There is a portrait of Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli standing next to philosopher Marsilio Ficino, one of the foremost minds of the Italian Renaissance. In it, Toscanelli appears as a mysterious man. He wears a turban embroidered alla moresca — in the Moorish-style — in a 15th-century Florence committed to fighting against the Turks. But who was Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli?
Born in Florence in 1397 and graduated from Padua medical school in 1424, he was a learned physician, astronomer, mathematician, and cartographer interested in finding a new way to “steal” the spice routes from Arab traders.
Like many other members of the Florentine bourgeoisie, he came from a family of merchants who procured for consumers a wide range of spices including pepper, ginger, cinnamon, clove, and saffron. And as everyone knows spice trade from Asia was the most profitable at the time.
“With the Ottoman conquest of the eastern Mediterranean countries and especially of Byzantium / Constantinople in 1453, the supply of spices became a problem,” explains Professor Leonardo Rombai, former professor of historical geography at the University of Florence.
Constantinople at the convergence of the Spice Routes that skirted ports from southern China to the Red Sea began levying prohibitively expensive tariffs on goods transported through the city. “The Christian countries of Mediterranean Europe – and especially the Italian city-states, including Florence – found themselves in a serious economic crisis,” professor Rombai explains.
With Muslims controlling the lucrative trade, Europeans had to find new seaways to Asia. Kingdoms began sponsoring exploratory expeditions. “That is why Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli began to verify and measure the ocean route to the Indies, a globe in his hands and astronomical calculations in place functional to the evaluation of longitudes,” Professor Rombai explains.
In 15th-century Florence there was a great deal of geographical research. “Toscanelli had well received the geographical and cartographic work of Ptolemy brought to Florence in 1397 by the Byzantine scholar Manuele Crisolora and had studied Marinus of Tyre, a Greek geographer who founded mathematical geography and provided the underpinnings of Ptolemy’s influential Geography,” explains Rombai. “He had also revised the Ptolomy’s Almagest as witnessed by humanist Ugolino Verino, a contemporary of Toscanelli.”
The Almagest is a 2nd-century Greek-language mathematical treatise on the apparent motions of the stars and planetary paths. It canonized a geocentric model of the universe that was accepted for more than 1,200 years from its origin in Hellenistic times to the early Renaissance until Copernicus.
Professor Rombai says the scholar was also indebted to Paolo Dagomari, or Paolo dell’Abbaco, a famous Florentine astronomer, astrologer, and mathematician of the 14th century.
Basing his calculations on Ptolemy’s geographic information according to the size of the Greek ecumene, the known inhabited world, Toscanelli developed his ideas of sailing west to reach the east by covering a distance of only 6,500 miles. He proposed a scheme to sail west as a shortcut to lands in the spice-producing regions in the east. To him, the shortest route to the east was moving west to cross the Atlantic Ocean.
Toscanelli died aged 85 in 1482, ten years before Christopher Columbus discovered the New World while sailing under the flag of Spain. We don’t know if the two ever met but for sure their lives were interconnected.
Toscanelli inspired the Italian explorer. Toscanelli’s theories convinced Columbus in the formulation of his plan to find a direct water route west from Europe to Asia. Few stories in history are more familiar than that of the Genoese navigator sailing west for the Indies and finding instead the New World.
“There is no evidence Toscanelli and Columbus ever met. Yet Columbus had the Toscanelli’s map,” says Professor Rombai, who is also co-author of a book on the long-lost Toscanelli’s chart that accompanied his letter dated June 25, 1474 addressed to the humanist Fernao Martins of Lisbon, confessor Canon and agent of the Portuguese King Alfonso V.
Toscanelli urged the Iberian powers Portugal and Spain to realize the transatlantic project discussed in Florence and laid out for them the map and the scientific information required for its success. “Toscanelli and Martins met several times in Rome, Florence, and other Italian cities,” says Rombai. Martins and Portuguese envoys were also in Florence in 1459 to consult Toscanelli. “On that occasion, Toscanelli borrowed the now well-known Francesco Castellani’s ‘almond’ globe to discuss with his guests the easiest way to get to the East Indies.” Today the Castellani globe is kept in the National Central Library of Florence.
Professor Rombai says Columbus got a hold of the Toscanelli’s map during his stay in Portugal and copied the 1474 letter to Martins when he moved to Portugal from Spain. “Columbus transcribed the letter on a white page of his copy of the Historia Rerum Ubique Gestarum of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II),” says Professor Rombai. “Columbus heavily read and annotated that book where he also drew his itinerary.” Today the book Columbus used to prepare for his voyage is kept in the Columbine Library in Seville Cathedral in Seville, Spain.
Although there is no historical evidence that the Florentine scholar wrote directly to the Genovese explorer, it is now certain that Toscanelli laid the scientific foundations for the Columbus enterprise, confirms Professor Rombai.
But why were Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli’s studies so influential to be taken as absolute truth by Columbus?
The explorer was not a scholarly man. He trusted Toscanelli because he was a great scientific personality, “perhaps the greatest in the field, in both Italy and Europe”, says Rombai. “The fame of Toscanelli, and specifically the letter to Martins of 1474, are to be considered the element that convinced Columbus to elaborate his project.”
