Islario General

1541 geography book by Alonzo de Santa Cruz

Islario^[a] general de todas las islas del mundo (1541)^[1] is a geography text in four volumes by Alonzo de Santa Cruz about the islands of the world.

Composition

The Islario was a monumental undertaking, composed of eight regional maps and 103 local maps, and a map of Mexico. Some volumes of the work are dedicated to Charles V.^[2]

The work contains maps as well as description in prose. It resembles De situ orbis of Pomponius Mela in organization, taking its literary form from the physical layout of the geographic features it describes.^[3] A substantial portion of the information Santa Cruz reports is also derived from ancient geographical texts.^[4] Sánchez argues that the New World portion of the text was, like a number of other 16th-century works of geography, 'produced to facilitate control and domination of the New World'.^[5]

It contains either the first or second account of llamas in Western cartography.^[6]

Archival preservation

Three manuscript copies of the Islario are known. One is located in the City Library of Besançon, and two copies are in the Imperial Library of Vienna.^[7]

Notes

^ 'Islario' is a Spanish term without a clear English equivalent. It designates a map or compendium of islands.

^ Sauer, Carl Ortwin (1971). Sixteenth Century North America: The Land and the People as Seen by the Europeans. University of California Press. p. 64. ISBN 0-520-01854-0. OCLC 215780.
^ Portuondo 2009, p. 73–74.
^ Portuondo 2009, p. 73.
^ Portuondo 2009, p. 74.
^ Sánchez, Antonio (2009). "Cartographic Representation of the New World in Sixteenth-Century Spain, 1503—1598". Imago Mundi. 61 (2): 278. ISSN 0308-5694. JSTOR 20720518.
^ George, Wilma B. (1969). Animals and Maps. University of California Press. p. 64. OCLC 1148014794.
^ Stevenson 1910, p. 393.

Sources

Portuondo, María M. (2009). Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-67537-4.
Stevenson, E. L. (1910). "Review of Die Karten von Amerika in dem Islario General des Alonso de Santa Cruz, Cosmografo Mayor des Kaisers Karl V". The American Historical Review. 15 (2): 392–394. doi:10.2307/1838355. JSTOR 1838355. This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain.