Hybrid Maps: Cartography and Literature in Spanish Imperial Expansion, Sixteenth Century

Ptolemy’s Grid and Abstract Space

The Geography of Claudius Ptolemy was the basic touchstone of Renaissance cartography. At first, it appealed primarily as a reader’s aid that helped one locate the places mentioned in Greco-Roman historiography.⁴ Over time, however, the Geography began to be treated as a manual for making maps on mathematical principles. A very loose community of like-minded mapmakers and map readers emerged all over Europe. The mapmakers might be highly educated humanists or prominent printers and engravers, but sometimes they were former ship pilots of humble origins pursuing a second career, so to speak. Humanists and other intellectuals stood out among the early adopters of Ptolemaic maps, as did the rich patrons who financed the work. But the community of users grew dramatically in size and diversity as the sixteenth century transformed maps from rarities into essential elements of such varied endeavors as warfare, diplomacy, architecture, urban planning, archeology, taxation, and navigation.⁵

This community of mapmakers and map users shared ideas about what a map should be and how it should be made. According to this community, a good map faithfully represented the surface of the earth or some part of it, although it could also represent the heavens. It might engage in speculation about parts unknown, but if it did, it usually marked the frontier between the certain and the speculative. It was made in full awareness of the distortions that inevitably resulted when one depicted the spherical earth on a flat surface and used a systematic geometric projection to control for these distortions in predictable ways. It drew on a reliable set of data, either gathered specifically through surveys carried out for the purpose, or mined from sources considered trustworthy.

At the heart of the Ptolemaic map lay the coordinate grid. This was the tool that made it possible to control for the distortions produced by projecting the curved surface of the earth onto the flat surface of the map, and it was the basic framework into which one plotted locations according to their latitude and longitude. It also made manifest a particular understanding of space as an isotropic expanse substantially independent from the objects it contained. This was something relatively new. Antiquity and the Middle Ages had been familiar with abstract space, but the Renaissance fell in love with it, using it to make maps, draw pictures, design buildings, and plan cities. In the Spanish New World, the grid actually acquired material form in the orthogonal street plans of colonial cities, thereby announcing the shape of things to come, a modernity that assigned a privileged role to representations of space built on abstraction and that allowed the mapmaker, the architect, the city planner, and the like unprecedented sway over the lived space of human existence.⁶ One of the central characteristics of this new spatiality, at least as far as cartography was concerned, was its close association with ocularity. The map’s abstract spatiality promised to make the territory visible to the viewer, as if he could see it from a godlike height. When a map lies “before our eyes,” wrote Abraham Ortelius, one of the most important map publishers of the sixteenth century, “we may behold things done, or places where they were done, as if they were present to our eyes.”⁷

The Limitations of the Ptolemaic Map

Over the course of the past few decades, numerous scholars have repeatedly demonstrated that maps are never transparent representations of territory, no matter how much they seem to be, or how much their makers and users claim them to be. Maps are saturated with bias, whether cultural, ideological, or political.⁸ Sixteenth-century maps were certainly not the windows on the world that their creators made them out to be, but the reasons for this were not limited to their general deconstructability. The maps of the period suffered from a series of limitations, technical and otherwise, that assured that no gridded map could ever achieve the degree of transparency to which it aspired. Some of the techniques involved in collecting data, designing a map, or producing the finished product were simple enough in principle but daunting in practice. Theoretically, it was easy to determine one’s latitude, but in practice, it required environmental conditions that were not always available, and instruments a great deal more precise than those the sixteenth century had at its disposal. This is not to say that mapmaking did not improve over the course of the sixteenth century, however slowly and sometimes fitfully. In 1500, for example, European cartography lacked a projection that could be used to construct good nautical charts. The Portuguese mathematician Pedro Nunes was the first to identify the mathematical challenge in 1546, but it was not until 1569 that the Dutch mapmaker Gerhard Mercator solved it by making a usable chart, and it was not until 1599 that the English mathematician Edward Wright outlined the mathematics behind Mercator’s projection, making it available for reproduction. Despite these advances, however, intractable technical limitations continued to vex mapmakers. It is truly astonishing to think the period managed to fetishize the gridded map when it had no reliable means at its disposal for measuring longitude!⁹

