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Americana Beginnings: The First Map to Name Florida & the First to Delineate the Texas Coast. The First Plan of a New World City.

This magnificent and legendary American map, here exhibiting wonderful period-correct hand-color, was printed just three years after Cortes vanquished and razed the Mexica Aztec capital, thereby bringing about an epochal leap in Spain's burgeoning world empire.

The map presented Europeans with a stunning two-part cartographic vision of New Spain: on the one hand, it showcases the great Tenochtitlan through a fantastic concentric or fisheye-like view of the thriving Aztec capital and its surrounding lakes, while on the other, it opens a window, as it were, on a vast and largely unexplored empire in North America - in the form of a startlingly accurate map of the Gulf Coast - the first to name Florida and the first to delineate the Texas shoreline. Over the centuries, scholars have speculated on the origins of the map and its maker - Cortes himself, who may have mediated indigenous source maps informing the work, certainly did not draw the map - and after 500 years, it still exudes a powerful aura of mystery. 

We can be reasonably sure that Cortes sent Charles V at least two manuscript maps, drawn by one or more unidentified draftsmen working directly under the conquistador; and that both derived from a combination of European and indigenous sources.

Sometime before 1524, such Cortesian manuscript maps or their descendants came into the hands of a woodcut artist who then distilled the two into the single-sheet cartographical tour de force we have before us today - an unprecedented proclamation of territorial possession over vast lands in North America, which would transform the European perception of the New World.

The Map: "It Was Once a Distinguished Thing, and the Greatest Glory"

Tenochtitlan appears on the Nuremberg map as a well-protected island city with an inner ceremonial temple precinct, all interpreted through European mapmaking conventions. The Nuremberg woodcut artist who created this image has framed the "heart & head of the New World" (Barbara Mundy) like a jewel, surrounding the Templo Mayor square with a marvelous city of neatly arranged settlements connected by several causeways. Evoking Venice, tiny ink-black figures row canoes throughout the surrounding lake waters. While solidly embodying European mapmaking conventions, the temple square in the center of the map presents a different approach to map or city view making. Indeed the map center presents a highly concentrated representation of the Great Temple Precinct, redolent of Bernardino de Sahagún's later manuscript depiction of the same site in the Florentine Codex, his Historia General de Las Cosas de la Nueva España.

Barbara Mundy makes a strong case that the Tenochtitlan map is based on an indigenous source map. The center Temple Precinct serves as the foundation of her argument. She points out the resemblance of the centerpiece Temple Precinct imagery with several well-known representations of Tenochtitlan from indigenous codices. Such square or rectangular representations of Tenochtitlan appear on post-conquest manuscripts such as the Codex Mendoza. While such depictions were made after the Spanish conquest, these painted maps are believed to fully embody pre-Hispanic pictorial mapmaking conventions.

According to Mundy:

The historic importance of [the Cortes map] has led to its widespread publication in the twentieth century, but most writers have expressed a vague uncertainty about the map's nature. The woodcut is undoubtedly carved by a European craftsman, but close examination reveals many precise details of the Amerindian city that do not appear in the long description of the city that Cortes had included in his Second Letter. In short, the map is not just an illustration drawn from the letter. We are left to conclude that the picture must derive from another source... Was it an Aztec map or a European one? ... we know the Culhua-Mexica and their neighbours in central Mexico made maps, and these maps - in their symbols and their logographic writing - share many features with Aztec 'picture writing' in general. Unfortunately, we know of no map of Tenochtitlan that survived the conquest... Today we can count few indigenous maps that show the sixteenth-century city. The Nuremberg map offers a tantalizing possibility: Could it have been based on yet another, now lost, indigenous map of the capital?... Manuel Toussaint held that it was not made by Cortés but by a fellow conquistador trained as a pilot or surveyor... I argue that the Nuremberg map is indeed based on an indigenous prototype - a Culhua-Mexica map of the capital city - and offer a re-interpretation of the map that embraces its ideological and rhetorical functions.

