But the decisive influence came from a remote corner of the Vosges.
René II., Duke of Lorraine, the old school companion of Vespucius, shared, as has been already said, the elevated tastes natural to princes of the Renaissance. He followed with attentive eye the explorations of navigators, and favored the progress of geographical science.
Americus Vespucius addressed to him, as we know, from Lisbon, in 1504, an account or rather an abstract of his four voyages.
There lived in those days in Lorraine, in the little town of Saint Dié, a learned bookseller, a native of Fribourg-en-Brisgau, and an ancient student in the university of that town. Following a custom of the time, he had, by a Greek transformation, translated his name from Martin Waldsee Muller to Martinus Hylacomylus. [Footnote 199] He prepared an edition of Ptolemaeus. The mathematician of Alexandria, the last exponent of geographical knowledge and of cosmography among the ancients, had been successively the oracle of the immovable middle ages and of the invincible pioneers who opened the modern era. The world was never weary of making reprints of his writings, adding in a supplement what antiquity had not known of our globe, or as the saying went, of lands outside Ptolemaeus, (regiones extra Ptolemaeum.)
[Footnote 199: Crit. Exam. vol. iv. p. 99 and following. See the positive and sagacious researches which led M. Von Humboldt to discover the true name of Hylacomylus. The passage is of great interest, not only on account of the problem whose solution it presents, but as showing with what persevering ardor the illustrious author devoted himself to the elucidation of the truth.]
But before entering upon his great work, Hylacomylus published an introduction to the cosmography, and as an addition precious as it was novel, enriched it with the four voyages of Americus Vespucius, under this title "Cosmographiae introductio cum qui busdam geometriae ac astronomiae principlis ad eam rem necessariis. Insuper quatuor Americi Vespucii navigationes." He wrote anonymously, revealing his name only with the second edition in 1509.
From whom did he obtain these four voyages, never before printed? No doubt from the Duke of Lorraine. But he is silent upon that point, limiting himself to the information that they had been translated from Italian into French and from French into Latin.
Here and there in the nine chapters that compose his work Hylacomylus alludes to the discoveries of Americus Vespucius, extolling their extent and their scientific importance. "The torrid zone," he says, "is habitable and inhabited. The Golden Chersonesus and Taprobane contain many human beings, as well as a very considerable portion of the country entirely unknown until lately, when it was discovered by Americus Vespucius."
Further on, in a more decided manner, after mentioning the seven climates described by Ptolemaeus, and named after several remarkable towns, mountains, or rivers of the northern hemisphere, Hylacomylus opposes to them six others recently recognized in the southern hemisphere. The names of the first five repeat those of the north in symmetrical opposition. [Footnote 200] In the sixth, toward the antarctic region and the extremity of Africa, he places Zanzibar, discovered shortly before, the islands of Java Minor, (Sumatra,) Seula, (Ceylon,) with the fourth part of the world; "and this quarter, since Americus discovered it, we may be allowed to call the land of Americus, or America."