Nevertheless the limitation that matters most to this discussion has to do with the kind of source material that mapmakers had no choice but to use. Ideally, maps were built from precise measurements of real-world spatial information carried out deliberately and systematically. Occasionally, they were actually made this way. During the 1550s, for example, Philip II commissioned the mathematician Pedro Esquivel to map his Iberian kingdoms on the basis of a survey that he was to conduct. The result was the so-called Escorial Atlas, one of the most detailed and accurate cartographic images of any European kingdom produced during the sixteenth century. But surveys of this kind were expensive, and often demanded too much from the limited store of technical expertise and institutional capacity available even to the wealthiest patrons. As a result, mapmakers had to draw their data, more often than not, from a heterogeneous archive of materials, very little of which had been prepared with the needs of the mapmaker in mind.

Some of these materials consisted of the oral reports of travelers, like the ship pilots who were sometimes interviewed by the mapmakers of Seville’s Casa de la contratación, the royal institution charged with regulating Spain’s relationship with its overseas possessions.¹⁰ Some of the sources were cartographic in nature, perhaps nautical charts drawn by a ship’s pilot, sketch maps prepared by some conquistador, or even maps drawn by non-Europeans, in the cartographic idiom of a distant culture. Most of the archive, however, consisted of written texts. In Spain, these included the logbooks of ships’ pilots, the written reports of conquistadors and explorers, the responses of colonial officials to questionnaires from the crown, the letters of missionaries, or the narratives of travelers, ancient, medieval, or modern, not to mention the growing library of European historiography and geography. Texts like these were indispensible to the work of mapmaking, particularly when it involved the huge distances and enormous spaces of an overseas empire.

The vast majority of these texts were written without any thought to the needs of the mapmaker, and even without any knowledge of his existence. They included all sorts of spatial and environmental information, but often as a byproduct of their engagement with some other activity or interest, like saving souls, searching for lost cities, or guiding a ship to its destination. The information may have been gathered any number of ways, but precise measurement using appropriate instruments was rarely one of them. This meant that the data that could be garnered from such sources, from the mapmaker’s point of view, was often inaccurate, imprecise, incomplete, or simply conveyed in a manner that was difficult to translate into the work of plotting locations into a coordinate grid. Travel narratives, for example, often expressed distances from one place to the next in terms of the time it took to make the journey and could be very vague about the direction of travel. How did one translate such estimates into map coordinates? Ship pilots usually recorded latitudes, compass bearings, and daily distances traveled, but were their figures accurate? And what to do with the compass bearings, when one did not understand the phenomenon of magnetic variation, the tendency of the compass needle to point away from true north? Mapmakers had to be careful readers, and sometimes good guessers. This meant that their maps were not at all scientific representations of territory built by plotting reliable quantitative data into a sophisticated geometric armature. Instead, they were visual renderings of spatial and environmental information garnered primarily from a diverse archive of writing that was almost always inadequate to the task.

Some of the most useful information could be garnered from set-piece descriptions of individual places, such as cities, islands, or even entire regions. For example, when the Venetian mapmaker Giacomo Gastaldi constructed a map of Mexico City, he seems to have used the description of Tenochtitlán found in Cortés’s “Second Letter from Mexico” to modify the existing prototypes, which included the map published with the 1524 Latin edition of Cortés’s text, and a 1528 derivative of that earlier image. (See figure 8.1.) Both of these maps stemmed from a lost Aztec original that probably simplified the geography of the region for symbolic purposes.¹¹ This is why they both depict Tenochtitlán as an island at the center of a single, roughly circular lake, in clear contradiction to Cortés’s account, which speaks of two lakes, one saltwater and the other, fresh.¹² Gastaldi must have noticed the discrepancy, and favored the verbal description over the cartographic prototypes in the design of his own map. (See figure 8.2.)

