that other projects for urban renewal were inspired by New World urban design. See Kim, “Uneasy Reflections,” 89. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 27, cited in Barbara E. Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, The Life of Mexico City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 27. See Conley, “Virtual Reality and the Isolario ”; Wilson, “Francesco Lupazzolo’s Isolario of 1638”; George Tolias, “The Politics of the Isolario: Maritime Cosmography and Overseas Expansion during the Renaissance,” The Historical Review / La Revue Historique 9 (2012): 27–52; Stouriati, “Talk, Script and Print.” Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World, 112. John Brian Harley, Maps and the Columbian Encounter (Milwaukee: Golda Meir Library, 1990), 83. For instance, Porcacchi enumerated the sources of income from Jamaica. “There are rich mines of gold, herds [of animals] of every type reproduce in great multitudes . . . [and] the pastures, water, land and air are perfect and salubrious. It has many rivers and lakes that produce scattered fish, and from herds of animals, from the abundance fabric that they produce from cotton, and from sugar, its inhabitants earn a large income . . . It has good and secure ports, and great and beautiful fishing grounds, with everything you could want in the provinces, which in the Indies are reputed to be good, so that for this it comes to be considered noble and prized among the islands for its goodness, fertility and salubriousness” (“Vi son ricche miniere d’oro, armenti d’ogni sorte moltiplicati in gran copia . . . le pasture, l’acque, la terra e l’aria son perfetti, e salubri.

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Ha molti fiumi, e laghi, che producono sparsi pesci, e da gli armenti dalla copia delle tele, che vi si fanno, da’bombagi, e da’zuccheri cavano gli habitatori grosse entrate . . . Ha porti buoni e sicuri, e pescherie grandi e belle con tutto quel che si puo desiderar nelle provincie, che nell’Indie son riputate buone, talche per cio viene a esser annoverata per la bontà, fertilità, e salubrità sua, fra le isole nobili, e di pregio”), Porcacchi, L’isole piu famose, 176. Bordone, Libro, 50v–51r, 62v–63r, and 66v–67r. The Florentines had a long-standing interest in Brazil, which flourished especially during the reign of Ferdinando I (r. 1587–1609). See Brege, “The Empire That Wasn’t,” 289–361. On the passing Venetian considerations about direct involvement in the colonization of or trade with the Americas, see Chapter 2, n. 111– 112. “Ogni cosa viene a notitia del signor mutueezuma [sic],” Bordone, Libro, 9r. “Et tanto quelli che stanno lontani, quanto quelli che sono presenti alla sua presentia il temono, et ubediscono, con ogni reverenza, ne si crede, che signor alcuno che nel mondo si ritrovi, habbia tanta ubidienza quanto lui,” Ibid. Ibid, 9v. Ibid, 6v–9v. To offer just a few examples, Cortés reported “Muteczuma sedeva nel tempo del mangiar,” Cortés, La precalara narratione, 80, compared to Bordone’s “Mautueezuma [sic], quando manza . . . siede,” Bordone, Libro, 9v. Similarly, “Et quando li chiamati venivano davanti di lui, racconciavansi col capo dimesso et occhi aterra . . . et quando allui parlavano non lo guardavano nel volto,” Cortés, La preclara narratione, 81; “Et quando nanti al signore alcuno se presenta, tiene il capo chino, et gli occhi riguardanti la terra, ne alcuno è di tanta domestighezza del signore, che ardisca nel viso riguardarlo,” Bordone, Libro, 9v. “Sarebbe difficil cosa di sapere quanto il regno di questo signor mutuezuma si stenda. . .il suo dominio `è in grandezza come la spagna,” Bordone, Libro, 9r. On Contarini’s report, see n. 7–8. “Avvertisca però il lettore, che, prima che da gli Spagnuoli fosse questa città soggiogata, l’anno, come già s’è detto, 1520, era ella

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tale, qual descritta l’habbiamo; et i costumi tali de’paesani, quali sono narrati da noi. Perdè poi per le guerre, che furono tra gli Spagnuoli, et i paesani, quasi tutta la sua forma primiera: in guisa che, distrutta in gran parte per esse, poscia s’è rifatta di nuovo; et, atterrati gl’idoli, et spenta la lor superstitione, hor vi si adora Iddio, et Giesu Christo, et han le genti appresi piu civili costumi,”

66

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68 69

70 71

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Ballino, De’disegni, “Timistitano” (no pagination). “A queste loro statue, poste nelle capelle, offeriscono molti cuori d’huomini; e del sangue, che n’esce, ungono loro il volto . . . Riveriscono il loro Re con grande humilità, gli ubidiscono prontissimamente, et usano nel servirlo ceremonie infinite,” Ibid. “Hanno in successo di tempo queste genti si ben cangiato i lor costumi crudeli, e inhumani, che son doventate humane et gratiose,” Porcacchi, L’isole piu famose, 160. Cortés, Letters from Mexico, 270. See also Kim, “Uneasy Reflections,” 90, n. 51. See Kagan, Urban Images, 91. To be clear, the Mexica still occupied large portions of the city, indigenous rulers retained many positions and substantial power in the capital, and the process of drying up Lake Tetzcoco and filling the Laguna of Mexico would take centuries, but Spanish conquistadors clearly marked the city center as theirs. See Mundy, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, 72–98. See Wilson, The World in Venice, 70–132. Pietro Bertelli, Diversarum nationum habitus (Padua: Apud Alciatum Alcia et P. Bertellium, 1589), 65–66. The source of these images is unknown. Idem, Diversarum nationum habitus (Padua: Alicatus Alcia and Pietro Bertelli 1592), 21–22, reprinted in 1594 on pages 27–28, and Alessandro Fabri, Diversarum nationum ornatus cum suis iconibus (Padua: Alexandri Fabri, 1593), 65–66. Cesare Vecellio, Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo (Venice: Giovanni Bernardo Sessa, 1598), 487v–507r. On Vecellio’s costume books, see Federica Ambrosini, Paesi e mari ignoti, 159–175; Ann Rosalind Jones, “‘Worn in Venice and Throughout Italy’: The Impossible Present in Cesare Vecellio’s Costume

Books,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39 (2009): 511–544; Idem, “Cesare Vecellio, Venetian Writer and Art-book Cosmopolitan,” in Singh, A Companion to the Global Renaissance, 305–322; Idem, “Ethnographer’s Sketch, Sensational Engraving, FullLength Portrait: Print Genres for Spanish America in Girolamo Benzoni, the De Brys, and Cesare Vecellio,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 41 (2011): 137–171, at 138–139; Eugenia Paulicelli, Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy: From Sprezzatura to Satire (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 89–126; Bronwen Wilson, “Reproducing the Contours of Venetian Identity in Sixteenth-Century Costume Books,” Studies in Iconography 25 (2004): 221–274. For the most complete bibliography on Vecellio, see Cesare Vecellio, Cesare Veccellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni: The Clothing of the Renaissance World, ed. Margaret F. Rosenthal and Ann Rosalind Jones (London: Thames and Hudson, 2008), 45. 74 For a study of the Recueil, see Ann Rosalind Jones, “Habits, Heterologies, Holdings: Populations in Print in a Sixteenth-Century Costume Book,” Yale French Studies 110 (2007): 92–121. On the history of European costume books, see Ulrike Ilg, “The Cultural Significance of Costume Books in Sixteenth-Century Europe,” in Clothing Culture, 1350–1650, ed. Catherine Richardson (Burlington: Ashgate, 2004), 29–47; Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 146–165. 75 De Bry’s engravings in part 1 were based on John White’s watercolors of 1585, painted to illustrate Harriot’s briefe and true report. Le Moyne had served as the artist for René de Laudonnière’s expedition to Florida in 1564; De Bry obtained Le Moyne’s original sketches not long after the artist’s death in 1588. De Bry derived images for his series on the Occidental and Oriental Americas from a wide range of sixteenth-century publications; see Sturtevant, “First Visual Images of Native America,” in First Images of America, ed. Chiappelli, and Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Texts, Images and the Perception of ‘Savages’ in Early Modern Europe: What Can We Learn from White and Harriot?,” in European Visions: American Voices, ed. Kim Sloan (London: The British Museum Press, 2009), 120–130. For the most complete discussion of the De Bry collection, see

NOTES TO PAGES 194–205

76

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78

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80 81

Michiel van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages (1590–1634) (Leiden: Brill, 2008), and Maureen Quilligan, ed., Theodore de Bry’s Voyages to New and Old Worlds, special issue of The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 41 (2011): 1–249. See also Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection, 46. On the titles of these volumes, see n. 79. De Bry also made prints of New Spain to illustrate Latin translations of the account of Girolamo Benzoni (Americae pars quarta (Frankfurt, 1594); Americae pars quinta (Frankfurt, 1595); Americae pars sexta (Frankfurt, 1596)) and for his separate volume of Bartolomé de las Casas’s 1552 account of Spanish atrocities (Narratio regionum Indicarum per Hispanos quosdam devastatarum verissima (Frankfurt, 1598)). Few of Vecellio’s woodcuts resemble De Bry’s New Spain images, however, partly because many of De Bry’s indigenous figures in New Spain are nude. Bertelli’s two images of Algonquians, his “Mulier Virginie insule Habitatrix” and “Vir virginie insule habitator,” also copied De Bry. See Bertelli, Diversarum nationum habitus, 27–28. Theodor De Bry, Collectiones peregrinatiorum in Indiam orientalem et Indiam occidentalem, XIII partibus comprehenso a Theodoro, Joan-Theodoro de Bry, et a Matheo Merian publicatae, 13 vols. (Frankfurt, 1590–1634), vol. 1 (1590), plate 10; Vecellio, Habiti antichi, 503v. The title Les grands voyages, referring to De Bry’s volumes on the Americas, also sometimes referred to as de Bry’s Americae series, was never De Bry’s title for any of his family’s books; late in the family’s work, they were colloquially called Les grands voyages to distinguish them from the smaller formats of the later publications about Africa and the East Indies (Les petits voyages). The Americae series was first published in 1590 and completed in 1624 by de Bry’s widow and descendants. As is common practice, I will refer to these publications about the Americas hereafter as Les grands voyages. De Bry, Les grands voyages, vol. 2 (1591), plate 39; Vecellio, Habiti antichi, 497v. De Bry, Les grands voyages, vol. 1, plate 8; Vecellio, Habiti antichi, 500v.

281 82 De Bry, Les grands voyages, vol. 2, plate 18; Vecellio, Habiti antichi, 499v. 83 De Bry, Les grands voyages, vol. 2, plate 14; Vecellio, Habiti antichi, 501v. 84 De Bry, Les grands voyages, vol. 2, plate 39. 85 van Groesen, The Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection, 11; “Assai meno rassicurante,” Maria Benzoni, La cultura italiana e il Messico, 130. 86 See Ann Rosalind Jones, “Cesare Vecellio’s Floridians in the Venetian Book Market: Beautiful Imports,” in Italy and the New World, ed. Horodowich and Markey, 248–269. 87 Claudia Swan, “From Blowfish to Flower: Classification and Its Images, circa 1600,” in Merchants and Marvels, ed. Smith and Findlen, 109–136, at 128. 88 Wilson, The World in Venice, 77. 89 Leitch, Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany, 5. Indeed, the collection of objects, specimens, and images from around the world and the multiplication of these representations helped to make the idea of cultural and ethnic diversity truly real and concrete in the early modern world. See Joan-Pau Rubiés, “New Worlds and Renaissance Ethnology,” History and Anthropology 6 (1993): 157–197, at 160. 90 Rosenthal and Rosalind Jones, introduction to Cesare Veccellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni, 23–24. 91 Vecellio, Habiti antichi, 500r. 92 Ibid, 491r, 504r. 93 See Rosalind Jones, “Cesare Vecellio’s Floridians,” 256–258. 94 Vecellio, Habiti antichi, 495r, 497r, 501r, 503r. 95 Bordone, Libro, 8r–v. Pedro Sancho, the official secretary to Francisco Pizarro, similarly emphasized the beauty of the built environment of Cuzco in his relatione published in Ramusio’s Navigazione e viaggi. See Schreffler, “Inca Architecture from the Andes to the Adriatic.” 96 Bordone, Libro, 8v. 97 “Et nel fabricar de gli loro iddii usano una diligenza incredibile, sono tutti di oro, over, di argento, et anchora ne fanno di piuma, di uccelli, et di pietre preciose, et questi sono di tanta eccellenza, che ad ognaltra natione farli cosi, perfettamente, impossibile sarebbe,” Ibid, 8v–9r. 98 Ibid, 9v. 99 “Che in vero dimostra in quelle parte esser gente de inzegno,” Sanudo, I diarii, 18:376.

