Amerigo Vespucci (9 March 1451 – 22 February 1512) was an Italian merchant, explorer and navigator for the Spanish and Portuguese Empires.
As you can easily note, he's the man The Americas (North and South) are named after, although the exact circumstances and merits for this are a truly complicated topic as only the Age of Exploration can produce. To sum up, the reason behind the name might be the greatest case of fake news in history, caused by a series of written claims published in Europe which Vespucci might have not been involved with. Indeed, it's even unknown whether this man ever learned during his lifetime that his name was being attached to entire continents, not to mention that it would become their permanent name in the history of mankind.
Vespucci was the heir of a rich but decadent merchant family from Florence in The City State Era of The Renaissance. A cultured young man with a crave for exploration, he started working for the Medici and was put in charge of their business in Castile, where The Catholic Monarchs were busy conquering Granada. He befriended Christopher Columbus and participated as a backer for his first three expeditions, and afterwards Amerigo himself embarked in another expedition to the lands now known as Venezuela under Alonso de Ojeda in 1499. He was reportedly the one to name them, observing the native shacks built on water and comparing them to the city of Venice, thus calling them Venezzuela ("Little Venice"). Upon his return, Vespucci moved briefly to Portugal by unknown reasons: some claim he was working as a Spanish spy, others think the Spaniards kicked him out because they believed him to be a foreign spy, and other believe the King of Portugal simply paid better. In any case, he apparently participated only in one confirmed expedition, exploring the lands of Brazil discovered by Pedro Álvares Cabral during the Conquest of Portuguese India. He might have taken part of more, but this part of his life is unclear.
By 1505, some years after returning to Spain, Vespucci had become quite a big man of the Casa de Contratación in Seville, where he fulfilled multiple roles, among them manager of expeditions and professor of cosmography. There are implications that he wasn't as good in all of his jobs as he claimed, to the point he was apparently regarded as a massive Know-Nothing Know-It-All in topics like piloting ships, but he did have some good ideas and deeds, like profiling the Gulf Stream or lining the ships hulls with lead to make them sturdier, and was by all accounts competent enough for King Ferdinand to retain him in his job until his death seven years later. Amerigo had been married to a illegitimate daughter of the Great Captain, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, and had been also a neighbor of Bishop Juan Rodríguez de Fonseca, a political Arch-Enemy to Hernán Cortés who got eventually demoted by their frequent quarrels.
Now the interesting topic. Why is America named after him? The reason is found in a series of letters and works, supposedly penned by Vespucci, that were published throughout Europe from 1500 to 1506. Research has shown that those works mainly contain well-known cosmographical knowledge, jabs to other navigators, and fantastic garbage about the discovered new lands, and it's unknown whether Vespucci wrote all of them, or even whether he actually wrote a single line of them. In any case, the more relevant ones are the 1504 Mundus Novus and the 1505 Letter to Soderini, which contain the claims over which the name of America was erected.
- Mundus Novus is a letter-diary whose author claims to have participated in a Portuguese expedition in 1501, which he saved heroically from getting lost because those Portuguese navigators couldn't differentiate between a polar star and a polar bear, and in whose course he discovered the Indies are actually not Asia, but a new continent. The general plot of the diary does seem based on letters by Vespucci, but it goes on a series of insane embellishments and contradictions that imply its true author was not entirely familiar with Vespucci's job. The notion about a new continent was not new by that point; it was probably extrapolated from Columbus' own publications after his 1498 travel to the Orinoco river, where he realized he had discovered something much greater than a mere island, and from Pedro Mártir de Anglería's previous usage of the expression "new world" to refer to the Indies.
- The Letter to Soderini is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, a supposed letter from Vespucci to the statesman of Florence Piero Soderini. This work is certainly wrong to some degree, not only because the Vespucci and Soderini families were mortal enemies, but also because it contains all sorts of mistakes, disfigurations and even language typos that imply the author didn't know much about Amerigo's cultural context. Some have speculated it might be a Translation Train Wreck of a real letter, while others believe it is rather a mix of reality and fiction, and most are unanimous it clearly functions as a propagandistic work for Vespucci's homeland. It basically claims that Vespucci performed four great expeditions like Columbus and also reached the Indies a year before Columbus.
They were published in many European countries except by Spain and Portugal, probably because these countries were the headquarters of both Vespucci and Columbus and it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to try to publish fake data about them over there. However, the damage was done, as the rest of the Europe enthusiastically embraced them and started churning out maps and treatises with the name of America stamped on them. Ironically, one of those publishers, Martin Waldseemüller, would later realize they had made a big mistake, but by then it was too late, and the name "America" became deeply entrenched in European culture. As said above, it's unclear whether the real Vespucci ever found out about this whole mess, but people like Bartolomé de las Casas jumped on the conclusion he had been the mastermind of the move and called him a massive liar (note the Hypocritical Humor here), an opinion that would be repeated in the next centuries by Voltaire and other authors, clashing against the more benevolent stance of Alexandre von Humboldt and Ralph Waldo Emerson that Vespucci had likely no hand in the hoax. The truth remains unknown.
Media referencing Amerigo Vespucci:
- In Assassin's Creed II and Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Ezio Auditore's First Love in his Florentine youth is named Cristina Vespucci. She's a fictional cousin of Amerigo.
- He's played by Lee Boardman in Da Vinci's Demons.
