Treaty Of Tordesillas Research Articles

Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan

Straits: Beyond the Myth of Magellan

Entangled Histories, Catholic Missions and Languages

This essay focuses on the heterogeneous missionary contexts connected to the Portuguese Empire, in the hemisphere assigned to Portugal by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) and Zaragoza (1529), ranging from Brasil, Sub-Saharan Africa, to India, Vietnam, China and Japan. In these plural missionary contexts, between ca. 1540 to 1650, Portuguese was used, mostly by the Jesuits and their more numerous local native mediators, as translational language for several idioms unknown in Europe. These early modern linguistic and cultural translations of living languages based on Portuguese as translational language, have largely been overlooked outside of the field of missionary linguistics. This essay highlights instead their strong documentary potential, meaning and implications, beyond linguistics, with respect to current debates on early modern global history and its periodization.

TERRITORIAL FORMATION OF THE GUIANAS REGION

For more than 9,500 years, the indigenous people reigned supreme in the construction of territorialities in the Guiana region, a part of the Amazon between the Orinoco and Amazon rivers, which borders the Atlantic Ocean. With the encounter of both worlds, a metaphor that refers to the contact of the indigenous people with the European explorers, everything changed and the last five centuries have been marked by wars, killings, and various territorial restructurings in the Guianas. Through a geopolitical perspective as a methodological fulcrum, and anchored in literature review and thematic cartography, this text examines the local-global relationship of the region over the five centuries of contacts, demarcating important facts and contexts in Europe that imprinted significant changes on the political space of the Guianas. Of the relevant moments, the great navigations, the bourgeois revolutions, and the Cold War were the most important for the transformations that occurred in the region. In addition, boundary treaties played a crucial role, with special attention to two of them: the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) and the Treaty of Madrid (1750). The text concludes that the search for riches and moments of instability in Europe, whether due to territorial recompositions there or conflicts, determined important reorganizations in the Guianas that made it what it is today, a complex region from the geopolitical point of view.

Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America by Jeffrey A. Erbig Jr.

Reviewed by: Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America by Jeffrey A. Erbig Jr. Timothy B. Norris Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met: Border Making in Eighteenth-Century South America. Jeffrey A. Erbig Jr. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xx+280, figures, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $99.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-1-4696-5503-1. $34.95, paperback, ISBN 978-1-4696-5504-8. $19.99, eBook, ISBN 978-1-4696-5505-5. In Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met Jeffrey Erbig gives an account of the mid-eighteenth-century cartographic encounter between native peoples (under the ethnonyms Charrúas, Bohanes, Yaros, Guenoas, and Minuanes) of the Río de la Plata borderlands (now Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina) and the Spanish and Portuguese empires. At first glance his work appears to align with prior studies on the history of cartography and the mapping of indigenous peoples. He reiterates the importance of indigenous collaborators and informants in the mapmaking process and how maps wield power not just as representations but also as actors in the transformation of geographical imaginaries of empire into physical features of the landscape. Indeed, at points the woven narrative reads like yet another tale of dispossession and genocide wrought by colonialism and empire building. But in his analysis of "the dynamic production of space and the interplay between territorial imaginings and spatial practices" (7) he makes apparent the underlying goal to reformulate "the historical memory—professional, political, and popular—of the boundary commissions in the Río de la Plata connecting the entrenched narratives of Native disappearance to colonial geographic imaginings that emerged in the eighteenth century" (11). It is this underlying goal and his success in showing not only indigenous agency in the historical account but also the contemporary persistence of indigenous presence that makes the monograph worth the read; in the end it is a story of resilience and victory. The story centers on two border-making efforts, the Treaty of Madrid (1750) and the Treaty of San Idelfonso (1777), through which Portugal and Spain sent joint cartographic expeditions to rectify conflict that emerged from the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) and subsequent imperial expansion in the New World. Erbig uses an array of primary sources to meticulously recount events leading up to, including, and after the boundary-making expeditions. While he acknowledges the lack of indigenous voice and the bias in the colonial sources he uses, [End Page 91] the vignettes he creates attempt to (mostly successfully) highlight how "Native peoples did not simply foil or adapt to Iberian efforts; they altered the very structure of imperial governance, making borders necessary and transforming the meaning and form of mapped lines" (7). His historiographic approach is meticulous, full of rich detail (almost biblical at points), and is a pleasure to read. But what makes this work stand out is the use of geographic information systems (GIS) and a digital humanities approach to geographically and temporally locate all mentions of indigenous individuals, encampments (referred to as tolderias), and movements from the seven-hundred-plus primary sources that span 1680 to 1834. Arguably the design of the resulting maps could be improved (the addition of scale bars, for example), but the content along with the historical narrative is remarkable and presents a unique approach to and perspective on this moment in history. The book is organized into five chapters. The first two explore the period from 1680 up until the first cartographic expedition in 1752. The discussion of movement and location of indigenous groups and the colonial settlements centers on how access to natural resources, wild cattle for the most part, and European ideas of natural law came together as a form of ad hoc governance in which indigenous people retained control of the hinterlands of the colonial settlements. Chapter 3 outlines the joint Portuguese/Spanish border-mapping expeditions. Erbig highlights the fact that the conflict between empires was set aside in a moment when European powers were fully aware that "maps were not simply representations of territorial possession but rather the preeminent determinants of it" (67). The expeditions were specifically designed to weaken indigenous groups' hold in the region...

