Commercial and cultural interactions between Portugal and Italian cities since the Middle Ages led to a network of knowledge that spanned great distances. The cultural and political impact of Portuguese Expansion as well as cosmographic knowledge related to Portuguese navigations were among the central interests of this network, mostly because of the concrete geo-political necessity of dividing up the dominion of the oceans and the organization of spice trade. At this regard, the slow cultural process of redefining, correcting and expanding the imago mundi - a crucial issue for both Italian cities and Portugal - was above all the result of the movements of men and cosmographic knowledge among Portugal, Spain, several Italian cities, especially Venice and Florence, and the itinerant Holy See. From the end of the Quattrocento several German and French cities began to take part (especially Nuremburg and Saint-Dié des Vosges with Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringman).
On analyzing the abundant collections of documents in the Portuguese and Italian archives, respectively (more specifically those of Florentine, Venetian, Genovese and Vatican origin), two predominant trends become evident.
During the course of the fifteenth century, both Florentine and Venetian cosmographic studies were commissioned (through the trading companies operating between Italy and Portugal) by the Portuguese Court, as well as by high ranking men of the Church.
From the beginnings of the sixteenth century, the reverse takes place: it is now the Italian courts who attempt to acquire, often resorting to espionage, the padrão real, or new synthetic world maps drawn up by the cosmographers and pilots of Portuguese - as well as and Spanish - ships at the time. These documents were a synthetic account of their sea voyages, beyond the existing boundaries of the known, and inhabited, world of the period, often accompanied by written accounts.
The Fifteenth Century As for the first trend, paradigmatic examples of the movement of people, goods and knowledge are the commission in Venice of a mappamundi, to be drawn up by the Venetian Camaldolese monk, Fra Mauro, on behalf of Alphonse the V of Portugal in 1457, as well as a code of Ptolemy's Geographia, with illustrations by Piero del Massaio, commissioned by the Bishop of Algarve, Alvaro Afonso in 1461. Also the biographical events of Dom Pedro of Portugal (1392-1449), the Venetian Andrea Bianco (active ca 1430-1460), Alvise Ca' da Mosto (1432-1488), also known as Cadamosto, and the Genoese Antonio da Noli are noteworthy at this regard.
In 1457, a Portuguese embassy to Venice, Milan, and Rome was negotiating the participation of Portuguese militias in the crusade for Constantinople proclaimed by Pope Callixtus III (1455-58) in 1453. The embassy was headed by João Fernandes da Silveira (circa 1420-1484), chief chancellor of King Alfonso V (1438-1481), who commissioned a copy of a monumental mappamundi for the Portuguese court ("la Maiestad del Senhor di Portogallo") from Fra Mauro, a converse (a lay brother) from the Camaldolese monastery of San Michele di Murano in the Venetian lagoon. The map was sent to Lisbon on April 24, 1459 through the Venetian patrician Stefano Trevisan. Called cosmographus incomparabilis by his contemporaries, Fra Mauro was one of the greatest cartographers of his time. One of his mappamundi, now in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, is considered the most complete and complex depiction of the world in the mid-fifteenth century. Two years after the mappamundi was commissioned, several "ambassadors of the king of Portugal," apparently in the context of the same embassy to Italy led by Silveira, interviewed the humanist-scientist, Paolo dal Pozzo Tascanelli (1397-1482). The Florentine knight Francesco Castellani mentions it in his Ricordanze (Memories): I remember that on the day...of July I lent Andrea di Bochacino for master Paolo of master Domenico dal Pozo Toscanelli my large decorated mappamundo, completely finished; he took...his servant and was supposed to return it to me except when doing so he had it for several days and showed it to some ambassadors of the king of Portugal; and so Andrea and master Paolo promised to return it to me.
While no other direct information exists concerning the meeting between Toscanelli and the Portuguese ambassadors, it likely pertained to cosmographic issues that were discussed with the aid of a "large decorated mappamundo, completely finished." The connection to the commission from Fra Mauro is obvious.
Prince Pedro, the brother of Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), was one of the first Portuguese to navigate these cultural networks in the age of exploration. Pedro traveled extensively in Europe from 1425 to 1428 and, on his way back to Lisbon, managed to bring from Venice a manuscript book by Marco Polo that was printed in Lisbon in 1502.
