ordinary soldier, his Historia verdadera de la conquista de la
Nueva Espana (The true history of the conquest of New
Spain; 1632). It contains vivid eyewitness accounts of per-
sonalities, events, and places involved in the conquest of
Mexico and was intended to counterbalance Cortés’ self-
promotion in his own letters and the eulogistic account of
the conquest by Cortés’ secretary, who had not even been
in the New World.
Diaz de Novaes, Bartholomeu (died 1500) Portuguese
navigator and the first European to sail around the Cape of
Good Hope (1488)
Diaz was of noble parentage, although the date and place
of his birth are unknown. His first major voyage was to the
Gold Coast as navigator in 1481. King John II was im-
pressed by Diaz and in 1487 sent him with three ships to
chart the African coast and explore possible routes to
India. A prolonged storm forced him southwards and by
the time he sailed north again, he had unknowingly
rounded the Cape of Good Hope. He followed the coast
eastwards as far as the Great Fish River before discontent
among his crew forced him to turn back, but he did not re-
turn before ascertaining the north-eastwards trend of the
coast. This confirmed the feasibility of a route round
Africa to India. Diaz was received enthusiastically when
he arrived back in Lisbon, but with Vasco da GAMAestab-
lished as court favorite he was never given independent
command again. He was lost at sea off the Cape of Good
Hope on CABRAL’s expedition.
Digges, Leonard (c. 1520–1571) English mathematician
Little is known of Digges’s early life other than that he was
born in Kent, trained as a lawyer, and was caught up in the
rebellion of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Sentenced to death in
1554, he was later reprieved. Digges belonged to the first
generation of English mathematicians who sought to
apply their newly acquired skills to the practical arts. To
this end he produced some of the earliest surviving Eng-
lish texts on surveying (Tectonicon, 1556), geometry (Pan-
tometria, 1571), and, as augmented by his son Thomas
Digges (died 1595), the application of the “Science of
Numbers” to military matters (Stratioticos, 1579).
Dijon A city in eastern France, formerly the capital of
Burgundy. Dijon’s heyday was under the 14th- and 15th-
century dukes of Burgundy until the union of the duchy
with the French Crown in 1477. Parts of the ducal palace
survive, also a number of important churches from the
15th and 16th centuries, including St. Michel with a re-
markable Renaissance facade and sculptures by Hugues
Sambin (1515/20–c. 1601), a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci
who ran a workshop in Dijon. The nearby Chartreuse de
Champmol was founded (1383) by PHILIP THE BOLDas the
burial place of his dynasty. It was wrecked in 1793 and
only fragments of the Puits de Moïse, the masterpiece of
his sculptor, Claus SLUTER, survive, with further fragments
in Dijon’s museum.diplomacy The practice of diplomacy in the modern
sense—the maintaining by a state of permanent represen-
tatives abroad—was a Renaissance development that went
hand-in-hand with the older practice of exchanging am-
bassadors on an ad hoc basis. Such exchanges routinely
took place when matters such as trade agreements, politi-
cal pacts, royal marriages, or religious issues were under
discussion. Aenea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope PIUS II,
who traveled extensively on Church business in the
1430s, included an account of his embassy to King James
I of Scotland in his autobiographical Commentarii; his re-
ception in Scotland is also recorded in the series of fres-
coes on his career painted by PINTURICCHIO for the
Piccolomini Library in Siena. In the years before the fall of
Constantinople in 1453 the Byzantine emperors sent nu-
merous ambassadors to Catholic Europe to attempt toddiipplloommaaccyy 114411Leonard DiggesWoodcut illustrations appearing in his
Pantometria(1571), an early treatise on surveying according
to the principles of geometry. The surveyor in the top picture
is using a theodolite, an instrument first described in Digges’s
work.