«The Silver Age of Piracy»: French pirates in the Atlantic in the first third of the XVI century

The purpose of the study was to find a causal relationship between the activities of king Francis I and the large-scale pirate actions of the captains of the French merchant fleet, Jean Ango. This was necessary to show piracy as a fusion of the military and diplomatic policies of France against Portugal and Spain with the naval experience of warfare on the seas and in the oceans, which had the captains of the merchant fleet of Jean Ango. We can see this connection by the captured and looted of hundreds of ships in Portugal and Spain with the full support of piracy from the French crown. The goal was also to show how France, through piracy and its promotion at the state level, destroyed the system of international agreements and Royal oaths in the Christian world for the sake of its commercial advantage. The author studies and gives examples of numerous acts of piracy, numbering in the hundreds of captured, robbed, and sunk ships, the reasons and conclusions are given why Francis I began to demand Open seas and oceans and why he demanded a revision of the borders of the world in the XVI century. The author has considered and found the answers to the questions of what caused the rupture of international treaties, on the part of Francis I. The author has also revealed and shown the facts of multiple penetrations of France on the territory of Portugal and Spain, which later led to attempts by France to establish settlements in Brazil in 15551559 and Spanish Florida in 15631565, contrary to all international norms and agreements the Popes bulls of 1493 and the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 and subsequent ones. The paper shows that the scale and scope of the pirate actions of French pirates in the Atlantic contributed to the formation of piracy as a mass phenomenon and can be called the Silver age of world piracy, which falls on the 16th century, and anticipates the Golden age of piracy of the 17th and 18th centuries. This term is quite appropriate to introduce for this time, especially if it is considered together with the even larger-scale pirate actions of Berber pirates in the Mediterranean, which are quite well known and described in the scientific literature.