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See also Symcox, Italian Reports on America, 78, 131. 100 On Mexican feather art in early modern Europe, see Russo, Wolf, and Fane, Images Take Flight. 101 “[A]lguni vestidi et adornamenti tutte fati de pene de oselo, tanto ben e sotilmente lavorate che mai vi afermo aver visto alcun rechamo nè di seda nè di oro che con questi si posano paragonar, et ha uno lustro natural tanto bellissimo, che si muda di color secondo la vista; che veramente è cosa meraviglosa. Di le altre cose, benchè siano bellissime non ve ne fo memoria, perchè questa parmi la più meraviglosa,” Sanudo, I diarii, 34:357–358. 102 “[U]no vestimento di prete tutto lavorato di pene et piume sotilissimamente de diversi naturali colori, ma sopramodo belli, che per mia fede, non sio (sic) se al mondo se atrova le più belle,” Ibid, 36:597. 103 “Li habitanti sono molto civili . . . Le habitation loro sono commode et ben ornate, vesteno et ornano ditte loro case de panni fatti di gotton. Hanno copia di oro, ma non lo usano per moneta: ben lo appreciano et lo usano in diversi ornamenti,” Ibid, 28:501–505, at 502. See also Symcox, Italian Reports on America, 84–85, 136–137, and Berchet, Fonti italiane, 1:102–104. 104 “Sono poi industriosi in lavorare; e io ho veduto alcuni vasi d’oro, ed altri venuti di là, bellissimi e molto ben lavorati. Nè hanno ferro, ma adoprano alcune pietre in luogo di ferro. Ho veduto eziandio speechi fatti di pietra. Lavorano poi lavori di penne di uccelli, miracolosi. Certamente non ho veduto in altre parti alcun ricamo, nè altro lavoro tanto sottile, come sono alcuni di questi di penne, li quali hanno un’altra vaghezza, perocchè paiono di diversi colori, secondo che hanno la luce, come vediamo farsi nel collo d’un Colombo,”

Firpo, Relazioni, 2:129. For a discussion of Amerindian craft and ingegno, see Davide Domenici, “Missionary Gift Records of Mexican Objects in Early Modern Italy,” in Italy and the New World, ed. Horodowich and Markey, 86–102. 105 Karl Marx claimed that the manufacture of crafts represented a characteristic, early modern precondition of capitalist development. “As a characteristic form of the capitalist process of production, it prevails throughout the manufacturing period properly so called, which extends, roughly speaking, from the middle of the sixteenth century to the last third of the eighteenth century . . . In the manufacture of carriages . . . different craftsmen are assembled in one building where the unfinished product passes from hand to hand,” Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1990), 455. “The other condition of labour, however – a certain level of skill, instrument as means of labour, etc. – is already available to it in this preliminary or first period of capital . . . This historic process is not the product of capital, but the presupposition for it,” Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1993), 505. 106 According to Elliott, José de Acosta saw America and its inhabitants through Aristotle’s eyes, and Bartolomé de Las Casas employed Cicero to understand the rationality of New World peoples. See Elliott, The Old World and the New, 39–49. 107 Rosenthal and Rosalind Jones, introduction to Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni, 35–41. 108 Jill Burke, “Nakedness and Other Peoples: Rethinking the Italian Renaissance Nude,” Art History 36 (2013): 714–739, at 726. 109 Vecellio, Habiti antichi, 488r. 110 Ibid, 495r. 111 Ibid, 489r, 493r. 112 Ibid, 494r. See Rosalind Jones, “Worn in Venice,” 519. 113 Vecellio, Habiti antichi, 496r. 114 “Costume as a subject allows no absolute certainty, for styles of clothing are constantly changing, according to the whim and caprice of their wearers. Add to this, if you will, that many regions of the world now are too far away for us to have news of them,

NOTES TO PAGES 211–216

although they are none the less being discovered; we hardly know the names of many places discovered within our and our fathers’ memories, let alone their costumes and customs; and costume shares the mutability to which all worldly things are and have been subject,” Ibid, “To the Reader,” in Rosenthal and Rosalind Jones, Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi e Moderni, 52. 115 See Susanna Regazzoni, “‘La buona selvaggia’: L’America di scena nella Venezia del ‘700,” in L’impatto della scoperta, ed. Aricò, 309–320. 116 Kagan, Urban Images, 89–94, at 94. 117 See Chapter 1, n. 19. 118 Vecellio, Habiti antichi, 496r, 497r; Bertelli, Diversarum nationum, 27–28. 119 Magni Aurelii Cassiodorii, Epistulae variae, 1:12, no. 24, cited in Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 73. 120 Cassiodorus, The Letters of Cassiodorus, trans. Thomas Hodgkin, cited in Elisabeth CrouzetPavan, Venice Triumphant: The Horizons of a Myth, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 5. 121 Sansovino, Venetia città nobillissima, 3r–4r. 122 Zen, Dello scoprimento, 50r–51r. 123 Vecellio, Habiti antichi, 500r, 501r. 124 Ballino, De’disegni, “Temistitan” (no pagination). Claudio Tolomei’s La pazzia similarly compares the people of the Indie Occidentali with the citizens of Plato’s Republic. For Tolomei, New World peoples were blessed, and lived without laws, writing, or leaders in a world of peace and generosity until the arrival of the Spanish. See Claudio Tolomei, La pazzia (Venice: Giovanni Andrea Vavassore detto Guadagnino, 1547) (no pagination). 125 On the use of America to explain European origins, see Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World, 64. 126 Vasco de Quiroga, quoted in Germán Arciniegas, America in Europe: History of the New World in Reverse, trans. Gabriela Arciniega and R. Victoria Arana (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1986), 69. See also Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 58–83.

283 127 Symcox and Eatough, Selections from Peter Martyr, 55 and 69. For comparison, see, for instance, Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima, 3r. Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan has described Venice as “a city without walls, without the ceremonial closure of doors, that could not sufficiently control the outside world.” See Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, “Potere politico e spazio sociale: Il controllo della notte a Venezia nei secoli XIII-XV,” in La notte: Ordine, sicurezza e disciplinamento in età moderna, ed. Mario Sbriccoli (Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1991), 46–66, at 48, and Idem, Venice Triumphant, 10–11. 128 Rosenthal and Rosalind Jones, introduction to Cesare Veccellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni, 37. 129 See Muir, Civic Ritual, 15, and Jutta Gisela Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 83–84. 130 “[L]’mmaginario di un tempo felice, di una durata tranquilla quando tutto altrove sembra travolto dal mutamento,” Donattini, “Ombre imperiali,” 37. 131 Wilson, The World in Venice, 132. 132 Vanita Seth, Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500–1900 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 4. 133 See Wintroub, A Savage Mirror, 4–8. 134 Gruzinski, The Eagle and the Dragon, 49. 135 Leitch, Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany, 10. 136 On this process of assimilation, see Michael T. Ryan, “Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 519–538. Carina Johnson argues that Habsburg inventories demonstrate a shift during the course of the sixteenth century from a sense of compatibility between New World peoples and Europeans to a clear sense of hierarchy; see Johnson, Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe. 137 “Non è dubbio alcuno, Illustre sig. mio, che la prudenza è il maggior dono, che posseggano gli huomini in terra; poi che col mezo di essa ogniuno sa prevedere ciò che di bene, ò di male può derivare da diverse operationi. Questa, col pratticare co’grandi huomini, si viene acquistando, poi che essi

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piu ne sono possessori de gli altri, per la continoua prattica, che loro conviene havere con piu persone di varie nationi, e paesi. Altri non aggradendo quella vita, che, essendo piena di honori, è insieme colma di miserie, va piu tosto peregrinando per il mondo, e con gli occhi viene dalla diverstà de luoghi . . . Ma molti sono ancora, che ne all’una, ne all’altra delle due vie non vogliono, ne possono attendere, e perciò si danno a leggere de’libri; con la lettione de’quali vengono apprendendo tutto quello, che nell’una e nell’altra maniera potevano acquistare, e con maggior consolatione, e minor fatica. A que’ due primi non occorre aiuto, poi che essi hanno la volontà, e’l modo di sodisfare al lor appetito. Questi terzi sono degni d’essere aiutati in ogni possibile maniera,” Porcacchi, L’Isole piu famose, dedication. 138 On the complexities of the production of knowledge in print culture, see, for instance, Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the 14th and 18th Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979); Heather Hirschfeld, “Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of Authorship,” Publications of the Modern Language Association 116 (2001): 609–622; Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Richardson, Printing, Writers, and Readers, 13–20. 139 “Investigando, de’molti errori che gli antichi a’posteri lasciati havevano,” Bordone, Libro, preface, and Porcacchi, L’isole piu famose, preface. 140 “[U]tile et dilettevole insieme a descriverlo et rappresentarlo oltra la espressione della parole, con gli intagli anco in stampe di rame di tutte le città, isole et luoghi considerabili . . . in modo che egli si possa non solo leggendo imparare, ma quasi vedere in fatto con gli occhi propri,”

Giuseppe Rosaccio, Viaggio da Venetia a Costantinopoli per mare e per terra et insieme quello di Terra Santa (Venice: Giacomo Franco, 1598), dedication. See also Wilson, “Francesco Lupazzolo’s Isolario of 1638,” 196–198. Conclusion

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4

The definitive article on the maps in the Sala dello Scudo remains Rodolfo Gallo, “Le mappe geografiche del Palazzo Ducale di Venezia,” Archivio Veneto 5:32–33 (1943): 3–113. Marica Milanesi believes that “those we see today have no relation to the originals.” See Milanesi, “La cartografia italiana,” 46. By contrast, the theologian and historian Giacinto Placido Zurla believed that the maps in the Sala dello Scudo directly transmitted the ideas of Ramusio and Gastaldi, and were perhaps based directly on the original maps that they had designed. In addition, he argued specifically that the northwestern part of the American continent had been copied from an earlier, Polian map. This map would have contained the Strait of Anian and geographic knowledge of the North Pacific, a knowledge Polo possessed long before the voyages of Bering. See Giacinto Placido Zurla, Sulle antiche mappe idrogeografiche lavorate in Venezia (Venice: Tipografia Picotti, 1818), 84–89. For a list of the archival documents pertaining to Gastaldi’s commission to paint maps in the Ducal Palace as well as Grisselini’s repainting, see Navigatori veneti del qattrocento e del cinquecento, 83–85, 104–105, and Giambattista Lorenzini, Monumenti per servire alla storia del Palazzo Ducale di Venezia, Parte I, dal 1253–1600 (Venice: Marco Visentini, 1868), 265–280. See Susanna Regazzoni, “‘La buona selvaggia’: L’America di scena nella Venezia del ‘700,” in L’impatto della scoperta, ed. Aricò, 309–320, and Stefania Buccini, The Americas in Italian Literature and Culture, 1700–1825 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 39–46. In eighteenth-century Venice, the meaning of mondo nuovo evolved to include a “cosmorama” or a kind of pop-up, mobile peep show popular in Venetian street life. See Darius A. Spieth, “Giandomenico Tiepolo’s Il Mondo Nuovo: Peep Shows and the ‘Politics of Nostalgia’,” The Art Bulletin 92 (2010): 188–210. “Tra le nobili instituzioni che fioriscono con gran sucesso in questa illustre capitale, una

NOTES TO PAGES 221–224

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6 7 8

9

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11 12

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certamente è quella della società, che fu eretta l’anno 1753 per l’incoraggimento delle arti delle Manifatture e del Commercio. Infinito è l’applauso e la benemerenza che essa si convidia quotidiamente in vista dei sommi progressi, che va facendo l’industria nazionale,” ASV, Senato, Dispacci Inghilterra, Filze, 122, n.183, 4 Marzo 1768, f. 243–248, at 243. I thank Anne Ruderman for this citation. See Federica Ambrosini, “L’immagine di Nuovo Mondo nel settecento veneziano,” Archivio Veneto 133–134 (1973): 127–168, 31–105. Benzoni, La historia, 79r–80r. Luigi Groto, Orationi volgari (Venice: Zoppini, 1586), 9r, 141v. Girolamo Muzio, Il gentilhuomo (Venice: Appresso gli heredi di Luigi Valvassori & Gio. Domenico Micheli, 1575), 53–54. Thomas Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities, 2 vols. (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1905), 1:314. “Chi lei vede, stima veder raccolto in breve spatio il mondo,” Gioan Nicolò Doglioni, La città di Venetia con l’origine e governo di quella (Venice: Antonio Turini, ad istanza di Giacomo Franco, 1614) n.p. Vecellio, Habiti antichi, translated by and cited in Ann Rosalind Jones, “Cesare Vecellio,” 306. Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women, ed. and trans. Virginia Cox (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 44. On the Venetian refusal to assimilate new economic realities in the first global age, see Davide Scruzzi, Eine Stadt Denkt sich Die Welt. Wahrnehmung, Geographische Räumung und Globalisierung in Venedig von 1490 bis um 1600 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010). Antonio Possevino, Apparatus ad omnium gentium historiam (Venice: Apud Io. Bapt. Ciottum Senensem, 1597), 198r–199v. See Thomas R. Adams, “Some Bibliographical Observations,” in First Images of America, ed. Chiappelli, 2:529–536. On the Black Legend in seventeenth-century Venice, see Ambrosini, Paesi e mari ignoti, 135–158. Castellani had previously published the virulently anti-Spanish texts Avviso di Parnaso nel quale si racconta la povertà e miseria dove è giunta la Repubblica di Venezia e il Duca di Savoia (Antinopoli: Stamperia regia, 1619) and Castigo esemplare de’calunniatori. Avviso di Parnaso

