It became apparent that maps would be the key to settling this global dispute, although, as one contemporary Castilian commentator wrote, geographical partisanship came in the most unusual of shapes:
It so chanced that as Francis de Melo, Diego Lopes of Sequeira, and other of those Portugals of this assembly, walked up the river side of Guadiana, a little boy who stood keeping his mother’s clothes which she had washed, demanded of them whether they were those men that parted the world with the Emperor. And as they answered, yea, he took up his shirt and showed them his bare arse, saying, come and draw your line here through the middest. Which saying was afterwards in every man’s mouth and laughed at in the town of Badajoz.17
The story is probably apocryphal, a crude joke at the expense of the Portuguese delegation. But it shows that by the early sixteenth century even very ordinary people were beginning to be aware of the changing geography of the wider world.
Even before Magellan’s circumnavigation, the realization that maps and charts facilitated better navigation and access to overseas markets led first the Portuguese then the Castilian crowns to fund institutions with responsibility for training pilots and collating geographical material relevant to seaborne exploration. The Portuguese Casa da Mina e India (the House of Mina – a fort on the West African coast, now in Ghana – and India) was created in the late fifteenth century to regulate trade and navigation with West Africa and India (once it reached there), and in 1503 Castile followed suit with the foundation of the Casa de la Contratación (the House of Trade) in Seville.18 Portuguese navigation in the fifteenth century had shown that both an intellectual understanding of astronomy and a practical knowledge of sailing was required to map the Atlantic Ocean, and as a consequence both organizations aimed to unify the empirical data gathered from pilots and navigators with the inherited classical knowledge of educated cosmographers. Alexandria, Baghdad and even Sicily had seen the creation of centres of geographical calculation before, but they had usually aimed at creating a single map that would synthesize all known geographical knowledge and finally confirm what the world looked like. The maps and charts made by the Portuguese and Castilian trade organizations were different: they incorporated new discoveries, but were content to leave huge blanks across their surfaces, in anticipation of subsequent information that would be incorporated in later updated maps.
As the crowns of Portugal and Castile began to use these maps to resolve territorial claims and boundary disputes in the Atlantic and down the coast of Africa, they took on the status of legal authority. A map like that created under the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas was regarded as part object, part document that the two political opponents accepted as legally binding because of its pivotal role in an internationally agreed treaty, confirmed by the pope. Such maps could settle disputes over places on the terrestrial globe that neither mapmakers nor their political paymasters had ever seen, never mind visited. They also laid claim to a new degree of scientific objectivity based on verifiable reports and logs of long-distance travel rather than hearsay and classical assumptions. Such claims were, as we shall see, somewhat dubious, and benefited the mapmaker as much as his political patron, but they allowed maps a new status, whereby early modern empires traded territory, and nowhere more decisively than with the Portuguese–Castilian conflict over the Moluccas, and its attempted resolution at Bajadoz-Elvas in 1524.
