Alexander and the Geographer’s Eye: Allegories of Knowledge in Martín Fernández de Enciso’s Suma de geographía (1519)

Abstract

Martín Fernández de Enciso’s Suma de geographía (1519) is one of the cornerstones of Spanish cartographic and navigational literature in the first half of the sixteenth century. Although the book is known today mainly for containing the first printed description of America in Spanish, the Suma was in fact a synthesis of the geographic knowledge of all the known world. At the center of the book, Fernández de Enciso records the medieval story of Alexander the Great’s journey to the Earthly Paradise. This essay argues that Enciso’s reworking of this story within the context of the new cartographic developments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encapsulates the new observational and representational techniques derived from the early modern reading of Ptolomy, while at the same time situating the production of geographic knowledge at the center of the Spanish Imperial program.