The Cèllere Codex (officially, Del Viaggio del Verrazzano Nobile Fiorentino al Servizio di Francesco I, Ri de Francia, fatto nel 1524 all'America Settentrionale, also Morgan MS. MA. 776) is one of three surviving copies of a manuscript letter sent by Giovanni da Verrazzano (1481–1528) in 1524 to King Francis I of France describing the former's navigation of the East Coast of the United States. It is nowadays preserved at the Morgan Library of New York.
Verrazzano was an Italian who lived in France, and he undertook his voyage in Francis' service. The King, prompted by the French mercantile community, charged Verrazzano to discover whether there was a direct passage from the Atlantic to China and Japan.
The Codex is considered by scholars to be the most important of the three copies, although there is debate as to how much weight should be given to some of the detail it provides. Over twelve pages, the Codex describes how Verrazzano sailed due west from Madeira in December 1523, and in little more than a month had arrived at North Carolina. From there they journeyed south, towards Florida. This direction was not without danger, as Florida represented the northerly point of the Spanish Empire, and Spanish warships patrolled the sea. Verrazzano then turned northwards again and, hugging the coast, passed Virginia, New Jersey, and eventually New York, where he anchored in what is now New York Harbor. He then continued north around New England, to Newfoundland, where, with provisions running low, he turned eastwards. Verrazzano and crew returned to Dieppe in July 1524. The Codex describes Verrazzano's journey in a far greater degree of detail than the other versions of his letter, which may be because it was originally transcribed by Verrazzano's brother, and then further annotated by Verrazzano himself. It was sent via a series of letters to colleagues of Verrazzano in France and then to Italy, where it then remained undiscovered in a Viterbo library until the early twentieth century. Until its discovery there had been some doubt as to whether Verrazzano had ever made the voyage at all.
Background
Verrazzano's fellow Italian, Christopher Columbus, in the service of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, had reached the New World in 1492, and over the next thirty years, three European nations — the English, Portuguese and Spanish —investigated the new continent, claiming land for their respective monarchs when possible. A few years after Columbus, John Cabot made multiple voyages to Newfoundland in the service of the English king, Henry VII. In September 1522 Spaniard Juan Sebastián Elcano made the first circumnavigation of the globe, and in the following year the king of France, Francis I, was persuaded to dispatch an expedition. This was under the command of the Florentine explorer and humanist Giovanni da Verrazzano. Verrazzano was tasked with discovering a westward-passage to China, which would enable traders to avoid the treacherous Strait of Magellan. This was the goal Columbus had originally set out to achieve over 30 years earlier.
Lyon was the hub of France's silk industry, and a newer, shorter such passage would protect and increase their lucrative trade with Cathay. Francis was a willing backer, although no royal commission survives for the expedition: France had a particularly bitter commercial rivalry with Portugal, which repeatedly led to armed clashes in the areas where their mutual interests overlapped, such as the Brazilian and West African coasts. On the other hand, Francis wanted Portugal's assistance in the war in Italy. More immediately, his finances were sufficiently precarious to render an expedition worthwhile only if it discovered new wealth for France. It has been suggested that Verrazzano too was intending to profit personally from his voyage of discovery. The Lyonnais mercantile community was almost exclusively Florentine, like Verrazzano, and effectively formed an expatriate community. Records dating from March the previous year suggest that together Verrazzano and these merchants had formed a syndicate at the expedition's planning stage. This was intended to divide both the investment and the profit from the voyage between them; they are described as tous marchans florentins (French for "all Florentine merchants").
Verrazzano left France with a ship provided and paid for by the King, a 100-ton caravel called La Dauphine. He had a crew of 50 men, materiel and provisions sufficient for eight months at sea in December 1523. Verrazzano chose a course across the mid-Atlantic, perhaps aware that by now Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon had mapped the area as far north as 33° 30' and that Juan Ponce de León had extended Spanish influence from South America up to Florida. This course ensured him the best chance of discovering a western passage while avoiding the Spanish fleet. After forty days sailing they reached and landed just north of Cape Fear, near Myrtle Grove Sound, North Carolina. Verrazzano named this new continent "Francesca", after his King. He knew he had not reached China, as he described it as "a new land which had not been seen before by any man, either ancient or modern".
The Codex
Discovery The Cèllere Codex is a manuscript attributed to Verrazzano held in the library of Count Guido Macci of Cèllere in 1908, after which it is named. It was discovered by Italian scholar Alessandro Bacchiani in 1908, who published a critical edition the following year.
