Gómez’s voyage inspired the creation of the first of Ribeiro’s series of world maps that provided a compelling case in support of Castile’s claim to the Moluccas. The map, completed in 1525, can be seen as a first draft of Castilian territorial ambitions in South-east Asia. Handdrawn on four pieces of parchment measuring 82 × 208 centimetres, the map has no title, no explanatory text, and many of its outlines are sketchy and incomplete. China’s coastline is a series of discontinuous lines, the northern outline of the Red Sea is incomplete, and the Nile is not even shown – these regions were of little interest to Ribeiro or his Castilian paymasters. Instead, the map’s innovative geography is confined to its eastern and western extremities. Its only inscription is written in a faint hand just inside the North American coastline running from Nova Scotia down to Florida, which reads: ‘[l]and which was discovered by Esteban Gómez this year of 1525 by order of His Majesty’.30 On Ribeiro’s map, all six of Gómez’s new landfalls along the Florida coastline are carefully transcribed.31 The revised eastern coastline is shown in a sharper but lighter hand than the rest of the map, suggesting that Ribeiro hastily incorporated the results of Gómez’s voyage just as the map was being finished in the last few months of 1525.
Ribeiro’s innovations did not end with a new outline of the North American coastline. At the bottom right-hand corner of the map, situated right below the Moluccas in the western hemisphere, is a mariner’s astrolabe, used for making celestial observations. In the left-hand corner, Ribeiro has drawn a quadrant, used to measure height and declination. Just to the left of the Americas is an enormous circular declination table (the ‘circulus solaris’), incorporating a calendar which allowed navigators to calculate the sun’s position throughout the year.32 These make it the earliest known example of a map depicting navigational instruments used at sea, replacing the usual religious or ethnographic icons of earlier world maps.
If this is effectively a sketch map of Castilian overseas imperial policy, why should Ribeiro go to so much trouble to include such carefully drawn scientific instruments? The answer seems to lie in his positioning of the Moluccas. At the map’s eastern limits, just above the astrolabe, the ‘Provincia de Maluco’ is clearly depicted, but it also appears again on the other side of the map, at its most westerly point. In the east the astrolabe flies the flags of both Castile and Portugal, but the Portuguese flag is positioned to the west of the Moluccas, while the Castilian flag is placed to their east. According to the line drawn at Tordesillas, which is shown running down the dead centre of Ribeiro’s map and labelled ‘Linea de la Partición’, the astrolabe’s flags show the Moluccas just inside the Castilian half of the globe. As if to emphasize the point, Ribeiro reproduces the islands again on the western side of the map, and positions the rival flags of the two empires to reiterate the Castilian claim. Science, in the shape of Ribeiro’s astrolabes, quadrants and declination tables, is appropriated in support of Castile’s territorial ambitions: the position of the Moluccas must be correct if the mapmaker has recourse to such technically complicated scientific instruments. As a paid servant of Castile, Ribeiro was compiling a comprehensive world map that placed the Moluccas within the Castilian half of the globe, but as a cosmographer committed to the incremental mapping of the known world, he was also carefully incorporating the geographical discoveries made by Gómez and his contemporaries.
In December 1526 Charles V ordered yet another expedition to the Moluccas. But he needed money urgently to sustain an empire that stretched across Europe, Iberia and into the Americas, and which was facing conflict with Turks and Lutherans. Charles had begun to realize that maintaining a claim to the Moluccas was logistically and financially unsustainable, so before the fleet could depart he announced that he was prepared to sell his claim to the Moluccas. It was an unpopular move in Castile. The Cortes, the kingdom’s ruling assembly, wanted to bring the spice trade through Castilian ports and was therefore against such a sale, but for Charles there were larger issues at stake. He needed to finance imminent wars with France and England, and to settle his sister Catherine’s dowry to King John of Portugal, following their marriage in 1525. King John celebrated the marriage by commissioning a series of tapestries entitled ‘The Spheres’, depicting a terrestrial globe controlled by the king and his new wife. John’s sceptre rests on Lisbon, and the globe shows Portuguese flags flying over its possessions throughout Africa and Asia. On the furthest eastern limits of the globe it is possible to see the Moluccas, still flying the Portuguese flag.
Complementing John’s marriage to Catherine, Charles married John’s sister Isabel in March 1526, in a further attempt to cement the dynastic alliances between the two kingdoms. Notwithstanding the opinions of his new brother-in-law, Charles still insisted on his claim to the Moluccas. He presented the papal ambassador, Baldassare Castiglione, with Diogo Ribeiro’s 1525 map of the world, including its obvious placement of the Moluccas within Castilian dominion. It was a fitting gift for Castiglione, better known today as the author of The Courtier, one of the Renaissance’s greatest manuals on how artfully to make friends and influence people at court. Through their respective use of geography, both emperors were sending out a clear message: they might be closely united in marriage, but they were still divided over their territorial claims to the Moluccas.
