"This," he said.
"Toledo steel speaks all languages."
The Florentine's black eyebrows lifted a little, but he did not pursue
the subject. Ojeda was not the sort of man likely to be convinced of
anything he did not believe already, and Vespucci was having too good a
time to waste it in argument.
This middle-aged, shrewd-looking individual had for half his life been
chained to the desk, for he had been many years a clerk in the great
merchant houses of the Medici. Until he was forty years old he had
hardly gone outside his native city. In the latter half of the fifteenth
century each Italian city was a little world in itself, with its own
standards, customs and traditions. The fact that Vespucci spent most of
his leisure and all of his spare ducats in the collection and study of
maps and globes and works on geography, was regarded as a proof of mild
insanity. When he paid one hundred and thirty gold pieces for a
particularly fine map made by Valsequa in 1439, even his intimate friend
Soderini called him a fool. Vespucci was himself an expert mapmaker.
This may have been a reason why, about 1490, the Medici sent him to
Barcelona to look after their interests in Spain. In Seville he secured
a position as manager in the house of Juanoto Berardi, who fitted out
ships for Atlantic voyages.
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