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19 20

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25

(Antinopoli: Stamperia regia, 1621), under the pseudonym Francesco Bersabita, both of which employed ideas from Las Casas. See Foresta, Il nuovo mondo, 274. “Dissensioni, persecution, ruvine, stragi, trucidamenti, incendii, violenze, e morti, cose tutte abhorrite dalla natura, abominate dale genti, detestate dale leggi, condennate da Dio,” Bartolomé de Las Casas, Istoria ò brevissima relatione della distruttione dell’Indie Occidentali (Venice: Marco Ginammi, 1626), preface. “È la più tragica, e la più horribile istoria, che da occhi humani, nella grande scena del Mondo, fosse veduta giamai,” Ibid. See Gino Benzoni, “A proposito di Gesuiti: Paraguay e ‘felicità,” in Il letterato, ed. Aricò, 63. “Vederanno i Sommi Pontefici, come sotto il pretesto delle giuste concessioni da loro predecessori fatte alli Rè di Castlglia, accioche procurassero la conversione de gli Indiani alla fede di Christo . . . siano state precipitate . . . milioni d’anime nel baratro dell’inferno,” Las Casas, Istoria ò brevissima relatione, preface. “Quelli ch’al governo de gli Spagnuoli si trovano sottoposti, ancorche fossero discontenti, si consoleranno almeno, perche al sicuro non saranno mai cosi mal trattati, come furono gli infelici Indiani,” Ibid. See Carla Forti, “Un lascasiano e polemista antispagnolo del Seicento a Venezia: Giacomo Castellani,” in Studi in onore di Armando Saitta dei suoi allievi pisani, ed. Regina Pozzi and Adriano Prosperi (Pisa: Giardini, 1989), 73–98; Angela Nuovo, “L’editoria veneziana del XVII secolo e il problema Americano: La pubblicazione delle opera di Bartolomè de las Casas (Venezia, Marco Ginammi, 1626–43),” in L’impatto della scoperta, ed. Aricò, 175–186; Giuseppe Bellini, “Las Casas, Venezia e l’America,” in Il letterato, ed. Aricò, 39–59. Michel di Montagna, Saggi di Michel sig. di Montagna (Venice: Marco Ginammi, 1633). See Ramón Iglesia Parga, Cronistas e historiadores de la conquista de México: El ciclo de Hernán Cortés (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1933), 133. “Il re Cattolico dovria esser il più ricco di tutti i principi, e lo stato suo più dovizioso ed abbondante di quello degli altri; e tuttavia . . . la Spagna è assai povera . . . onde pare che non senza ragione gli

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spagnoli dicano in proposito di quest’oro che dalle Indie se ne viene in Spagna, che faccia quell’effetto appunto che a la pioggia sopra i tetti delle case, le quali se ben vi cade sopra, discende poi tutta al basso senza che quelli chi primi la ricevono ne abbiano benefizio alcuno,” Firpo, Relazioni, 8:897–899. 26 Risposta alla lettera scritta contro la Serenissima Republica di Venetia dal sig. Duca d’Ossuna vicerè di Napoli alla S.ta di nostro sig. Papa Paulo V, cited in William James Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 503. 27 See Anastasia Stouraiti, “Colonial Encounters, Local Knowledge and the Making of the Cartographic Archive in the Venetian Peloponnese,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 19 (2012): 491–514, and Idem, “Printing Empire: Visual Culture and the Imperial Archive in Seventeenth-Century Venice,” The Historical Journal 59 (2016): 635–668. On the reception and representation

28

29 30

31

32

of Brazil in seventeenth-century Dutch print culture, see also Michiel van Groesen, Amsterdam’s Atlantic: Print Culture and the Making of Dutch Brazil (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). Patrick O’Brien, “Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives for the Restoration of Global History,” Journal of Global History 1 (2006): 3–39, at 36–37. See Horodowich and Markey, introduction to Italy and the New World. “Le navigationi strane e inusitate del Colombo, del Cortese . . . Megalanes . . . hanno fatto parere il mondo più picciolo con la loro grandezza,” Federico Borromeo, Liber inscriptus argumenta, cited in Maria Matilde Benzoni, “‘Il mondo più picciolo’: America Spagnola e mondializzazione iberica all’Ambrosiana,” in Milano, L’Ambrosiana e la conoscenza dei nuovo mondi, ed. Catto and Signorotto, 177–207, at 179. Maartje Van Gelder, Trading Places: The Netherlandish Merchants in Early Modern Venice (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 67–68. Ibid, 72–77.

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Archival and Manuscript Sources Archivio di Stato, Venice Capi del consiglio di X. Filze, Lettere. Senato. Dispacci Spagna. Senato. Dispacci Inghilterra. Filze. Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan Cod. Misc. S. 99. sup. Biblioteca Comunale Ariostea, Ferrara Mss. cl. II.10. Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Bologna Coppo, Pietro. De toto orbe. 1520. Ms. A. 117. (16.b.1). Biblioteca Correr, Venice Dispacci di Andrea Navagero Ambasciatore alla Corte di Spagna. Cod. Cic. 2792. Fracastoro, Girolamo. Lettera sulle lagune di Venezia. Venice, 1815. Ms. P.D. 233c. Ms. Donà della Rose. 447/11. Ms. Donà della Rose. Leonardo Donà, Bibliotheca historicorum et geographorum. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence Zorzi, Alessandro. Raccolta Alberico. Ms. B.R. 234. Cod. Magliabecchiano XIII.10.52. Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice Ms. It.6.24 (6111). Ms. It.6.208 (5881). Ms. It.7.18 (8307). Ms. It.7.928 (8597). Ms. It.7.1009 (7447). Ms. It.7.2053 (7920). Ms. It.11.143 (6676). Ms. It.cl.7. 323 (8646).

It.Cl.11.184 (7414). Ms. Cod. Marciano.7 (1009). Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence Ms. 1910. Library of Congress, Washington, DC Mss. Med. and Ren. n. 26. PRINTED SOURCES

To eliminate excessive irregularities, all books printed before 1850 have been cited here by date alone. Additional information about their publication can be found in the body of the text. When multiple years are listed, these represent the volumes I have consulted, and not necessarily a complete list of a text’s editions. Acosta, José de. Historia natural y moral de las Indias. Venice, 1595. Agnese, Battista. Atlante nautico. Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 2008. Airaldi, Gabriella, and Luciano Formisano, eds. La scoperta nelle relazioni sincrone degli italiani. Rome: Istituto Poligrafo dello stato, 1996. Aretino, Pietro. Libro de le lettere di M. Pietro Aretino al sacratissimo re d’Inghilterra. 6 vols. Paris, 1609. Badoer, Federico. Atto di Fondazione. Venice, 1560. Ballino, Giulio. De’disegni delle più illustri città et fortezze del mondo. Venice, 1569. Barpo, Giovanni Battista. Le delitie et i frutti dell’agricoltura et della villa, libri tre. Venice, 1634. Bembo, Pietro. Rerum Venetarum Historiae, Libri XII. Venice, 1551. Bembo, Pietro. Dell’istoria viniziana. Venice, 1552. Bembo, Pietro. Opere. 4 vols. Venice, 1729. Bembo, Pietro. History of Venice. Edited and translated by Robert W. Ulery Jr. 3 vols.

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Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Benzoni, Girolamo. La historia del Mondo Nuovo. Venice, 1565, 1572. Berchet, Guglielmo, ed. Fonti italiane per la storia della scoperta del nuovo mondo. 2 vols. Rome: Il ministero della pubblica istruzione, 1892. Bergamo, Jacopo Filippo Foresti da. Supplementum supplementi chronicarum. Venice, 1503. Bergamo, Jacopo Filippo Foresti da. Novissime historiarum. Venice, 1503. Bergamo, Jacopo Filippo Foresti da. Sopplimento delle croniche universali del mondo, di F. Giacopo Filippo da Bergamo. Tradotto nuovamente da M. Francesco Sansovino; Nel quale si contengono tutte le cose avvenute nel mondo, dalla creatione d'Adamo, fino a quest'anno presente 1581. Venice, 1581. Berlinghieri, Francesco. Geographia. 1482. Reprint, Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1966. Bertelli, Pietro. Diversarum nationum habitus. Padua, 1589, 1592, 1594. Böhm, Johannes. Gli costumi, le leggi, et le usanze di tutte le genti. Venice, 1558. Bordone, Benedetto. Libro di Benedetto Bordone. Venice, 1528. Bordone, Benedetto. Libro di Benedetto Bordone. Edited by Giovanni Battista de Cesare, 1528. Reprint, Rome: Bulzoni, 1988. Bordone, Benedetto. Isolario. Edited by Massimo Donattini. Modena: Edizioni Aldine, 1983. Bry, Theodor de. Collectiones peregrinatiorum in Indiam Orientalem et Indiam Occidentalem, XIII partibus comprehenso a Theodoro, Joan-Theodoro de Bry, et a Matheo Merian publicatae. 13 vols. Frankfurt, 1590–1634. Cantino, Alberto. La carta del Cantino e la rappresentazione della terra nei codici e nei libri a stampa della Biblioteca Estense e Universitaria. Edited by Ernesto Milano. Modena: Il Bulino, 1991. Carillo, Jesús, ed. Oviedo on Columbus. Repertorium Columbianum 9. Turnhout: Brepols, 2000. Cartier, Jacques. Navigations to Newe France. Translated by John Florio. London, 1580. Casas, Bartolomé de Las. Istoria ò brevissima relatione della distruttione dell’Indie Occidentali. Venice, 1626. Castellani, Giacomo. Avviso di Parnaso nel quale si racconta la povertà e miseria dove è giunta la

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INDEX

Accademia della Fama (Venice), 83, 255n114 Acosta, José de, 61, 213, 265n112, 278n42, 282n106 Africa, 10, 11, 166 allegorical, 111 and Asia, 68 explorations of, 6, 42, 71, 73, 75 isolarii on, 186 maps of, 219 in travel compendia, 34, 35, 87 and Venice, 7, 163, 219 Africanus, Leo, 67 Agama, kingdom of, 130–1, 132, 138, 269n158 Age of Encounters, 18, 20 vs. colonialism, 8–9 and maps, 91, 92 Northern Europe in, 135, 236n8 and print culture, 4–5, 61, 76 and travelogues, 21, 26 Venetian role in, 58, 61, 76, 150, 163, 174, 218, 225 Agnadello, battle of (1509), 8, 31, 85, 93–4 Agnese, Battista, 94, 98, 112, 136, 175, 259n27, 262n62 Ago, Renata, 134 Aguilar, Gerónimo de, 151–2, 271n30 Alarcón, Hernando, 115 Alessandro VI (pope), 223 Almagià, Roberto, 58, 179, 265n116 Alvarez, Francesco, 252n64 Amazém de Guiné (Portugal), 100, 101 ambassadors: on aesthetics of New World, 205–6 and Black Legend, 77–8, 82 New World information from, 24–5, 64, 73, 78, 83, 85, 88, 163, 214, 216 papal, 12, 24 America in European Consciousness (Kupperman), 10 America occidentalis (de Bry), 82, 111, 124, 194, 195 American Revolution, 221 Americana: bibliographies of, 223 German, 23, 41, 84, 87 impact of, 86–8 Venetian, 7–8, 17, 22, 23, 25, 40, 59–62, 164, 166, 170. See also particular titles and authors Americas. See New World; North America; South America

Amerindians, 10, 283n124 accounts of, 43, 47, 186, 188, 211–14, 252n73, 278n42, 282n106 aestheticizing of, 203–8 cannibalism of, 124–5, 143, 149, 151, 152, 154, 186, 195, 206, 214 and Columbus, 168, 169 in costume books, 193–211 defense of, 76–7 and east-west similarity, 3, 125–6, 164, 173, 180, 188, 211–13, 283n136 exoticism of, 123–4 and Genesis, 213–14 and idealized early Venice, 211–12, 213 illustrations of, 193, 195–204, 209, 210 literacy of, 153 in maps, 111 origins of, 265n112 purported wealth of, 118–21 religions of, 66 suicides of, 77, 79, 80 as ten tribes of Israel, 128, 213 violence against, 27, 70, 76–82, 192, 211, 223. See also Black Legend Amsterdam, 11 Andaman Islands, 130–1 Angiolello, Giovanni Maria, 34, 73 Anian, Strait of, 127–30, 132, 138–42, 265n116, 266n120, 269n158, 284n2 Annius of Viterbo, 156–7, 160 Antwerp, 5, 11, 12, 59, 89, 137, 138, 226 Aparatus ad omnium gentium historiam (Possevino), 223 Apian, Philipp, 113 Apollodorus, 217 Arabic language, 263n79 Arabic texts, 5, 250n44 Arcadia, 116, 264n89 Archilochus, 157 Aretino, Pietro, 147 Ariosto, Ludovico, 70, 249nn39–40, 263n80 Aristotle, 282n106 Armitage, David, 14 Asia: allegory of, 111, 118, 119 alternative routes to, 127–9, 144, 245n111, 251n61

