Polo, Marco: Santaella, Rodrigo, translator:

$225,000 · Offered by William Reese Company · No longer available

LIBRO DEL FAMOSO MARCO POLO VENECIANO DE LAS COSAS MARAVILLOSAS QUE VIDO EN LAS PARTES ORIENTALES: CONVIENE SABER EN LAS INDIAS, ARMENIA, ARABIA, PERSIA, & TARTARIA. E DEL PODERIO DEL GRAN CAN Y ... Third edition in Spanish and the earliest feasibly obtainable in that language. Of the various early versions of Marco Polo, this is of exceptional importance for Santaella's suggestion in the introduction that the regions visited by Polo in Asia were geographically distinct from the lands newly discovered by Columbus.Santaella's introduction, titled "Cosmographia," is a survey of the known parts of the world. Challenging the traditional tripartite conception of the continents (Africa, Europe, Asia), Santaella posited the distinction between East and West Indies on the basis of the different natural resources and environments of both regions, a whole year before Vespucci's Mundus Novus (1504). Santaella concludes that Asia, Tarshish, Ophir, Cethim, and the other territories explored by the Portuguese are in the East, while Hispaniola and Antilla (a corruption of "Antindia," meaning "opposite to India") are in the West, a conclusion that reflected the growing conviction, in the years following Columbus' discoveries, that these lands represented a New World rather than an extension of the Old, even as Columbus himself persisted in his belief that he had found outliers of Marco Polo's Indies: "There is no evidence...that Columbus ever changed his cosmographical ideas, or realized the

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