I. The New Worlds and Europe in the Sixteenth Century

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Abstract
‘Thanks to thy sublime merits the times in which we live may be freely compared with the greatest days of Antiquity.’ So, in 1490, wrote Politian to the king of Portugal, casting a hopeful eye over something like a century of Portuguese imperial endeavour.1 Sixty years later, in a significantly different style, a Spanish chronicler surveying his own country's even more spectacular achievements saw them as ‘the greatest event since the making of the world, apart from the incarnation and death of him who created it’. Since then the idiom may have changed, but not the conviction, and at some time or other almost everything from the unshackling of man's mind from the bonds of medieval superstition to the rise of a capitalist economy has been attributed to the discoveries. Recently we have been invited to see Lisbon as the second Byzantium, and from the Sorbonne there has come the grand apocalyptic message of the birth of ‘un humanisme technique’ manifested in a new and seminal ‘sens du réel, sens du chiffre et de la précision’.

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