Peter Martyr, first historian of the Americas, in his own hand

Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, Italian historian of the New World (1457-1526). Autograph receipt of funds, signed in full.

€ 65,000.00

A unique survival in the hand of Peter Martyr d'Anghiera (1457-1526), the first European historian of the New World. Peter Martyr was an Italian swept up in the milieu of the Spanish court, a tutor to princes, and a personal friend of the likes of Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Amerigo Vespucci. It was Martyr who wrote the first accounts of Central and South America in a series of letters and reports, which were subsequently published from 1511 to 1530 in compilations referred to as his "Decades". Much of what is known about the looks, personality, and minds of the early explorers come from Martyr's letters, which sometimes included lively gossip. He was the first to describe contact between Europeans and Native Americans, and provided vital early insight into Pre-Columbian American civilizations; he was the first to understand the importance of the Gulf Stream, and the first European to reference India rubber.

This receipt of funds is written in Peter Martyr's own hand ("mia propria mano") while he was spending time back in Milan, attached to the Sforza family. It acknowledges the receipt of a sum of twelve imperial livres linked to the late Baptista Sfondrato, a member of the powerful Sfondrato family and another high connection of Peter Martyr's.

Between the Sforzas and the Sfondratos, already Martyr was moving in powerful circles, and at the court of Spain he witnessed the earliest years of the Age of Exploration and one of the greatest sea-changes in human history. His friendships with the great explorers of the age granted Martyr access to documents and personal interviews few others could reach, swiftly establishing him as the foremost historian of the Americas in Europe.

When this note was sold at Goodspeed's Book Shop in the 1970s, then-director Gordon Banks referred to it as "probably the most unusual item and perhaps the rarest that we have listed in several years." A unique text in Martyr's own hand, it helps sketch the complex web of political and personal alliances through which Martyr navigated his career. No handwritten notes by Martyr or any of his conquistador colleagues Columbus, Magellan, Vespucci can be traced on the market; as stated by Goodspeed fifty years ago, the present autograph stands alone.