{ "id": "pedro-martir-decadas-de-orbe-novo", "type": "entity", "name": "Pedro Mártir de Anglería, Decades of the New World (1511-1530), read in Richard Eden's English of 1555", "summary": "An Italian humanist at the Castilian court began writing down what returning captains told him about the western islands, because, as he put it, the Spaniards took care only of the general findings and the particulars would otherwise have drowned in oblivion. The result was the first history of the Americas. Its third decade also carries the earliest printed account of the demographic collapse of Hispaniola, written by a man employed by the crown that caused it.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "americas", "spanish-empire", "books", "historiography", "ethnography", "sixteenth-century", "translation", "firsts", "caribbean" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "oviedo-historia-general-y-natural-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "montesinos-sermon-1511" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "bartolome-de-las-casas" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "spanish-navigation-manuals-in-england" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "casa-de-contratacion" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "herrera-descripcion-de-las-indias-ocidentales" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "cieza-cronica-del-peru-1553" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "columbian-exchange" } ], "questions": [ "Who wrote the first history of the New World?", "What are the Decades of Pedro Mártir de Anglería?", "What was the first English book about America?", "What did Peter Martyr say about the depopulation of Hispaniola?", "Why did Peter Martyr write about the Indies if he never went there?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The text read for this object is not the Latin. It is Richard Eden's English version of 1555, as reset in Edward Arber's collection of the first three English books on America, and every wording quoted below is attributed to that printing rather than to Anglería's pen. The chain is Anglería's Latin, Eden's Tudor English, and a nineteenth-century editor's type, and the evidence tier of this object is set for the weakest link in it.", "sources": [ "eden-decades-newe-worlde-arber-1895" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The section leaf gives the work's shape. Under the running title \"The Decades of the newe worlde or west India\", the parts are listed as the First Decade, \"Of the Ocean\"; the Second Decade, \"Of the supposed Continent\"; the Third Decade; and \"Of the new found islands\". Their first printings are dated by the editor to 1511 for the first, 1516 for the second and third, and 1521 for the last, and the third is glossed by him as containing the discovery of the Pacific by Vasco Núñez de Balboa on 25 September 1513 and the voyages of Pedro Arias and Sebastian Cabot. The dating and the gloss are the editor's; the divisions are the book's.", "sources": [ "eden-decades-newe-worlde-arber-1895" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "A second editorial note fixes the dedication that opens the volume: it first appeared in the second and enlarged edition of the Decades, whose printing was finished at Alcalá on 9 November 1516, while nearly the whole of the First Decade that follows it had already been printed in 1511 and was for the most part written even earlier than that year. The First Decade is therefore contemporary with the events it reports rather than retrospective.", "sources": [ "eden-decades-newe-worlde-arber-1895" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "The dedication is addressed \"TO THE MOSTE NOBLE PRINCE AND CATHOLIKE KYNGE, CHARLES, PETER MARTYR OF ANGLERIA WYSHETH PERPETUALL FELICITIE\", and it states the author's reason for writing in a single clause. Providence, he says, brought him out of his native country of Milan and out of the city of Rome, where he had continued almost ten years, into Spain, \"that I myght particularlye collecte, these marueylous and newe thynges, which shoulde otherwyse perhappes haue line drowned in the whirlepoole of obliuion: forasmuch as the Spanyardes (men woorthy [of] greate commendation) had onely care to the generall inuentions of these thynges\". The founding motive of American historiography is there given as a complaint about record-keeping.", "sources": [ "eden-decades-newe-worlde-arber-1895" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The same dedication explains how a Milanese came to be at the Castilian court at all, and the answer is the war of Granada. He does not claim the credit of the labour for himself, he writes, since the chief reward is due to Cardinal Ascanio, who, perceiving that he was willing to leave the city to be present at the wars of Granada, dissuaded him from his purpose, and then, seeing him fully resolved, required him to write such news as were famous in Spain and worthy to be noted. He took his journey into Spain chiefly for the desire he had to see the expedition prepared against the enemies of the faith, being, as he says, a young man desirous of knowledge and experience of things, and from the wars he wrote to the cardinal by sundry epistles. The Decades grew out of a correspondence.", "sources": [ "eden-decades-newe-worlde-arber-1895" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The author's own framing of that war is on the same page and is not softened here: after he saw that by the overthrow of the enemies of our faith \"Spayne was pourged of the Moores as of an euyll weede plucked vp by the rootes\", he was minded to return to Italy, and was detained only by the singular benignity of the Catholic king and queen and their large promises to him on his return from his legation to the Sultan at Cairo. The witness whose record of the Indies is valued for its closeness to the participants is the same witness who describes the expulsion of a people as weeding a garden.", "sources": [ "eden-decades-newe-worlde-arber-1895" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The book's method is described by its English translator in terms of proximity to the actors. Anglería is introduced as a commissioner appointed by King Ferdinand in the affairs of the Indies, who gathered the rest partly by information and partly out of the writings of such as had been, in Virgil's phrase applied to him, \"Et quorum pars magna fui\" — doers and part of the things contained in the history: governors, lieutenants, captains, admirals and pilots who had not only subdued those lands and seas but committed the order of them to writing.", "sources": [ "eden-decades-newe-worlde-arber-1895" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "The same preface records the institutional apparatus behind that flow of paper. Because the new world was by then so much frequented, the ocean so well known and the commodities so great, the king erected a house in the city of Seville, \"cauled the house of the contractes of India\", pertaining only to the affairs of the Ocean, to which all such resort for necessaries as attempt any voyage to the new world, and likewise at their return make their account to the council for the Indies for the gold and such other things as they bring from thence; and those concerned in the Indies \"haue and yet doo in maner dayly sende from thense into Spayne such monumentes as are most certeyne testimonies of theyr doynge\".", "sources": [ "eden-decades-newe-worlde-arber-1895" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "The passage on which this object chiefly rests stands in the third decade, at page 172, under the marginal heading \"By what meanes the people of the Iland are gretly consumed\". It is worth having in full because it is usually paraphrased. Among so many blessed and fortunate things, the text says, this one grieves the author not a little: \"That these simple poore men neuer brought vp in labour, do dayly peryshe with intollerable trauayle in the golde mynes: And are therby brought to suche desperation, that many of them kyll them selues, hauynge no regarde to the procreation of chyldren. In so much that women with chylde, perceauynge that they shall brynge foorth such as shalbe slaues to the Christians, vse medecines to destroy theyr conception.\"", "sources": [ "eden-decades-newe-worlde-arber-1895" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "The same paragraph records that the law had already been made and was not being kept: \"And albeit that by the kynges letters patentes it was decreed that they shulde bee set at lybertie, yet are they constrayned to serue more then seemeth conuenient for free men.\" It then gives a figure and refuses to give the second one: \"The number of the poore wretches is woonderfully extenuate. They were once rekened to bee aboue twelue hundreth thousande heades: But what they are nowe, I abhorre to rehearse.\" The 1,200,000 is a reported earlier reckoning rather than a count the author vouches for, and he declines to state the later figure at all.", "sources": [ "eden-decades-newe-worlde-arber-1895" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "What makes that passage evidence rather than lament is its position. It is immediately preceded, on the same page, by the triumphal note — that all things are blessed and fortunate, and now more fortunate, for that so many thousands of men are received to be the sheep of Christ's flock, all their zemes and images of devils being rejected and utterly out of memory — and immediately followed by a return to the pleasures of Hispaniola and the gold of the Cibao. The author does not present the collapse as a thesis. He interrupts himself with it, apologises for the digression, and goes on.", "sources": [ "eden-decades-newe-worlde-arber-1895" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c12", "text": "The English translator of 1555 read the same book and drew the opposite conclusion, and his preface should be read beside the passage it introduces. The Spaniards, Eden writes, in their merciful wars against these naked people have so used themselves toward them in exchanging of benefits for victory that greater commodity has ensued thereof to the vanquished than to the victors; they have taken nothing from them but such as they themselves were willing to depart with and accounted as superfluities, as gold, pearls and precious stones. To the objection that they possess and inhabit their regions and use them as bondmen and tributaries where before they were free, he answers that they inhabit their regions indeed, yet so that by