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--- Begin Message ---John: I fully agree with you that the 1494 treaty line is suggested or implied in the Waldseemueller world map because there is that bisection of that island (or land mass) in the North Atlantic to the west of Greenland which is a bow in the direction of Portugal's claims in that region of the NW Atlantic -- presumably the land that Gaspar Core Real had seen or claimed as suggested in the Cantino/Caverio maps. . I never thought to follow or figure out how exactly this implied line in Waldseemueller might run to the south through South America and where it might exit along the eastern coastline of South America -- perhaps at the Rio de la Plata as you have suggested. In any case, by deciding not to draw the treaty line clearly (as was done in the Cantino map) I think the scholars at Saint-Die were indicating that they did not want to take a clear position and interject themselves and the Vatican -- given the direct institutional tie to the Holy See -- into what was still very delicate legal issue between Lisbon and Madrid. Louis Dommartin who was the Grand Prevot at Saint-Die and a major scholar in his own right and who had studied in Italy would have not have allowed the scholars to get the Vatican into this dispute in such a detailed fashion. Also, by deciding not to name the New World in honor of Columbus -- who had connections to the Saint-Die circle via the Dommartin family which Vespucci did not enjoy -- they also avoided interjecting themselves (and again the Vatican by implication) into the ongoing legal dispute between King Ferdinand and Admiral Diego Colon in the Spanish courts after Columbus' death in May 1506 as to the privileges in the Capitulations that had been granted in 1492 to Columbus by Queen Isabella. This was a nasty legal dispute not settled between the King and the Second Admiral Diego Colon until late 1508 or early 1509. Dommartin and the scholars wanted to steer clear of that dispute, hence Columbus was not given the honor. It was a tough decision given Columbus' ties to Dommartin and also Duke Rene's grandfather (King Rene) but it was the decision that they made. That is the true story here. Of course naming the New World for Vespucci in 1507 who had fled Lisbon in late 1504 and most likely suspected as a Spanish spy after that by the Portuguese King Manuel) had some major risks. It was a real jab in the eye King Manuel. There is no way sugar-coat this decision at Saint-Die but Vespucci was back on the Spanish royal payroll in 1505 and the Saint-Die scholars dedicated Vespucci's letters to Amerigo's employer King Ferdinand. This was how the scholars decided to play it, package it all politically. Nonetheless, there are clear visual bows in Lisbon's direction (its claims or interests) here and there throughout the Waldseemueller world map as we have discussed in the past many times. That said, the aforesaid packaging discussed above was a clear tilt toward King Ferdinand/Spain. And beyond that, the scholars could not resist the temptation to depict the new southern continent with a southern water passage (see the globe gores) and a western coastline and a cone/island-like shaped land mass which they considered to be non-hypothetical in their minds (e.g. see alteration of Ringmann's 1505 poem, other statements by Lud/Waldseemueller). Surely this would have made eye-pop in Spain. These amazing geographical depictions simply revealed far too much for Lisbon's liking, as I argue in my book, and this was the context for Waldseemueller's later cartographic reversals in 1513 and 1516. Keep in mind, in an effort to prevent leaks, King Manuel had issued a royal edict in November 1504 forbidding the depiction of the east coast of the new southern land mass below 7 degrees latitude south. But he did not succeed in this regard, the new knowledge seeped into some maps, especially the Waldseemueller map and globe gores. I devote portions of several chapters in my book to assessing the various pro- and cons the Saint-Die had to weigh and did weigh when putting this package together at Saint-Die including their astute decision to balance out the dedications of the Vespucci letters to King Ferdinand and Cosmographiae Introductio to the Holy Roman Emperor Maxmilian whose son Philip lost out via a strange death in September 1506 to Ferdinand in what had been a titanic dynastic power struggle after Queen Isabella's death in late 1504. The Saint-Die scholars were politically aware scholars about all these various matters, and not fellows or fools who got "suckered: by Vespucci's letters (a word Fernandez-Armesto uses in his book) and their political awareness and can be seen when we make an effort to contextualize their actions in terms of the historical situations during the 1505-1507 time frame. All this is going beyond cartographic analysis in the narrower technical sense of that term. Furthermore, as far as I can recall, Schwartz, Lester and perhaps also Professor Castro in their books have nothing to say about how the Saint-Die scholars decided to deal with or dodge the obviously major political-legal treaty line issue issues. This sums up my analysis on these specific points. I will post it on Maphist because someone who has not read my book might have a different line of analysis or can point to something in the books of these other 3 scholars which I have overlooked. Peter
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