Peter Martyr d'Anghiera

Life

Peter Martyr d'Anghiera entered the world on 2 February 1457 in Arona, a town in Piedmont on Lake Maggiore, and later took his name from the nearby settlement of Angera. His early education came under Giovanni Borromeo, who was then the Count of Arona. When he turned twenty, Martyr traveled to Rome, where he connected with influential figures within the Catholic Church. There he met the Spanish ambassador Íñigo López de Mendoza y Quiñones, and in August 1487 accompanied him from Rome to Zaragoza. Quickly, Martyr rose to prominence among Spain’s humanist circles. In 1488, the University of Salamanca invited him to lecture. He eventually became chaplain to the court of Ferdinand and Isabella. From 1492 onward, his main responsibility was instructing young nobles at the Spanish court. In 1501, he undertook a diplomatic journey to Egypt, aiming to prevent the Sultan from retaliating against Christians in Egypt and Palestine after the Moors’ defeat in Spain and the fall of Granada. Martyr succeeded by insisting that no forced conversions had occurred and that Granada’s Muslims had requested baptism freely; he also offered Spanish aid against the Ottoman threat to Egypt. He recorded this voyage in the Legatio Babylonica, included in the 1511 edition of his Decades. For this achievement, he earned the title maestro de los caballeros, or master of knights. In 1520, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, appointed Martyr as chronicler for the newly created Council of the Indies, tasking him with documenting New World explorations. Charles granted him the title Count Palatine in 1523 and recalled him to the Council of the Indies the following year. Pope Clement VII, at Charles’s suggestion, invested Martyr as Abbot of Jamaica. Though he never set foot on the island, Martyr oversaw the building of its first stone church. He died in Granada in 1526.

Works

Peter Martyr d'Anghiera left behind a massive body of work, with historians estimating he wrote around eight hundred letters. These were sent to many important people and covered events in Spain and its royal court, often adopting a chatty, newsy tone. Because he moved in courtly circles, Martyr knew most of the leading figures of his time personally, and his letters have become a key source for details about their looks, personalities, habits, and interesting stories. His greatest literary achievement came as a chronicler. He gathered documents and firsthand reports from explorers, interviewed them directly, studied Christopher Columbus’s letters, and used records from the Council of the Indies. He had a strong understanding of geography and was the first European to recognize the importance of the Gulf Stream.

In 1511, his Opera was published in Seville. This collection included the first historical record of Spanish discoveries. The core of this work was the Decades, ten reports. Two of these had originally been letters about Columbus’s voyages, sent to Cardinal Ascanius Sforza in 1493 and 1494. In 1501, at the request of Cardinal Luigi d’Aragona, Martyr added eight chapters covering Columbus’s voyage and the deeds of Martin Alonzo Pinzón. A supplement covering events from 1501 to 1511 was added in 1511. Alongside the Decades, he published an account of his time in Egypt, describing its people, land, and history. By 1516, he had completed two more Decades. The first covered the exploits of Alonso de Ojeda, Diego de Nicuesa, and Vasco Núñez de Balboa. The second described Balboa’s discovery of the Pacific Ocean, Columbus’s fourth voyage, and the expeditions of Pedrarias Dávila. These three Decades were published together in Alcalá de Henares in 1516 as De orbe novo decades cum Legatione Babylonica. The fourth Decade, printed in 1521 as Enchiridion de nuper sub D. Carolo repertis insulis, covered the voyages of Francisco Hernández de Córdoba, Juan de Grijalva, and Hernán Cortés. The fifth Decade, from 1523, dealt with the conquest of Mexico and Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe. The sixth Decade, published in 1524, recounted Dávila’s discoveries along the west coast of America.