Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas

Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas (Cuéllar 1549 to Madrid 1626), Cronista Mayor de Indias under Philip II and Philip III, wrote the official history of the Spanish conquest: the Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas y tierra firme del mar océano, published at Madrid in eight Décadas between 1601 and 1615. It opened with the Descripción de las Indias Occidentales, a geography of the Spanish empire in America with fourteen engraved maps: a general map of the Indies, a map of the northern and one of the southern Indies, and eleven maps of the audiencias from New Spain to Chile, together with the Philippines and the Moluccas.

The maps were drawn after the manuscript charts of Juan López de Velasco, cosmographer of the Council of the Indies, and they made public for the first time the administrative geography of the Spanish overseas world. They were copied at once: by Hulsius in Frankfurt (1623), by Colijn in Amsterdam (1622). The second Madrid edition of 1725 to 1730 re-engraved the whole series.

Our collection contains maps from the first edition of 1601 and a near-complete series of the second edition, plus the Hulsius volume in German.