Wet

Wet Nils van Beek (bio) I admit it—it is a striking image. The novel Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates published by Mary Mapes Dodge in 1865 contains a story called "The Hero of Haarlem" in which an anonymous boy plugs his finger into a hole in a dike, thereby preventing the hole from growing, the dike from collapsing, and the neighboring city from disaster. The book was adapted into several films and plays. In the Netherlands a few statues have been erected to honor this fictional character and to offer American tourists a photo opportunity. The author never visited our country, and even the legends on which her story is presumably based aren't of Dutch origin. My fellow countrymen, however, do identify themselves with the metaphor of a country conquered from the sea, which is in a continuous battle with the water and which is inhabited by people who, no matter what their social status might be, are joining forces to build ingenious constructions to keep the water out. It's very effective for populists here to stretch this metaphor to the influx of immigrants who should remain behind a wall; a fence; or in our case, a dike. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Woerdersluis Monument in Spaarndam—the symbol of the fight against the water—in bronze, with a polished freestone base. Another legend comes to mind, probably relatively unknown beyond [End Page 240] our dikes. In 1621 the acclaimed jurist Hugo Grotius (Hugo de Groot) escaped from his prison in a book chest and fled to Paris, after having become involved in a theological dispute and in a climate of bigotry. With his treaty Mare Liberum, Grotius made an invaluable contribution to the topic of the sea in Western thought. In 1493 Pope Alexander VI wrote in a papal bull that the oceans of the world should be divided between the two countries that then explored the seas (registered later in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494). Spain would acquire all the territories west of the Tordesillas meridian (480 kilometers west of the Cape Verdes archipelago); Portugal, the parts east of it. Grotius argued that the open seas cannot be anyone's property. At open sea, he insisted, no borders can be drawn. The water is intangible and, from those times' perspective, inexhaustible. This viewpoint, which became dominant since the seventeenth century, allowed for the bourgeois and predominantly protestant nation of the Dutch Republic to cross the seas freely; to fish for haring close to Scotland; and, paradoxically, to monopolize many trades and build up a colonial empire for themselves. In his marvelous geophilosophical book Water: Een geofilosofische geschiedenis (2014), René ten Bos, a prominent Dutch philosopher, shows how the cultural meaning of water has developed in the Western world. In ancient Greek philosophy, water had a positive connotation, even though it was the domain of unpredictable gods. Thales of Miletus stated that water is the principal element of things—all is water. The motto panta rhei ("everything flows") is attributed to Heraclitus, who uses water as a dominant metaphor to understand our position in place and time. The Greeks used three terms for the sea: thalassa, the sea as a mother from which, for instance, Venus was born; pelagos, the sea as distance; and pontos, the sea as a bridge, as provider of connectivity. Since then, ten Bos explains, thinkers have taken on a process of distancing themselves from the seas. Plato disrespected fishermen, for they wouldn't give the fish a fair chance in opposition to the way hunters treat their game. Harbors came to be seen as the lower, unesteemed areas of towns. In ten Bos's view, Grotius's Mare Liberum is one of the pillars of modern capitalism. By denying anyone the possession of nonterritorial waters, the seas created some of the basic conditions for capitalism to flourish, including the possibility of being able to connect to the whole world, for instance. More importantly, capitalism needed the sea as a place where no limitations or prohibitions would inhibit [End Page 241] free trade and competition. And most importantly, capitalism can only function at the expense of...

As fontes do projecto de navegação de Fernão de Magalhães

In 2019, five centuries will have passed since Ferdinand Magellan’s departure from Seville, in charge of a Spanish expedition that sought to claim the fabulous Spice Islands. The Portuguese defector, annoyed with the Portuguese monarch Manuel I (r.1485-1521), who had refused him the reward requested for many years of dedicated services to the Portuguese Crown, had moved to Spain two years earlier, where he offered his services to Carlos I (r.1516-1556). He presented the Spanish king with the proposal of reaching the eastern islands of Indonesia by a western route, avoiding navigation in areas that the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed in 1494, had decreed to be of Portuguese influence. This involved quite simply retracing Christopher Columbus’s Indian project, but now with new bases and a more developed knowledge of the geography of the Far East. What sources could Ferdinand Magellan have used to trace his planned western route to the East?

Spanish maritime experience in Southern Africa during the Early Modern Period

Apparently, the Treaty of Tordesillas dismissed the possibility of Spanish shipping via Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. The preferred route to Asia was via Cape Horn or Acapulco. In this article we will show that access to Southern Africa was not entirely closed to the Spanish between the 16th and 18th centuries. We will analyse shipping in this period and, above all, we will discuss the enlightened reforms of the 18th century that changed the connecting routes between Spain and the Philippines, making them pass through Cape Town, as well as the hostility shown to the Hispanic presence in those waters by great powers like the Netherlands. Based on these connections, we will discuss the exchange of plants between Spain and Southern Africa.

2000 Years of ‘globes vs. maps’ – lessons (to be) learned

ABSTRACTThis paper sheds light on the question of whether globes or maps are best suited to providing an adequate understanding of global phenomena. Drawing upon evidence from the history of cartography, we show how the ancient, medieval and early sixteenth-century mapmakers had already recognized the importance of globes and world maps. An analysis of Ptolemy, Strabo and the negotiations around the Treaty of Tordesillas will demonstrate how our basic assumptions regarding the relationships of globes and world maps have been present for a long time. These assumptions are discussed in the light of current user studies on world maps, for example on distance and area estimations and the issue of peripheral continuity. As we can see from this review of empirical research, designing an appropriate world map is not only an issue of map projection; the edge of a world map also affects the knowledge users may generate. In terms of the importance of ‘globes vs. world maps’, these findings indicate that globes are prominent because of their undistorted, but also seamless visualization of global phenomena.