Andrea Bianco is one of the most important cartographers of the fifteenth century. He was a comitus, that is ship's officer on board of Venetian galleys, who served for thirteen times on the muda di Fiandra. The muda di Fiandra was the most spectacular of the eight fleets of galleys that departed regularly from Venice at the beginning of the fifteenth century: at the end of spring, four or five of the most solid and capable galleys among those produced at the Arsenale of Venice, would sail out for a voyage of at least two years at a time to Portugal (Lagos, Faro and Lisbon) England (Southampton and London) and Flanders.
In 1448, while in London, Bianco drew a nautical map (nowadays held at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, F. 260, inf. 1) that is the most complete and updated cartographic synthesis of Portuguese navigations along the African coast of the mid-fifteenth century before the Atlantic expedition narrated by Alvise Cadamosto. Bianco's marine chart registers toponyms that entered Western knowledge following the expedition guided by the Portuguese pilot Aires Gomes da Silva who reached capo roxo and capo dos mastos on the Western coast of Africa in 1446 through the use of Portuguese maps that went lost. It is important to highlight that this Venetian document together with the contemporary Venetian mappamundi drawn by Fra Mauro (ca 1450) constitutes the first mention of the existence of a Portuguese cartographic tradition linked to the first phase of the Portuguese expansion.
Like Andrea Bianco, Cadamosto and Noli were merchants on the routes to Flanders and England. Attracted by the prospect of profit during a stopover in Portugal, they placed themselves in the service of the Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), participating in at least two expeditions to the region of southwest Africa. Between 1455 and 1456 they reached the Cape Verde archipelago and explored the Gambia and Senegal rivers along the African coast. Antonio da Noli remained in Portugal while Cadamosto returned to Chioggia, near Venice. In 1463 he wrote a report of the voyages he had completed, Delle navigazioni di Alvise da Ca' da Mosto, gentiluomo veneziano (The Voyages of Alvise da Ca' da Mosto, a Venetian Gentleman). Its pages represent the first European description of first-hand experiences in navigation and trade along the coast of Africa beyond the world of antiquity. The Venetian sketched a full account of that moment of European expansion, including the role of Prince Henry. He described, for example, the slave trade, which was not mentioned by other Portuguese chronicles, such as the renowned Cronica do Descobrimento e Conquista de Guiné (A Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea) by Gomes Eanes de Zurara (1410-1474), rediscovered in Paris by Ferdinand Denis and published in 1841 by Viscount de Santarém. Nor is slavery discussed in "hagiographic" reconstructions of the sixteenth century, such as the work of Giovanni Battista Ramusio, in which Prince Henry is described as a humanist motivated only by scientific curiosity and religious interest in the Crusades against the Muslims.
Meanwhile, it needs to be emphasized that during the period that includes the first seventy years of Portuguese expansion (1430-ca 1500), many documents appertaining to the sphere of either map-making, hand-written tales of sea voyages, as well as documentary evidence from the Italian printed material, have proved to be invaluable sources in better understanding this crucial phase in Portuguese history.
At this regard, the situation regarding documentation about Bartolomeu Dias, one of the great figures of Portuguese navigation and the first to reach the southern end of Africa, is worthy of mention. Portuguese sources are completely silent on his 1487-88 voyage to the Cape of Good Hope: it is not mentioned in either in Crônica del re D. João II (Chronicle of King João II) by Rui de Pina and Garcia de Resende or other contemporary Portuguese documents. Only later chronicles and writings from the mid-sixteenth century, such as the Tratado dos descobrimentos (Treatise of the discoveries) by Antonio Galvão, and the first Década by João de Barros shed light on this central personality of the Portuguese navigations. Until recently the only certainty concerning Dias's biography was that he died in the Atlantic in 1500 in the wreckage of a ship in the fleet of Pedro Álvares Cabral; the fruitful research of Luisa d'Arienzo in the Florentine Archive of the Spedale degli Innocenti (in particular, in the accounting books of the Cambini trade company, essential for a detailed study of the presence of Tuscans in Portugal and the presence of Portuguese in the Mediterranean) has added to this knowledge. The records of the Spedale enable the reconstruction of, with great richness of detail, the seafaring and privateering experiences of Dias and Gil Eanes, another important navigator in the service of João II.
