This paper shows what an important role Renaissance culture played in shaping the mindset of modern travelers thanks to its focus on observation, curiosity and the pursuit of intellectual refinement. Another peculiarity of this historical period is the use of geographic knowledge for strategic purposes. However, the official secrets, homologated by the Casas de Contratación (entities set up by Spain to control colonial trade), went through a continuous process of corrosion. The need of the Portuguese and Spanish Crowns to ratify their possession of new colonial territories made the disclosure of such information as important as silence. Furthermore, the experience of the Discoveries was assimilated by second-hand informers and shared through diplomatic and commercial channels that branched out across Europe. This collective and non-official organism - or "network" as we might call it today - made data relative to Asia, Africa and America available to cosmographers, thus constituting a firm basis for 16th-century cartography. The paper is an effort to show that the flow of geographic knowledge during the Age of Discoveries was characterized by a virtually unrestricted practice of copying and by a circuit of consumption that was both informal and international.
Discoveries; Cosmography; Secrecy policy; Propaganda; 16th-century cartography; Informal knowledge networks