Figure 8.1. Map of Tenochtitlán and the Gulf of Mexico from *Praeclara Ferdina[n]di: Cortesii de noua maris oceani Hyspania narratio* … Nuremberg, 1524. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Figure 8.2. Map of Mexico City attributed to Giacomo Gastaldi from Giovanni Battista Ramusio, *Terzo volume delle nauigationi et viaggi*. Venice, 1556. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Set-piece descriptions were thus quite useful for what Ptolemy called “chorography,” the representation of localities in ways that captured their individual character, but they only helped with “geography,” the representation of larger spaces in ways that emphasized quantitative spatial relationships, insofar as they included some sort of locational information.¹³ Ideally, this meant coordinates of latitude and longitude, but these were rarely available in the mapmaker’s archive. As we have seen, the best a mapmaker could hope for was a measure of latitude, and/or some indication of the distance and direction from the place in question to some known location. A particular place, therefore, could only be mapped to that of other places, as part of a web of displacements anchored, hopefully, in what was already known. To search for this sort of information in the texts of the mapmaker’s archive is to take in the text as a whole, to consider its fundamental structure, and to discover how these texts were themselves maps of a sort.

The Spatiality of the Itinerary

That structure often takes the form of a route of travel, or a network of such routes. The text leads from place to place, providing some indication of the distance and direction from one to the next, with varying degrees of precision or thoroughness. At the very least, it establishes the order in which the places appear along the route. The itinerary might be fleshed out with dramatic episodes and detailed descriptions, as in the report of a conquistador, or it might exist practically on its own, bereft of anything but the locational information, as in the log of a pilot. In any case, itineraries appear all over the mapmaker’s archive, at both the microlevel of individual descriptions and the macrolevel of overall textual organization.

One might think that their presence can be explained by pointing to the fact that these are written texts, and that thanks to the linearity of verbal exposition, they have no choice but to take the form of a tour, introducing one aspect of their object at a time, in succession, until they have described the whole.¹⁴ Not all tours, however, are itineraries. Some are what psychologists of perception call “gaze tours,” which lead the reader around an object in piecemeal fashion, but assume a perspective outside the object or space being described.¹⁵ Take, for example, the following excerpt from the description of Europe in Peter Apian’s 1524 Cosmographia: “In Europe, the first region toward the west is Spain, which the Greeks called Iberia. It is the head of the imaginary dragon-body which is Europe. Ancient writers divided Spain into three parts. … The province adjacent to Spain is France … which is separated from Spain by the Pyrenees on its west.”¹⁶ The passage suggests a discursive setting in which one person, the narrator, talks another person, the narratee, through a map of Europe spread out before them, moving from west to east. Both narrator and narratee remain outside, even above, the geography being described.

By contrast, the “route tour,” or itinerary, brings the narratee into the space being described. It does so by traveling along a real-life route or routes that the narrator has taken, often takes, or believes can be taken. Not only is the route real, but it is made to feel that way through references to bodily experience. Here we can consider the following example from a report filed by a colonial official in 1580, describing the region of New Spain under his charge:

The town of Tecuicuilco … is seven great leagues from the said city [Oaxaca], where the mayor habitually resides, over very high mountains, and toward the north of the city. This town [Tecuicuilco] has another village subject to it—what is known here as an “estancia”—which is called Santa Inés Tepeque; it is one league from here. … So is the town of Atepeque. … It is four leagues from the said town of Tecuicuilco, on the northeast side, along rough, mountainous, twisting paths.¹⁷

This is a route tour. Like the gaze tour, it arranges individual places in the linear series made necessary by writing, but it follows real-life routes from one to the next, rather than simply moving from one place to the next without any regard for how a body would actually make the trip. It also brings the reader into the space by mentioning the difficulties of travel, such as the high mountains and the tortuous paths. Linearity, real-life routes, and an embodied perspective: these are the characteristics of the “route tour” or “itinerary.” Of the three, only linearity is imposed by the verbal medium.