Dias, the "Receiver of the storehouse of Guinea and Mina" (i.e., the arsenal), equipped the fleet of Vasco da Gama and sailed at various times on Portuguese carracks to the port of Pisa, which was involved in trade with the Cambini and Marchionni companies in Florence. The navigation to Mediterranean ports and the deals Dias and Eanes negotiated with Florentine companies in Lisbon and Tuscany highlight how the relations among the most important of the era were close. Such was the case with Bartolomeo Marchionni, who arrived in Portugal in 1468 as an agent of the Cambini and soon attained unequaled financial power. He became linked to the Portuguese rulers to whom he provided many loans, participating actively in business traffic in Guinea and in the voyages of discovery. These relationships help explain why the voyages of the Portuguese Diogo Cão (1482 and 1485) and Bartolomeo Dias were immediately recorded in the Florentine planispheres of Henricus Martellus Germanus.
Also Piero Vaglienti's recount and collections of Portuguese navigations in the Indian Ocean are particularly important for the history of Portuguese expansion. Piero Vaglienti (1438-1514) was a Florentine-Pisan merchant and the author of A Story of His Times, written in the form of a chronicle at the end of the fifteenth century. He collected in a type of anthology the numerous and detailed letters and reports about Portuguese navigation and trade in the Indies that arrived in Florence from Lisbon through the Florentine business community, transcribing them into an autograph codex preserved in the Biblioteca Riccardiana of Florence.
The Vaglienti codex constitutes some of the most important documentary evidence about Portuguese navigation. It includes the expeditions of Vasco da Gama recounted by Girolamo Sernigi (1497-98, 1502); Francesco Corbinelli on the voyages of Giovanni da Empoli, who sailed with Afonso de Albuquerque (1502-4 and 1510-14); a Report on the Kingdom of the Congo by the Portuguese chronicler, Rui da Pina; the celebrated Letters to Soderini attributed to Amerigo Vespucci; and a description of the expedition to India led by Tristão da Cunha (1507). The twenty-six letters/reports collected by Vaglienti-including at least a pair of unique surviving copies in which the Italian translation entirely replaces the original Portuguese that has been lost-provide first-hand evidence of the primary protagonists during this crucial moment in Portuguese and European history, including their reception in the Tuscan and Venetian commercial environment.
In the texts composed by Vaglienti and in his annotations to the letters, the Florentine merchant distinctly demonstrates his understanding of the role of the Portuguese voyages in world history and their inauspicious consequences for Venetian trade. The opening of a new route for spices through the activity of Vasco da Gama and other Portuguese navigators ended Venetian supremacy in the spice trade, changing the balance of power in the commercial world and also among the Italian states themselves. In a commemorative text addressed to King Manuel I (1469-1521), Vaglienti wrote:
The spices had or used to go to Cairo by the Red Sea route, [the king of Portugal] nowadays has brought them to Lisbon, so that he has taken from the sultan a yearly income of 500 or 600 thousand ducats, and as much again from the Venetians, and he has brought each thing to the port of Lisbon, his port and the place belonging to His Majesty.
In this Elogio, Vaglienti gives credit to the Florentine Toscanelli for showing Alfonso V (through the Florentine merchant Bartolomeo Marchionni, who was at the Portuguese court) the way to avoid the Cairo route and establish a direct link between the spice trade and Lisbon:
of such a thing and activity is the main reason our Florentine medical doctor, who had first lost much of time with histology and heavenly signs, saw and recognized that there was not a single person on the Earth who was better able to make and set in motion this voyage than his majesty the king of Portugal: and this was maestro Pagholo del Pozo Toschanelli, a singular person, who advised one of our Florentines who was in his court named Bartolomeo Marchiane of this matter, and he recommended it to His Majesty so that he that would be praised by the entire world, and the spiceries that s hould have or used to go to Cairo through the Red Sea
from there brought to Lisbon.
According to Vaglienti, through the mediation of Marchionni, Toscanelli's recommendation would have reached the Portuguese court via the Lisbon cleric Fernão Martins. In a famous letter to Martins sent from Portugal in early 1474, supposedly accompanied by a now lost map, Toscanelli had expressed his opinion not just about western but eastern navigation as well (which was more important to Portuguese interests). Written in Latin, the letter was transcribed by Colombus on several pages in his copy of the Historia rerum ubique gestarum of Pius II, printed in Venice in 1477 and housed at the Biblioteca Columbina of Seville.
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