313

314

INDEX

Asia: allegory of (cont.) America as, 7–8, 18, 19, 20, 52, 54, 126–33, 163, 186, 234n78, 265n114 islands in, 179 maps of, 74, 219, 220, 266n118 otherness of, 132 in travel compendia, 38–9, 42, 67, 86, 87 Venetian links to, 3, 6–7, 67–9, 71–2, 73 wealth of, 132, 191. See also particular countries and regions Atlantic World: historiography of, 9–10, 18, 135 islands in, 15, 126–7, 143, 151, 157, 161, 162, 179, 187, 191 and Mediterranean, 15, 20, 29, 76, 88, 188, 226 Northern, 97, 147, 154, 158, 161–3, 178, 219 and Venice, 3, 6, 13, 19, 26, 57, 148, 161–3, 191, 226 in Zen account, 19, 143–72. See also particular countries and regions Atlantis, 76–7, 213 Atlas sive cosmographicae (atlas; Mercator), 137 atlases, 6, 105, 184, 244n102, 263n76 and isolarii, 136, 178 manuscript, 94, 112, 133, 136 Northern European, 135–42 portolan, 136, 137 and Ptolemy, 96, 136, 137, 138, 268n142 Augsburg, 23, 59, 93, 136, 201 authorship, 57, 58, 98–9, 166 Aztecs, 60, 185, 192–3, 205, 213. See also Tenochtitlan Badoer, Andrea, 78 Badoer, Federigo, 255n114 Badoer, Giovanni, 25 Balboa, Vasco Núñez de, 142, 151 Ballino, Giulio, 186–7, 188, 192 Barbari, Jacopo de’, 55, 57, 175 Barbarigo, Nicolò, 223 Barbaro, Daniele, 147 Barbaro, Giosafat, 6, 67, 73, 158, 250n42 Barbaro, Marco, 146 Barbarossa, Frederick, 147 Barpo, Giovanni Battista, 61 Barros, João de, 250n44 Basel, 23, 83, 96 Behaim globe (1492), 130 Belle-Forest, François, 140, 278n36 Bembo, Pietro, 27, 64, 83, 246n6, 248n29 Beneventano, Marco, 95 Benzoni, Girolamo, 66, 79–82, 248nn31–32, 281n77 Historia of, 61, 79, 82, 168, 170, 199, 221–2, 228n25 Bergamo, Jacopo Filippo Foresti da, 60, 228n22 Bering, Vitus, 131 Berlinghieri, Francesco, 264n81 Berosus, 157

Bertelli, Donato, 137, 260n42 Bertelli, Ferdinando, 89, 122, 123, 137, 265n101 Bertelli, Pietro, 193, 194, 212, 281n78 Binotti, Lucia, 31 Black Legend, 6, 18, 76–82, 174, 197, 223, 226, 254n108 Blaeu, William J., 269n158 Bobadilla, Francisco de, 168–9 Böhm, Johannes, 34, 61 Bologna, 13 Peace of (1529), 85 Book of John Mandeville, The (Mandeville), 148, 155 Bordone, Benedetto, 197, 212, 217, 268n154 vs. Cortés, 180–2, 184–8, 191, 192 on exoticism vs. similarity, 214, 215 maps by, 6, 90, 103, 128, 259n27, 279n52 on Tenochtitlan, 178, 179–88, 191–2, 194, 205, 211, 278n36, 279n52 and Zen account, 151, 153, 155, 162, 179, 185. See also Libro di Benedetto Bordone Borromeo, Federico, 225 botanical literature, 12, 61, 62, 228n25, 245n122. See also plants, New World Botticelli, Sondro, 214 Bracciolini, Poggio, 66 Braudel, Fernand, 11, 14 Braun, Georg, 278nn36–37 Brazil: accounts of, 25, 33, 61, 149 cannibalism in, 124, 125, 149, 195 in costume books, 194 and Florence, 13, 191, 279n59 and France, 215, 232n59 maps of, 97, 103, 111 toponym for, 6, 90, 228n26, 258n4 trade with, 226 Breu, Jörg, 201 Brevissima relación (Las Casas), 82, 211 Briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia, A (Harriot), 194 Briganti, Annibale, 61 British Empire, 10–11, 148, 267n138. See also England Brook, Timothy, 14 Bruno, Giordano, 142 Buisseret, David, 261n61 Buondelmonti, Cristoforo, 178 Burden, Philip, 89, 101 Burgkmair, Hans, 201 Burke, Jill, 207 Burke, Peter, 11, 24 Burma, 131, 266n122 Cà Masser, Leonardo da, 25 Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez, 115 Cabot, John, 162, 242n77 Cabot, Sebastian, 33, 75, 251nn58–61, 263n79, 266n128, 267n129 accounts of, 25, 242n77, 262n62

INDEX

and Venice, 58, 105, 245n111 Cabral, Pedro Alvares, 34, 39, 136, 241n60 Cabrillo, Juan Rodriguez, 115, 263n73 Cachey, Theodore, 5, 24 Cadamosto, Alvise, 34, 35, 39, 67, 71, 219 Caesar, Julius, 29 Calvino, Italo, 21, 59 Cambrai, League of, 31 Camocio, Giovanni Francesco, 89, 109–11, 116–19, 263n76, 264n98, 265n101, 266n124 on cannibalism, 124, 125 and east-west similarity vs. exoticism, 122, 123, 125, 131 maps by, 107, 110, 117, 122, 124, 137, 141 and Spanish colonialism, 133 Canada, 220, 264n97, 266nn123–24 similarity vs. exoticism of, 122–5, 126, 131 toponym for, 6, 90, 258n4 Canal, Paolo, 95 cannibalism, 143, 186, 206, 214 in Brazil, 124, 125, 149, 195 in Zen account, 151, 152, 154 Cantino, Alberto, 105, 154 Cantino planisphere (1502), 105, 128, 262n62 Canziani, Giuseppe, 221 Capellari, Vivaro, 146 Cappello, Francesco, 13 Caribbean, 15, 19, 220 accounts of, 42, 43, 44, 49, 148, 152, 186 and east-west similarities, 213, 248n23 in travel compendia, 37, 87 wealth of, 118, 265n101 Carta da Navegar (1558 map; Nicolò Zen), 97, 100, 143, 144, 154, 158, 160 “Carta del Nuovo Mondo in 9 Pezzi” (1569 map; Camocio), 110, 117, 122, 124 Carta Marina (1516 map; Waldseemüller), 179 Cartier, Jacques, 67, 108, 115, 118, 123, 132, 263n73 cartography, Venetian: culture of, 6, 97, 136, 137 of New World, 89–142. See also maps Casa de la Contratacíon (Spain), 101, 102, 103, 105 Casanatense atlas (1567), 136–7 Cassiodorus, 164, 212–13 Castellani, Giacomo, 223 Cateau-Cambresis, Treaty of (1559), 85, 171, 224 Cato, 157 Cavalli, Sigismondo, 78, 253n80 Caverio map (1504), 262n62 censorship, 85, 167, 224 Central America, 186, 265n111 Central Asia, 67 Champlain, Samuel de, 132 Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor), 77, 84, 85, 133, 205, 246n6, 249n39 biography of, 61 Cortés’s letter to, 31, 60, 180, 192 Charles VIII (king of France), 29 charts, nautical (portolan), 43, 136, 137, 268n143

315 vs. isolarii, 179 secrecy of, 100–1 Venetian publication of, 93–4 Cheinan, Gulf of, 129, 130 China, 7, 19, 155, 163, 266n124. See also Polo, Marco Chioggia, Battle of (1380), 146, 157 Chirari, Pietro, 221 Chojnacki, Stanley, 86 Christianity, 15, 85, 208, 223, 241n60 Cibola, Seven Cities of, 116, 118 Cicero, 282n106 Cieza de León, Pedro de, 29, 61, 77, 173 Cimerlino, Giovanni, 99 classicism: and Atlantis, 76–7, 213 and geography, 30–1, 63, 91 and global knowledge, 3, 15, 66, 162, 217 in illustrations, 43, 207, 208 and New World, 74, 149, 207, 208, 282n106. See also Ptolemy Clavus, Claudius, 154 Clement VII (pope), 85 Colón, Bartolomé, 65, 255n112 Colón, Diego, 165 Colón, Luis, 165, 166 colonialism: vs. Age of Encounters, 8–9 British, 10–11, 111, 116, 148, 267n138 historiography of, 10, 215 and isolarii, 188, 190–1, 199 and maps, 92, 95, 101, 111, 133–5, 267n135 in Mediterranean, 4, 15, 16, 17, 94, 191, 221, 222 Portuguese, 57, 64, 92, 101, 128 possibility of Venetian, 15, 18, 172, 174, 214, 218 and print culture, 58–9, 86, 87 Venetian perspectives on, 13–16, 29–30, 179, 215. See also Spanish colonialism Columbus, Bartholomew, 43 Columbus, Christopher, 136, 179, 225, 275n110 and America as Asia, 126 and Amerindians, 168, 169 biography of, 164–72 claims about, 166, 170, 274n88, 275n112 contrasting views of, 36–8 criticism of, 248n31, 249n39 fantastical accounts by, 148, 150 glorification of, 3, 12, 15, 18, 29, 65, 167, 170, 249n40 and Hispaniola, 167, 168 illustrations by, 178, 184 and Italy, 231n53 letters of, 40, 60, 178, 184, 228n22, 242n77 and Marco Polo, 19, 71, 72, 74, 132–3, 166 Martyr on, 33, 36–8, 69, 70, 166, 170 Oviedo on, 70, 166, 170 and print culture, 4–5 Ramusio on, 66, 69–71, 72–4, 76, 166, 167, 170 religiosity of, 167–8, 274n97 and Spain, 70, 81, 166, 167–70

316

INDEX

Columbus, Christopher (cont.) travel direction of, 229n38 Trevisan on, 36–40, 61, 166, 261n54 and Venice, 6, 13, 27, 29, 72 and Zen account, 151, 153, 155, 172 Zorzi on, 42, 43, 52, 54–5, 73, 242n73 Columbus, Ferdinand, 61, 82, 164–72, 199, 273nn86–87 Contarini, Ambrogio, 67, 73, 158 Contarini, Carlo, 205 Contarini, Francesco, 84 Contarini, Gasparo, 25, 28, 77, 252n73 and Cabot, 58, 105 on Tenochtitlan, 174–5, 192, 206 Contarini, Giovanni Matteo, 6, 89–90, 112 Contarini, Marcantonio, 25, 78 Contarini, Tomaso, 205 Contarini-Rosselli map, 6, 89–90, 95–6, 127, 258n4, 262n62 Conti, Nicolò de’, 51, 52, 54–5, 73, 219, 240n53, 250n44 Copia della lettera per Columbo mandata ali Serenissimi Re et Regina di Spagna (trans. of Columbus’s fourth letter), 60 Coppo, Pietro, 105, 106, 136, 259n27, 268n143 Cornaro, Alvise, 189 Corner di Fantino, Francesco, 25, 205, 206 Corner di Giorgio, Francesco, 25 Coronado, Francisco Vásquez de, 115, 116, 117, 132, 263n73, 266n124 Coronelli, Vincenzo, 178 Corte-Real, Gaspar, 25, 34, 39, 115 Corte-Real, Miguel, 115 Cortés, Hernán, 116, 172, 225 accounts of, 25, 28–9, 33, 67, 206 vs. Columbus, 70, 167 letters of, 29–31, 47, 60, 82, 180–2, 184–8, 191, 192, 194, 205, 277nn32–33, 278n38 Liburnio on, 29–31 praise for, 29, 239n41, 249n39 on Tenochtitlan, 174–5, 177, 178, 180–2, 184–8, 191, 192, 211 and Venice, 13, 72 Cortés, Martin, 175 Coryat, Thomas, 222 Cosa, Juan de la, 262n62 Cosgrove, Denis, 177 Cosmographia (Münster), 23, 34, 41, 140, 269n2, 278n36 Cosmographia universalis (1561 map; Gastaldi), 107, 108, 111, 114–15, 126, 265n16 costume books, 19, 193–211 ahistoricity of, 199, 208, 211 lack of violence in, 195–7, 207, 208 and Venice, 172, 174, 199, 201, 203, 215, 216 craftsmanship, New World, 203–5, 208, 282n105 Cravaliz, Agostino de, 61, 238n29 Cretico, Giovanni Matteo, 83, 241n60