The Treaty of Tordesillas and the (re)Invention of International Law in the Age of Discovery

This paper aims to investigate some of the main features of sixteenth century international law in order to challenge traditional international law foundations. By exploring concrete cases, and indicating situations in which state and non-state actors resorted to international norms in order to promote trade and celebrate peace treaties, it is inquired whether some pre-Westphalia international trade and warfare practices may be defined as the beginning of “modern” international law.

The Treaty of Tordesillas and the (re)Invention of International Law in the Age of Discovery

This paper aims to investigate some of the main features of sixteenth century international law in order to challenge traditional international law foundations. By exploring concrete cases, and indicating situations in which state and non-state actors resorted to international norms in order to promote trade and celebrate peace treaties, it is inquired whether some pre-Westphalia international trade and warfare practices may be defined as the beginning of “modern” international law.

Tordesillas and the Ottoman Caliphate: Early Modern Frontiers and the Renaissance of an Ancient Islamic Institution

This article revisits the question of the “Ottoman caliphate,” the doctrine defining the Ottoman sultan as the universal sovereign and protector of Muslims throughout the world in addition to the territorial ruler of the Ottoman Empire itself. In existing scholarship, a wide gap divides those who describe this doctrine as a construct of modernity, with a history that goes back no farther than the late eighteenth century, and those who maintain a direct line of transmission from the earlier Abbasid caliphate to the Ottoman dynasty. This article proposes an “early modern alternative” to these two opposing narratives, which acknowledges a dynamic history of reinvention for the caliphate but locates its rebirth not in the period of colonial modernity but rather in the sweeping reconfiguration of space, time, and sovereignty ushered in by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.

The Events that Led to the Treaty of Tordesillas

The events leading to the Treaty of Tordesillas began when Columbus returned from his first voyage. Spain and Portugal competed in the attempt to obtain their desired rights of navigation and conquest in the Atlantic Ocean and to be the first Europeans to the Indies. The combined versions of what happened by Davenport (1917) and Nowell (1945) exemplify the historical narrative of these events. The present paper’s version of the narrative considers for inclusion ten items absent from these two previous accounts. Three of these ten new items are considered here to be highly probable: King João’s pony express, his 1488 threat of war with Spain over the marriage of his son, and Freire’s discovery not only of missing chancery records, presumably of King João’s southern Atlantic voyages, but also of contemporaneous records containing the ship’s biscuit data suggesting long Atlantic voyages. The other seven new items must await additional documentation if they are to be considered highly probable. Using some highly probable items as well as some deemed less than highly probable, the present article offers an explanation for the behavior of both King João and King Ferdinand in the latter’s ultimate agreement that the treaty should move the line of demarcation westward.

Repercusiones de la Unión Ibérica en los confines de la América Portuguesa: discusiones en torno a los Tratados de Límites del siglo XVIII

In the present article, we take a brief journey through the History of the Portuguese expansion into America, in order to explain how the meridian fixed by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 was neglected and crossed during two centuries. Likewise, we give details about the way the conquest and colonization process was reported in the Hispanic-Portuguese diplomatic treaties, which reached its zenith in the Treaty of Madrid in 1750. This treaty was the first to establish the borders which, with little differences, demarcated the territory of current Brazil, and it could therefore be considered a turning point in the historical formation of the territory of Latin America’s giant.

An Official Image of the World for the Hispanic Monarchy

This paper discusses the Padrón Real (Royal Pattern Chart or master sea chart), an official class of maps of the world instituted by the Spanish monarchy and produced by Seville’s Casa de la Contratación (House of Trade) from 1508 onwards, in a political context dominated by the dispute between the two largest expansionist empires in Europe – Portugal and Castile – which was heightened following the signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. The Padrón Real became a model for European cartographers and its history sheds light on the development of map-making practices at the Casa in the Crown’s attempt to regulate cosmography for its own political ends. The Padrón Real was unprecedented for its time and, together with the question of how to determine longitude, reflected what were the most important cartographic challenges facing the early modern world: how to represent a three-dimensional body – the globe – on a flat surface and how to provide reliable geographic maps when they were subject to constant revision.

