Martín Fernández de Enciso

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Suma de geographia

Martín Fernández de Enciso (* around 1470 in Seville , † around 1528 there) was a Spanish geographer, cartographer and navigator.

Life

In 1508 Martín Fernández de Enciso lived in Hispaniola . In 1510 he followed Alonso de Ojeda to conquer the isthmus of Darién . On the Guajira Peninsula , near what is now Cabo de la Vela , they founded a village called Nuestra Señora Santa María de los Remedios del Cabo de la Vela . (The settlement was moved to today's Riohacha in 1544 due to constant attacks by locals and pirates .) In 1510 he founded Santa María la Antigua del Darién . Vasco Núñez de Balboa was one of his colleagues . Shortly after the city of Balboa was foundedsucceeded in instigating a rebellion and banishing Enciso to Spain. In 1514 he went back in the company of the new captain general of Castilla de Oro ("Golden Castile", which meant the Caribbean coast of today's Panama and the adjacent Caribbean coast of today's Colombia), Pedrarias Dávila .

Soon afterwards he traveled back to Spain, where in 1519 he published his Suma de Geographia que trata de todas las partidas y provincias del mundo , the first work in Spanish on the discoveries in the New World .

On August 24, 1499, Amerigo Vespucci and Alonso de Ojeda drove through an isthmus into a huge brackish lake they called Lago de Bartolomé (August 24 is the feast of St. Bartholomew in the Catholic calendar of saints ) - today 's Lake Maracaibo . The stilt houses of the natives reminded Vespucci of the city of Venice (Italian: Venezia ), so that he called the region Little Venice ( Venezuela ).

Although the story of Ojeda and Vespucci remains the most popular and accepted version of Venezuela's name origin, some sources refer to Martín Fernández de Enciso. In Suma de Geographia que trata de todas las partidas y provincias del mundo. describes this an indigenous people who called themselves "Veneciuela". This allows the conclusion that the name “Venezuela” can be natively derived from this.

Works

  • Suma de Geographia que trata de todas las partidas y provincias del mundo. Cromberger, Seville 1519 ( digitized version ).

literature

  • Jean Baptiste Marie Alexandre Dezos de la Roquette: Le cosmographe Espagnol Martín Fernández de Enciso. Étude biographique. Bertrand, Paris 1855.

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ^ Hugh Thomas: Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire, from Columbus to Magellan . Random House, 2005, ISBN 0-375-50204-1 , p. 189.
  2. ^ Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos ( Spanish ). Instituto de Cultura Hispánica (Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional), 1958, p. 386.
personal data
SURNAME Enciso, Martín Fernández de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Spanish geographer, cartographer and navigator
DATE OF BIRTH around 1470
PLACE OF BIRTH Seville
DATE OF DEATH around 1528
Place of death Seville