The Project Gutenberg EBook of De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2)
by Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt

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Title: De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2)
The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera

Author: Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt

Release Date: May 24, 2004 [EBook #12425]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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DE ORBE NOVO

The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera

Translated from the Latin with Notes and Introduction

By Francis Augustus MacNutt

In Two Volumes

Volume One

1912

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

THE FIRST DECADE

THE SECOND DECADE

THE THIRD DECADE

ILLUSTRATIONS

CARDINAL ASCANIO SFORZA From the Medallion by Luini, in the Museum at
Milan. Photo by Anderson, Rome.

LEO X. From an Old Copper Print. (No longer in the book.)

DE ORBE NOVO

INTRODUCTION

I

Distant a few miles from the southern extremity of Lago Maggiore, the
castle-crowned heights of Anghera and Arona face one another from
opposite sides of the lake, separated by a narrow stretch of blue
water. Though bearing the name of the former burgh, it was in
Arona[1], where his family also possessed a property, that Pietro
Martire d'Anghera first saw the light, in the year 1457[2]. He was not
averse to reminding his friends of the nobility of his family, whose
origin he confidently traced to the Counts of Anghera, a somewhat
fabulous dynasty, the glories of whose mythical domination in Northern
Italy are preserved in local legends and have not remained entirely
unnoticed by sober history. What name his family bore is unknown; the
statement that it was a branch of the Sereni, originally made by Celso
Rosini and repeated by later writers, being devoid of foundation. Ties
of relationship, which seem to have united his immediate forebears
with the illustrious family of Trivulzio and possibly also with that
of Borromeo, furnished him with sounder justification for some pride
of ancestry than did the remoter gestes of the apocryphal Counts of
Angher