St. Dié.
Duke René.
It concerns us chiefly to know that somehow a copy of this condensed narrative of Vespucius came into the hands of his fellow-townsman, Fra Giovanni Giocondo, then in Paris at work as an architect constructing a bridge over the Seine. It is to be allowed that R. H. Major, in tracing the origin of the French text, assumes something to complete his story, and that this precise genesis of the narrative which was received by Duke René of Lorraine is open to some question. The supposition that a young Alsatian, then in Paris, Mathias Ringmann, had been a friend of Giocondo, and had been the bearer of this new version to René, is likewise a conjecture. Whether Ringmann was such a messenger or not matters little, but the time was fast approaching when this young man was to be associated with a proposition made in the little village of St. Dié, in the Vosges, which was one of those obscure but far-reaching mental premonitions so often affecting the world's history, without the backing of great names or great events. This almost unknown place was within the domain of this same Duke René, a wise man, who liked scholars and scholarly tomes. His patronage had fostered there a small college and a printing-press. There had been grouped around these agencies a number of learned men, or those ambitious of knowledge. Scholars in other parts of Europe, when they heard of this little coterie, wondered how its members had congregated there. One Walter Lud, or Gualterus Ludovicus, as they liked to Latinize his name, a dependent and secretary of Duke René, was now a man not much under sixty, and he had been the grouper and manager of this body of scholars. There had lately been brought to join them this same Mathias Ringmann, who came from Paris with all the learning that he had tried to imbibe under the tutoring of Dr. John Faber. If we believe the story as Major has worked it out, Ringmann had come to this sparse community with all the fervor for the exploits of Vespucius which he got in the French capital from associating with that Florentine's admirer, the architect Giocondo.
VESPUCIUS.
Coming to St. Dié, Ringmann had been made a professor of Latin, and with the usual nominal alternation had become known as Philesius; and as such he appears a little later in connection with a Latin version of the French of Giocondo, which was soon made by another of the St. Dié scholars, a canon of the cathedral there, Jean Bassin de Sandacourt. Still another young man, Walter Waldseemüller, had not long before been made a teacher of geography in the college, and his name, as was the wont, had been classicized into Hylacomylus.
There have now been brought before the reader all the actors in this little St. Dié drama, upon which we, as Americans, must gaze back through the centuries as upon the baptismal scene of a continent.
Waldseemüller.
Cosmographiæ Introductio.
The Duke had emphasized the cosmographical studies of the age by this appointment of an energetic young student of geography, who seems to have had a deft hand at map-making. Waldseemüller had some hand, at least, in fashioning a map of the new discoveries at the west, and the Duke had caused the map to be engraved, and we find a stray note of sales of it singly as early as 1507, though it was not till 1513 that it fairly got before the world in the Ptolemy of that year. Waldseemüller had also developed out of these studies a little cosmographical treatise, which the college press was set to work upon, and to swell it to the dignity of a book, thin as it still was, the diminutive quarto was made to include Bassin's Latin version of the Vespucius narrative, set out with some Latin verses by Ringmann. The little book called Cosmographiæ Introductio was brought out at this obscure college press in St. Dié, in April and August, 1507. There were some varieties in each of these issues, while that part which constituted the Vespucius narrative was further issued in a separate publication.