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Around 1520, Peter Martyr Anglerius began composing a new decade for his De orbe wofo,1 about the recently encountered lands of Yucatan. De orbe novo's first three decades, published in 1516, had expanded Christopher Columbus's and Amerigo Vespucci's depictions of Caribbean island cultures. In these narratives, Caribbean peoples were portrayed as licentious and either living outside of society or with few possessions and limited regard for the ties of family and government. The final chapter of Peter Martyr's third decade had hinted that more civilized peoples might be found to the southwest of the Caribbean: the people of Darien inhabited fortified towns and were "citizens" (cives) subject to laws.2 When Peter Martyr picked up his pen again to write the fourth decade, published in 1521,3 he confirmed reports that the people of Yucatan were even more civilized than those of Darien. They lived in well-constructed cities with stone houses and grand temples, paved streets, and marketplaces filled with commerce. They possessed structured governments and judicial bodies, married, practiced religion, and produced books. Even the social elite in the Yucatan might be familiar to the Latin Christian reader: they were sumptuously clothed and wore gold and jewels.To organize his descriptions, Peter Martyr drew on an established set of conventions for cultural evaluations. As Latin Christians traveled beyond the bounds of Europe and the Mediterranean in previous centuries, they produced ever-richer descriptions of the peoples they encountered. These accounts of "customs, laws, and rites" (mores, leges, et ritus) focused on governance and judicial systems, social customs (most often those involving gender relations and trade), religious practices, urban design and architecture, and origins.4 Most of these categories of cultural description had been proposed by Aristotle: in the Politics, he had argued that households, family, property, government, arts, arms, religious practice, and adjudication were necessary for a civilized city-state.5 During the 1510s, while Peter Martyr was composing and circulating his first decades, Desiderius Erasmus repopularized these Aristotelian categories in his Dulce helium inexpert is. There he argued that good rulers, regardless of religious belief, fostered the "arts of civilization" throughout their territories: they instituted letters and laws; they built towns, bridges, and ports; and they increased economic prosperity.6 Although many previous cultural descriptions had focused on the customs and laws of a single people,7 by the early sixteenth century ambitious travel accounts or ethnographies were broader in scope. With the appearance of new travelers' accounts and the increased availability of classical histories, authors began extending such texts, now labeled cosmographies, across the entire world and all the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Europe.8 Arguably the most influential cosmography was Johannes Boemus's Omnium gentium mores, leges et ritus (1520).9 As the prologue by Sigismund Grim proudly announced, this book's goal was to gather together, from accounts by ancient authors and recent travelers, all that was known about religious rites, practices, governments, laws, and customs of the world's peoples.10 The book was intended to serve as an informative aid to both armchair and real travelers, with each chapter describing a people in as great detail as possible.In Peter Martyr's descriptions of Yucatan peoples, religious practices were woven in with political and economic matters. After detailing the use of stone and wood in architecture, Peter Martyr moved to their ritual and economic practices: "[t]hey follow the cult of idols and are circumcised. They conduct business in the highest good faith, trading without money. They honor crosses."11 For the city-state of Cozumel, he described "[r]ooms in the towers rilled with marble statues and clay images of bears, which they invoke by singing in exalted unison. … |