It is interesting to note that in later iterations of the Cortes map, such as those issued by Benedetto Bordone (1528 and later), Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1556 and later), and Braun & Hogenberg (1576), the Temple Precinct evolves into a thoroughly Europeanized depiction. Two pyramids so prominent in the Nuremberg map are replaced with architectural elements that could bear no resemblance to the built environment of Tenochtitlan.

Latin Inscriptions on the Nuremberg Map of Tenochtitlan per Barbara Mundy, lending credence to an indigenous source for this part of the map:

1. Ex isto fluuio conducut agua in ciuitatem = From here a stream of water flows into the city.
2. Atacuba = Tacuba
3. Viridarui D. Muteezuma = Gardens of Don Moteuczoma
4. Domus aduoluptase d. Muteezuma = Pleasure-houses of Don Moteuczoma
5. Foru[m] = Plaza
6. Templum ubi sacrificant = Temple where sacrifices are made
7. TEMIXTITAN = Tenochtitlan
8. Capita Sacrificatoru[m] = Skull racks
9. Platea = Street
10. Idol Lapideu[m] = Stone idol
11. Dom[us] D. Muteezuma = House of Don Moteuczoma
12. Capita sacrificatoru[m] = Skull racks
13. Dom[us] a[n]ialui[m] = House of the animals or zoo
14. Istapalapa = Ixtapalapa
15. Templu[m] ubi orant = Temple of worship
16. Aggeres ad tutelam domoru[m] a Lacus fluctiuz = Dike to protect the houses from lake tides
17. Telqua = Texcoco

In the Third Letter, Cortes makes reference to a map that Montezuma was supposed to have given him, which suggests an indigenous source for the Gulf Coast map. Cortes wrote:

...that he, Montezuma, would have painted for me the entire coast... On the following day they brought me a cloth with the entire coast painted on it, and on it there appeared a river that flowed into the sea, more open, according to the depiction, than the others...

...pero que el [Moctezuma] me haria pintar toda la costa... Otro dia me trajeron figurada en un paño toda la costa y en ella parecia un rio que salia a el mar, mas abierto, segun la figura, que los otros...

This statement by Cortes himself confirms an independent tradition of native mapmaking and would seem to support Mundy's overall argument. We can surmise that Cortes learned how to interpret such Aztec maps and their pictographic writing, in order to incorporate the information on a European style map. However, the exact nature of the indigenous cartographic contribution remains highly debatable.

[Peter Martyr records having seen an indigenous painted map of Tenochtitlan as part of Montezuma's treasure, soon after it was brought to Europe by Juan Ribera, possibly in Seville:

One of the maps we have examined is thirty feet long and not quite so wide. It is painted on white cotton cloth. All the plains and provinces, whether vassal or hostile to Muteczuma, are there represented, as well as the lofty mountains which completely surround the plain... After seeing [this] large map... we were shown a somewhat smaller one but which interested us just as much. It is a native painting representing the town of Temistitan, with its temples, bridges and lakes - De Orbe Novo, 1912 translation, v. 2, pages 198-99, 201.]

Jean Delanglez points out some of the problems with the idea of a solely indigenous basis for the Gulf Coast map, bringing up the earlier Pineda sketch map of the Gulf as a clue to non-indigenous sources:

It is doubtful, however, if this drawing [Montezuma's coastal map] showed the coast line from the Rio Panuco to the Rio del Espiritu Santo, and it is also doubtful if the Spaniards explored the coast line from their base at Vera Cruz to the Punto de Arrecifes, which latter is still about fifty Spanish sea leagues from the Rio del Espiritu Santo on the map.The sketch used by the German engraver was obviously similar to the Pineda drawing, and the additional nomenclature on the printed map, although somewhat vague, seems to be genuine. It is known that some of Pineda's men were captured by Cortes, and these may have supplied the conquistador with the information necessary to draw the coast line as well as with the additional names which are found on the printed map. - Delanglez, El Rio del Espiritu Santo, page 15.

