Cortés, Hernan: Pietro Martire d'Anghiera [Peter Martyr]:

$65,000 · Offered by William Reese Company

DE NUPER SUB D. CAROLO REPERTIS INSULIS, SIMULATQUE INCOLARUM MORIBUS...ENCHIRIDION. From the collection of R. David Parsons. Peter Martyr's De nuper repertis insulis ("On the islands recently discovered") is the first substantial printed account of the first three expeditions to Mexico and the discovery of the Mayan and Aztec civilizations. Including information from the lost first Cortés letter, it is a key work for the history of the New World from 1516 to 1520, including the conquest of Mexico and a description of Cuba. Indeed, with the loss of the first Cortés' letter, this is the first authoritative account of that expedition as well as of the preliminary explorations by Cordova and Grijalva which preceded it. In the bibliographical sequence of works related to the discovery of Mexico and conquest, Martyr's De nuper repertis insulis is preceded only by the brief account in German printed in Nuremberg in 1520 and the account of Fr. Juan Diaz printed in Italian and Latin in 1520.Cortés' first letter remains unlocated, and is believed by some to have been suppressed by the Council for the Indies. Written in July of 1519, it would be the earliest account of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, including the founding of Vera Cruz; a letter written by the magistrates of that new settlement at the same time confirms what the contents would have been, and therefore the appropriateness of Martyr's 1521 letter as a substitute. Historian and bibliographer Henry R. Wagner was long convi

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