Narrating Magellan Today: An Exhibition About the Circumnavigation in a Small Italian Town

Is it possible today to narrate Magellan’s experience around the world outside Iberia with an exhibition? Even more so, in a rural small Italian town, possibly the most different place from the world of ocean navigation that gave birth to the Portuguese explorer? This was the challenge I faced when I decided to organize the exhibition Il Giro del Mondo in 500 Anni, on display from September 17th, 2022 to January 31st, 2023 in the town of Guastalla, a small renaissance town in the rural heart of northern Italy. The exhibition is designed to take visitors step by step along Magellan’s journey, to visit the places of the circumnavigation and the wonders encountered by its protagonists, from the giants of Patagonia to the penguins of the eponymous Strait.

The planispheres exhibited in the rooms of the local Gonzaga’s Ducal Palace are meant to show how in the age discoveries and encounters different ways of representing the world could exist simultaneously. For a long time, geographers and cartographers debated the possibility of Asia and America being united. Magellan himself, in order to reach the Mar del Sur, i.e. the Pacific Ocean, had to find the passage that still bears his name. Finally, we wanted to show to visitors the connection between this global journey and the local context: Guastalla. On display in the exhibition are a series of objects: paintings, religious vestments, and textbooks, in which the vast world peeps into the erudite culture and daily reality of the small town. Geography books for use in local schools testify to the knowledge about the world and its nature that entered people’s collective awareness. Depictions of animals and plants on textiles and pictorial canvases tell us of a cultural globalization which was different from how we know it today, but no less pervasive. Even Bernardino Baldi’s poetical treaty La Nautica, displayed in the exhibition, tells of distant ways of transmitting scientific knowledge derived from early modern oceanic sailings.

Among the exhibition’s purposes was the desire to showcase the documentary and bibliographic heritage of the local Maldotti Library, from which all the iconographic and book material on display comes. This institution represents a still too little-explored treasure of historical sources of local, but also regional, and even national importance. The mounting of an exhibition on a global theme, a bold choice for a vibrant but small reality such as Guastalla, testifies to the great research potential guarded by local cultural and archival institutions, of which the Maldotti Library has been the centerpiece for more than two hundred years.

Last but not least, it is important to mention the educational value of the exhibition, designed to be visited by schoolchildren of various grades as an interactive and audiovisual moment of learning. In fact, the exhibit features a three-dimensional model of the ship Victoria, the only one to return to Spain in 1522, as well as various wooden reproductions of navigational instruments used by 16th-century navigators, made to be used by visitors. It was also possible to borrow a mobile planetarium from the University of Parma, housed in the rooms of the Ducal Palace, to show visitors the celestial vault of the southern hemisphere as seen by Magellan and his sailors after crossing the equatorial line.

I hope I have achieved the goal of narrating Magellan in one context not directly affected by the tradition of ocean voyages. Have I succeeded? I leave that answer to the exhibition visitors. [David Salomoni]

From the “leap day before the calends of March” to the 29th of February – Part III

Taking up from where we left in our latest episode, and to draw some conclusions, we can see how the need for tables with astronomical references, such as those for the Sun’s Declination, led to a new representation of the month of February: in the three common years with 28 days, in the “leap” years with 29 days— actually switching the added or “leap” day to the end of the month, from being a duplication of February 24th, to the new and shiny 29th of February. But the result is the same: the month of February had 29 days every 4 years.

And even after the Gregorian Calendar Reform in 1582, we still have leap years and their model still has an intercalary day. Formerly, the leap day was introduced after February 23rd, now the leap day is added at the end of the same month of February. Formerly, February 24th was repeated and called the “leap day before the calends of March” (bis sextus ante calendas, remember?), but now the numbering of the days of February goes from 1 to 29 without interruption. It is as if there was no longer an intercalary “leap” day, but simply a month of 29 days, in which the 29th is an additional or “extra” leap day. The result is the same, as shown by the fact that intercalations at the end of the year were already used in the traditional Roman calendar and in Julius Caesar’s reform.

Perhaps this comes most naturally to us because we no longer organize the dates or the calendar in the manner of the Romans of the Republic or the Empire. But the basis of this solution, having years with days added every fourth, remains Julius Caesar’s because we prefer, like him, an annual solar calendar which follows the seasons, having equinoxes and solstices on (roughly) constant dates.

Here, in the Sun’s Declination Tables used by early modern mariners, we witness the transition from the medieval model of the month of February in the Julian calendar, still with Roman dates, to a month of February with the Indo-Arabic numerals we still use today.

Quadrennial table February page, from the Évora Nautical Guide, ca.1516.

This transition reflected, in some way, the transition from the use of Roman numerals to Arabic numerals, and the transition from handwritten to printed documents. The Évora Nautical Guide (shortly to be made available through our RUTTER Digital Library), may be among the first Portuguese calendars printed with the longer month of February including a 29th day—without a patron saint! [José Madruga]

The Ambassador and the Captain: a Classical Story of Espionage?

Drawing on previous blog posts (Surprises Awaiting the Visitors to Simancas Archive and A 16th-century Run for Gold and for… an Accurate Nautical Rutter?), we could not fail to report more novelties on Manuel Mesquita Perestrelo. It is another instance of how the Secretaria de Estado Portugal (in Simancas Archive) holds really a surprise at every corner.

In December 1569, King Philip II appointed a new ambassador to Portugal: D. Juan de Borja (1533-1606). The ambassador came from a prestigious noble house (he was the son of the famous Francisco de Borja, the duke of Gandia who renounced his title and later was appointed as the Jesuit general in Rome) and became known as the espía-embajador (the spy-ambassador). Shortly after arriving in Lisbon in 1570, Borja wrote a small warning to the Spanish court. He claimed that Manuel Mesquita Perestrelo had been convinced by a Portuguese pilot to return to Portugal, as he was given a formal pardon letter by the Portuguese King. According to the best rumours in Lisbon, Borja asserted that Perestrelo was to be named captain of the Portuguese Moluccas.

D. Juan de Borja (1533-1606)

Indeed, Perestrelo had fled to Spain during the 1560s. This was owed to his previous imprisonment in Lisbon. Perestrelo had been accused of siphoning money off for personal profit and mainly for not opposing John Hawkins’s fleet in 1562 at Mina, where he had succeeded as captain due to the previous captain’s decease. As Perestrelo considered this to be an injustice against him, he fled to Spain. However, some years later, the Portuguese ambassador in Spain seems to have mediated his return. But why would Borja, in 1570, be so worried about such an apparently insignificant story?

Manuel Mesquita Perestrelo's manuscript

The answer resides in a second letter by Borja to King Philip II. In this letter, Borja had discovered that Perestrelo had orders to attack the Spanish in the Philippines and had confirmed with several informants that he was, in his own words, a “great mariner and cosmographer” (let us not forget Perestrelo’s 1575’s famous nautical rutter on the East African coast). For this reason, Borja regretted deeply that he could not prevent Perestrelo’s departure. The letter seems to imply that Borja tried to disrupt Perestrelo’s expedition (which departed in 1570). Still, it remains unknown whether Borja approached Perestrelo to convince him to return to Spain. What remains certain is that this sort of episode remained very common all along the 16th century, when the acquisition of nautical knowledge could justify espionage. Borja knew well that in order to sustain a successful maritime empire, espionage under the utmost secrecy was a necessity. So too did King Philip II when he ordered Borja, in his December 1569 instruction, to use mucho segredo (much secrecy) in his important acquisitions in Portugal. Indeed, Borja’s story with Perestrelo is merely one of the espionage episodes of Borja’s embassy in Portugal. [Nuno Vila-Santa]