The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America: From Conquest to Revolution and Beyond (review)

Latin American The History of the Catholic Church in Latin America: From Conquest to Revolution and Beyond. By John Frederick Schwaller. (New York: New York University Press. 2011. Pp. x, 319. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-814-74003-3.) John Frederick Schwaller has taken on a most monumental task in writing the history of the Catholic Church in Latin America from the late 1400s to the present. This overview of an enormous topic provides the necessary information on Iberian religions, including the Jewish and Muslim faiths, and the history of Portuguese and Spanish exploration of Africa as background to the discovery of the Western Hemisphere and the Treaty of Tordesillas, which dates to the start of international law. Then, the author leads readers through the intellectual debates over sovereignty and property rights, just war, and whether or not the native peoples were human and capable of becoming Christians. He rightly notes that despite the many missionaries in Mexico and Peru, many native peoples remained uncontacted and uninitiated for many years. His discussion of church finance, the Bourbon initiatives of the eighteenth century, and the Enlightenment's impact end his discussion of the colonial era. After Schwaller's discussion of independence, his narrative summarizes the checkered history of the Church. The section on how governments negotiated or not with the Holy See and how agreements could potentially affect everyday life is followed by a fascinating few pages on the role of family politics in Chile, through which one large patrilineage controlled both church and state. The nineteenth century also saw popular religion and uprisings gaining prominence in Brazil; the rise of the ethic, especially in Central America; and the conservative First Vatican Council in 1869-71. Regarding the twentieth century, he retells the history of the Church against a background of revolution in Mexico; la violencia in Colombia; and the rise of fascism, socialism, the populists, the Marxists, and Catholic-based trade unions. Throughout, the Church was viewed by many as a stabilizing influence. However, the Church was not a homogeneous institution. It included groups that ranged from those against the reforms of the Second Vatican Council who supported a Tridentine church to progressive liberationists and Catholic socialists. Furthermore, he notes the increasing challenges to the once near-monopoly of spirituality exercised by the Catholic hierarchy, citing popular religion, like Candomble in Brazil, secularization, and Protestant and Evangelical inroads. …

The European struggle to settle North America: colonizing attempts by England, France, and Spain, 1521-1608

This history of early European colonial efforts in North America examines why three colonies--St. Augustine, Jamestown and Quebec--succeeded where many before them had failed. Chapters cover Columbus' exploration and the Treaty of Tordesillas; other Spanish explorers and settlements in the New World; French attempts at settlement prior to Quebec; early English settlements, including Roanoke; failed settlements dating to the Norse enclaves on Greenland; and in-depth studies of the three colonies that survived.

Sensoriamento remoto como suporte para estudos cartográficos sobre o território da América Portuguesa entre 1500 e 1822

Este artigo aborda a utilização de imagens de satélites como suporte para evidenciar a expansão histórico-cartográfica das fronteiras paulistas entre o descobrimento do Brasil e a sua independência, recurso esse utilizado na exposição Cartografia de uma história, realizada no Museu Paulista da USP em 2005. As imagens foram aquelas do Modis, do Shuttle Radar Topographic Mission e do Satélite Landsat-5. As cenas foram georreferenciadas valendo-se da ferramenta Spring e dos mosaicos georretificados disponibilizados pela Nasa. Sobre estes produtos foi lançado um valioso conjunto de informações cartográficas coletadas pelas pesquisadoras da Cátedra Jaime Cortesão da USP. O conjunto inclui o Tratado de Tordesilhas, com suas distorções, o Mapa das Cortes, as capitanias, as bandeiras, as monções, as trilhas, os tropeirismos, ou seja, todo o conjunto de ações pioneiras que permitiram consolidar o território paulista e grande parte da identidade espacial brasileira. Foram analisados também o mito da Ilha Brasil e os enlaces das bacias do rio Amazonas e do rio Paraná-Prata a partir dos atributos geomorfológicos dispostos nas imagens orbitais. Os resultados foram consolidados em um banco de dados de 800 megabites, sendo dispostos em exposição junto ao Museu Paulista. Este artigo descreve os procedimentos metodológicos de geração e de análise das imagens bem como sintetiza os resultados alcançados.

