author
Pietro Martire d' Anghiera
1457–1526
A lively humanist at the Spanish court, he became one of Europe's earliest chroniclers of the Americas. His letters and histories gathered first-hand reports from explorers and helped shape how the New World was understood in print.
1 Audiobook
De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera
by Pietro Martire d' Anghiera
About the author
Born in Arona in 1457, Pietro Martire d'Anghiera was an Italian-born humanist who built his career in Spain. He moved there in the late 1480s, entered court circles, and served the Catholic Monarchs and their successors as a teacher, cleric, diplomat, and writer.
He is best remembered for recording some of the earliest European accounts of the Americas. Rather than traveling on the famous voyages himself, he collected reports from explorers, officials, and returned travelers, then turned that information into vivid Latin letters and histories. Those writings were later gathered into De orbe novo (Decades of the New World), a major source for the first decades of Spanish exploration and conquest.
His work matters because it preserves how news of the Atlantic world first reached educated readers in Europe: full of curiosity, court politics, geography, and wonder. He died in Granada in October 1526, leaving behind a body of writing that still helps historians understand the early age of exploration.