their diligence and better manuring of the same they may now better sustain both than one before, and that \"Theyr bondage is suche as is much rather to be desired then theyr former libertie\".", "sources": [ "eden-decades-newe-worlde-arber-1895" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c13", "text": "Eden goes further in the same preface, and the sentence is the plainest statement in the volume of what an apologetic reading costs: now thanked be God, he writes, \"by the manhodde and pollicie of the Spanyardes, this deuelysshe generation is so consumed, partely by the slaughter of suche as coulde by no meanes be brought to ciuilitie, and partly by reseruynge such as were ouercome in the warres, and conuertynge them to a better mynde\". The same depopulation that the author of the Decades could not bring himself to quantify is offered by his English translator as a mercy, in a book printed forty years later for an English readership.", "sources": [ "eden-decades-newe-worlde-arber-1895" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c14", "text": "The volume also records what the translation was for. The section leaf calls Eden's book the third English book on America and \"THE FIRST ENGLISH COLLECTION OF VOYAGES, TRAFFICS, & DISCOVERIES\", and Eden's preface names the House of Trade at Seville and the Council of the Indies as models worth an English reader's attention. The first substantial English account of the Americas reached English readers as a translation out of a Spanish-court Latin history, together with its translator's argument that England should be doing the same thing.", "sources": [ "eden-decades-newe-worlde-arber-1895" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c15", "text": "What this object does not establish should be said. It rests on one nineteenth- century reprint of one Tudor translation, so no claim is made here about Anglería's Latin wording, about what Eden altered, added or dropped in translating, or about the differences between the 1511, 1516, 1521 and 1530 printings beyond the dates the editor supplies. The pages opened do not establish Anglería's sources for any particular report, whether he ever crossed the Atlantic, how the Decades were received at court, or how the figure of twelve hundred thousand was originally arrived at. The First and Second Decades, and the Latin editions, were not opened.", "sources": [ "eden-decades-newe-worlde-arber-1895" ], "confidence": 0.9 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "secondary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "Peter Martyr is normally met in English as a source of quotations — the coiner of \"New World\", the man who never crossed the Atlantic — and the Decades themselves as a bibliographic fact. The two things a reader actually needs are rarely put together: why the book was written, and what it says about the cost. This object prints both from the page. The motive is in the author's own dedication, and it is not glory but salvage: he came to Spain to collect particulars that would otherwise have drowned in oblivion, because the Spaniards took care only of the general findings. The cost is in the third decade, in full rather than in the usual clipped half-sentence, including the women who ended their pregnancies rather than bear slaves, the crown's letters patent that had already decreed liberty and were not being kept, and the refusal — \"what they are nowe, I abhorre to rehearse\" — that is more eloquent than the number it withholds. And because the text is read in Richard Eden's 1555 English, the object can set that passage against the first English translator's preface, in which the same depopulation is thanked God for. The two readings of one book, forty years apart, are printed here in the same volume, and neither is left out.", "confidence": 0.8, "last_verified": "2026-08-16", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/pedro-martir-decadas-de-orbe-novo", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/pedro-martir-decadas-de-orbe-novo.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Pedro Mártir de Anglería, Decades of the New World (1511-1530), read in Richard Eden's English of 1555", "description": "An Italian humanist at the Castilian court began writing down what returning captains told him about the western islands, because, as he put it, the Spaniards took care only of the general findings and the particulars would otherwise have drowned in oblivion. The result was the first history of the Americas. Its third decade also carries the earliest printed account of the demographic collapse of Hispaniola, written by a man employed by the crown that caused it.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/pedro-martir-decadas-de-orbe-novo", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-16", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "The First Three English Books on America [?1511]-1555 A.D. — Section I, Pietro Martire, The Decades of the newe worlde or west India, translated by Richard Eden (London, 1555)", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=VHoKAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA61" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "Pedro Mártir de Anglería, Decades of the New World (1511-1530), read in Richard Eden's English of 1555" } }