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1. ‘ … to gain some renown with posterity’
The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez provided a memora- ble introduction to Antonio Pigafetta’s First Voyage around the World ( Viaggio attorno al mondo ) when he evoked, at the beginning of his 1982 Nobel Lecture, the Renaissance traveller ‘who went with Magellan on the first voyage around the world’ and wrote ‘a strictly accurate account that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy.’ In the words of the Colombian novelist, the Italian witnessed ‘hogs with navels on their haunches, clawless birds whose hens laid eggs on the backs of their mates, and others still, resembling tongueless pelicans, with beaks like spoons. He wrote of having seen a misbegotten creature with the head and ears of a mule, a camel’s body, the legs of a deer and the whinny of a horse. He described how the first native encountered in Patagonia was confronted with a mirror, whereupon that impas- sioned giant lost his senses to the terror of his own image.’^1 In effect, for García Márquez, Pigafetta’s ‘short and fascinating book … even then contained the seeds of our present-day novels.’ He acknowledged in Pigafetta a genealogical source for the ‘marvellous’ realism (more familiar perhaps as ‘magical realism’) that one has come to associate with the novelist’s own fictions as well as those of other prominent Latin American authors. The political implications of these Renaissance origins were not lost on the Latin American Nobel Laureate. Indeed, the rhetorical category of the ‘marvellous’ that characterized Renaissance literature of discovery and explora- tion was often employed to veil an act of power and to gloss over real conflict by evoking ‘a sense of the marvelous that in effect fills up the
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emptiness at the center of the maimed rite of possession.’ 2 Towards the end of his address, the Colombian novelist pointedly isolated the literary category of the ‘marvellous,’ synonymous with so much Euro- pean ‘Americanist’ writing, and turned it back against the Old World. For García Márquez the contemporary novelist’s report of Latin America’s incredible political reality – the incessant upheavals, the mil- itary coups and massacres, the continents surreal political melodrama
- was ‘strictly accurate’ but nonetheless resembled ‘a venture into fantasy.’ Exploiting another trope of European Americanist writing, the commonplace of the New World’s immense proportions when compared with those of the Old World, García Márquez observed that the number of desaparecidos , at that time 120,000, was equivalent to all the inhabitants of Uppsala, Sweden, being unaccounted for. He noted that the death toll from civil strife in Central America of one hundred thousand in four years was proportionally equivalent to 1.6 million violent deaths in the United States. Europe’s ‘marvellous’ dream of possession had become Latin America’s incredible night- mare of war and massacre, of exile and forced emigration. García Márquez’s citation of Antonio Pigafetta’s First Voyage around the World is among the more recent and resonant of a long line of prestigious literary responses to this Italian travel narrative. If Pigafetta undertook his voyage, as he says, ‘so that I might be able to gain some renown with posterity’ (2), he can be said to have suc- ceeded brilliantly. The author’s desire for fame, for the extension of the self in space and time, was in fact a prominent motive for both undertaking the journey and writing the narrative in the first place. Pigafetta’s account of the circumnavigation originally expressed a desire for the circumvention of death that is at the heart of travel lit- erature itself, which has always sought to ‘fix and perpetuate some- thing as transient and impermanent as human action and mobility.’ 3 William Shakespeare’s use of Pigafetta’s libretto (or ‘little book,’ as the author terms it) in The Tempest is perhaps the best known manifes- tation of Pigafetta’s literary fame during the Renaissance:
Caliban [ Aside ]: I must obey – his art is of such power, It would control my Dam’s god, Setebos, And make a vassal of him. (1.2. 372–4)
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Ubaldo’s marvellous voyage to Armida’s island followed a radically dif- ferent itinerary from the one familiar to readers of the Gerusalemme liber- ata. Rather than pass directly to the Fortunate Islands, the ‘barca avventurosa’ set out upon the Ocean Sea bound for the New World. Tasso’s heroes coasted a lengthy tract of South American terra ferma identified as the land of the ‘inospitali Antropofagi,’ and sighted along the shore the incredible ‘Patagon giganti’ made famous by Antonio Pigafetta’s narrative. The literary quality of Pigafetta’s book strongly stimulated the imagination of the Italian epic poet, especially its ‘mar- vellous’ treatment of the voyage. Tasso created a gallery of poetic mar- vels in a series of octaves based directly upon Pigafetta’s prose account. Pigafetta’s literary reception therefore, stretching from Torquato Tasso to Gabriel García Márquez, suggests intriguing lines of continuity, espe- cially as regards the literary category of the marvellous, from the High Renaissance travel narrative, to High-Renaissance poetics of the marvel- lous (practised and expounded upon at length by Tasso and other High-Renaissance literary theorists), to contemporary Latin American magical realism.^7
