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Concept
New World
Summary
The term New World is often used to describe the majority of Earth's Western Hemisphere, including the Americas. The term gained prominence in the early 16th century during Europe's Age of Discovery, shortly after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci concluded that America, now often called the Americas, represented a new continent and subsequently published his findings in Mundus Novus, a Latin language pamphlet. This realization expanded the geographical horizon of classical European geographers, who had thought until then that the world only included Africa, Europe, and Asia, which was collectively referred to as the Old World or Afro-Eurasia. The Americas were then referred to as "the fourth part of the world", or the "New World".
The Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci is usually credited for coming up with the term "New World" (Mundus Novus) for the Americas in his 1503 letter, giving it its popular cachet, although similar terms had nonetheless been used and applied before him.
The Venetian explorer Alvise Cadamosto used the term "un altro mondo" ("another world") to refer to sub-Saharan Africa, which he explored in 1455 and 1456 on behalf of the Portuguese. This was merely a literary flourish, not a suggestion of a new "fourth" part of the world; Cadamosto was aware that sub-Saharan Africa was part of the African continent.
The Italian-born Spanish chronicler Peter Martyr d'Anghiera doubted Christopher Columbus's claims to have reached East Asia ("the Indies"), and consequently came up with alternative names to refer to them. Only a few weeks after Columbus's return from his first voyage, Martyr wrote letters referring to Columbus's discovered lands as the "western antipodes" ("antipodibus occiduis", letter of 14 May 1493), the "new hemisphere of the earth" ("novo terrarum hemisphaerio", 13 September 1493), and in a letter dated 1 November 1493, refers to Columbus as the "discoverer of the new globe" ("Colonus ille novi orbis repertor").
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