Amerigo
by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
Summary
In 1507, European cartographers were struggling to redraw their maps of the world and to name the newly found lands of the Western Hemisphere. The name they settled on: America, after Amerigo Vespucci, an obscure Florentine explorer.
In Amerigo, the award-winning scholar Felipe Fernández-Armesto answers the question “What’s in a name?” by delivering a rousing flesh-and-blood narrative of the life and times of Amerigo Vespucci. Here we meet Amerigo as he really was: a sometime slaver and small-time jewel trader; a contemporary, confidant, and rival of Columbus; an amateur sorcerer who attained fame and honor by dint of a series of disastrous failures and equally grand self-reinventions. Filled with well-informed insights and amazing anecdotes, this magisterial and compulsively readable account sweeps readers from Medicean Florence to the Sevillian court of Ferdinand and Isabella, then across the Atlantic of Columbus to the brave New World where fortune favored the bold.
Amerigo Vespucci emerges from these pages as an irresistible avatar for the age of exploration–and as a man of genuine achievement as a voyager and chronicler of discovery.
Excerpt
THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICESHIP
Florence, c. 1450–1491 Launching the quest for “honour and fame”
Heroism and villainy shade into each other. So do salesmanship and sorcery. Amerigo Vespucci was both hero and villain—but I expect readers of this book already know that. My purpose is to show that he was also both salesman and sorcerer. He was a merchant who became a magus.
This book tells the story of how that strange mutation happened and tries to help readers understand why. The naming of America was a by- product of the story: a measure of the success of Amerigo’s self- salesmanship, an effect of the spellbinding nature of his sorcery. Salesmanship and sorcery require some of the same qualities: quicksilver tongue, featherlight fingers, infectious self-confidence. Vespucci began to acquire those qualities in the city of his birth and education. In Renaissance Florence, where life was fast-paced, flashy, competitive, consumerist, and violent, prestidigitators’ skills came easily. That was just as well, because you needed them to survive.
The Magical City
In this city of forty thousand people, as much wealth was concentrated as in any spot in Europe. Florentine prosperity was a triumph against the odds, a classic response to a challenging environment. The city became a great riverside manufactory of fine wools and silks, despite having an unreliable river that habitually ran dry in summer. Florence became a great international trading state, with its own fleets, despite its location fifty miles from the sea, where enemies could easily control outlets and approaches. Fifteenth-century Florentines took pride in their peculiarity: They retained a republican constitution in an age of encroaching monarchies. The elite were unashamed oligarchs who celebrated the nobility of wealth rather than birth. In Florence, a prince could be a merchant without derogation.
In an age that worshipped antiquity, Florence had no historic pedigree, but most Florentines nourished their identity with myths: Their city was a sister of Rome, founded by Trojans. Closer to the truth was the origins narrative that Florence’s historians proposed: Florence was a “daughter” of Rome, founded by Romans, “of the same stuff,” only more faithful to republican traditions.1 Florentines asserted their superiority over older, self-proclaimedly nobler neighbors by investing in civic pride: an ampler dome than any rival cathedral’s, more public statuary, higher towers, costlier paintings, richer charities, grander churches, more sumptuous palaces, more eloquent poets. They claimed Petrarch as their own because he had Florentine parents, even though he hardly ever visited the city.
In consequence, Florence valued genius and was prepared to pay for it. Like classical Athens or fin de siècle Vienna or the Edinburgh of the Enlightenment or the Paris of the philosophes, the city seemed to breed talent, nurture genius, and deserve renown. The greatest age was over by the mid–fifteenth century, at about the time of Amerigo Vespucci’s birth. The generation of Brunelleschi (d. 1446), Ghiberti (d. 1455), Fra Angelico (d. 1455), Donatello (d. 1466), Alberti (d. 1472), and Michelozzo (d. 1472) was aging, dead, or dying. The institutions of the republic had fallen under the control of a single dynasty, the Medici. But the tradition of excellence in arts and learning lived on. The sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio rented his home from one of Amerigo’s cousins. Sandro Botticelli lived next door to the house where Amerigo Vespucci was born. In Amerigo’s parish church, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio worked on commissions from his own family. At the time Machiavelli was an unknown twentysomething. Machiavelli’s rival as an historian and diplomat, Francesco Guicciardini, was a small boy. Florence’s fertility in the production of genius seemed inexhaustible. By the time Amerigo left the city in 1491, Leonardo da Vinci had already departed for Milan, and the revolution that was to overthrow the Medici in 1494 caused a temporary loss of opportunities for patronage. But the careers of the next generation—including that of Michelangelo, who was Ghirlandaio’s apprentice—were already under way.
Could any of the greatness with which he was surrounded have rubbed off on young Amerigo?
Copyright © 2007 Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
Reprinted by permission of Random House Inc.
Reviews
“A dazzling new biography . . . an elegant tale” –Publishers Weekly (starred review)
”[T]he author introduces [Amerigo] as an amazing Renaissance character independent of his name’s fame–and does Fernández-Armesto ever deliver”–Booklist (starred review)
“Eminently readable…Fernandez-Armesto tells this complicated story with verve and skill”—Washington Post Book World
Author's Biography
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, the Prince of Asturias Professor of History at Tufts University, is the author of several books. He is the recipient of many honors and awards, including the Cairo Medal, the John Carter Brown Medal, and the Premio Nacional de Investigación of Spain’s Sociedad Geográfica Española. His work has appeared in twenty-four languages, and his journalism and broadcasts appear frequently in Spanish and British media.