Diantha Steinhilper sees the Tenochtitlan view as a multi-layered palimpsest, in contrast to the Gulf Coast, which reflects a "measured rigor" in its geographical representation: 

That modern eyes so often separate the two images speaks to their inherent differences. The Cortes Gulf Map records with almost measured rigor the geographical representation of space. The other, the Cortés Map of Tenochtitlan, so multifaceted that the terms map, plan, and city view all apply, operates as an intricate palimpsest. It maps the central valley of Mexico, records the plan of the Mexica capital city, and attempts to define the ideological importance of the city within its empire. - "An Emperor's Heraldry, a Pope's Portrait, and the Cortés Map of Tenochtitlan: The Praeclara Ferdinadi Cortesii as an Evangelical Announcement," Sixteenth Century Journal 47 (2016), pages 371-399.

As a counterpoint to Mundy et al., consider the following notice by the highly respected Mexican scholar Miguel Leon-Portilla, who categorically stated that "the indigenous hand is completely absent" from the Cortes map:

Even a cursory comparison of the indigenous manuscript map of part of Mexico City known as the "Plano en papel de maguey," with the one included in the Latin edition of Cortes' Second Letter, that which we will call "Cortesian" and which was almost certainly based on one that the same conqueror sent to Charles V and to which the third letter of relation that he wrote on May 15, 1522, to the king of Spain, refers. It encompasses Mexico City with the lakes and mainland that surround it. While it is evident that the map locates both the Templo Mayor of the Mexicas and the main causeways that went from the island to the opposite shores, as well as the locations of towns, among them Azcapotzalco, Tacuba, Tepeyac, Tetzcoco, and others, it is clear that the said map has been conceived with a distinctly European criterion. Beyond the causeways and channels, the constructions, temples, palaces, and crowded together houses, have towers and windows that resemble European styles. With the exception of the central part in which the precinct of the Great Temple is outlined with a Latin inscription, Templum ubi sacrificant (Temple where they sacrifice), everything appears following the pattern of countless city maps of the Old World. The indigenous hand is completely absent. Comparing this map, made known in the Latin edition of Cortes' second letter of relation, with the amate paper one preserved in the Library attached to the National Museum of Anthropology, of a part of Mexico City, is to glimpse into two distinct cultural universes.

While the extent of indigenous influence on the Cortes Map may never be fully quantified, one thing remains clear: the map embodies an unprecedented transatlantic cartographic fusion that, while obviously conforming to European mapmaking conventions of the time, almost certainly incorporates information from indigenous Aztec cartographic sources.

A fair view would be to acknowledge some degree of indigenous influence on the Cortes map, with Cortes's own references to Aztec maps and Peter Martyr's eyewitness report providing evidence, while acknowledging the fact that the map was a thoroughly European production mediated through several layers of non-indigenous interpreters.

First Map To Name Florida: Shows the Gulf Coast, Texas

The map sheet includes a woodcut depicting the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, which stands as the first map to name Florida as well as the first to delineate the Texas coast. Manuscript versions of the plan of Tenochtitlan and map of the Gulf of Mexico were presumably sent to Charles V sometime between 1520 and 1522.  The map of the Gulf Coast may be partially based on an indigenous map provided to Cortes by Montezuma himself - in fact, such a map is mentioned in the third letter.  But there was also an important Spanish source, associated with the ill-fated expedition under Alonzo Alvarez de Pineda, alluded to earlier. Indeed, if any name can be highlighted as the likely maker of the Gulf Coast map, it is the pilot of this disastrous Gulf Coast expedition under Pineda.

Manuel Toussaint posits a likely name for our mapmaker.  After discounting the possibility that Cortes himself could have drawn the map, as mapmaking was not one of his known skills ("No consta que el caudillo haya sido dibujante y si nos dan noticia de todas sus habilidades, no habia razon para callar ésta. Ademas, si el hubiese dibujado el plano no dejaría de decirlo cuantas veces se ofreciere"), we are left with a pool of skilled pilots of varying experience who accompanied Cortes and could have drawn the source maps. The names that rise to the top of this list include: Antón de Alaminos, who "almost certainly made the map of the Gulf Coast which accompanies the plan of Tenochtitlan" (Toussaint); Juan Cermeño; one Galdín; and Lorenzo Ginovés. Other possibilities include men trained in construction and other practical fields, including Alonso Martin Velázquez, Alonso Yáñez, and Pedro Valenciano.