The changing perception of the role of the mapmaker and his maps can be gleaned from the composition of the negotiating teams that arrived in Badajoz-Elvas that spring. The Portuguese delegation consisted of nine diplomats (including the much maligned Francis de Melo and Diego Lopes of Sequeira), as well as three mapmakers, Lopo Homem and Pedro Reinel and his son Jorge. The Castilian delegation had more to prove than the Portuguese. It was their aggressive claim to Portugal’s hold over the South-east Asian spice trade that brought the two delegations together, and they arrived with an equally impressive array of nine diplomats, including Sebastião del Cano, and no fewer than five geographical advisers drawn from across Europe. They included the Venetian Sebastian Cabot, head of the Casa de la Contratación. Cabot was one of the great navigators of his generation, said to have discovered Newfoundland in 1497 in the employ of King Henry VII before transferring his allegiance to the wealthier Castile. The team also included the Florentine mapmaker Giovanni Vespucci, nephew of Amerigo, as well as the Castilian mapmakers Alonso de Chaves and Nuño Garcia; Garcia was himself a former head of the Casa de la Contratación, and drew some of the maps for Magellan’s circumnavigation prior to its departure. The final member of the Castilian team was neither Castilian nor Italian, but Portuguese: Diogo Ribeiro.19
Of all the Castilian team, we know least about Ribeiro. Born into relative obscurity in the late fifteenth century, Ribeiro joined the Portuguese fleets sailing to India in the first years of the sixteenth century, quickly rising to the position of pilot. Like many Portuguese mapmakers of his day, Ribeiro learnt to draw charts at sea rather than in the academy, which still privileged the knowledge of astronomy and cosmography over hydrography and mapmaking. By 1518, as we have seen, he was working for the Castilian crown in Seville, the centre of Castile’s overseas imperial ambitions, and home of the Casa de la Contratación. By this time the Casa also included an office with sole responsibility for hydrography – the measurement of the seas for navigational purposes – founded to regulate the stream of new charts that came into Seville from the fleets returning from the New World and beyond. Ribeiro’s success as a pilot led to his royal appointment as a cosmographer, and it was in this capacity that he took his place as an adviser to the Castilian negotiating team at Badajoz-Elvas, sitting opposite his Portuguese compatriots.20 Despite his relative obscurity in comparison with his more distinguished colleagues, it was Ribeiro who, over the next five years, would offer the most compelling case in support of Castile’s claim to the Moluccas, producing a series of beautiful, scientifically persuasive maps which would not only alter the course of those islands’ history, but contribute to the change in global geography and mapmaking in the Renaissance.
The meeting at Badajoz-Elvas was preceded by weeks of intense espionage between the two imperial delegations. The Portuguese had managed to woo the Reinels back after their time working for Magellan in Seville, but as the delegations arrived, Pedro Reinel confessed to two of the Portuguese representatives that he had been ‘invited together with his son to enter the emperor’s service’ for the substantial salary of 30,000 Portuguese reis, as had Simão Fernandez, another senior member of the Portuguese delegation.21 Looking back on the dispute more than eighty years later in his book Conquista de las islas Malucas (1609), the Castilian historian Bartholomé Leonardo de Argensola summarized Charles V’s diplomatic and geographical brief to his team. The emperor
urged, that by mathematical demonstration, and the judgment of men learned in that faculty, it appeared, that the Moluccas were within the limits of Castile, as were all others, as far as Malacca, and even beyond it. That it was no easy undertaking for Portugal to go about to disprove the writings of so many cosmographers, and such able mariners, and particularly the opinion of Magellan, who was himself a Portuguese . . . Besides that, in relation to the article of possession on which the controversy depended, it was only requisite to stand by what was writ by and received among cosmographers.22
The Castilian delegation understood that this was a dispute that could only be resolved through the systematic manipulation of maps, the exploitation of national differences, the selective appropriation of classical geographical authority and, where necessary, bribery.
On 11 April both teams met on the bridge over the River Caya, right on the boundary between Portugal and Castile. Negotiations faltered almost immediately. The Portuguese protested against the presence of two Portuguese pilots amongst the Castilian delegation, Simón de Alcazaba and Esteban Gómez, who were quickly replaced. The Portuguese were also worried about the composition
of the Castilian team of geographical advisers, and one man in particular. Days before negotiations began one of the Portuguese delegation wrote to King John in Lisbon, dismissing the authority of the Castilian geographers, with one exception. ‘Their pilots are without any credit,’ he claimed, ‘except Ribeiro.’ By this time Ribeiro’s knowledge of the placement of the Moluccas seems to have been unrivalled. He knew the geographical claims of both sides, with privileged access to information about the islands before and after Magellan’s voyage, and the Portuguese clearly feared that his contribution to the dispute could prove decisive.
The formal appointments of each team having been agreed, negotiations began in earnest. The lawyers quickly reached an impasse in establishing which side would act as the plaintiff, and it became clear that the geographers would be crucial to settling the claim. Both sides began by reiterating the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas. The line of demarcation drawn at Tordesillas was 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. This represented an unofficial prime meridian, from which Castile claimed all territories 180 degrees to the west, Portugal everything 180 degrees east. But the prize of the Moluccas was now so contested that both delegations even quibbled over from ‘which of the said islands [in the Cape Verdes] they should measure the 370 leagues’.