2. The Book of a Courtier
The prestigious literary circulation enjoyed by Pigafetta’s book is due only in part to the heroic dimensions of its incredible historical sub- ject – the Magellan-Elcano circumnavigation of the globe of 1519–
- In fact, if the return of the Victoria and its few surviving crew rep- resented the greatest and culminating feat of the Renaissance Age of Discovery, so too Pigafetta’s account of that achievement, first pub- lished in manuscript between February and June 1525, represented the literary epitome of its genre. 8 One of the masterpieces produced by Italian courtier culture of the High Renaissance, Pigafetta’s First Voyage belongs to the same generation, albeit in a minor generic key, as other more familiar Italian literary classics published in the first decades of the 16th century such as Sannazaro’s Arcadia , Machiavelli’s The Prince , Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso , and Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. Like these works, Pigafetta’s First Voyage emerges from a period of deep political and cultural crisis in Italy that began with the
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initial French invasion of the peninsula in 1494 and reached its height in the Sack of Rome in 1527. The breakdown of the Italian court system under the pressures of French and Spanish incursions, the religious revolution set in motion by the Protestant Reformation, and the great oceanic discoveries all contributed to Italy’s increas- ing marginalization within the context of early modern Western European history. From a literary and cultural point of view, the Ital- ian High Renaissance therefore represented a kind of swansong, a brilliant culminating flourish. Like the better-known literary classics and artworks of the period, Pigafetta’s libreto achieves a kind of fulfil- ment or realization in its genre within an Italian context. And in its own way, like other Italian cultural products of the period, Pigafetta’s First Voyage went abroad and achieved an international reputation, beginning with at least three French illuminated manuscripts and the Simon de Colines editio princeps published in Paris circa 1525.^9 Pigafetta’s First Voyage illustrates in its own way, even at the reputedly unexalted level of the travel narrative, both the mobility of the cos- mopolitan courtier and the exportability of Italian courtier culture of the High Renaissance. At the same time that Italian culture enters a period of deep crisis and growing marginalization, the Italian courtier- traveller goes out into the world, pen in hand, 10 to assert a compensa- tory literary authority, in relation to European political hegemony established over the newly discovered lands by some of the same emerging European powers that were engaged in carving up the Ital- ian peninsula. The original Italian courtly derivation of the work merits further consideration, given that Pigafetta’s First Voyage represents a particu- larly mature expression of courtly Italian Renaissance travel writing. Indeed, to speak of an Italian courtier extraction for the work is to locate it within the ‘lingua e letteratura cortigiana’ (courtly language and literature) that flourished briefly on the peninsula between the end of the fifteenth and the first decades of the sixteenth centuries, and produced the Italian High Renaissance. We can gain perspective on Pigafetta’s literary and linguistic sensibility by considering his position in relation to the Italian ‘Questione della lingua,’ that is, as expressive of Italian cosmopolitan court culture in contrast to the
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perspective, a relative detachment from national political and com- mercial interests, and a paradoxically legitimating utilization of the ‘marvellous.’ Girolamo Benzoni’s Historia del nuovo mondo (1565), the last major Italian contribution to the tradition of Americanist travel writing, is, by comparison, merely a highly interesting epigone of that tradition, as well as a masterpiece of Americanist plagiarism.^14 Pigafetta’s book also represents the point of arrival for an impor- tant Orientalist subgenre of Italian Renaissance travel writing. The isolario , or Book of Islands genre might plausibly be termed ‘Oriental- ist’ since the earliest examples from the fifteenth century limited their coverage to the culturally mixed, and politically and commer- cially contested, archipelagos of the eastern Mediterranean. 15 The fifteenth century prototype of the Book of Islands genre, Crisotoforo Buondelmonti’s Liber insularum archipelagi , circulated widely during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and as a member of the Order of the ‘Sea Knights’ of Rhodes, Antonio Pigafetta would surely have been familiar with this work. 16 To recognize the First Voyage’s affinity to the isolario tradition generally, and to Buondelmonti in particular, is to recover an important aspect of the work’s original courtier Renaissance character, which has been lost on post-Enlightenment readers of the work.
