![]() ![]() Being very lustful, cause the private parts of their husbands to swell up to such a huge size that they appear deformed and disgusting. among them who had a flabby breast," but they are also monsters and witches: ". who was reputed to have eaten more than 300 human bodies." The women are intensely desirable: "none. "They eat one another, the victor the vanquished," he wrote. it pleased the Almighty to show us the continent, new earth and an unknown world."īut turn the coin and he was in a world of devils. we were prey to such terrible fear that we gave up every hope of surviving." But when everything was as bad as it could get, "In the midst of this terrible tempest. Writing to Lorenzo de'Medici, he moaned about "the risks of shipwreck, the innumerable physical deprivations, the permanent anguish that afflicted our spirits. He left on his first voyage on, taken on as a specialist in the primitive artof navigation. Supporting himself as a supplier to departing ships – hence the "pickle-dealer" slur hurled at him centuries later by Ralph Waldo Emerson – he immersed himself in maps and charts and speculation. But the challenge of the unknown was too muchto resist: in 1491, the year before Columbus made landfall in "the Indies", Vespucci left Florence and headed for Seville. It was all of course a tremendous bluff: these men knew the world was round, but had only the haziest idea what lay on the other side of it. "I send Your Majesty a map drawn by my own hand the islands from which the journey to the East must commence." ![]() ![]() Vespucci's contemporary in the city, the polymath Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, wrote to the King of Portugal in June 1474, dangling before him visions of "these very fertile lands with every type of spice and gems," of palaces covered with solid gold where philosophy and astrology, arts and inventions flourish," and insisting that a sea passage to the East was a certainty. Thanks to Polo all Europe knew about the fabulous riches of the Orient, and now the Renaissance men of Florence and elsewhere dreamt of reaching them by sea. With the fall of the Khans in China and the conversion of the Mongols who ruled Persia to Islam, Marco Polo's land route to the Far East was blocked. The studies were by no means only of theoretical interest. Vespucci was swept up in the hectic scholarly atmosphere of the city, the rapidly evolving knowledge of geometry, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, astronomy and astrology, and became a close friend of a cousin of Lorenzo de'Medici. The son of a notary who expanded his client base to include the city's ruling elite, Vespucci was born in 1454, and in his youth he was close to the men and women who made Florence the flower of the Renaissance. ![]()
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