1556 / 1565 Giovanni Battista Ramusio Map of Mexico/Tenochtitlan

Contemporaneous Revision of Cortéz' Map

This is the scarce 1565 issue of Giovanni Battista Ramusio's map of Mexico - Tenochtitlan, among the earliest depictions of the capital of the Aztec empire. It results from the combination of two firsthand accounts. Much of it is drawn from the report of Hernan Cortéz himself, but the present depiction incorporates the further report of an anonymous conquistador who accompanied Cortéz, and whose account adds further detail to the European view of the city for the first time. In its 1524 iteration, this was the first printed image of any American city.

A Closer Look

The southern-oriented map focuses on two lakes - one salt, one sweet - that formed the environment of the Aztec capital. The surrounding mountains are depicted, including a phalanx of volcanoes at the southern edge of the map. The northern (lower) body is Lake Texcoco, mapped predominantly after the 1524 model of Hernán Cortés. Tenochtitlan - here named Mexico - is shown in the middle of that lake, spanned by bridges and causeways - an idealized representation of the city, meant to emphasize its similarity to Venice. The view includes the palaces of Moctezuma and Axayácatl, the square of Tlatelolco, the aqueduct to the mainland, numerous canals, the great temple, and even the Emperor Moctezuma’s zoo. Boats are depicted plying the water.

Cortéz's map focused only on Lake Texcoco, with the result that the majority of 16th and 17th-century depictions of the city followed suit: the maps appearing in Benedetto Bordone's 1528 Isolario, Münster's Cosmographia, and Braun and Hogenberg's 1572 Civitatis Orbis Terrarum were based exclusively on Cortés' model. Ramusio's work was not a rote copy of Cortéz. While Lake Texcoco is closely modeled after the 1524 map, it includes many more notes and place names than were present on Cortés' map. Most visibly, Ramusio's map depicts a freshwater lake to the south, with islands and additional towns. This is the earliest depiction of the endorheic Laguna de Chalco, though conflated with Lake Xochimilco (the place name appears associated with one of the islands, 'Suchimilco'). These unique elements correspond to the report, first published in Ramusio's Navigationi et Viaggi accompanied by this map, credited to an anonymous gentil'huomo del Signor Fernando Cortese.

Foreshadowing Mexico City's Desagüe

The mapping of Cortéz captured the image of a Venice-like city situated on a network of interconnected islands on Lake Texcoco. The anonymous courtier extended that knowledge to include the endorheic lakes to the south of the city. The Aztecs understood the local watershed and built their city to accommodate it. Cortéz destroyed this indigenous city and its dikes during his conquest. In rebuilding, the Spanish failed to restore the Aztec water management system despite aggressive expansion. Instead, they instituted massive landfill projects built directly atop the lakebed. Heavy rainfall thus led to seepage, floods, and unstable foundations. Over and over, the floods caught the colonials unprepared, toppling buildings and threatening ruin. This problem that persists in Mexico City to this day.

Colonial authorities instituted a long-standing, costly engineering project known as the Desagüe to control Mexico's central lake system. This included multiple failed water management projects. In 1748, Joseph Francisco Cuevas Aguirre y Espinosa, a lawyer and city Regidor, compiled a register and assessment of the various surveys and water mitigation projects. His report includes Carlos Sigüenza y Gongora's Mapa de los Aguas, which was the first map of the area produced by a Mexican and with no reference to Cortés. The comparison of the two works is rewarding, in that it confirms that the place names appearing on this map were not the concoction of some anonymous formschneider but were genuine, if inaccurately placed, locales.

Publication History and Census

This map was first cut by Matteo Pagano for inclusion in the 1556 third volume of Ramusio's Navigationi et Viaggi. The woodblocks for this, and indeed all the maps of the 1556 edition, burned in a 1557 warehouse fire. It appears in only one known state. The blocks were all re-engraved, probably again by Pagano, for the 1565 edition of the Navigationi et Viaggi. The second block (the present example) is geographically identical to the first; the two blocks are most easily distinguished by the sharp differences in the fence posts in the bottom-right corner of the woodcut. This second block was used again in 1606. That edition is easily identifiable by the small worm-shaped blank areas (woodworm appears to have similarly infested all blocks of the 1606 edition.) The 1556 edition of the third volume of Navigationi et Viaggi is rare. Seven examples of the 1565 are listed in OCLC, while perhaps twenty of the 1606 edition appear in institutional collections. No confirmed examples of this separate map are cataloged in OCLC: one listed as a 1565 is actually a 1556 block; it is equally possible that one or more of the examples in institutional collections with a 1556 attribution may in fact be a 1565.

Cartographer

Giovanni Battista Ramusio (July 20, 1485 - July 10, 1557) was an Italian civil servant, humanist, scholar, historian, and geographer active in the middle part of the 16th century. Ramusio spent most of his life in the service of the Republic of Venice, first as part of that state's embassy to France, and later as a reporter on voyages and discoveries. He was born to an illustrious family in Treviso and moved to Vencie as a young man, where his father was a magistrate. He studied at the University of Padua but may not have received a full degree. He entered the civil service shortly after leaving the university and was immediately assigned to diplomatic service for his facility with languages, particularly French. His most significant contribution to cartography is his publication of Navigationi et Viaggi a collection of travel narratives he collected in his service to the state. The narratives include those of Marco Polo, Niccolò Da Conti, Magellan, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, Giosafat Barbaro, and Tomé Pires, among others. Some of the voyages appearing in the Navigationi et Viaggi are otherwise unknown, marking it as an exceptionally important volume. Ramusio died in Venice in 1557.   Further Details...

Source

Ramusio, G. B., Delle Navigationi et Viaggi Raccolte da M. Gio. Battista Ramusio, (Venice: Appresso i Giunti) 1565.    

Condition

Excellent. Minor marginal stain, else fine.

References

OCLC 316463587 (1556).