In Venice towards the end of 1523, while Antonio Pigafetta was finalizing the manuscript for his chronicles of the Magellanic Expedition’s first circumnavigation of the globe, he was summoned to Rome by order of the Pope Clement VII. Pigafetta owed allegiance to the Pope as a member of the Knights of Rhodes, so he dutifully went to Rome and did papal service there for about three months.
By the time Pigafetta got back to Venice in May 1524, Maximilianus Transylvanus, the wealthy and well-connected courtier of the Roman Emperor King Charles V, had already appropriated those chronicles for his own first-person account of the Magellanic voyage to the Moluccas.
Above left: A traditional portrait of Magellanic chronicler Antonio Pigafetta, little of whose personal affairs and none of his appearance are in the historical record; this likeness is from a bust of a presumably look-alike Pigafetta relative of his, taken from a Pigafetta family tomb in the Venice Civic Museum in Italy. Above, right: Cover of an 1888 reprint of Pigafetta’s long-lost manuscript in French of his chronicles of the Magellanic Expedition's first voyage around the world, recovered in Milan only in 1797 or 400 years after he wrote it.Transylvanus quickly did his tract
“De Moluccis Insulis” in Latin within 45 days upon the return of the lone surviving ship Magellanic ship Victoria to Spain, with Pigafetta among the 18 returnees. Working with the Venetian geographer-travel writer Giovanni Batistta Ramusio as partner, Transylvanus then produced a sensational narrative of the Magellanic voyage, adroitly presenting it as a letter to the powerful Cardinal-Archbishop of Salzburg, Matthäus Lang von Wellenburg, on October 23, 1522. Three months later Transylvanus published it as a book.
Transylvanus freely used the detailed draft chronicles of the Magellanic Expedition that Pigafetta had presented as a courtesy to the Roman Emperor. However, not having been trained in historiography, Transylvanus lopped off no less than 5,000 words constituting 20 days of Pigafetta’s chronicles of Magellan’s Mazaua sojourn, in the wink of an eye moving the narrative to Subuth (Cebu) so he could present much earlier the more compelling and explosive developments that would happen there.
Dismissive of Pigafetta’s too detailed descriptions of the archipelago’s strange people, flora, and fauna, Transylvanus gave more room in his book for testimonies and scuttlebutt from his own interviews of the Magellanic voyage survivors as well as for his own extensive background material on previous voyages to the Moluccas. And to his credit on a crucial matter that most history writers would get wrong after him, Transylvanus correctly identified where Magellan’s storm-driven fleet dropped anchor as the island of Massana (Mazaua) in Mindanao.
But for all of Transylvanus’ seriously flawed historiography and garbled abridgments that would continue to confound and divide Philippine historians even today, there was no stopping
“De Moluccis Insulis” from making it to the bestseller lists in European capitals.
Pigafetta no doubt was taken aback by the distortions of history in
“De Moluccis Insulis” and by Transylvanus’ usurpation of his authorial rights to his voyage chronicles, but he was powerless to oppose and get redress for them. He kept his peace and hurriedly finished his manuscript. On August 5, 1524, he applied for copyright with the chief magistrate of Venice in these words:
“(I), Antonio Pigafetta, Venetian knight of Jerusalem who, desiring to see the world, have sailed in past years with the caravels of his Cesaraean Majesty that went to discover the islands in the new Indies where the spices grow. On that voyage I circumnavigated the whole world, and since it is a feat which no man had accomplished before, I have composed a short narration of all the said voyage, which I desire to have printed.
“For that purpose, I petition that no one may print it for 20 years except myself, under penalty to him who should print it, or who should bring it here if printed elsewhere…”
Pigafetta’s copyright application was granted by majority vote, but even with the spate of anonymous pirate editions and unauthorized translations of his Magellanic voyage chronicles that followed
“De Moluccis Insulis,” his copyright was never asserted nor invoked against them until his death in 1534.
In fact, the totally sidetracked Pigafetta never got to publish his complete manuscript. It completely vanished for almost 400 years until the Augustinian priest Carlo Amoretti found it in 1797 at the Ambrosian Library in Milan.
(Next:
Getting our history right after 500 years – Part 8) May 13, 2021
This essay, 2,044th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the May 6, 2021 Internet edition of The Manila Times,
© 2021 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. Read this article online in
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ALL PARTS OF THIS HISTORY SERIES IN THE FORUM:1.
Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 12.
Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 23.
Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 3 4.
Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 45.
Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 5 6.
Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 6
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Getting our Philippine history right after 500 years - Part 7 THIS POST
PART 8 TO FOLLOW MAY 13, 2021