3. Reading for Scholars and Princes
The book’s courtly Americanist and Orientalist origins are conve- niently signalled in the dedicatory letter: by the presence of Pigafetta’s fellow Vicentine and patron, the powerful ecclesiastic and diplomat Francesco Chiericati, who first took Pigafetta with him to Spain; and by the dedication of the work to the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes, the French noble Philippe Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Francesco Chiericati, with whom Pigafetta ‘discussed the great and marvellous things of the Ocean Sea’ (2) possessed impeccable Americanist credentials. He appears, for example, in the introduc- tion to one of Matteo Bandello’s Novelle (I, 34), at the court of Pan- dino upon his return from Portugal, recounting the marvels of the New World, and displaying ‘golden objects, pearls, precious stones
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and other beautiful things brought back from those countries. He exhibited also certain idols marvelously fashioned in mosaic, that those people, who have by now for the most part become Christians, used to adore.’^17 Bandello has Chiericati go on to tell about the cus- tom among some men in those new countries to vie for the honour of having their wives pass the night with foreign visitors, concluding that ‘jealousy has no place among those simple and primitive people, nor does it cause them to take up arms.’ An observation that leads, without fail, to a novella illustrating the negative effects of Old World jealousy. Beyond this literary representation, Chiericati’s own travel writings, usually addressed to Isabella d’Este (to whom he recom- mended Pigafetta immediately following the return of the Victoria ), include a fascinating account of a trip to Ireland, 18 and oscillate between the same poles of critical investigation and ingenuous enthusiasm for the marvellous that characterize Pigafetta’s narrative. As a member of the Order of the ‘Sea Knights’ of Rhodes, Pigafetta dedicates his First Voyage to Grand Master Villiers de l’Isle-Adam at a crucial historical moment. The Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem had since the fourteenth century represented ‘the bulwark of Christendom’ in the Levant. The surrender of Rhodes and flight to Italy, which led to the Order’s temporary settlement in Viterbo and later establishment in Malta, sent shock waves through Christian Europe. Clearly, no more dramatic period of crisis for the order, or of Christian power in the eastern Mediterranean, could be conjured up as a background for Magellan’s circumnavigation. As we shall see in the next section, recognition of this ‘Rhodian’ context for Pigafetta’s First Voyage suggests a strong connection between Pigafetta’s book and the Book of Islands genre. For the moment, however, one can observe how Chiericati and the Grand Master provide a literary and ideologi- cal framework for a reading of the work. The dedicatory letter also establishes the heroes of the narrative, for there are indeed two heroes of this epic – Magellan and Pigafetta
- just as there are two heroic activities to be celebrated – exploration and narration. A recent Italian editor of Pigafetta’s narrative has per- suasively illuminated the care with which Pigafetta structured the text so as to celebrate the heroic figure of Magellan as ‘bon pastore’
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Magellan’s martyrdom and the achievement of the circumnavigation. The narrative presents the account of a kind of fictional death and resurrection of Pigafetta, ‘fictional rather than real because death is used as a context for the assertion of an essential and irreducible self; implicitly denied is the reality of death as a dissolution of form and a solvent of identity.’ 20 Just as the circumnavigation is figured by Pigafetta as an escape from death, Pigafetta’s book expresses at yet another level a heroic desire to circumvent death and to ‘gain some renown with posterity.’ Without question, Pigafetta’s experience and its writing are in their own ways celebrated as glorious and heroic. Besides ‘the great and wonderful things’ to report from ‘my long and dangerous voy- age,’ Pigafetta’s ‘vigils, hardships, and wanderings’ (5) recall the heroic vigils and sleepless nights of Amerigo Vespucci, canonized in the famous Stradanus engraving that portrays the Florentine sighting the stars during the middle of the night, while sailors lie slumped around him sleeping in a kind of New World Gethsemane. Like Ves- pucci, Pigafetta is careful to cite all the highly placed personages who legitimate his endeavour in one way or another – and what more appropriate patrons for a circumnavigation of the globe than the emperor and the pope. Pigafetta sailed in fact ‘with the good grace of his Caesarean Majesty’ (2), and upon his return was summoned by the pope to recount his adventures. The author’s reference to his ‘going to see his Holiness, Pope Clement’ (4) alludes to just one key moment in the remarkable history of Pigafetta’s peregrinations after his return (these are detailed in the bio-bibliographical treatment that follows this introduction). At one point, there was actually the promise of Pope Clement VII’s sponsorship for the printing of Pigafetta’s book. From a rhetorical perspective, the legitimating strategy of evoking highly placed patrons for one’s explorations was of course common- place. It had already been masterfully practised by Vespucci: ‘two [voyages] were by command of the exalted King of Castile Don Fernando VI, to go west over the depths of the Ocean Sea, and the other two were by the command of the mighty King Don Manuel of Portugal, to go south.’ 21 Pigafetta adopts a similar strategy in both
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the dedicatory letter and in the work’s concluding paragraph, which is more explicit in this regard, and which represents a kind of envoi to the work (a quintessentially courtly literary feature). The narra- tive, in fact, circles around like the voyage itself, and returns to the courtly context from which it had departed, with details concerning the courtly reception that awaited the author:
Leaving Seville, I went to Valladolid, where I presented to his sacred Majesty, Don Carlo, neither gold nor silver, but things worthy to be very highly esteemed by such a sovereign. Among other things, I gave him a book, written by my hand, concerning all the matters that had occurred from day to day during our voyage. I left there as best I could and went to Portugal, where I spoke with King Dom João of what I had seen. Pass- ing through Spain, I went to France, where I made a gift of certain things from the other hemisphere to the mother of the most Christian king, Don Francis, Madame the Regent. Then I came to Italy, where I devoted myself forever, and these my poor labours, to the famous and most illustrious lord Philippe Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, the most worthy Grand Master of Rhodes. (1352–6)
While Amerigo Vespucci reports in his letters that he had explored and discovered at the command of the kings of Spain and Portugal, Pigafetta records in a similar vein his post-circumnavigation tour, dur- ing which he was repeatedly called upon to recount his experiences at court. There had been an evident shift in emphasis since 1492, from the Genoese Columbus’s claim to glory as ‘inventor’ of a New World (as an explorer first and a writer second), to Antonio Pigafetta’s claim on ‘some renown with posterity’ based principally upon his having composed a book about the circumnavigation. Vespucci occupies a middle position between these two. While the Florentine’s contributions in the literary ‘invention’ of America through the publication of the Mundus Novus and Letter to Soderini surpass and overshadow his contributions to geographical and naviga- tional knowledge, the latter were nonetheless based upon some genu- ine expertise, given that Vespucci was appointed ‘Pilot Major’ by the king of Spain in 1508. Italy’s role however as historical protagonist in
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combining useful (particularly ethnographic and geographical) information, with delightful, ‘marvellous’ matters. Moreover, it makes ideal reading for princes and scholars for it serves ‘to relax a little the intention of their thoughts, that they may be more apt and able to endure a continued course of study,’ as Lucian put it in the preamble of the True History. 