In response, both sides requested maps and globes to ascertain the exact location of the demarcation line. On 7 May, ‘the Portuguese representatives said that sea charts were not so good as the blank globe with meridians as it represents better the shape of the world.’ For once, the Castilian delegation agreed, saying they also ‘preferred a spherical body, but that the maps and other proper instruments should not be debarred’.23 The thinking of both sides was by this stage noticeably global, although Castile still knew that the maps produced from Magellan’s voyage would be crucial in supporting their claim. Not surprisingly, the Castilian team then argued for calculating the line of demarcation from San Antonio, the most westerly island in the Cape Verdes, which would allow them a greater portion of the Pacific, and by implication the Moluccas. The Portuguese predictably responded by insisting that the calculation begin from La Sal or Buena Vista, the easternmost points in the Cape Verdes. There were less than 30 leagues separating the two points – not enough to make the crucial difference in locating the Moluccas one way or another – but a sign of the delicacy of the negotiations.
The two sides reached stalemate, and from this point negotiations became almost comically adversarial. Maps were solemnly presented for inspection, fiercely attacked, then locked away, never to be revealed again. Both sides claimed map-rigging. God was brought into the argument on more than one occasion. On some days, when the claims became particularly heated, delegates simply feigned illness, or decided they were too tired to answer difficult questions. Castile responded to Portugal’s claim to place the line of demarcation by saying ‘they thought it best to pass beyond this question, and to locate the seas and lands on a blank globe’. The advantage of this was that at least ‘they would not be standing still and doing nothing’, and ‘perhaps it would prove to whom the Moluccas belong no matter how the line be drawn’. Finally, both sides agreed to show the maps they possessed. The reason for their reticence was obvious: navigational knowledge was jealously guarded information. There was the added fear of presenting maps which might have been manipulated in the interests of a particular claim, and which could be exposed as fraudulent by experts from the opposing side.
On 23 May the Castilian delegation presented a map tracing Magellan’s voyage to the Moluccas, from which they concluded that the islands lay ‘one hundred and fifty [degrees] from the divisional line’ in a westerly direction: thirty degrees within the Castilian half of the globe. The maker of this map is unknown, but earlier maps locating the Moluccas point to Nuño Garcia, one of Castile’s team of geographical advisers, who was involved in drawing Magellan’s original maps. Garcia was responsible for a map dated 1522 which shows the eastern line of demarcation bisecting Sumatra, exactly where del Cano believed it to fall. The Castilian travel writer Peter Martyr regarded Garcia and Ribeiro as the most effective mapmakers on the Castilian team, ‘being all expert pilots and cunning in making cards for the sea’. Capturing the tone of the negotiations, he described both men as presenting ‘their globes and maps and other instruments necessary to declare the situation of the islands of the Moluccas about which was all the contention and strife’.24
That same afternoon the Portuguese responded by rejecting the map for its failure to depict key locations, including the Cape Verdes. Instead they ‘showed a similar map on which the Moluccas were one hundred and thirty-four degrees distant [eastwards] from La Sal and Buena Vista, quite different from theirs’, and forty-six degrees within the Portuguese half of the globe. Each side was claiming the authority to possess half of the known world, and yet their geographical knowledge apparently put them more than seventy degrees apart in locating the Moluccas on a world map. They were even still unable to agree on where they drew the meridian through the Cape Verdes, not that this made that much difference to the wider dispute. Five days later both delegations acknowledged that terrestrial globes represented the only way forward in trying to resolve their differences. As a result, ‘both sides presented globes showing the whole world, where each nation had placed the distances to suit themselves’. The Portuguese gave little ground, estimating that the Moluccas lay 137 degrees east of the line of division, 43 degrees within their dominion. Castile then made a radical revision to its global estimate, claiming the islands lay 183 degrees east of the line – just 3 degrees within their half of the globe.