Anton de Alaminos: Pilot for Ponce de Leon and Alvarez de Pineda, Likely Mapmaker of the Gulf Coast Map

Alaminos figures prominently in the early years of Spanish exploration before the conquest of Mexico. He might even be called an old hand in America, as he was with Columbus in Honduras in 1502.  Notably, Alaminos piloted Ponce de Leon to Florida and served as pilot on several voyages from Cuba in the years leading up to Cortes's invasion, including that commanded by Juan de Grijalva, which brought back news of a dazzling land in the west. And while Cortes was soon busy in that splendorous land, starting in 1519, another Spaniard, Pineda, was sent by Governor Francisco de Garay of Jamaica to seek a direct sea route to the Orient. The search for such a route intensified after Balboa's sighting of the Pacific Ocean in 1513. Alaminos piloted this expedition, skirting the entire Gulf Coast, through Florida, but the expedition lost many men to disease. The survivors reached Cortes at Panuco in Vera Cruz, shown on the map as Provincia Amichel, the name for Garay's projected colony. A crude sketch map exists in the Archivo General de Indias (AGI), known as the Pineda map, and believed to have been sent to Spain by Garay, which delineates the entire Gulf from the Florida Keys to Yucatan. That sketch map bears a marked similarity to the Cortes Gulf map, which suggests the Pineda expedition as perhaps the main source for the Cortes map.

Rio del Epiritu Santo

Rio del Espiritu Santo (River of the Holy Spirit) appears here for the first time on a printed map. This name was used in later maps to show the Mississippi River, but for maps of this early date (1524) experts are not in agreement as to what river is intended by Rio del Espiritu Santo. According to Philip Burden:

To the north is shown Rio del spiritu sancto for the first time. This is the name used later for the Mississippi River; however, here its application is debated, it most probably represents the Mobile River and Bay instead.

The Cortes map does shows European knowledge of a significant river in the region prior to Hernando de Soto's 1541 expedition - the latter typically recognized as the discovery of the Mississippi River by Europeans in a concrete sense.

Yucatan is shown as an island possibly due to an error of the pilot Alaminos based on the 1518 Grijalva voyage, which provided most of the Spanish names along the Tabasco-Veracruz coast. Oddly, Sevilla - the name given by Cortes to Cempola - appears, but not Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz. Farther north, some of the features appear also on the Pineda map: the Rio Panuco, and the Rio del Espirtu Santo. The Florida peninsula is shown as a proper peninsula joined to the mainland, recently proved by Pinera. Many names beyond what the Alvarez de Pineda map could have provided must necessarily derived from another source, perhaps tranmitted from memory directly from men captured at Villa Rica in July or August 1519.

The Cortes map, unlike its Pineda predecessor, indicates shoals or islands extending from the Panuco to the Rio del Espiritu Santo. The indication of barrier islands along the Texas-Tamaulipas shore, and the Tiger and Trinity shoals on the Louisiana shore suggests that Pineda examined this area quite closely. The absence of the Alabama-Mississippi sea islands and the total lack of the Mississippi Delta projecting into the Gulf hints that this part of the coast was seen from afar only, with the Mississippi River perhaps discerned from some distance, based on the river's great discharge. Contrast this with the representation of the Florida coast, with shoals and even keys shown, which certainly indicates close observation (see Weddle, Spanish Sea: The Gulf of Mexico in North American Discovery, 1500-1685).

Historian Rolena Adorno summarizes the main sources for the Gulf Coast depiction, emphasizing both indigenous and Spanish contributions:

The map Moctezuma had had prepared for Cortes... may have served as the source for the one Cortes had Juan de Ribera carry to Spain in July 1522 along with Cortes's third letter and a map of the city of México-Tenochtitlán. The map Ribera brought was first published in Nuremberg in 1524 by Frederico Peypus Arthimesio in his Latin edition of Cortes's second and third letters... The manuscript version of this map of the Gulf of Mexico that Cortes sent to Spain with Ribera had most likely been drafted by his own men from information he acquired from the one Moctezuma provided, to which he probably added data he had obtained from exploration carried out along the southern coast of the Gulf of Mexico and that he had collected from Camargo and his expeditionaries regarding their exploration and settlement on the northern coast between 1518 and 1520... The map shows the idea still prevalent in 1524 of the Yucatán Peninsula as an island, and it demonstrates the greater detail of the considerably better-known southern coast of the Gulf of Mexico compared to the relative lack of information beyond the legend indentifying the Río San Pedro. ... If the plate [sic] of the published map was engraved directly from the one Cortes sent to Spain with Ribera in mid-1522, then the Rio de las Palmas would have had to be discovered and named prior to Garay's accidental landing there in mid-1523, since Ribera carried Cortes's map to Spain in 1522. If we accept Martire d'Anghiera's (Decadas 658 [dec. 8, bk 1]) assertion that Garay discovered the river and named it "for the many [palm trees] that were on it," then it becomes obvious that the version of the map Cortes sent to Spain with Ribera in 1522 was augmented by a draftsman with information from Garay's 1523 expedition before the map was published in 1524. The spatial relationship between the Rio Pánuco and the Rio del Espiritu Santo is similar to the one shown on the 1519 Pineda map - Adorno, Cabeza de Vaca, pages 268-269.

Kenneth Nebenzahl:

Cortes claimed that the coastal delineation of the Mexican mainland was given him by Montezuma; this may be true. The coastlines of Florida and what are now Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas are drawn from reports of the Garay expedition survivors who had escaped several hostile enounters with Indians and joined Cortes. The leader of that ill-fated expedition was Alonso Alvarez de Pineda, while the navigator, Anton de Alaminos, was chief Spanish pilot for the Caribbean. Four caravels were outfitted by Francisco de Garay, the wealthy Governor of Jamaica. The expedition's objective was to locate a route to the South Sea (Pacific Ocean), recently discovered by Balboa in Panama. Alaminos was convinced that the west shore of the Gulf of Mexico would yield the long-sought passage to the Orient. In addition, if luck favored them, they might find gold along the way. Pineda discovered the mouth of the Mississippi [sic], where he spent six weeks among the friendly Indians....After bloody skirmishes with the less hospitable natives along the Texas coast, the expedition lost a final battle to the Aztecs near today's Tampico. Pineda was killed and the survivors, a sick and starving crew on the one remaining ship, barely made Vera Cruz, from where they were brought to Cortes. Their failure to find gold or other precious metals caused later explorers to bypass the rich agricultural region from West Florida to Texas for 150 years, until the French became interested in colonization of that region. Cortes sent these two maps to the King with his "Second Letter" detailing his exploits. They were not printed in Spain where such information was kept secret. However, this edition, published in Germany, gave the rest of Europe its first look at maps detailing these important discoveries.

The Italian Connection & Tenochtitlan as "Great Venice"

After 500 years, new perspectives on the Cortes Map shine light on old questions about its sources and maker. One intriguing conundrum that has heretofore escaped most experts is why the Nuremberg map sheet is printed on paper bearing a Venetian watermark, apparently the case in all extant examples of the map. The 16th-century European imagination certainly associated Tenochtitlan with Venice (both were styled "island cities" in 16th century isolarios), to an extent that Tenochtitlan was occasionally referred to as the "Great Venice.” A Venice-printed Italian translation of the Nuremberg Cortes letters was issued by B. Vercellensis and G. B. Pederzano in late 1524, but the map issued to accompany the Italian edition of the Cortes letters is clearly a copy after the Nuremberg map, with captions in Italian.

The intriguing presence of a Venetian watermark on our map sheet suggests an Italian link, which is not fully explained in the literature. A bull's head watermark indicating expected Nuremberg paper sources can be found on the text leaves of the Cortes letters published in Nuremberg, but the map (as in other extant examples we have checked) bears a distinctive watermark associated with Venice papermakers (star & anchor watermark similar to Briquet, p. 40, 479). Did an Italian mapmaker or artist have a hand in making the Cortes map? What connection, if any, does the Italian edition of the Letters and Map issued later in 1524 in Venice, have with the original Nuremberg printing of the map? We can only speculate on this point. A recent exhaustive scholarly work by Elizabeth Horodowich investigates a Venetian thread running through early printed Americana, The Venetian Discovery of America: Geographic Imagination and Print Culture in the Age of Encounters (2018). Horodowich seems to have overlooked the Venetian watermark on the Cortes map. Further study is needed. Venetian fascination with Tenochtitlan extended well into the 16th-century, and is reflected in the Isolarios or island books of the time.