The other two characteristics may very well stem from the fact that the authors of so much of the material in the archive got to know their territory by actually traveling through it as explorers, conquerors, missionaries, merchants, or pilots.¹⁸ Alternatively, they may respond to an overall tendency in the culture at large to treat the itinerary as the default approach to conceptualizing and representing territory. Contemporary psychological subjects tend to mix itinerary perspectives with other points of view, like the extrinsic one of the gaze map, but we must remember that these people are products of a modern, map-saturated world.¹⁹ The authors of the texts in the mapmaker’s archive were not. Until rather late in the sixteenth century, maps were rare commodities, and many of those authors would have had little or no experience with them. In fact, so new were maps to sixteenth-century culture that the word mapa was not even in general circulation when the century started, and by century’s end, it still enjoyed some neologistic glow.

Just as the word mapa, and maps themselves, were new to most sixteenth-century Spaniards, so was the abstract spatiality associated with them. When Spaniards used the word espacio (“space”), they rarely meant a two-dimensional or three-dimensional expanse. In most instances, they would have been referring to an interval of time. For example, when a character in La Celestina (1499) complains about how long someone else is taking to arrive, he explains, “What a long space [time] the old bearded woman takes!”²⁰ The use of espacio to refer to space rather than time echoed the linearity of the temporal usage, denoting a distance rather than an expanse. In Don Quixote, part I (1605), a character rides to meet his companion, “who was waiting for him a good space [distance] from there.”²¹ Even among the learned such as the compiler of the period’s most extensive dictionary of Spanish, espacio does not register as a name for expanses, but rather for intervals of time or space.²² It is only in texts written by people with mathematical or technical training that we find espacio used to refer to two-dimensional expanses, and it is not until the eighteenth century that this usage becomes common to the culture as a whole. When it finally registers in the eighteenth-century Diccionario de autoridades, moreover, its definition makes specific reference to latitude and longitude—that is, to cartography.

For the vast majority of Spanish speakers espacio meant an interval of time or a distance between two points, suggesting that the itinerary was the dominant spatiality of the early modern Spanish-speaking world. As such, it could not have been more different from the abstract space of the gridded map. While the gridded map represents space as an abstraction substantially independent from, and logically prior to, the objects it contains, the itinerary builds space by connecting preexisting places along routes of travel. The grid renders space as a uniform abstraction that extends equally in all directions, undergirding everything. The itinerary creates a route or routes, but has nothing to say one way or another about the “nonspace” outside the network. The grid presents space for optical inspection, saying nothing about how knowledge of that space came into being. The itinerary memorializes the process by which the territory came to be known, physical travel. The user of the gridded map looks down on space from the disembodied perspective of Ptolemy’s eye. The reader of the itinerary gets to know space by moving through it.²³

The time has come, therefore, to recognize that the texts in the mapmaker’s archive cannot be understood merely as imperfect sources for the mapmaker’s data. They were the products of what Matthew Edney has called a “mode” of mapmaking, a particular conjunction of techniques, assumptions, institutions, and materials that combine to map space in recognizable, more or less consistent ways.²⁴ According to Edney’s approach, different modes of mapping can and often do coexist within a particular place and time, and that coexistence cannot always be understood in terms of hierarchies of value or teleologies of development. In fact, the language of modes invites us to refrain from defaulting to such models, and to look for more subtle ways modes of mapping interact, displace each other, combine, repel, or simply cohabit. To say that written itineraries represent a mode of mapping space and territory, therefore, is to say that such texts are not just source texts for “real” maps, but are themselves “real maps,” verbal ones that play by their own rules, with their own sense of space.