Cronica del gran regno del Perù (León), 29 Crouzet-Pavan, Elisabeth, 283n127 Cuba, 96, 123, 188 Bordone on, 179, 183, 186 Zorzi on, 43, 45, 47, 49, 50, 54, 55 Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans (Carina Johnson), 11 Curzola, Vincenzo Paletino da, 61 Cuzco (Peru), 6, 208, 264n94, 268n154, 278n36, 281n95 da Gama, Vasco, 33, 34, 39, 67, 72–3 da li Sonetti, Bartolomeo, 178, 179 Dalché, Patrick Gautier, 258n4, 260n39, 268n142 D’Anania, Giovanni Lorenzo, 4, 177, 264n97, 269n2 Dati, Giuliano, 228n22 d’Avalos, Alfonso, 249n39 Davies, Surekha, 159 De Bry, Theodor, 87, 207, 213, 214, 280n75, 281n77 and Black Legend, 82, 197 on cannibalism, 124, 195 illustrations by, 195, 197, 199, 201, 203 works by, 82, 111, 124, 194–5, 281n79 de Certeau, Michel, 86 De i commentarii del viaggio in Persia, 163–4 de Jode, Cornelis, 269n158 de Jode, Gerard, 136, 137, 138, 278n36 de la Cosa, Juan (Juan Vizcaino), 42 de la Saita, Francis, 241n60 De latinae linguae reparation (Sabellico), 4 De mali Galleci ortu et nomine (Rangone), 3 De marmoreis Volturrhenis tabulis (Annius of Viterbo), 156–7 de Mena, Cristóbal, 65, 66 de Niza, Marcos, 115, 116, 117, 264n94 de Sintra, Pedro, 34 de Soto, Domingo, 224, 264n90 de Soto, Hernando, 116 De toto orbe (atlas; Coppo), 136, 259n27 Decades (De orbe novo decades; Martyr), 41, 60, 136, 240n55, 246n5 on Columbus, 33, 36–8 in Summario, 64–5, 101 on Tenochtitlan, 177 De’disegni delle più illustri città et fortezze del mondo (Ballino), 186–7, 188 Dee, John, 269n2 Delicado, Francisco, 24, 61 Dello scoprimento (Nicolò Zen), 18–19, 143–72, 269n1 on Amerindians, 213 authenticity of, 144–6 and Columbus, 165–7 credibility of, 148–50 Greenland in, 143, 154, 158, 160, 270n8 influence of, 144, 145, 154, 155, 158, 162, 163, 269n2, 272n58

INDEX

islands in, 178 map in, 97, 100, 143, 144, 154, 158, 160 as pastiche, 150–6, 158, 172 patriotism in, 150, 160–4, 170, 172 sources for, 151–6 as substitution, 156–60 textual strategies in, 146, 148 Dell’origine de’ barbari (Nicolò Zen), 147, 149 Dell’origine di Venetia (Nicolò Zen), 163–4 Dell’universale (c.1555 map; Gastaldi), 126, 127, 128, 265n100, 266n124 Desceliers, Pierre, 41, 104, 244n102, 265n114, 267n129 Descripción de las Indias Occidentales (Herrera y Torsedillas), 77 Descriptionis ptolemaicae augumentum (atlas; Wytfliet), 138 Despres, François, 194, 203 d’Este, Duke Ercole (Ferrara), 104 Di Robilant, Andrea, 145 Díaz, Juan, 60, 163 Dieppe school, 104, 133, 244n102 Dioscorides, 61 Discours et histoire veritable des navigations (Nicolay), 194 “discovery,” concept of, 8–10, 133, 142, 226 Divers Voyages (Hakluyt), 87 Diversarum nationum habitus (Pietro Bertelli), 193, 194, 281n78 Diversarum nationum ornatus cum sui iconibus (Fabri), 193, 194 Doglioni, Giovanni Nicolò, 222 Don Pedro, Prince, 73 Donà, Leonardo, 78, 79, 253n80, 253n87 Donattini, Massimo, 59 Doni, Anton Francesco, 4, 26, 55, 57 Drogeo, 126, 151, 152, 153, 160 Duchetti, Claudio, 137 Durán, Diego, 213 Durante, Castore, 4, 61 Dürer, Albrecht, 276n20 Dutch. See Netherlands Egypt, 68–9 Eliot, T. S., 1 Elliott, John Huxtable, 10, 16, 207, 229n40, 230n50 England, 20, 24, 195 colonialism of, 10–11, 111, 116, 148 in historiography, 10, 18 and Spain, 82, 87 travel literature in, 10, 22, 86–7. See also British Empire English language, 10, 22, 25, 33, 86–7, 165 Erasmus, 4 Estotiland, 126–7, 143–4, 151, 152, 154, 160, 162, 269n2 Europe, 10–12, 24, 215 allegorical, 111

317 Northern, 135–42, 226, 236n8 print culture of, 4–5 and Tenochtitlan, 184, 185. See also Atlantic World; particular countries European Encounters with the New World (Pagden), 10 Fabri, Alessandro, 193, 194 Fara, Giovanni, 276n20 Faroe Islands, 145 Ferdinand (archduke of Austria), 205 Ferdinand (king of Spain), 169, 171, 228n22 Fernandes, João, 116 Fernandes, Valentim, 73, 240n53 Fernández-Armésto, Felipe, 9 Ferrara Codex (Zorzi), 42, 43, 47 Finé, Oronce, 99, 113 Florence, 5, 7, 11, 83, 255n109, 258n4 and Brazil, 13, 191, 279n59 maps in, 93, 97, 106 Florentine language, 25 Florian, Antonio, 100, 262n62 Florida, 194, 195, 197, 198, 203, 207, 212–14 Florio, John, 87, 257n134 Fonseca, Juan Rodriguez de, 168, 169 Fonte, Moderata, 222 Foresti, Jacopo Filippo, 70 Forlani, Paolo, 89, 137, 258n4, 260n42, 260n45, 261n59, 262n62 and America as Asia, 126, 129 maps by, 98, 99, 129, 175, 177 on wealth, 265n101 Forli, Giovanni Ruffo da, 215 Fornari, Baliano de, 165 Fortini-Brown, Patricia, 156 Foscarini, Marco, 219 Fracastoro, Girolamo, 64, 74, 83, 158, 189, 246n6, 252n64 France, 5, 10, 11, 20, 59, 82, 87 and Brazil, 215, 232n59 settlements of, 111 Franceschi, Francesco de’, 164 Francis I (king of France), 99 Franco, Giacomo, 217 Frankfurt Book Fair, 136 French language, 24, 34, 79, 165 French Revolution, 221 Frisland, 126, 143, 144, 151, 155, 160–2, 166–7 Frobisher, Martin, 144 Fuchs, Barbara, 10 Gallucci da Salò, Giovanni Paolo, 61, 255n114, 278n42 Gambia, 34 Garciá Torreño, 261n57 Garimberti, Gerolamo, 76 Garzia de Loreno, Niño (Nuño Garciá Torreño), 101 Garzoni, Tommaso, 79, 133

318

INDEX

Gastaldi, Giacomo, 14, 18, 91, 96–9, 255n114, 263n72, 267n141, 268n154 and America as Asia, 126, 128, 129–30, 131, 132 and atlases, 136, 137 on cannibalism, 124 and Columbus, 166 Cosmographia universalis map of, 107, 108, 111, 114–15, 117, 118, 126, 265n116 Dell’universale map of, 126, 127, 128, 265n100 on east-west similarities, 125, 278n37 on exoticism of New World, 122–3, 214 influence of, 99, 113, 142, 263n76, 269n157 information on maps of, 105, 107–9, 114–15, 118 and Marco Polo, 15, 74, 133 and Ramusio, 129, 247n19, 263n76, 264n90, 266n118 in Sala dello Scudo, 219, 284n2 sources of, 179, 262n62 and Spanish colonialism, 133 on Tenochtitlan, 175 toponyms of, 117, 136, 138–41, 142 Universale della parte del mondo nuovamente ritrovata map of, 129, 175 Universale map of, 107, 109, 128, 137 Venetian perspective of, 174, 225 on wealth, 118, 121 and Zen account, 143, 154 Gastaldi, Giovanni, 122, 123 Gaztelu, Domingo de, 24, 28, 60, 83, 246n7 Genoa, 5, 7, 12, 13, 69, 254n105 Geographia (Ptolemy), 95, 97 geography, 67, 74, 264n81 classical, 30–1, 63, 91 Venetian knowledge of, 68, 76, 83–4 German Discovery of the World, The (Christine Johnson), 11 German language, 24, 34, 79, 263n79 Germany, 11, 12, 24, 104, 236n8 travel literature in, 23, 41, 84, 87. See also particular cities Gerusalemme liberata (Tasso), 70 Ginammi, Marco, 223, 224, 226 Giotto, 156 Giovio, Paolo, 177 Giunti, Tommaso, 63, 105, 248n21 Giunti printing firm, 83 Gli costumi, le leggi, et le usanze di tutte le genti (Böhm), 61 globalization: and classicism, 3, 15, 66, 162, 217 historiography of, 14, 15, 19, 91, 171, 225, 248n24 and knowledge, 3, 10, 15, 23, 66–8, 91, 113, 133– 5, 155, 162, 199, 201, 203, 211–12, 214, 217, 218, 223, 225 mentality of, 7–8, 13–14 “Globuspokal” (chalice globe; Stampfer), 130 Goldoni, Carlo, 221 Gómez, Estéban, 102, 116, 261n58, 262n62

Grafton, Anthony, 10, 57, 230n50 Graziani, Girolamo, 275n112 Greenblatt, Stephen, 12, 16, 55, 230n50 Greenland, 143, 154, 158, 160, 167, 270n8 Grijalva, Juan de, 60, 163 Grimani, Antonio, 174 Grimani, Marino, 277n32 Griselini, Francesco, 219–21, 225, 226 Gritti, Andrea, 28 Groto, Luigi, 222 Gruzinski, Serge, 14 Grynaeus, Simon, 23, 41 Guadalupe, 186 Habiti antichi et moderni (Vecellio), 193–204, 206–10 Habsburg Empire: dominance of, 17, 134–5, 218, 226, 248n23 expansion of, 29, 31, 164 in Italy, 8, 12, 82 and New World, 13, 70, 85, 128 vs. Venice, 17, 22, 30, 64. See also Spain Haggi Ahmed map (1559), 263n79 Hakluyt, Richard, 22, 35, 76, 87, 269n2 Harisse, Henry, 223 Harley, David, 191 Harley, John Brian, 134 Harriot, Thomas, 194, 280n75 Hayton the Armenian, 73, 272n43 Henry II (king of France), 215, 232n59 Henry VII (king of England), 116 Herbario novo (Durante), 61 Hereford world map, 7 Hermano, Diego, 262n62 Herodotus, 71, 121 Herrera y Torsedillas, Antonio, 77 Higgins, Iain Macleod, 155 Hirsch, Rudolf, 59 Hispaniola, 96 Amerindians of, 60, 213, 240n55, 243n87 and Columbus, 167, 168 genocide on, 77, 80, 169 hurricane on, 65, 167, 169 in isolarii, 186, 188 in Zen account, 153 Zorzi on, 43, 49 Historia de la conquista de Mexico (López de Gómara), 151, 152 Historia de las Indias (Durán), 213 Historia de las Indias (Las Casas), 166, 170 Historia de las Indias (López de Gómara), 238n29 Historia delle nuove Indie Occidentali (López de Gómara), 61 Historia dell’India detta America detta altramente Francia Antartica (Thevet), 61 Historia dello scoprimento della Nuova Spagna (López de Gómara), 28, 177 Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Acosta), 61, 278n42

INDEX

Historie del Ferdinand Colombo, 82, 164–72, 199 historiography: Anglophone, 11 authenticity vs. plausibility in, 156, 159, 171, 235n4, 272n51 encounter, 14–15 of global history, 14, 15, 19, 91, 171, 225, 248n24 Italian, 12 Mediterranean, 15 New Historicism in, 145 New World, 10–11 Renaissance, 156, 159 History of the New World (La historia del Mondo Nuovo; Benzoni), 61, 79, 82, 170, 199, 221–2, 228n25 History of the World (Raleigh), 272n63 Hogenberg, Franz, 278nn36–37 Holland. See Netherlands Homer, 70, 75 Hondius, Jodocus, 267n128, 269n158 Householder, Michael, 10 Hurtado de Mendoza, Diego, 84 Huttich, Johannes, 41, 83 Huyghen van Linschoten, Jan, 269n158 I marmi (Doni), 4 I mondi (Doni), 26 Iberia. See Portugal; Spain Icaria, 126, 143, 144, 160 Iceland, 154, 161, 167 Il disegno del discoperto della Nova Franza (1566 map; Forlani), 98, 99, 129 Il mondo e sue parti cioe Europa, Affrica, Asia et America (Rosaccio), 113 Il viaggio fatto da gli spagniuoli a torno a’l mondo (Pigafetta and Transilvano), 28, 60–1 illustrations: of Amerindians, 193, 195–204, 209, 210 classicism in, 43, 207, 208 by Columbus, 178, 184 by De Bry, 195, 197, 199, 201, 203 in marginalia, 42–57 of New World vs. Old, 173–218, 244n102, 281n77 outdated, 212 revisions of, 174 of Venetian supremacy, 221. See also costume books Incas, 103, 193. See also Peru India, 8, 11, 130, 261n54 and Columbus, 37, 166 vs. New World, 39, 234n78 Ramusio on, 68, 73 spice trade with, 27, 38–9, 74 in travel literature, 34, 39, 155, 163, 241n60 and Venice, 7, 219 Zorzi on, 42, 55 indigenous peoples. See Amerindians information dissemination, New World: by ambassadors, 24–5, 64, 73, 83, 85, 88, 214, 216