"Great Venice" = Tenochtitlan

It is worth noting an obscure and very rare 1522 Augsburg printed pamphlet, which (imperfectly) reported the news of Cortes's exploits in the New World: Newe zeitung. von dem lande. das die Sponier funden haben ym 1521. iare genant Yucatan. Newe zeittung von Prussla. The text of this brief account applies the term "Great Venice" to Tenochtitlan. Mostly fanciful, and based on unknown sources, the Augsburg newsletter predated the publication of the Cortes letters, but had no map. It was illustrated with crude woodcut scenes purporting to depict Tenochtitlan.

Albrecht Dürer, the renowned Nuremberg-based artist, who likely traveled to Venice in the late 15th century, was profoundly impressed by New World treasures brought to Europe, including gold jewelry, featherwork, and other exotic materials, which he may have seen in Brussels, all of which he enthusiastically recorded in his diary. Dürer likely knew the Cortes map, either in manuscript or printed form, and was almost certainly influenced by it. The artist's scheme of an ideal city, published in his book on military fortifications, Etliche Underricht, zu Befestigung der Stett, Schloss, und Flecken (Nuremberg, 1527) is certainly suggestive. Erwin Walter Palm formulated a theory that Dürer derived his ideal city from the 1524 plan of Tenochtitlan, but this idea has been discounted by later scholars for lack of evidence.

[The Tenochtitlan map-view within the realm of a still-evolving European city viewmaking tradition. Indeed, several contemporary European maps bear remarkable similarities in style - including slightly later productions that suggest the Nuremberg map may have even influenced European city viewmaking in its immediate wake. See, for instance, Da Vinci's town plan (ca. 1502), Jacopo de' Barbari (Venice, 1500), and Nikolaus Meldemann's Siege of Vienna view (1530), especially the black figures wielding the oars in the small gondola-like canoes in the de' Barbari view of Venice which seem to reappear in Tenochtitlan ("Great Venice").]

We should remember there were very real links between Nuremberg and Venice.  Many German publishers and carvers, including some from Nuremberg, moved to work in Venice. To be sure, there are known woodcuts printed in Nuremberg on Italian paper (notably some later impressions of Dürer's work).

Yet the style of the woodcuts of the Nuremberg map can be described as "soft," much more in keeping with the Italian rather than the German manner of woodcut printing. The letter styles used on the map sheet also have a strong resemblance to Italian type of the time.

Summary

With the quincentenary of the Cortes map upon us, new perspectives and interpretations on the map's origin and meaning abound. While certain questions, such as the identity of the mapmaker, may remain unanswered, we can be sure that this iconic image - the first printed map of an American city - will never cease to provoke amazement.

In his letters to Charles V, Cortés conveyed a sense of wonder and ambition that transcended mere conquest, painting Tenochtitlan as an island city of dreams, evoking a floating utopia upon the lake, its temples and pyramids surpassing Venice, glittering in the sun-like visions of a promised land. This moment encapsulated not just the allure of untold riches but also a new horizon of possibilities, reflecting the dual edge of the European encounter with the Americas: a marvel at the sophistication and beauty of what they found, and the foreshadowing of the inexorable tide of conquest and change they were to bring. Cortes, in both word and action, was steeped in the rhetoric of discovery and destiny, echoing the same blend of aspiration and hubris that would characterize the American dream centuries later. The famous map which bears his name thus marks the beginning of a complex legacy of exploration and radical transformation whose reverberations continue to this day.

A rare opportunity to acquire an iconic American cartographical rarity with beautiful period-correct hand-color.

Rarity

The map is very rare on the market.

This is the first example we have offered for sale (1992-2024).