Amerigo Vespucci

Amerigo Vespucci, who lived from 9 March 1454 to 22 February 1512, was an Italian explorer and navigator from the Republic of Florence after whom the Americas are named. He took part in at least two voyages of the Age of Discovery between 1497 and 1504, sailing first on behalf of Spain from 1499 to 1500 and then for Portugal from 1501 to 1502, and in 1503 and 1505 two booklets published under his name gave colorful accounts of these and other voyages that became extremely popular across Europe, even though historians still dispute their exact authorship and accuracy. Vespucci claimed to have understood by 1501 that the region later called Brazil was part of a fourth continent unknown to Europeans, which he termed the Mundus Novus, or New World, and that claim inspired the cartographer Martin Waldseemuller in 1507 to apply the Latinized name America to a map of the new lands, a naming later adopted widely by other mapmakers. In 1505 Vespucci was made a subject of Castile by royal decree, and in 1508 he was appointed piloto mayor, or master navigator, for Spain's Casa de Contratacion in Seville, a post he held until his death in 1512; it remains unknown whether he was ever aware of the honor of having a continent named for him.