25 This courtly literary context for Pigafetta’s First Voyage explains in large measure the role of the ‘marvellous’ in Pigafetta’s narrative, as well as much of the work’s undeniable literary appeal. The narrative of the voyage more or less begins with a description of the miraculous tree of the waterless island of Hierro in the Canaries (on the thresh- old between the Old and New Worlds): ‘the leaves and branches of which distil a quantity of water ... [and] the people living there, and the animals, both domestic and wild, fully satisfy themselves with this water and no other’ (30). The first in a series of marvels that consti- tute Pigafetta’s account of the outward passage, the miraculous tree of Hierro had, since Columbus, represented one of those classic Atlantic myths that served rhetorically to mark the passage from Old World to New. The tree’s status as a literary commonplace seems paramount here, especially in light of the fact that the expedition did not stop at Hierro. The marvellous serves to establish the authority of Pigafetta’s account with the contemporary courtly audience, which had come to expect such wonders from their travel narratives. Other marvels of crossing include tremendous storms and the repeated appearance of St Elmo’s fire, sharks with terrible teeth, and those birds mentioned by García Márquez that ‘make no nest because they have no feet, and the hen lays her eggs on the back of the cock, and hatches them.’ The marvellous ‘caccia de’ pesci’ with which our author highlights the passage through the Strait of Magellan (later poeticized by Tasso) represents yet another marvellous ‘passage,’ which serves both to establish the alterity of the new worlds encountered and, paradoxi- cally, to legitimize the veracity of Pigafetta’s account. Another related strategy employed by Pigafetta is exemplified by the stereotypical account of his first encounter with the natives of Brazil (49–86), based upon the authoritative descriptions of Columbus and Vespucci. In this regard Pigafetta continues in the line of Vespucci, who had
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imitated Columbus in a similar fashion. The ‘inventor’ Columbus not only discovered a continent but inaugurated a new Americanist sub- genre within the context of travel narrative, and thus became a model for imitation. After satisfying the readers’ initial expectations, Pigafetta goes on to describe the famous encounters with the Patago- nian giants, which can be seen as brilliant literary elaborations on a theme of American giants inaugurated by Amerigo Vespucci both in his first familiar letter and in the Letter to Soderini. This kind of appreciation for the Italian courtly literary context for the First Voyage also casts light on the notorious problem presented by the fact that in this, the most important by far of the first-hand sources regarding Magellan’s voyage, there is so little information about the dramatic episodes of mutiny and desertion that plagued the expedition from the start, and even this is garbled and oblique. Indeed, the expedition’s internal politics, that have always fascinated historians of the voyage, are generally elided in favour of the ‘mar- vels’ of travel, the heroic stature of the captain-general, and the achievement of the circumnavigation. An initial incident in fact took place during the Atlantic crossing when Juan de Cartagena’s insubor- dination led to his deposition as commander of the S. Antonio and his being placed in the stocks. As we have just seen, Pigafetta, during this part of the voyage, instead treats us to a gallery of transatlantic ‘mar- vels.’ Generally speaking, the ‘marvellous’ seems to expand and fill the narrative space in precisely those moments when trouble is afoot. The mutiny that Pigafetta could not ignore took place at Port St Julian by Gaspar Quesada, Juan de Cartagena, and Juan Sebastian del Cano on 1–2 April 1519. The story is perhaps best told by Magellan’s excellent biographer Guillemard, who based himself upon a collation of all the sources.^26 While Pigafetta is generally con- sidered the most important source for the expedition’s history, on these episodes he is no help at all. Indeed, according to Guillemard, his account is ‘remarkable for its extraordinary inaccuracy’ (174); it seemed ‘incredible that an eyewitness – which [Pigafetta] undoubt- edly was – should have failed to remember circumstances such as these, and the fact somewhat lessens the value of his book as a credible narrative’ (174). For fuller and more accurate accounts of the mutiny,