“In the 1474 letter to Martins, Toscanelli claimed that between the European-African west and “the beginning of the Indies with the islands and places where you can go” (il principio delle Indie con le isole e i luoghi dove potete andare) there was a “brevissimo cammino” or a very short path. The Florentine scholar estimated that the distance between Lisbon and Quinsay was 6,500 miles as evidenced by his letter: “From the city of Lisbon straight toward the west there are on the said chart 26 spaces, each one of which contains 250 miles, as far as the noble and great city of Quinsai, which is 100 miles around…”
Quinsai was a strategic city port in “Cataio” or Cathay (China) also mentioned by Marco Polo as the City of Heaven. Today, it is called Hangzhou. But was Toscanelli’s unit of measurement a nautical mile (1,852 m) or a Roman-Ptolemaic mile (1,489 m)? “We don’t know,” says Rombai. “Depending on the choice, the estimated distance fluctuates between 9,620 and 12,038 km”.
The indicated route was highlighted in an attached Carta de Marear or navigational map that Columbus never let out of his sight for even a moment during his first voyage. The historical map was replicated at scale 1: 55,000,000 by Toscanelli scholars Herman Wagner and Gustavo Uzielli between the 19th and 20th centuries, says Rombai: “The copy of it is held at the Cartographic Archive of the Istituto Geografico Militare Firenze, folder 95.”
But if Columbus hadn’t followed Toscanelli’s ideas to move west, wouldn’t he have ever set foot on the New World?
“It is difficult, indeed impossible, to answer this question,” says professor Rombai. “However, with his masterful nautical experience acquired at first in the Mediterranean and later in the continental and insular space of the Atlantic between Iceland, England, Western Europe, and West Africa up to the Gulf of Guinea, Columbus had already had the opportunity to accumulate clues and empirical evidence on the navigability of the great ocean to the west also taking into account the study of the direction of constant and periodic winds.”
Professor Rombai remarks that several centuries earlier the Vikings had also ventured there, although further north.
At any rate, isn’t it prodigious that Columbus found land right there where Toscanelli had indicated, even though the continent was the wrong one?
“Certainly, the substantial compatibility of the distances may seem weird. But it is to be considered a simple, strange coincidence,” comments Rombai.
But again, who was Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli? He was a Renaissance man, the ‘Universal Man’ or l’uomo universale, according to an ideal that developed from the notion expressed by his close friend architect Leon Battista Alberti that “a man can do all things if he will.” To him, Alberti dedicated his first book of the Intercenales, a series of fantastic stories, fables, and short dialogues written by the great architect.
Sparse testimonies portray Toscanelli as a scholar who attended only the restricted cenacoli or circles of humanists. He immersed himself in the study of the classics.
Regarding his character traits, the great biographer of artists Giorgio Vasari described him as a man of strict morals, laconic, and a bit gloomy. He was curious about the world and willing to transmit his erudition to the young Florentine bourgeois in the years the Medici family consolidated their power.
Florence, the cultural epicenter of the Italian Renaissance, was a haven for artists, writers, philosophers, and all kinds of thinkers open to innovations from all over the known world. And they all freely exchanged ideas.
Toscanelli loved listening to travelers yet never personally traveled much. “Numerous travelers flocked to Florence in 1439, on the occasion of the Council of Florence, the seventeenth ecumenical council recognized by the Catholic Church,” says Rombai. “They brought geographic innovations in some ways shocking, on little-known parts such as Africa and especially Asia. There are testimonies of Toscanelli questioning travelers coming from the region where the River Tanai (the legendary River Don) sprang and discussing with an Ethiopian monk … .”
“With his humanist friend Giorgio Antonio Vespucci — navigator Amerigo Vespucci’s uncle — Toscanelli would have transmitted the passion for cosmography, geography, and cartography to a young Amerigo Vespucci and to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici,” adds Rombai. “Later, the great navigator Amerigo Vespucci became an employee of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici.” In the early 1500s, Amerigo would send most of his famous letters on the New World to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco.
Other friends were theologian Nicholas of Cusa and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi. Toscanelli and Brunelleschi had an active collaboration on the construction of the Florence Cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore. In the legendary Brunelleschi’s dome, there is a gnomon for measuring the maximum elevation of the sun at the summer solstice. “To expand his patient celestial observations, Toscanelli succeeded at building that gnomon in Santa Maria del Fiore in 1475,” explains Rombai.
After graduation, his first job in Florence was that of an “astrologo giudiziario.” What did it mean? He provided horoscopes to members of the Medici family, even if he made fun of horoscopes as his friend Marsilio Ficino recounted.
The Florence Central National Library preserves two natal charts Toscanelli cast in 1448 and 1449. “There was a great demand from the ruling classes who could afford to pay for their natal horoscopes and paid well.” Astrological expertise was important in their eyes. And those experts were the astronomers themselves.
His geographic works — all handwritten — went missing. “Printing was taking its first steps in the last years of his life,” remarks Professor Rombai. The Florentine geographer represents “the true equilibrium point of the extraordinarily advanced Florentine geographic culture of the 15th century,” he says. “Toscanelli used, and made known, new geographic works and maps to be constructed in a modern way utilizing topographical contents obtained through empirical knowledge and the scientific support of celestial observations. Toscanelli not only did that for the sake of scientific progress, but also for the precise practical use of moving around the world.”
As a commemorative plaque reads on the facade of his palazzo at Piazza de’ Pitti, “Toscanelli began the discovery of the New World.” Thanks to miscalculations, he opened the window to landscapes of wonder.
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