Toscanelli had proposed “a sea route from here to India, the land of spices; a route which is shorter than that via Guinea.” His reasoning was that because the world was spherical, it was possible to reach the Indies by sailing in either direction, and that it was a shorter voyage to sail west. Apart from the as yet invisible barrier of the Americas, Toscanelli had made a fundamental error: he had under-calculated the circumference of the earth. But the letter and the map were destined to become a potent ingredient in the accelerating race for the world that gripped the Iberian Peninsula in
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