Competing Cartographic Modes in Ercilla and Góngora

Iberian culture of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque seems to have had a penchant for mapping the world in verse. We can identify a series of texts written in Spain and Portugal between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries that include what one critic has called a “mappamundi episode,” a description of the world appearing as part of a verse narrative, often a heroic one.²⁵ The tradition has rich precedents in Greco-Roman antiquity, and reaches its culmination, as far as Iberia is concerned, with the mappamundi episodes of part II of the Araucana of Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga (1578), an epic poem about the conquest of Chile, and the Soledad primera of Luis de Góngora y Argote (1613), a bucolic idyll.²⁶ Ercilla’s mappamundi provides a gaze tour of the known world meant, on the face of things, to celebrate the majesty of Philip II’s far-flung empire, while Góngora’s mappamundi can be understood as an itinerary tour of the world that provides a critical, even cynical answer to Ercilla’s imperial map.

Alonso de Ercilla was a poet and courtier with close ties to Philip II who formed part of the military expedition sent from Peru to the south of Chile in 1557 to suppress the revolt of the Mapuche people, known as the Araucanians. According to its author, La Araucana was born of his battlefield experiences, but it was clearly raised back in Europe, on a steady diet of overtly literary material. The imprint of the literary tradition is perhaps strongest in a series of patently fictional episodes that appear in part II of the poem’s three parts. In one of them, a literary sorcerer in Araucanian costume has Ercilla, who appears as a character in his own poem, gaze into his crystal ball to see the world in its entirety.

Ercilla’s vision takes the form of a poetic gaze tour of the entire world, forty-six octaves long, the Araucana’s mappamundi episode. Most of it reads like the following stanzas, which trace a series of place names down the length of the Chilean theater of war, then follow Magellan’s expedition across the Pacific to the Spice Islands:

Vees la ciudad de Penco y el pujante

Arauco, estado libre y poderoso;

Cañete, la Imperial, y hacia el levante

la Villa Rica y el volcán fogoso;

Valdivia, Osorno, el lago y adelante

las islas y archipiélago famoso

y siguiendo la costa al sur derecho

Chiloé, Coronados el estrecho

por donde Magallanes con su gente

al Mar del Sur salió desembocando,

y tomando la vuelta del poniente

al Maluco guió norduesteando.

Vees las islas de Acaca y Zabú enfrente,

y a Matán, do murió al fin peleando;

Bruney, Bohol, Gilolo, Terrenate,

Machicán, Mutir, Badán, Tidore y Mate. (27. 50–51)

(Gaze on Penco, and the mighty / Shrine of Freedom’s cult, Arauco. / Glimpse the Imperial, Cañete, / Villarica’s wroth volcano; / To the West, Valdivia, Osorno, / Lago; past the isles and fabled / Archipelago; on the south coast, / Chiloé, Strait of Coronados. // To the Straits, through which Magellan / Found the South Sea, steered his compass / Northward past Molucca, sailing / To Zabú and Acacan Islands, / Dying on Matán in battle, / With Bohol, Bruney, Gilolo, / Terrenate, Machian, Mate, / And Mutir, Badán, Tidore.)

The stanzas are made up primarily of place names predicated to imperative forms of the verbs look and see, occasionally interrupted by a micronarrative that serves to mediate an important transition from one part of the globe to the other, or to editorialize about some uniquely important place. The number and arrangement of the stanzas is very deliberate. Half the tour covers Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the other half covers Spain, the Americas, and the Spice Islands, to which Spain lay claim. At the center of the stanzas devoted to Spain we find the Escorial, the massive monastery-palace that Philip II constructed as a monument to his military victories, a mausoleum for his dynasty, and a tribute to the orthodox Catholicism that he hoped to defend and believed himself to embody. On the face of things, the episode appears to tell its Spanish reader that his or her world constitutes a righteous empire encompassing half the globe.

