The Race to the New World: Excerpt

  On November 4, 1494, Nürnberg’s Jerome Münzer ascended the bell tower of Seville’s Cathedral of the Virgin Mary. It had been built in the late twelfth century as the minaret of Seville’s great mosque, when the city was the capital of the Muslim empire of the Maghreb, which included North African territories from present-day...

The German Connection: Munzer, Behaim, and the Cabot and Columbus voyages

A key element of my book The Race to the New World is how it integrates two marginalized figures of the late 15th century, Jerome Munzer and Martin Behaim, into the narrative of the early-modern European arrival in the Americas. Neither man is unknown to history, but neither man has been properly placed in the story...