AMERICAN HISTORIES

In 1519 a young Indian woman named Malintzin was thrust into the center of dramatic events that transformed not only her world but also the world at large. As a young girl, Malintzin, whose birth name is lost to history, lived in the rural area of Coatzacoalcos on the frontier between the expanding kingdom of the Mexica and the declining Mayan states of the Yucatán peninsula. Raised in a noble household, Malintzin was fluent in Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica.

In 1515 or 1516, when she was between the ages of eight and twelve, Malintzin was taken by or given to Mexica merchants, perhaps as a peace offering to stave off military attacks. She then entered a well-established trade in slaves, consisting mostly of women and girls, who were sent eastward to work in the expanding cotton fields. Malintzin was apparently sold to a Chontal Mayan village along the Tabasco River near the Gulf of Mexico. As a slave, Malintzin was among thousands of workers who planted, watered, weeded, and harvested the cotton or beat and carded the raw fibers into thread and spun and dyed the yarn. She may also have been forced into a sexual relationship as the concubine of a landowner. Whatever her situation, Malintzin learned the Mayan language during her captivity.

In 1517 Mayan villagers sighted Spanish adventurers along local rivers and drove them off. But in 1519 the Spaniards returned. Well armed and sailing huge boats, they traveled up the Tabasco River and attacked local villages. The Maya’s cotton armor and wooden arrows were no match for the invaders’ steel swords, guns, and horses. Forced to surrender, the Maya offered the Spaniards food, gold, and twenty enslaved women, including Malintzin. The Spanish leader, Hernán Cortés, baptized the enslaved women as Christians, though they neither understood nor consented to the ritual. He assigned each of them Christian names, including Marina, which was later changed to Malintzin. Cortés then divided the women among his senior officers, giving Malintzin to the highest-ranking noble.

Already fluent in Nahuatl and Mayan, Malintzin soon learned Spanish. Within a matter of months, she became the chief translator between the Spaniards and native peoples. As Cortés moved into territories ruled by the Mexica (whom the Spaniards called Aztecs), his success depended on his ability to understand Aztec ways of thinking and to convince subjugated groups to fight against their despotic rulers. Malintzin thus accompanied Cortés at every step, including his triumphant conquest of the Aztec capital in the fall of 1521.

At the same time that Malintzin played a key role in the conquest of the Aztecs, Martin Waldseemüller sought to map the frontiers along which these conflicts erupted. Born in present-day Germany in the early 1470s, Waldseemüller enrolled at the University of Fribourg in 1490, where he probably studied theology. He would gain fame, however, not as a cleric but as a cartographer, or mapmaker.

In 1507 Waldseemüller and Mathias Ringmann produced a map of the world, a small globe, and a Latin translation of the four voyages of the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci. The map and the globe, entitled Universalis Cosmographia, depict the “known” world as well as the “new” worlds recently discovered by European explorers. The latter include an elongated territory labeled America, set between the continents of Africa and Asia. A thousand copies of the map were produced, each consisting of twelve sections engraved on wood and covering some 36 square feet. The map offered a view of the world never before attempted.

In 1513 Waldseemüller and Ringmann published the world’s first atlas, which included a Latin edition of the works of Ptolemy, the Greco-Egyptian mathematician and astronomer. Three years later, Waldseemüller produced an updated map of the world, the Carta Marina. Apparently in response to challenges regarding Vespucci’s role in discovering new territories, he substituted the term Terra Incognita (“unknown land”) for the region he had earlier labeled America. But the 1507 map had already circulated widely, and America became part of the European lexicon.•

THE PERSONAL HISTORIES of Malintzin and Martin Waldseemüller were both shaped by the profound consequences of contact between the peoples of Europe and those of the Americas. Both Malintzin and Waldseemüller helped to map the frontiers of an increasingly global society. See Document Project 1: Mapping America. It took much longer in the sixteenth century than today to travel from continent to continent and to communicate across such vast distances. Nonetheless, animals, plants, goods, ideas, and people began circulating regularly among Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas during the sixteenth century. Malintzin and Waldseemüller, in their very different ways, were part of these dramatic transformations.