The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (review)

PADRON, RICARDO. The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. xvi + 287 pp.Among the most famous paintings in the Museo del Prado hangs a large canvas by Velazquez entitled La rendicion de Breda, sometimes known as Las lanzas. In the foreground of the painting, Velazquez depicts the impressive culmination of a great military course of events: the transfer of the key to the city of Breda from the Dutch army to the Genoan-born commander of the Spanish forces, Ambrosio Spinola. Behind them, in the maplike background against which this action is set, the smoke of war rises from the landscape, bordered by a checkered flag and framed by the vertical lances that have made the painting famous. The work could well have been a point of departure for The Spacious Word by Ricardo Padron, which deals with both practices in early Spain and with the maplike qualities of a number of early Spanish texts, the so-called chronicles of the Indies most prominent among them. But if the Velazquez image had been the focal point of this study, the author might have reached very different conclusions from the ones he urges in this provocative and wide-reaching book. For whereas The Spacious Word seeks to demonstrate the affinities between early mapping and the cartographical prose of this same era, Velasquez brings together the visual form of the map and the representation of grand deeds in a way that allows us to recognize their separate historical roots even while they converge to make an impressive view of action and its place.How then does Padron regard the affinities between the mapping practices of the early world and the cartographic prose of the chronicles of Indies? He argues in a twofold way. First, he claims that the representation of space in an abstract, gridlike form, which we have come to regard as normative for maps, was not at all widespread in the early world. On the contrary, he suggests that the large-scale development and regularization of what we conceive as modern mapping practices happened much later than is often supposed. Abstract mapping was the province of a few experts, and hardly played a significant ideological role in the project of conquest and imperial expansion. Indeed, Padron produces compelling evidence in the form of written texts and printed images to suggest that early mapping practice owed far more than is usually supposed to earlier, medieval ways of representing the world. Well into the early age there survived an array of mapping practices whose fundamental notion of space was linear. Distance, the line, and the itinerary, rather than an encompassing sense of space, were the points of orientation for the vast majority of mapmakers throughout the early age. Indeed, the makers of maps could not truly aspire to an accurate and abstract representation of the surface of the earth until the problem of longitude was solved, and that did not occur until the development of timepieces adequate to the required measurements in the eighteenth century. Until that time, mapping practice was not only linear but was also subject to an arbitrariness that was driven by interests and ideologies somewhat alien to those that came into play with the rise of scientific views about world representation. Witness the ad hoc arguments and the contradictions leading up to and following the Treaty of Tordesillas, which separated Spanish and Portuguese claims over in the newly discovered parts of the globe by an imaginary vertical line running near the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic.Far more than can be indicated in the space of a brief review, Padron has a very deep understanding both of the technical and scientific issues involved in mapmaking and of the historical needs that were instrumental in sustaining Spain's national interest in this technology, especially the desire to find secure and reliable routes to (and itineraries through) the lands that its explorers were discovering. …

A Sea of Denial: The Early Modern Spanish Invention of the Pacific Rim

“A Sea of Denial” examines the cartographic invention of the Pacific Rim by the Spanish imperial imagination during the long sixteenth century. Guided by the desire to include as much as possible within the line of demarcation established by the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) and the negotiation of its antimeridian in the 1520s, Castilian mapmakers designed maps of the world and of the Hispanic Indies that fashioned the lands around the Pacific Ocean into an increasingly coherent image of a trans-Pacific empire. This study examines how this development is accomplished on specific maps through the interplay of line, word, and image, of geography and artistry, that struggle to map the traditional “East” as a Hispanic “West,” called “las Indias del Poniente.” These maps include the 1529 world map by Diogo Ribeiro, in the collection of the Vatican Library, and the 1570 map of the Indies by Juan López de Velasco eventually published as part of Antonio de Herrera’s Descripción de las Indias (1601). The world map of Martin Waldseemüller (1507) and the Pacific map of Abraham Ortelius (1589) provide points of comparison. Although this effort avails itself of the flexibility inherent in modern cartography, it cannot convincingly displace the deep-seated tendency to think of East and Southeast Asia precisely as “Eastern.” Ultimately, the effort fails, but not without offering us some insight into the ways that the early modern imperial imagination could attempt to remap the world for its own purposes.