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that, besides making occasional reference to the ‘line of demarcation,’ Pigafetta never explicitly discusses the political issue that the histori- ans tell us constituted the motivating force behind the circumnaviga- tion in the first place: to determine the true position of the Spice Islands (or Moluccas), and to establish that they were on the Spanish side of the line. Pigafetta also exhibits a relatively neutral perspective on the com- mercial aspects of the expedition, which is what one would expect given both his courtier social background and his epic-heroic literary intentions. Vespucci had already belittled the achievement of the Por- tuguese Vasco da Gama for sailing for primarily commercial reasons, a motivation that detracted from the heroic virtue of discovery as an end in itself.^28 The voyage of discovery, in order to be the heroic object of epic celebration, must find a way around the commercial bourgeois motive for travel more appropriate to the literary category of romance. 29 Like Vespucci before him, Pigafetta apparently had lit- tle direct economic or political stake in the voyage. Instead, he is ‘Antonio Lombardo’ (Antonio of Lombardy), ‘sobresaliente’ (a super- numerary), as he is called in the expedition’s roster. The detached per- spective of the courtly observer is drawn to the ‘marvellous’ natural and anthropological world encountered, and celebrates both the heroic virtues of the captain-general (whose attributes of ‘bon pas- tore’ and ‘bon cavaliero’ are exalted beyond the realm of immediate political contingency), and the epic geographical achievement of the circumnavigation.
4. A Unity of Narrative and Cartography
It would be misleading to leave the impression that Pigafetta’s narra- tive is a marvel-filled travel narrative and hagiographic text, although it presents characteristics of both these genres. Indeed, The First Voyage is much more: its remarkably accurate ethnographic and geographical account of the circumnavigation has guaranteed its elevated status among modern historiographers and students of the discoveries and earliest contacts between Europeans and the people of the East Indies. Recall that Gabriel García Márquez emphasized in his Nobel
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address the accuracy of Pigafetta’s account ‘that nonetheless resembles a venture into fantasy.’ While we have just seen how, with respect to the political implications of the ‘marvellous,’ Pigafetta’s procedure may constitute a diversion (which García Márquez took pains to rec- tify), the ethnographic and geographic truth value of Pigafetta’s account is not finally undermined. Indeed, although it might seem something of a paradox, there is clearly a sense in which the marvel- lous aspects of the narrative serve rhetorically to authorize or enhance the truth value of the ethnographic and geographic evidence. The post-Enlightenment view of geography and ethnography as sciences distinct from the literary leads us to see them as exclusive of literary ‘marvels,’ when for Pigafetta and his Renaissance readers the ‘marvel- lous’ and the true could still be not only co-present but actually mutu- ally reinforcing. In fact, structurally speaking, Pigafetta’s ‘marvellous’ can be said to enclose the central experiences in the book regarding the expedition’s encounters in the Philippines and Moluccas. The prominent place given to the marvellous natural and anthropological encounters in the New World, based as they are on recognizable liter- ary stereotypes, and the Marco Polian encounters (second-hand reports) of India and China, which Pigafetta recounts before embark- ing on the return trip (1267–1322), serve as an authorizing frame for what’s most new and most true in Pigafetta’s narrative. Indeed, it is the extremely lucid and precise account of the time spent navigating the East Indian archipelagos of the Philippines and the Moluccas, including the repeated courtly negotiations with various indigenous groups, which constitutes, beyond the celebration of Magellan, one of the book’s major interests.^30 Two aspects of Pigafetta’s account are particularly worthy of note in this regard. The first is Pigafetta’s attention to the language of the peoples encountered, which results in wordlists or vocabularies, including extensive lists for the Philippine (160 words of what he calls ‘the language of the heathen’ to distinguish it from the Malay Muslims) and Malay languages respectively (this last made up of some 450 words). The second is Pigafetta’s contribution to the car- tography of the East Indies, which takes the form of twenty-three painted maps, featured in the earliest manuscripts of the book. Both
