Clash of the Ancients: Cartography, Classics, and Imperial Struggle in the Sixteenth Century Atlantic World

The evolution of Europe out of its classical crucible and the early modern West\u27s turbulent interaction with an entirely alien civilization have always provided fresh grist for great history. By the late sixteenth century, Spain\u27s discovery and colonization of the West Indies ushered in a momentous series of conflicts and accommodations with Mesoamerican societies. At the same time, the continental power struggled to define itself in accordance with the attitudes of the Renaissance and the emerging scientific revolution. Recent scholarship in the growing field of critical cartography has allowed historians to examine the map as a window into the cultural and natural knowledge of early modern societies. This approach allows for a unique examination of the systematic or scientific struggle to reorder the chaotic world of the Columbian encounter from both sides of the Atlantic. Rather than characterize the European Renaissance as an inevitable evolution of classical ideals and the indigenous response as a reactive struggle to survive, this work will employ map analysis to draw out two parallel, not hierarchical, processes. Each process - one European, the other Amerindian - was an independent and pain-staking re-tooling of ancient ideas about society’s place in the world that occurred within a broader cultural nexus. The research centers on the Relaciones Geográficas de Indias, a major cartographic and ethnographic experiment initiated by Spanish authorities in 1577 to make New Spain “known”. The Relaciones, inked by both Westerners and Mesoamericans, will serve as a common ground upon which to build a comparative history. As is stands, the traditions in the Relaciones have been studied largely as texts that spoke past one another. A critical concern of this thesis is to demonstrate the way in which each culture utilized notions of space to achieve the same end: the re-imagination of classical authority