Charles knew that Portugal would not give up the islands without major concessions. He had agreed a paltry dowry of 200,000 gold ducats for his sister’s marriage to King John (in contrast, King John had paid Charles 900,000 cruzados in cash as Isabella’s dowry, the largest in European history). Charles therefore proposed that the 200,000 ducats be forgone in return for granting the Portuguese unlimited access to the Moluccas for six years, after which their ownership would pass to Castile.33 It was a breathtakingly mercenary offer, compounded by the fact that, as King John prevaricated, Charles offered to sell his claim to the islands to King Henry VIII, even as he contemplated war with his English relative. Robert Thorne, an English merchant living in Seville, wisely counselled Henry to stay well away from such a politically tangled dispute. ‘For these coasts and situation of the islands’ of the Moluccas, he argued, ‘every of the cosmographers and pilots of Portugal and Spain do set after their purpose. The Spaniards more towards the Orient, because they should appear to appertain to the Emperor [Charles V], and the Portuguese more toward the Occident, for that they should fall within their jurisdiction.’34 Henry sensibly declined an interest in the islands. Charles was left to gamble on John’s reluctance to intensify conflict with his brother-in-law over the Moluccas, and he was right. At the beginning of 1529 both sides agreed to conclude a treaty at Saragossa that would finally settle the matter of territorial ownership.
As these machinations continued, Ribeiro set to work redrafting his 1525 map to provide an even more convincing cartographic statement in support of Castile’s claim to the Moluccas. In 1527 he completed a second hand-drawn map, based closely on his 1525 map, but slightly larger and finished to a much higher level of detail and artistry. The map’s full title, running across its top and bottom, suggests the greater scale of its geographical ambitions: ‘Universal chart in which is contained all that until now has been discovered in the world. A cosmographer of His Majesty made it in the year 1527, in Seville.’ As well as filling in the gaps left on his 1525 map, Ribeiro adds a series of written legends, mostly describing the function of the scientific instruments, but south-east of the Moluccas is a telling inscription which once again announces the Castilian claim to the islands. Describing ‘[t]hese islands and province of the Moluccas’, the legend explains that they have been positioned ‘in this longitude according to the opinion and judgment of Juan Sebastián del Cano, captain of the first ship that came from the Moluccas and the first that circumvented the world to the navigation she made in the years 1520, 1521 and 1522’.35 Attributing the position of the Moluccas to del Cano’s calculations invokes him as a first-hand authority, but it perhaps also betrays Ribei
ro’s misgivings about locating the islands so far east. Nevertheless, his 1527 world map was clearly intended to provide even more persuasive evidence in support of Castile’s claim to the Moluccas.
In April 1529 the Portuguese and Castilian delegations reconvened in the town of Saragossa to renew their negotiations over the Moluccas. After the intense legal and geographical debates that took place at Badajoz–Elvas in 1524, the peremptory discussions were something of an anticlimax. In early 1528, as Charles was about to go to war with France, he dispatched ambassadors to Portugal to propose their neutrality in the coming conflict, in return for a quick settlement of the Moluccas dispute. The terms of the settlement were agreed by ambassadors by early 1529. The final Treaty of Saragossa, ratified by Castile on 23 April 1529, and by the Portuguese eight weeks later, agreed that Charles would give up his claim to the Moluccas in return for substantial financial compensation, and any Castilian found trading in the region could be punished.
Under the treaty’s terms the emperor agreed to ‘sell from this day and for all time, to the said King of Portugal, for him and all the successors to the crown of his kingdom, all right, action, dominion, ownership, and possession, or quasi-possession, and all rights of navigation, traffic and trade’ to the Moluccas. In return, Portugal agreed to pay Castile 350,000 ducats. But Charles also insisted on reserving the right to redeem his claim at any point: he could renew it by returning the cash in full, though this would require appointing new teams to resolve the questions of geographical positioning left unanswered at Badajoz-Elvas. For Charles, this was a clever face-saving reservation, as it was a clause that was unlikely ever to be invoked, but it sustained the fiction of Castile’s belief in the validity of its claim.
Both sides decided that a standard map should be created, based not on the accurate measurement of distances, but on the geographical rhetoric produced by the geographers at Badajoz-Elvas. It was a map on which ‘a line must be determined from pole to pole, that is to say, from north to south, by a semicircle extending northeast by east nineteen degrees from Molucca, to which number of degrees correspond almost seventeen degrees on the equinoctial, amounting to two hundred and ninety-seven and one-half leagues east of the islands of Molucca’.36 After six years of negotiations, Portugal and Castile finally agreed on where to place the Moluccas on a world map. A dividing line was drawn right round the globe, taking into account the curvature of the earth. In the western hemisphere the line passed through the islands of ‘Las Velas and Santo Thome’ in the Cape Verde islands, and crucially continued right round the globe to fall ‘17 degrees (which equal 297½ degrees) east of the Moluccas’, placing the islands firmly within the Portuguese sphere.
The use of maps enshrined in the treaty was unprecedented. Both Castilians and Portuguese acknowledged for the first time the global dimensions of the earth. They also established the map as a legally binding document able to uphold an enduring political settlement. The treaty stipulated that both sides should draw up identical maps enshrining the new location of the Moluccas, and that ‘they shall be signed by the said sovereigns and sealed with their seals, so that each one will keep his own chart; and the said line shall remain fixed henceforth at the point and place so designated’. This was more than just the royal seal of approval: it was a way of recognizing that maps were fixed objects, and a means of communication between competing political factions. As documents, they were able to assimilate and reproduce changing information, through which rival states could resolve their differences. The treaty concluded as much in its clause stating that the agreed map ‘shall also designate the spot in which the said vassals of the said Emperor and King of Castile shall situate and locate Molucca, which during the time of this contract shall be regarded as situated in such place’.37 The map thus bound the two empires to agree the location of the Moluccas, at least until they decided to disagree and relocate the islands for whatever diplomatic or political reason arose subsequently.
The official map based on the treaty’s terms has not survived. Another map did survive, and was completed just as the treaty received its final ratification: Ribeiro’s third and definitive version of his world map, entitled ‘Universal chart in which is contained all that has been discovered in the world until now. Diogo Ribeiro, Cosmographer to His Majesty, made it in the year 1529. Which is divided into two parts according to the capitulation which took place between the Catholic Kings of Spain and King John of Portugal at the city of Tordesillas in the year 1494.’ The map’s basis in Ribeiro’s first effort of 1525 is obvious, but its size (85 × 204 centimetres), detailed illustrations and copious inscriptions on expensive vellum testify to its status as a presentation copy designed to convince foreign dignitaries of Castile’s claim to the Moluccas. The position of the islands as well as the legend describing del Cano’s voyage remain as on the 1527 map. The distance between the west coast of America and the Moluccas is hugely underestimated at just 134 degrees, leaving the islands positioned at 172° 30′ W of the Tordesillas line – or 7½° within the Castilian half of the globe.38 Across the Atlantic and Pacific, ships are depicted plying their trade, but even these apparently innocent decorative flourishes play their part in supporting the Castilian claim. ‘I go to the Moluccas,’ says one; ‘I return from the Moluccas,’ says another.39 Despite the pervasiveness of the Moluccas on the map, many of the previous markers of the diplomatic conflict shown on Ribeiro’s earlier maps have gone. The Castilian and Portuguese flags in the eastern and western extremities of the map have disappeared, as has the Tordesillas line, even though the map’s title explicitly refers to it.
The map appears to be the final and definitive statement of Castile’s seven-year claim to the Moluccas. Charles’s decision to relinquish his claim to the islands was unpopular among the Castilian elite. Was Ribeiro’s map a last-ditch attempt by those who opposed Charles’s strategic surrender of his claim to reassert their authority over the islands? Or did it arrive too late, just as Charles agreed to relinquish his rights to the islands under the terms of the Treaty of Saragossa? Perhaps. But the decorative legends at the bottom of the map suggest another possibility. To the right of the rival Castilian and Portuguese flags, Ribeiro has placed the papal coat of arms. This, and the fact that the map is now held in the Vatican Library in Rome, may indicate that it was created in response to a very specific moment. In the winter of 1529–30 the emperor Charles V travelled to Italy to be crowned as Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Clement VII in Bologna in February 1530.40 The map appears to have been drawn to intimidate the papal authorities with an image of the world according to the wishes of its emperor. The original Treaty of Tordesillas was ratified by the papacy in 1494; by 1529, the power of Castile and Portugal meant that they paid little heed to the papacy’s opinion, unless one of its rulers needed something from them. As Charles V travelled to Italy to receive the crown of Holy Roman Emperor, he did indeed require papal sanction, even if only for public and ceremonial reasons. Offering the pope a world map adorned with the papal coat of arms may have assuaged fears that the papacy was being sidelined in the momentous global political decisions surrounding the fate of the Moluccas. But it also reminded Pope Clement that it was Charles, not Portugal’s King John, who was now the most powerful ruler in Christendom. Just two years earlier, after Clement had decided to transfer his political allegiance to the emperor’s great rival, the French king Francis I, Charles had ordered his troops to sack Rome. For diplomatic reasons, the emperor had relinquished his claim to the Moluccas, but Ribeiro’s map still reproduced the Castilian delegation’s belief in the position of the islands, regardless of the exigencies of diplomacy. Was this the world according to Charles V, for presentation to a humbled pope?
Although Ribeiro’s final map was not needed at the negotiating table in Saragossa, it still represents a comprehensive summation of the Castilian case for ownership of the Moluccas, and stands as a remarkable testament to the brilliance of Ribeiro’s skilful manipulation of a g
eographical reality that he probably suspected would eventually disprove its own fine detail. It remained available to the Castilian authorities, should they wish to revive their claim to the islands in future years. The fact that none of Ribeiro’s world maps were ever printed, but remained in manuscript form, is a further sign of their political sensitivity. To commit them to print would have fixed the parameters of Castile’s claims for the foreseeable future, but if they remained in manuscript they could easily be amended if it became necessary to locate the Moluccas somewhere else to support a future Castilian bid. If Castile had indeed renewed its claim, perhaps Ribeiro’s map would have secured even more enduring fame. As it was, Charles V’s imperial interests moved elsewhere, and Ribeiro was left to return to his adopted home in Seville, inventing increasingly irrelevant navigational instruments.
A History of the World in 12 Maps Page 27