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in Italy with the Prose della volgar lingua (1525). The Vicentine occu- pies the most avant-garde position within the courtly linguistic per- spective on the Italian ‘Questione della lingua’. Indeed, there appears to be a highly suggestive, even proportional inverse relation between the Italian vernacular humanist Bembo’s turning inward and back in time to erect Boccaccio and Petrarch as literary and linguistic auctores for Italian eloquence, and, simultaneously, the Italian courtier Pigafetta’s linguistic opening to other worlds at the farthest reaches of the globe. Pigafetta similarly redirects an Italian cartographic tradi- tion and sensibility in his twenty-three charts depicting the East Indian archipelagos. But in order for its contribution to that tradition to be adequately appreciated, his book must first be restored, as in the present edition, to its earliest form as a synthesis of narrative and car- tography. This unity, which characterized the work from its first appearance in the earliest manuscripts, was lost as soon as the book began to be printed; neither the humble setting of the Colines editio princeps (c. 1525) nor the nondescript 1536 Italian imprint anony- mously published by Giambattista Ramusio include the twenty-three charts, which were an integral part of Pigafetta’s original conception of the book (and neither did he later include them in his Navigazioni e viaggi ). The separation of the maps from the narrative effected at the beginning of the editorial history has been continued by most edi- tions, including, symptomatically, the recent and otherwise authorita- tive edition of the Italian text upon which the present edition is based.^32 The interpretive result of this dismemberment of the book has been the loss of a sense of Pigafetta’s original conception of the book as a unity of narrative and cartography, and its generic relation- ship to the tradition of Renaissance isolari , and especially the most important isolario of the fifteenth century and the genre’s capostipite , Cristoforo Buondelmonti’s Liber insularum Archipelagi ( The Book of the Islands of the Archipelago ).^33 Buondelmonti (born around 1380) is primarily known for the Liber insularum and the Descriptio insulae Cretae ( Description of Crete ), works authored during his travels in the Aegean, taking Rhodes as his base of operations, between 1415 and his death around 1431. A Flo- rentine prelate and contemporary of Poggio Bracciolini, with contacts
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to the humanist circle of Niccolò Niccoli, Buondelmonti was one of the most significant figures of the fifteenth century Aegean world, which played host to a cosmopolitan and socially mixed culture with strong ties, through a dense network of diplomatic, ecclesiastic, and commercial relations, to the world of Italian humanism. As a travel writer, Buondelmonti’s most significant innovation was to fuse the humanistic genre of geographical encyclopedic compendia (like Boccaccio’s De montibus , Bandini’s Fons memorabilium universi , and Da Silvestri’s De insulis et earum proprietatibus ) with that of contemporary sailing journals, charts, and portolans. Both the Liber insularum and the Descriptio insulae Cretae represent first-hand accounts of Buodel- monti’s travels laced with antiquary commentary and accompanied by charts of the islands visited. The original version of the Liber insularum was dedicated to the humanist bibliophile Cardinal Giordano Orsini and forwarded to him in Rome in 1420. Surviving in at least four redactions made during the Quattrocento, it was subsequently enlarged, altered, emended, and improved throughout the fifteenth century. It is known in sixty- four manuscripts, only thirteen fewer than Marco Polo’s travels, and evidently had an immense success during the Renaissance not only throughout Italy and in the Aegean, but also in other Western Euro- pean countries. Not less than three vernacular translations of the Liber were made in Italy during the Quattrocento. In addition, there was a translation in modern Greek in the fifteenth century, as well as one in English during the sixteenth century. The work’s character as a histor- ical and practical guide should be emphasized, as this explains its wide diffusion among those who had the occasion to travel or live in the Aegean. It should also be stressed that this diffusion was not limited to Italian humanists or other erudite Orientalists. In fact, its popular character is suggested by the several versions in various Italian vernac- ulars, as well as the one in modern Greek. It is natural and reasonable to suppose that the work enjoyed a particularly wide diffusion among members of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, based on Rhodes. Compelling analogies between Pigafetta’s and Buondelmonti’s books include their island subject matter, their mode of literary treatment alternating between narrative and expository modes, their