It was originally written on 8 July 1524 and addressed to a business associate of Gerolamo, Bonacorso Ruscellay. Written in Verrazzano's native Tuscan Italian, that first draft was translated, multiple times, into French for the King. It is unique among the surviving copies in being annotated by Verrazzano himself. These annotations are considerable, and they both expand on the context of the events the Codex describes and provide detailed minutiae about them. It is likely that many other versions of the letter were written for the convenience of the scribe before translating, although they appear not to have survived. The annotated Codex appears to have been given to either Leonardo Tedaldi or Thomaso Sartini, Lyonese merchants, and then forwarded to a Roman banker, Bonacorso Ruscellai, who was a relative of Verrazzano's. Within thirty years it was in the possession of noted Italian antiquarian Paolo Giovi, and eventually resurfaced hundreds of years later in the Cèllere library.
Bacchiani's version was subsequently translated into French in 1933, and again in 1946. The most recent translation was in 1956. The Director of the Morgan Library, Frederick B. Adams, Jr., decided to definitively publish the Library's Codex, complete with transcription, translation, appendices and footnotes. Adams appointed the Library's consultant, Lawrence C. Wroth to undertake the work, and it was eventually published in 1970. Wroth's book utilised and printed the 1956 translation of the Codex.
The reliance historians of the period have sometimes placed upon it—Seymour I. Schwartz, for example, has described it as holding a "nuclear position" in twentieth-century scholarship—has been criticised in some quarters. One modern Italian scholar, Luca Codignola, has blamed this phenomenon on a dearth of contemporary sources other than the Codex, and has condemned what he identifies as a tendency to take the manuscript "at face value", treating it as "a sort of sixteenth-century encyclopaedia".
Scholars were already aware of two other copies of Verrazzano's letter in existence, although the Codex is generally considered the best quality version; I. N. P. Stokes, as part of his six-volume The Iconography of Manhattan Island, described the Codex as an "accurate and full embodiment of Verrazzano's famous lost letter" to the King. Further, it was "one of the most important documents dealing with the topography of the North-East Coast" of the United States, particularly Manhattan island, which had been up until Verrazzano's arrival undiscovered.
It has been described as the "most significant" and the "definitive document" of Verrazano's voyage on account of its "semi-autobiographic" nature. The Cèllere Codex was written before Verrazano sent his king, Francis I, an official report, but after he had returned from the New World. Verrazzano devoted about one-third of the Codex to the natives he found on the new continent, especially their appearance, customs and society. Other areas of particular interest were the landscape, including climate and vegetation. In its various forms it is the only primary source historians' possess regarding Verrazzano's 1524 navigation of the north-east, and American historian Lawrence C. Wroth called it "the earliest geographical, topological and ethnological survey" stretching from Newfoundland to Florida. Indeed, the degree to which historians have relied on the Codex as informing them evidentially on subjects as diverse as flora, fauna, navigation, vegetation patterns, aboriginal relations, native food ("very wholesome"), and native boats ("a single log" carrying between 10 and 15 men of around to long).
Description
All three surviving copies of Verrazzano's letter appear to be based upon three separate originals. The Codex was titled A Discourse upon the Indies when it was first transcribed for public consumption by Giovanni Ramusio, the "official cosmographer of the Venetian Republic". It consists of 12 numbered sheets of Italian paper, with text on both sides, measuring x . It is written in the cursive court hand of the period, probably that of a secretary. It is copiously annotated with marginalia—at least 26 times—in a different, more hurried, hand to the prose. This has left ink blots and erasures over the pages. Historian Bernard Hoffman has described what he sees Verrazzano's text as illustrating about him:
Verrazzano's writing in the Codex has been interpreted in different ways. Two recent scholars have praised Verrazzano's prose. John Allen has called Verrazzano's landscape descriptions as "lyric", while Theodore Cachey described him as viewing French territorial expansion "through the lens of the Renaissance...it was an eclectic courtly language and literature". Margaret Eisendrath, on the other hand, has highlighted the author's "detachment" from his subject. She particularly notices it in his description of their failed kidnapping of a young woman and the successful kidnap of the boy: "what is most striking about this description", she suggests, "is the way it conveys the natives' terror in the same tone as that in which it praises the material richness of the place".
A photographic facsimile of the original document was created and published in 1916 by Phelps Stokes, and this was accompanied by a translation of the Codex by Edward Hagaman Hall. The Cèllere Codex is now held by the Morgan Library and Museum, in Manhattan, as MS MA 776.
Voyage description