319 and isolarii, 216, 217 on maps, 92, 101, 104–26 and politics of knowledge, 10 and print culture, 59 and substitution, 157 and translations, 29–31 in travel compendia, 32, 35, 83–4, 216 Venetian, 3–6, 21, 26, 41, 66, 83–6, 135, 211–12 and vicarious knowledge, 3, 9, 16, 58–9, 135, 146, 225 Innocence Abroad (Schmidt), 11 Inquisition, 77, 79, 110, 223 Interdict (1606–1607), 225 Inventing Americans in the Age of Discovery (Householder), 10 Invention of America, The (O’Gorman), 10 Invisible Cities (Calvino), 21 Irresistible North (Di Robilant), 145 Islam, 15, 163 islands, 228n22, 277nn22–27 Atlantic, 15, 126–7, 143, 151, 157, 161, 162, 179, 187, 191 Caribbean, 43, 49, 51, 52, 118, 148 and Columbus, 37, 39 Mediterranean, 121, 162, 178, 179, 187, 191, 212 and Venice, 162, 178–9, 212. See also particular islands isolarii (books of islands), 6, 14, 19, 60, 109, 174–93, 260n38 ahistorical view of, 208, 211 Amerindians in, 211 and atlases, 136, 178 and colonialism, 188, 190–1, 199 and information dissemination, 216, 217 maps in, 90, 99 as pastiche, 190 and Venice, 172, 178–9 and Zen account, 153, 162 and Zorzi, 49, 51, 52 Isolario (da li Sonetti), 178, 179 Istoria o brevissima relatione della distrutttione dell’Indie Occidentali (Las Casas), 223 Italian language, 24, 60, 61, 167, 224, 242n77, 277n32 Italy, 5, 212, 256n127 national consciousness in, 18, 24, 170–1, 231n53 and New World, 11–12, 18, 24, 239n45 and Spain, 8, 12, 24, 29–30, 77–82, 85, 133, 135, 168–71 in Zen account, 161–2. See also Rome Itinerario (Varthema), 163 Itinerario allo Yucatán (Díaz), 60 Iyer, Pico, 14 Jamaica, 55, 60, 152, 188, 243n87, 279n57 and Black Legend, 77 Bordone on, 179, 186 Japan, 72

320

INDEX

Jesuits, 12, 61, 141 Jews, 7 Johnson, Carina, 11, 283n136 Johnson, Christine, 11, 159, 236n8 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 207, 208 Joseph of Cranganor, 241n60 Julius II (pope), 241n60 Kagan, Richard, 211 Keen, Benjamin, 230n50 Kublai Khan, 21, 55 Kunyu wanguo quantu (Ricci map; 1602), 140–1 Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, 10 La città di Venetia con l’origine e governo di quella (Doglioni), 222 La conquista del Peru (Xerez), 28 La cosmographie universelle (1575 map; Belle-Forest), 140 La historia dello scoprimento et conquista del Perù (Zárate), 61 La Nuova Francia (1606 map; Gastaldi), 105, 108, 121, 123 La preclara narratione di Ferdinando Cortése della Nuova Hispagna (Liburnio), 60 La prima parte del l’historie del Perù (Cieza de León), 61 La universale descrittione del mondo (Gastaldi), 129 Labrador, 96, 115, 123, 127, 145, 186 Lafreri, Antonio, 136, 137, 268n146, 269n2 Langenes, Barent, 139 Langren, Arnold van, 269n158 Lapland, 111 L’arte del navegar (Medina), 61 Las Casas, Bartolomé, 254n108 on Amerindians, 66, 211, 282n106 on Columbus, 70, 166, 170, 275n110 on Spanish colonialism, 80, 82, 223–4, 281n77 Latin language, 24, 181 translations from, 25, 30, 37–8, 87, 95 translations into, 34, 79, 194, 242n77, 260n30, 277n32, 281n77 in travel compendia, 37–8, 41 in Zen account, 143, 154, 161 Latini, Brunetto, 272n43 Laudonnière, René de, 194, 280n75 Le Moyne de Morgues, Jacques, 280n75 on Amerindians, 194, 213–14 League of Cambrai, 8 Leardo, Giovanni, 259n27 Leitch, Stephanie, 11, 215, 234n78 Lesser Antilles, 186 Lestringant, Frank, 190 Lewis, Martin, 68 Li Zhizao, 140, 141 Liber insularum archipelagi (Buondelmonti), 178 Libraria (Doni), 55, 57

Libretto de tutta la navigatione de re di Spagna de le isole et terreni novamente trovati, 17, 32–41, 60, 67, 186 on Columbus, 36–8, 61, 166, 167 and Paesi, 33–4, 38, 240n55 and Summario, 65 and Zorzi, 42, 43, 52, 243n82 Libro di Benedetto Bordone (Bordone), 6, 14, 60, 61, 236n9 Cuba in, 179, 183, 186 maps in, 90, 103, 279n52 on Tenochtitlan, 179, 279n52 Libro primo de la conquista del Perù (Xerez), 60 Libro ultimo del summario delle cose de le Indie Occidentali (Xerez), 243n87, 246n7 Liburnio, Nicolò, 29–31, 47, 60, 82, 239n41, 277n32 Limes occidentis/Quivira et Anian (1597 map; Wytfliet), 139 L’isole piu famose del mondo (Porcacchi), 99, 178, 187, 189, 190, 216 Lives of the Artists (Vasari), 155 Locke, John, 87 L’octavo remedio para la reformación de las Indias (Las Casas), 224 Lope de Soria, 28 López de Gómara, Francisco, 28, 61, 177, 238n29, 248n31 on Amerindians, 213 on Columbus, 70, 166, 170 and Zen account, 151, 152, 155 Lucas, Frederick W., 145 L’universale fabrica del mondo (D’Anania), 177 Lupi, Diego, 276n20 Madoc, 148 Magellan, Ferdinand, 112, 142, 173, 243n87, 247n14, 261n57 accounts of, 23, 25, 60–1 and globalization, 225 lost day of, 28, 252n73 and Martyr, 33 Maggiolo, Vesconte, 179 Magini, Giovanni Antonio, 276n12 Magnus, Olaus, 154 Maier, Jessica, 272n51 Maine, 102 Major, Richard Henry, 145 Malipiero, Domenico, 261n54 Malipiero, Giovanni, 33, 241n60 Malta, Siege of (1565), 29 Mandeville, John, 7, 22, 148, 150, 155, 160 Manetho, 157 Mann, Charles C., 14 Manuel I (king of Portugal), 73, 116, 148 manuscript culture: and atlases, 94, 112, 133, 136 and maps, 175, 262nn61–62 vs. print culture, 42, 133

INDEX

Manutius, Aldus, 4, 34 Manutius, Antonius, 219, 255n110 maps: and colonialism, 92, 95, 101, 111, 133–5, 267n135 copying of, 98–9 exoticism in, 92–3, 105–26 and imagination, 131–2, 142 information on, 64, 88, 91, 92, 101, 104–26, 216, 262n70 in isolarii, 90, 99 large-scale wall, 105–11, 134–5, 138, 263n79, 267n136 manuscript, 175, 259n27, 262nn61–62 and Marco Polo, 74 painted, 106–7, 219 and print culture, 6, 92, 93, 104, 133 printed, 18, 89, 259n27 and Ptolemy, 95–7, 108, 109, 111 in Sala dello Scudo, 219–21 secret, 100–5 sources for, 103–5, 113 toponyms on, 106, 114–15, 116, 117 and trade, 92, 93, 221 in travel compendia, 41, 92 Venetian, 6, 55, 57, 89–142, 175 Venetian perspectives in, 91–4, 97–8, 113, 131–2, 201 on wealth of New World, 116–21. See also particular places, maps and mapmakers maps, world (universali), 7, 106, 264n81 large-scale wall, 107–11 master (padrão real), 100, 101 uses of, 94–5 Venetian, 91–8 Marciana atlas, 137 Marcolini, Francesco, 26, 147 marginalia, 22, 31, 86, 178 illustrations as, 42–57 material culture in, 43, 46–54 of Zorzi, 17, 41–56, 132, 162 Marini, Geronimo, 228n26, 258n4 Markey, Lia, 13 Martinique, 186 Martyr, Peter, 105, 271n30 on Amerindians, 80, 213, 252n73 in atlases, 136 and Black Legend, 77 on Columbus, 33, 36–8, 41, 60, 69, 70, 166, 170 on east-west similarities, 177, 215 and isolarii, 188 and Libretto, 32–3, 240n55 and Ramusio, 64–5, 66, 67, 101, 246nn5–6 and Zen account, 19, 155 Marx, Karl, 282n105 Masaccio, 156 Materia medica (Dioscorides), 61 Mattioli, Pietro Andrea, 4, 61, 95 Mauro, Fra, 154, 171, 259n27

321 Mazza, Giovanni Battista, 111, 264n91 Mecca, 163 Medici, Cosimo I de, 13, 61, 238n29 Medici, Lorenzo Pierfrancesco de’, 34, 173 Medici family, 13, 88 Medina, Pedro de, 61 Mediterranean, 42, 163, 219 and Atlantic World, 10, 15, 20, 29, 76, 88, 188, 226 canal to Red Sea from, 252n64 islands in, 16, 121, 162, 178, 179, 187, 191, 212 Venetian colonialism in, 4, 15–17, 191 Venetian dominance in, 8, 10, 17, 162, 221, 222 Mehmed II (Ottoman sultan), 34 Mercator, Gerardus, 100, 113, 128, 136–40, 263n79 atlas of, 137, 268n146 and Marco Polo, 266n128 and Zen account, 144, 154, 269n2, 272n58 Messia, Pietro, 29 Mexico: accounts of, 25, 55, 60, 153 conquest of, 4, 5, 61, 151, 152 in costume books, 205 Europeanization of, 184 maps of, 96, 116, 175, 220 and Venice, 13, 19, 31, 214 and Wales, 148. See also Aztecs; Tenochtitlan Michelangelo, 156 Michiel, Pietro Antonio, 245n122 Mignolo, Walter, 135 Milanesi, Marica, 284n2 Milione (Polo), 71, 72, 266n128 Millo, Antonio, 98, 259n27 missionaries, 13, 22, 23 Mocenigo, Alvise, 64 Moleto, Giuseppe, 147, 164–5, 170, 255n114 Moluccas, 42, 74, 128, 248n23 Monardes, Nicolò, 61 Mongols, 7, 73, 131 Montaigne, Michel de, 224 Montalboddo, Fracanzio, 34, 58, 67, 83, 86 Montezuma, 60, 148, 180, 184–6, 192, 205 More, Thomas, 26 Morosini, Giovan Francesco, 78 Motezuma (opera; Vivaldi), 221 Mukerji, Chandra, 259n16 Mundus Novus letter (Vespucci), 34, 38, 42, 60, 178 Münster, Sebastian, 96, 103, 104, 265n114 Cosmographia by, 23, 34, 41, 140, 269n2, 278n36 on Tenochtitlan, 175, 278n36 Muzio, Girolamo, 222 Nagel, Alexander, 156 Naples, 12, 29 Navagero, Andrea, 25, 64, 83, 95, 101, 246n5, 246n6 Navagero, Franceschina, 64 Navigazioni e viaggi (Ramusio), 14, 17, 61, 63–88, 143

322

INDEX

Navigazioni e viaggi (Ramusio) (cont.) and Black Legend, 18, 76–82 on Columbus, 18, 66, 69–74, 76, 166, 167, 170 and Gastaldi, 129, 247n19, 263n76, 264n90, 266n118 on Marco Polo, 71–6, 266n118 organization of, 66–8 and Summario, 64–6 on Tenochtitlan, 278n36 and Venice, 98, 105 and Zen account, 145, 158, 163 Near East, 6, 22, 42, 186, 219, 245n118 Netherlands, 11, 18, 141, 226 and Spain, 82, 87 travel literature in, 86, 135, 256n128 New France, 260n45 maps of, 98, 99, 105, 108, 121, 123, 129, 138 New Spain, 28, 60, 96, 97, 177, 281n77 New World: aestheticization of, 203–8, 221 allegorical representations of, 13, 111, 120 and Asia, 18, 20, 52, 54, 126–33, 234n78 economic disappointment in, 147–8 exoticism of, 121–6, 133, 185, 188, 197, 214–15, 217 first depictions of, 6, 17, 22, 32, 33, 60, 61, 89–91, 95, 96, 108, 136–8, 146, 174, 178, 184, 223 knowledge of, 3, 10, 15, 23, 66, 67–8, 91, 113, 133–5, 155, 162, 199, 201, 203, 211–12, 214, 217, 218, 223, 225 plants of, 3, 6, 13, 15, 47, 61, 62 similarity to Old of, 122–6, 131, 133, 173–218, 226 in theater, 221 and utopian literature, 26, 212 Venetian connections to, 13, 18–19, 143–72, 173, 191, 208, 213, 215, 225–6 Venetian expertise on, 13, 16, 19, 20, 22, 41, 146, 155–6, 160, 211–12, 226 Venetian perspectives on, 13–16, 29–30, 91–4, 97–8, 113, 131–2, 179, 201, 215, 216–17 Venetian similarity to, 174–93, 206, 218, 221–2, 276n12 wealth of, 116–21, 126, 133, 186, 191, 224–5, 264nn94–98, 265nn100–101 New Worlds, Ancient Texts (Grafton), 10 Newfoundland, 4, 96, 115, 121, 127, 145 Nicolay, Nicolas de, 194 Niño, Pedro Alonzo, 33, 37, 42 North America, 10, 13, 116, 162 and Asia, 127–31, 133, 144, 245n111, 251n61 maps of, 6, 18, 89, 90, 96, 98, 101, 108, 115, 118, 121, 124, 125, 138–9, 144, 220. See also Dello scoprimento; particular regions northwest passage, 128, 144, 245n111 Norumbega, 264n89 Norway, 154, 161, 219 Nova et aucta orbis terrae descriptio ad usum navigantium emendate accommodata (1569 map; Mercator), 139, 140