One might think that Ercilla would have drawn the material for his mappamundi episode from a contemporary map of the world, such as the “Typus orbis terrarum” of Abraham Ortelius, the famous mapmaker who had been named Royal Geographer to Philip II, but according to his modern editor, he seems to have favored textual sources, like Strabo, Pomponius Mela, Pliny, and the modern authors of Spanish Americana like Oviedo.²⁷ In other words, he turned to the same textual archive that nourished the production of iconographic maps, but plotted his locations into the rhythms and meter of his royal octaves, rather than the coordinates of a cartographic grid. The result is a subtle parody of that cartography. Like the Renaissance maps to which this episode implicitly alludes, Ercilla’s mappamundi invites us to “look” and “see,” by implicating us in the commands that the sorcerer directs toward his guest. But unlike those maps, this verse cartography cannot deliver on the promise.

The reader can imagine Ercilla gazing awestruck into the crystal ball, as the sorcerer’s tour takes him around the world, place by place, but may very well have trouble imagining the vision itself, particularly if that reader is a contemporary of Ercilla’s, not a modern reader accustomed to playing with Google Earth. Only the most learned sixteenth-century reader, or the one with the best library, or the best maps, could have fleshed out Ercilla’s list of toponyms with the various details, geographic, historical, cultural, required to make them mean something. Most would have run into trouble at some point or another, particularly when the gaze tour reached the newly discovered reaches of the New World. At that point, we can imagine, the reader would have become aware of the fact that he or she was looking, not at the world itself, and not even at a cartographic representation of the world, but at a mere list of names. The very savviest of those readers, moreover, might even have understood what this awareness implied for a grasp of maps and globes. They would have understood that they, just like Ercilla’s verse map, were nothing more than visual renderings of textual information, of names, designed in such a way as to deceive us into thinking that they somehow represented the world itself.

Something is definitely awry with the mappamundi episode and its putative celebration of Spain’s global imperial destiny, particularly when we consider what happens in the rest of the poem, which depicts Spain’s conduct of the war as excessively cruel and vindictive while simultaneously casting the Araucanians as classical heroes. The itinerary of conquest repeatedly becomes a frustrated act of penetration, at once territorial and sexual. But rather than dwell further on La Araucana, I turn to the Soledad primera of Luis de Góngora and its own mappamundi episode. It takes some reflection to discover how Ercilla’s map of the world in verse might be understood to mock the pretensions of cartography to place Spain at the center of the world and the heart of a hemispheric empire. Góngora’s map, by contrast, leaves no room for doubt about its acerbically critical attitude toward Spain’s overseas expansion.

The Soledad primera tells the story of an unnamed man who finds himself shipwrecked on an unnamed coast, where he enjoys the hospitality of humble country folk. The simple story provides an armature in which Góngora hangs intensely wrought images of the objects and doings of everyday life. At one point, however, the text takes an epic turn. The traveler encounters an old mountaineer who speaks against the art of navigation as a manifestation of human greed and a source of human suffering. Along the way, his diatribe maps the world in verse. In fact, one of Góngora’s most prominent critics has not hesitated to call the episode the poetic equivalent of the ornate world maps for which Renaissance cartography is so well known, infinitely more accomplished than what he considers to be Ercilla’s sterile rhymes.²⁸

In one very important sense, Góngora’s verse cartography can be understood as an attempt to undo the very building blocks of Ercilla’s map, and of cartography in general: place names. While Ercilla lists toponyms, and relies on the reader to recognize them and invest them with meaning, Góngora mentions very few place names, and none outside the world known to the ancient Greeks and Romans.²⁹ Instead, he figures places through elaborate circumlocutions built primarily out of mythological allusions. In the following passage, for example, he maps the same geography that appears in the second of the two stanzas from Ercilla quoted above:

De firmes islas no la inmóvil flota

en aquel mar del Alba te describo

cuyo número, ya que no lascivo,

por lo bello, agradable y por lo vario

la dulce confusión hacer podía

que en los blancos estanques del Eurota

la virginal desnuda montería,

haciendo escollos o de mármol pario

o de terso marfil sus miembros bellos,

que pudo bien Acteón perderse en ellos. (481–490)