The Castilians reached for plausible but ever more complicated scientific arguments. At first, they argued for the accurate measurement of longitude in resolving the dispute. By the sixteenth century, pilots could calculate latitude quite accurately by taking measurements according to a relatively fixed point, the North Pole star. The absence of any such fixed referent when navigating across lines of longitude from east to west meant this was less of a problem when sailing across the open Indian or Atlantic oceans, or down the coasts of Africa and America, but became one when the location of a group of islands on the other side of the world was under dispute. The only methods for calculating longitude were based on arcane and unreliable astronomical observations. The Castilians invoked the classical authority of Ptolemy to calculate longitude, claiming that ‘the description and figure of Ptolemy and the description and model found recently by those who came from the spice regions are alike’, and that as a result ‘Sumatra, Malacca and the Moluccas fall within our demarcation’.25 By now it was clear to everyone present that Magellan’s use of Ptolemy’s outmoded calculations inadvertently supported Castile’s claims to the Moluccas. Trying to estimate the circumference of the earth was also dismissed as unreliable, because nobody could agree on the exact measurement of a league as a unit of distance. ‘Much uncertainty is occasioned by this method,’ according to the Castilians, especially when such measurements were taken at sea, ‘for there are many more obstacles that alter or impede the correct calculation of them, such as, for instance, currents, tides, the ship’s loss of speed’ and a whole host of other factors.26
The Castilians therefore offered one final ingenious argument. Flat maps, they argued, distorted the calculation of degrees measured across the spherical globe. The Portuguese maps of the Moluccas and the ‘lands situated along the said eastern voyage, placed on a plane surface, and the number of leagues being reckoned by equinoctial degrees, are not in their proper location as regards the number and quantity of their degrees’. This was because ‘it is well known in cosmography that a lesser number of leagues along parallels other than the equinoctial, occupy a greater number of degrees’. There was some truth to this argument; most flat maps of the period portrayed the grid of latitude and longitude as straight lines intersecting at right angles, when geometrically they curved round the sphere, requiring complex spherical trig
onometry to calculate the exact length of a degree. The Castilians therefore concluded that ‘it will take a much greater number of degrees when they are transferred and drawn on the spherical body. Calculating by geometrical proportion, with the arc and chord, whereby we pass from a plane to a spherical surface, so that each parallel is just so much less as its distance from the equinoct is increased, the number of degrees in the said maps [of the Portuguese] is much greater than the said pilots confess.’27
Such arguments based on spheres were to no avail. Neither side was prepared to give way, and even the Castilians finally admitted in their closing remarks that they considered it ‘impossible that one side can succeed in convincing the other by demonstrating that the Moluccas fall within his territory’, without joint expeditions to agree on the size of a degree, and the correct measurement of longitude.28 That was a hopelessly ambitious prospect, and by June 1524 negotiations were brought to a close without any resolution.
Throughout the conference, Diogo Ribeiro was closely involved in shaping Castile’s geographical claim to the Moluccas, although rarely named in person. When Charles V took the diplomatic impasse over the Moluccas as an opportunity to dispatch fleets to the islands, Ribeiro was sent to La Coruña to act as the official cartographer of the recently founded Casa del la Especieria, established to challenge the Portuguese spice monopoly. Portuguese spies wrote to Lisbon from La Coruña, informing the crown that ‘a Portuguese named Diogo Ribeiro is also here, making sailing charts, spheres, world maps, astrolabes and other things for India’.29 Just five months after negotiations at Badajoz-Elvas foundered, Ribeiro was fitting out a new Castilian fleet with maps and charts, in an attempt to find a quicker westward route to the Moluccas. The fleet’s commander, the Portuguese Esteban Gómez, was convinced that Magellan had missed a strait leading into the Pacific along the coast of Florida. After nearly a year of fruitless navigation, during which he reached as far as Cape Breton, Gómez returned to La Coruña in August 1525 with little to show for his efforts other than a group of native Americans kidnapped off Nova Scotia. Having welcomed back the fleet, Ribeiro took one of the Americans into his home. He baptized him ‘Diego’, acting as his godfather. Did he adopt the kidnapped Diego as an act of compassion and charity? Or did he spot an opportunity to acquire some local knowledge of the geography of the New World? It is a fascinating but ultimately elusive glimpse of the mapmaker’s personality.
A History of the World in 12 Maps Page 26