Geography and Empire in the Late Renaissance: Botero's Assignment, Western Universalism, and the Civilizing Process

Abstract

The article seeks to relate the emerging, new discipline of geography to the European and specifically the Iberian, Catholic experience of expansion, power, and empire in those decades of Spain's alignment with Portugal and their respective colonial enterprises. The case of Giovanni Botero, the preeminent Italian interpreter of America forthe later sixteenth century, is examined in terms of Catholic expansion, world geography, but more immediately in terms of the European civilizing process on the indigenous peoples of America as that process pertains to the pre-Columbian civilizations, Christian conversion and the concurrent practice of the reducciones.