One of the most fascinating book I ever read on the history of the birth of the Americas. Pietro Martire d'Anghiera arrived in Spain in 1487. As a foreign scholar of modest repute, and dependent on the protection of his patron, the Count of Tendilla, Peter Martyr had risen in royal favour, until he came to occupy honourable positions in the State and numerous benefices in the Church. His services to his protectors were valued and valuable. His house, wherever he happened for the time to be, was hospitable meeting-place where statesmen, noblemen, foreign envoys, great ecclesiastics, and papal legates came together with navigators and conquerors, cosmographers, colonial officials, and returning explorers from antipodal regions Spain’s empire builders. It was in such society he collected the mass of first-hand information he sifted and chronicled in the Decades and Opus Epistolarum, which have proven such an inexhaustible mine for students of Spanish and Spanish-American history. Truly of him may it be said that nothing human was alien to his spirit. Intercourse with him was prized as a privilege by the great men of his time, while he converted his association with them to his own and posterity’s profit. knew most of the great explorers of his time, including Columbus. Page 23 of the book/Carl Roc