Nova Scotia, 102, 145 Nova totius terrarum orbis (1564 map; Ortelius), 138 Novissime historíarum (Bergamo), 228n22 Novus orbis regionum ac insularum veteribus incognitarum (Münster, Hüttich, Grynaeus), 23, 41, 83 Nueva Hispania Tabula Nova (Gastaldi), 97 Nuevo mondo (1551 map; Martin Cortes), 175 Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar, 115 Nunn, George, 266n123 Nuremberg, 23, 59, 93, 180, 184, 277n33 O’Brien, Patrick, 225 Ochieri, Pietro, 29 Odorico of Pordenone, 73, 272n43 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 10 Ojeda, Alonso de, 173 Old World and the New, The (Elliott), 10 Omnium Gentium Mores Leges et Ritus (Boemus), 34 Oriental Despotism (Wittfogel), 189–90 Orlando furioso (Ariosto), 70, 249n40 Orta, Garcia da, 61 Ortelius, Abraham, 128, 136–40, 261n59, 263n76, 264n90, 268n154 and Gastaldi, 138, 140 influence of, 99, 105, 113 and Marco Polo, 266n128 on Tenochtitlan, 278nn36–37 and toponyms, 269n158 and Zen account, 142, 144, 269n2 Ottoman Empire, 4–5, 9, 24, 34, 87, 252n64 and Venice, 8, 15, 267n141 Ovando, Nicolás de, 168 Oviedo, Gonzalo Fernández de, 58, 62, 64–6, 105, 188, 246n6 on Amerindians, 27, 65, 77 on Columbus, 70, 166, 170 and Ramusio, 67, 101, 102 Pacific Ocean, 115, 128, 133, 142, 173, 248n23, 261n58 legends on maps of, 118, 262n70 and Marco Polo, 284n2 Padoan, Giorgio, 145, 158–9, 273n67 Padrón, Ricardo, 10, 68, 128, 248n23 Paesi novamente retrovati et novo mondo da Alberico Vesputio Florentio intitulato, 17, 33–41, 60, 86 contrasting texts within, 36–8 and Historie del Ferdinand Colombo, 166, 167 and Libretto, 33–4, 38, 240n55 and Zorzi, 42, 43, 47–50, 52, 243n82 Pagano, Matteo, 163, 268n154 Pagden, Anthony, 10, 16, 230n50 Palladio, Andrea, 147 Panama, 80, 173, 221 paratextual material, 35, 39, 163 prefaces, 26–32, 68–76. See also marginalia Paris, 5, 59 Pasqualigo, Pietro, 25, 27, 83, 173, 241n60

INDEX

pastiche, 157, 185 isolarii as, 174, 190 Zen account as, 150–6, 158, 166, 172 patriotism, 14, 70 Italian, 161–2 and Marco Polo, 72, 132–3 of Zen, 150, 160–4, 170, 172 Pegu, 131, 132, 138 Pelliot, Paul, 130 Persia, 7, 34, 158, 163, 193 Peru: accounts of, 28, 61, 65, 261n59, 281n95 conquest of, 4, 5, 6, 60, 179, 243n87 in costume books, 193, 203 and east-west similarities, 173 exoticism of, 124 maps of, 103, 268n154, 278n36 and Spain, 85, 208 wealth in, 264n94, 265n100 Petrarch, 112 Petri, Sebastian, 269n2 Philip II (king of Spain), 78, 79, 133, 253n80 Philippines, 128 Pictor, Quintus Fabius, 157 Pigafetta, Antonio, 23, 28, 61, 67, 75, 243n87 Pinet, Antoine du, 278nn36–37 Pinzón, Arias, 33 Pinzón, Vincente Yáñez, 33, 42, 61 Pisani, Domenico, 25, 33, 83 Pizarro, Francisco, 67, 167, 228n27, 281n95 in Peru, 5, 6, 61, 103, 179 plague, Venetian (1575), 91, 110 Plancius, Petrus, 269n158 plants, New World, 3, 6, 13, 15, 47, 61, 62 Plato, 76–7, 213, 283n124 Pliny, 63, 71, 217 Poland, 7 Polo, Marco, 7, 8, 191 and Columbus, 3, 19, 71, 72, 74, 132–3, 166 and Gastaldi, 15, 74, 133 glorification of, 22, 220–1 and New World, 15, 17, 126–33, 284n2 patriotism of, 72, 132–3 and Ramusio, 18, 67, 71–6, 87, 130, 250n46, 266n118, 266n120 and Tenochtitlan, 185–6 text of, 17, 18, 71, 72, 130, 162–3, 240n53, 250n46, 266n118, 266n128 and toponyms, 141 and Venice, 21, 22, 58, 59, 174 veracity of, 250n44 and Zen account, 149, 162–3 and Zorzi, 49, 51, 54, 55, 74 Pomeranz, Kenneth, 14 Ponce de Leon, Juan, 116, 242n77 Porcacchi, Tomaso, 187–90, 192, 212, 217, 255n112, 278n36 L’isole piu famose del mondo, 99, 178, 187, 189, 190, 216

323 Porro, Girolamo, 187, 216, 276n12 Porta, Nunziato, 221 portolan (nautical) charts. See charts, nautical Portolano (Coppo), 105, 106 Portugal, 10, 12 colonialism of, 57, 64, 92, 101, 128 explorations by, 6, 27, 38–9, 42, 73, 75, 97 and Marco Polo, 71 Ramusio on, 67, 69, 73 secrecy of maps in, 100–5 trade of, 8, 11, 74, 224 travel literature in, 5, 22, 27, 38–9, 240n53 and Venice, 24, 68, 97 Portuguese language, 26 Possevino, Antonio, 223 Postel, Guillaume, 250n44 prefaces, 26–32, 68–76 Prester John, 7, 148 Principal Navigations, The (Hakluyt), 87 print culture: in Age of Encounters, 4–5, 61, 76 and authorship, 98–9 and Black Legend, 82, 224 and colonialism, 58–9, 86, 87 and consumerism, 259n16 and global knowledge, 59, 223 in historiography, 12 vs. manuscript culture, 42, 133 and maps, 6, 92, 93, 104, 133 and prefaces, 26 in Rome, 5, 225 print culture, Venetian, 3–7, 20, 167, 203, 217 decline of, 224, 225 impact of, 86–8 and mapmaking, 6, 93, 104 and New World expertise, 13, 16, 41, 146, 226 and Northern Europe, 135–42 and scientific literature, 61 and vicarious exploration, 3, 9, 16, 58–9, 135, 146, 225 printing, 4, 83, 236n8 censorship of, 85, 167, 224 of maps, 6, 18, 89, 91, 92, 93, 104, 133, 259n27 and reprinting, 23, 34, 40, 60, 138, 165, 179, 236n9 and travel literature, 21–62 Priuli, Antonio, 58 Priuli, Girolamo, 29, 270n11 Priuli, Lorenzo, 222 Problemi naturali e morali (Garimberti), 76 Ptolemy, 58, 63, 167 and America as Asia, 126, 127 and atlases, 96, 136, 137, 138, 268n142 editions of, 95, 147, 175, 262n68, 264n81, 276n12 and maps, 95–7, 108, 109, 111, 260n39, 269n2 and Zen account, 154, 269n2 Puerto Rico, 49 Purchas, Samuel, 22, 76, 87 Purchas his Pilgrimes (Purchas), 87

324

INDEX

Querini, Pietro, 73, 149, 158, 159, 219 Quinn, David, 10–11 Raccolta Alberico (Zorzi), 42, 43, 55, 259n27 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 116, 272n63 Ramachandran, Ayesha, 19 Ramusio, Giovanni Battista, 14, 17–18, 22, 63–88, 179, 248n21, 255n114 on alternative routes, 252n64 and America as Asia, 129, 132 and Black Legend, 18, 76–82 borrowing from, 257n134, 263n76 on Columbus, 18, 66, 69–74, 76, 166, 167, 170 fantastical accounts by, 150 and Gastaldi, 129, 247n19, 263n76, 264n90, 266n118 government positions of, 84 impact of, 86–8 innovations of, 75–6 and isolarii, 190 on Italy, 18, 24, 231n53 and lost day, 238n31 map (1534) of, 101–3, 112, 175, 247n7 maps by, 98, 105, 121, 219, 268n154 and Marco Polo, 18, 67, 71–6, 87, 130, 250n46, 266n118, 266n120 and Oviedo, 67, 101, 102, 246n6 on Portugal, 67, 69, 73 prefaces by, 68–76 and S. Cabot, 251n58, 251n61 in Sala dello Scudo, 284n2 on Spain, 67, 70, 73 Summario of, 64–6, 86, 101–2, 112 on Tenochtitlan, 175, 278n36 and toponyms, 141 translations by, 64–6, 238n31, 246n5 and travel compendia, 27, 35, 39, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 66, 83–6, 247n14 and Trevisan, 65–6, 67 Venetian perspective of, 15, 76, 92, 174, 225 and Zen account, 143, 145, 154, 155, 158, 162, 163, 272n58 and Zorzi, 42, 55. See also Navigazioni e viaggi Ramusio, Paolo, 255n114, 272n58 Rangone, Tommaso, 1–3, 15, 143, 227n4 Recueil de la diversité des habits (Despres), 194 Renaissance, 15, 57, 156, 159 Revelles, Giovanni de, 277n32 Ribeiro, Diogo, 101, 103, 105, 261n57, 262n61, 262n62 Ricci, Mateo, 140–1 Roanoke (Virginia), 264n91 Roldan, Francisco, 168 Roman Empire, 68–9, 85, 193 Rome, 12, 59, 64, 261n50 maps in, 93, 95, 97, 105, 106 print culture in, 5, 225

Rosaccio, Giuseppe, 98–100, 105, 117–21, 217, 269n2 and America as Asia, 126, 131 on cannibalism, 124, 125 maps of, 107, 111, 112–14, 116, 134, 141 Rosenthal, Margaret, 207 Rosselli, Francsco, 93, 128 Rotz, Jean, 104, 137 Royal Commentaries of the Incas (Vega), 70 Rubiés, Joan-Pau, 147, 150 Ruscelli, Girolamo, 95, 97, 147, 255n114, 268n154, 269n2 Russia, 7, 87 Russo, Alessandra, 271n29 Ruysch, Johannes, 95, 130, 162, 179 Sabellico, Marcantonio, 4 Sabin, Joseph, 223 Saches, Antonio, 269n158 Sahagún, Bernardino de, 176 Said, Edward, 215 Sala dello Scudo (Ducal Palace, Venice), 106, 219, 221 Salamanca, Antonio, 100, 265n114 Salazar, Francisco Cervantes de, 176 Sallmann, Jean-Michel, 14 San Salvador, 13, 60 Sancho, Pedro, 228n27, 281n95 Sansovino, Francesco, 67, 70, 71, 93, 213 Sansovino, Jacopo, 1–3, 15 Santa Croce, 188, 212 Santa Cruz, Alonso de, 261n61, 262n62 Santa Maria de Conception, 60 Santaella, Rodrigo de, 266n128 Santángel, Luis de, 178, 228n22 Sant’Angel, 178 Santo Domingo, 58, 184 Santo Stefano, Gerolamo di, 240n53 Sanudo, Marin, 85, 93, 162, 205, 244n95, 252n76, 267n136 Sanuto, Livio, 255n114 Sarpi, Paolo, 223 Savage Mirror, A (Wintroub), 11 Savorgnan, Pietro, 30, 277n32 Schmidt, Benjamin, 11, 134, 257n128 Schmidt, Suzanne Karr, 93 Schwartz, Stuart, 16 scientific literature, 12, 61, 62, 64, 228n25, 245n122 Scillacio, Nicolò, 228n22 Seed, Patricia, 230n50, 267n138 Selva di varia lettioni (Messia), 29 Senegal, 34 Sepulveda, Ginés, 224 Serlio, Sebastiano, 147 Seth, Vanita, 215 Sideri, Giorgio (Callapoda), 98, 259n27 Sierra Leone, 34 Silk Road, 67, 68