(Of the immobile fleet of islands lying / at anchor in that dawn sea / I say nothing, a multitude, though not / licentious, that through its beauty and delight / and variety might arouse / the same sweet perturbation / as did the white pools of the Eurotas / the naked virginal troop / whose ravishing limbs formed reefs / as if of marble or smooth ivory / among which Acteon / could not but lose his way.) (490–501)

Ercilla names the islands of insular Southeast Asia visited by Magellan’s expedition. Góngora never does. Instead, he converts them into the dazzlingly white body parts of the female entourage accompanying the goddess at her bath. Ercilla mentions that Magellan died in these islands. Góngora, instead, alludes to the figure of Actaeon, the hunter whose accidental voyeurism raised the ire of the goddess and led to his death. By investing the islands with sensuous beauty, and alluding to their discovery as an act of lascivious transgression, Góngora does not pretend to make them visible, as a map would, or to nudge his reader into reflecting on the problems of visibility, as Ercilla’s map does. Instead, he makes the world intelligible, in terms at once geographic, moral, political, and historical, while simultaneously playing with the very notion of visibility and its relationship to desire and truth.

Throughout his mappamundi, Góngora rails against the Apollonian perspective of cartography, with its pretension to see it all and know it all. One of the ways he does this is by constructing his poetic cartography, not as a gaze map, but as a route map. Rather than adopt a commanding perspective external to the geography he traces, like the one provided by the crystal ball in La Araucana, Góngora’s text follows in the wake of Columbus, da Gama, Magellan, and other figures from the major expeditions of the so-called Age of Discovery. He weaves their many historical journeys into a single allegorical itinerary, the round-the-world voyage of Greed personified. Greed never flies into the heavens to see the world from above, not even when his ship, in Góngora’s complex figures, becomes Apollo’s chariot. It remains earthbound, or rather seabound, cutting through crystalline waves rather than soaring into the celestial spheres.

Like the islands in the passage above, every place along the way becomes one version or another of Diana’s nymphs, a feminine figure who attracts the lascivious gaze of a decidedly masculine explorer bent on possession even at the cost of transgression, violation, and sacrifice. While Ercilla describes the world, Góngora sails through it, attaching geographic knowledge to the insatiable desire and violent striving of empire. It is an itinerary that can lead only to death, the death of the mountaineer’s son on the far side of a world that has come to be known, in various senses of the word, at tremendous expense. Góngora’s itinerary thus denounces empire, and simultaneously mocks the pretense of cartography to show us the world.

These are only two examples from a vast cartographic literature that emerged out of Spain’s internal transformation and external expansion during the early modern period, but they are particularly interesting examples. They are not just modes of mapping, like a written itinerary or gridded map, but reflections on the nature, limitations, and purposes of mapping itself, at least in the context of Spain’s imperial expansion. On the one hand, we cannot understand them without first getting a handle on the different modes of mapping available in early modern Spain, and the very different spatialities they favored, but on the other, we cannot reduce either to a simple manifestation of the two modes and spatialities I have charted. Their very existence points to a key feature of the Spanish effort to map the new world in which Spain found itself as a result of both its internal transformation and its external expansion. Some Spanish writers, at least, were aware of the profound difficulty of the challenge, and of the inadequacy of the tools at hand. They were familiar with maps of all kinds, but they were aware of the limitations their maps presented, and of the history of violence with which some of them were intertwined.

8 Hybrid Maps: Cartography and Literature in Spanish Imperial Expansion, Sixteenth Century

Introduction

Ptolemy’s Grid and Abstract Space

The Limitations of the Ptolemaic Map

The Spatiality of the Itinerary

Reading Early Modern Itineraries

Competing Cartographic Modes in Ercilla and Góngora

Notes

Bibliography