INDEX

Sinclair, Henry (Earl of Orkney), 145 Sloterdijk, Peter, 14 Sobre los indios que se han hecho esclavos (Las Casas), 223 Soderini, Piero, 173, 178 Solinus map (1538), 265n114 Soranzo, Giacomo, 245n111 South America, 34, 43, 60, 123, 125, 163 first sighting of, 33, 61 maps of, 96, 101, 102, 103, 133, 220. See also particular countries and regions South Carolina, 103 Southeast Asia, 55, 73, 131, 163, 219, 266n122 Spain: censorship by, 85, 224 and Columbus, 70, 81, 166, 167–70 and England, 82, 87 explorations by, 6, 27, 97 in historiography, 10, 18 Italian language in, 24 and Italy, 8, 12, 29–30, 77–82, 85, 133, 135, 168– 71 Ramusio on, 67, 70, 73 reconquista in, 10, 275n112 secrecy of maps in, 100–5 trade of, 7, 8, 74, 76 travel literature in, 5, 24, 25–6, 31–2, 61, 85, 88, 165, 167, 224, 239n45 and Venice, 20, 22, 24, 28–30, 31, 68, 81, 174, 253n86 Spanish colonialism, 10–12 and Asia as America, 128 and Black Legend, 6, 18, 76–82, 174, 197, 223, 226, 254n108 vs. British, 267n138 and isolarii, 188, 191–2, 199 Las Casas on, 80, 82, 223–4, 281n77 and maps, 92, 101, 133–5 and New World wealth, 224–5 and Tenochtitlan, 185 and Venice, 27, 57, 64, 87, 220–1 violence of, 26, 169, 192–3, 197, 199, 211 and Zen account, 162, 163, 164 Spanish Conspiracy (1618), 225 Spanish language: translations from, 24, 26, 32, 61, 85, 88, 165, 167, 224 translations into, 242n77, 266n128 Venetian disdain for, 29–30 Speculum orbis terrarum (atlas; de Jode), 137, 138, 269n158 spice trade: with India, 27, 38–9, 74 new routes for, 74–5 Ramusio on, 67, 68, 72 and Venice, 69, 224, 226 Staden, Hans, 149 Stampfer, Jacob, 130 Stobnicza map (1512), 265n114 Stoler, Ann Laura, 134 Storia della guerra veneto-turca (Nicolò Zen), 164

325 Stouraiti, Anastasia, 217 Strabo, 63, 68, 71, 109 Strasbourg, 59, 93 Suardino, Giacomo, 252n76 Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 14 substitution, anachronic, 156–60, 166 Sumario de la natural y general istoria de las Indias (Oviedo), 65 Summario de la generale historia de l’Indie Occidentali (Ramusio), 64–6, 86, 101–2, 112 Supplementum chronicarum (Foresti), 70 Suriano, Michele, 78, 256n125 Swan, Claudia, 199 Sylvanus, Bernardo, 4, 96 Tabula novarum insularum (Münster), 103, 104, 175 Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi, 87 Tartars (Mongols), 131 Tasso, Torquato, 70, 249n40 Teatro del cielo e della terra (Rosaccio), 105, 107 Teixeira, João, 269n158 Tenenti, Alberto, 7 Tenochtitlan (Temistitam), 173–218, 264n94 ahistoric views of, 211 Bordone on, 178, 179–88, 191–2, 194, 205, 211, 278n36, 279n52 Contarini on, 174–5, 192, 206 Cortés on, 60, 174–5, 177, 178, 180–2, 184–8, 191, 192, 211 in costume books, 19, 193–211 destruction of, 192–3, 206 exoticism vs. similarity of, 3, 28–9, 71, 184, 194, 211–18, 276n20 illustrations of, 55, 56, 175, 178, 244n102 in isolarii, 174–93, 211 in maps, 116, 175–7, 180–2, 184, 186, 188–90, 211, 220 Venetianization of, 55, 175, 185–6 and Venice, 174–93, 206, 213, 218, 222, 276n12 violence in, 181–2, 184–5, 199 wealth of, 186 “Terra de Lavoratore” (Libro di Benedetto Bordone), 90 Terra Novo map (1508; Ruysch), 162 Theatrum orbis terrarum (atlas; Ortelius), 136, 137, 138, 269n2 Thevet, André, 61, 87 Tibet, 130 Tiepolo, Antonio, 78, 253n80 Tiepolo, Paolo, 78 Tierra Nueva map (1548; Gastaldi), 108 Timaeus (Plato), 76 Tintoretto, 271n15 Titian, 147 Tolman (Toloman, Tholman), 130, 131, 132, 138, 139, 269n158 Tolomei, Claudio, 283n124

326

INDEX

toponyms, 228n26, 264n89, 264n97, 267n129, 269n158 and America as Asia, 129–30, 131, 133, 266n124 in cartography, 90, 91 of Gastaldi, 136, 138–41, 142 on maps, 106, 114–15, 116, 117 in Zen account, 143–4 Toscanelli, Paolo dal Pozzo, 251n61 Totius orbis descriptio (1560 map), 126 trade: in Atlantic World, 161–2 and east-west similarities, 206–7, 217 German, 236n8 and islands, 212 Italian language in, 24 and maps, 92, 93, 221 merchants in, 23, 24 new routes for, 74–5 Northern European, 226 Portuguese, 8, 11, 74, 224 and print culture, 87 Spanish, 7, 8, 74, 76 spice, 27, 38–9, 67–9, 72, 74–5, 223, 226 in travel compendia, 38–9, 83 Venetian, 8, 58, 67–9, 83, 88, 172, 221, 222, 226 Tramezzino, Michele, 89, 154, 175, 176, 265n114 Transilvano, Massimiliano, 61, 243n87 translations, 23–4, 33 of Columbus, 165, 242n77 politics of, 29–31 prefaces to, 26–32 by Ramusio, 64–6, 238n31, 246n5 of scientific literature, 61. See also particular languages travel, armchair, 3, 26, 216–17 and east-west similarities, 173, 179, 191 and maps, 92, 105–26, 142 and Ramusio, 63, 75 and Zen account, 151 travel compendia, 22, 33–41, 240n49 on Asia, 38–9, 42, 67, 86, 87 and Black Legend, 82 on Columbus, 39, 40, 41 impact of, 86–8 and information dissemination, 32, 35, 83–4, 216 and isolarii, 178 Latin language in, 37–8, 41 maps in, 41, 92 paratextual material in, 17, 35, 41–56, 132, 162 popular vs. scholarly, 64 Portuguese, 240n53 and Ramusio, 27, 35, 39, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 66, 83–6, 247n14 Venetian, 76, 83–8 Venice in, 35–6, 39–40 Zen account in, 163–4 travel literature: Dutch, 86, 135, 256n128 English, 10, 22, 86–7 German, 23, 41, 84, 87

Portuguese, 5, 22, 27, 38–9, 240n53 Spanish, 5, 24, 25–6, 31–2, 61, 85, 88, 165, 167, 224, 239n45 travel literature, Venetian, 5, 17, 21–62 credibility in, 147–50 and east-west similarities, 132, 173–218 and politics, 10, 29–31, 146 prefaces to, 26–32 and printing, 21–62 reprints of, 23, 34, 40, 60, 138, 165, 179, 236n9 and utopian literature, 26 violence in, 26, 195–7, 207 and Zen account, 160, 172. See also particular types, authors and works Travels (Marco Polo), 17, 18, 72, 130, 250n46, 266n118 and Zen account, 149, 162–3 Trevisan, Angelo, 33, 58, 60, 83, 86, 240n55, 241n60 on Columbus, 36–40, 61, 166, 261n54 and Ramusio, 65–6, 67 and Zorzi, 243n82. See also Libretto de tutta la navigatione de re di Spagna de le isole et terreni novamente trovati Trevisan, Marco, 223 True History (Warhaftige Historia; Staden), 149 Typus orbis terrarum (1564 map; Ortelius), 138, 139, 140 Typus universalus (1545 map; Münster), 175 Ulloa, Alfonso de, 24, 61, 83, 165–7, 274n94 Ulloa, Francisco de, 115, 262n62 Universale (1508 map; Rosseli), 128 Universale (1546 map; Gastaldi), 107, 109, 128, 137 Universale della parte del mondo nuovamente ritrovata (1556 map; Gastaldi), 129, 175 Universale descrittione (Ferdinando Bertelli), 118, 119, 120, 121, 122–3, 260n42 Universale descrittione di tutta la terra (c.1565 map; Forlani), 175, 177 Universale descrittione di tutto il mondo (Rosaccio), 99, 100, 111, 125 Universalior Cogniti Orbis Tabula (1508 map; Ruysch), 179 Utopia (More), 26 utopian literature, 26, 212 Valdivia, Juan de, 151–2 Valgrisi, Vincenzo, 96, 137, 260n30, 268n154 Valla, Lorenzo, 159 Vallard atlas, 244n102 Varthema, Lodovico, 163, 245n118 Vasari, Giorgio, 155, 156 Vavassore, Giovanni Andrea, 101, 260n34, 260n47, 262n70, 263n79 Vázquez de Ayllón, Lucas, 103 Vecellio, Cesare, 193–204, 206–10, 212–15, 217

INDEX

sources of, 201, 203 Venetian perspective of, 222, 225 Vega, Garcilaso de la, 70 Vendramin, Francesco, 224 Venetia città nobilissima (Sansovino), 67, 71 Venezuela, 173 Venice: asserted superiority of, 35, 84, 132–3, 163, 172, 218, 222 colonialism of, 15–18, 94, 172, 174, 191, 214, 218, 221 cosmopolitanism of, 28, 63, 64, 83, 86, 95, 188, 218, 226 decline of, 8, 17, 26, 27, 64, 86, 135, 214, 222, 226, 229n33, 267n139 and exploration, 58–9, 219 global importance of, 63–4, 67–8, 71–3, 75, 92, 97–8, 218, 221, 225 global knowledge in, 3, 10, 15, 25, 66, 67–8, 91, 113, 133–5, 162, 199, 201, 203, 211–12, 214, 217, 218, 223, 225 global mentality of, 7–8, 13–14, 68, 88 government of, 25, 31, 83, 93, 273n83 idealized early history of, 212–13, 214 precociousness of, 33, 41, 96, 137, 212, 223, 264n91 promotion of, 35–6, 39–40, 191 Vercellese da Lisona, Albertino, 33 Veronese, Paolo, 147 Verrazzano, Giovanni, 25, 67, 116, 132, 242n77, 262n62 Vespucci, Amerigo, 5, 19, 25, 33, 67, 173, 244n95 letters of, 23, 34, 38, 42, 60, 178 in travel compendia, 34, 39 and utopian literature, 26 and Zen account, 151, 153–4, 155 and Zorzi, 42 Viaggio da Venetia a Costantinopoli (Rosaccio), 217 Viaggio e naufragio di Pietro Quirino (Quirino), 158, 159 Vianelo, Geronimo, 244n95 Vignola, Cesare, 221 Vincent of Beauvais, 272n43 Virginia, 111, 116, 124, 212, 264n91 in costume books, 194, 200, 203, 204, 207, 211 Vita del’invittissimo e sacratissimo imperator Carlo V (Ulloa), 61 Vitruvius, 147 Vittoria, Alessandro, 2 Vivaldi, Antonio, 221 Vizcaino, Juan (Juan de la Cosa), 42 Vopel, Caspar, 41, 113, 260n47, 263n79 Waldseemüller, Martin, 96, 142, 179 1507 map of, 128, 265n114 Welsh language, 148 Wey Gómez, Nicolás, 229n38 White, John, 280n75

327 Wigen, Kären, 68 Willer, George, 136 William of Boldensele, 272n43 William of Tripoli, 272n43 Wilson, Bronwen, 116, 199, 215, 217 Wintroub, Michael, 11, 215 Witcombe, Christopher, 93 Wittfogel, Karl, 189–90 Wood, Christopher, 156 Woodward, David, 98, 111 Worth of Women, The (Fonte), 222 Wytfliet, Cornelis van, 138, 139 Xerez, Franceso de, 28, 60, 65, 66, 77, 238n29 Yucatán, 25, 163, 205 Zabarella, Giacomo, 146 Zahrtmann, Christian, 144–5 Zaltieri, Bolognino, 89, 98, 99, 138 Zárate, Augustín de, 61 Zen, Antonio, 143, 146, 150, 151, 155, 160–2, 219, 269n2 Zen, Carlo, 150, 151, 157 Zen, Caterino, 73, 158, 163 Zen, Marino, 146 Zen, Nicolò, 15, 18–19, 142, 143–72, 174, 255n114 and Bordone’s map, 179, 185 explorations by, 126–7, 219 family and career of, 146–7 and isolarii, 178, 190 offices held by, 270n11 patriotism of, 150, 160–4, 170, 172 textual strategies of, 160, 171–2 Venetian perspective of, 154–5, 225 works by, 147, 149, 163–4. See also Dello scoprimento Zen, Pietro, 270n10 Zerubavel, Eviatar, 9 Zhang Wentao, 140, 141 Zichmni, 143, 145, 161, 162 Ziletti, Giordano, 28–9 Zorzi, Alessandro, 41–59, 71, 83, 86, 136, 214 and Columbus, 73, 166, 242n73 family of, 243n82 and isolarii, 178, 190 and Libretto, 42, 43, 52, 240n55, 243n82 and Marco Polo, 49, 51, 54, 55, 74 marginalia of, 17, 41–56, 132, 162 and Paesi, 42, 43, 47–50, 52, 243n82 sketch maps of, 42–4, 259n27, 265n111 on Tenochtitlan, 55, 56, 175 Venetian perspective of, 67, 225 and Zen account, 155, 162 Zupanov, Inés, 14 Zurla, Giacinto Placido, 284n2