Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512) was born in Florence on March 9, 1454. The son of a notary, the young Amerigo was educated by his paternal uncle, Giorgio Antonio (1434-?), a humanist and teacher at a private school that provided training in letters and science. From his uncle, he learned Latin and the fundamentals of astronomy, which later enabled him to find his bearings during his perilous ocean voyages. After a brief stay in Paris as secretary to Guidantonio Vespucci, the Medici ambassador, Amerigo carried out several missions for Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-1492) before moving to Seville, in 1492, as inspector of the Medici bank. In Seville, he became a partner of Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) in the seafaring venture that led to the discovery of the New World. His change of career from merchant to navigator occurred after the break-up of the business partnership with Columbus. In 1497, he led the first of the four voyages described in his letters to the banker Pierfrancesco de' Medici (1487-1525) and the gonfalonier Pier Soderini (1452-1522). It was the immediate dissemination of these letters that inspired the humanist Matthias Ringmann (1482-1511) and the cosmographer Martin Waldseemüller (ca. 1470-ca. 1520) to give the name "America"—that is, "Amerigo's land"—to the New World. In his letters, Vespucci explained that the vast southward extension of those lands, and the variety of peoples and animals that he had seen, had suggested to him that they were not a part of Asia but the "fourth part" of the world—a new land unknown to the ancients. In his second expedition, again in the name of the Spanish crown, Vespucci discovered long tracts of coastline east of the Tordesillas line, in other words, in the territories assigned to Portuguese jurisdiction by the 1494 treaty. This was certainly the reason why King Manuel of Portugal (1496-1521) later ordered him to undertake two more voyages, which took Vespucci to latitude 50° south. Having returned to Seville for good, Amerigo was named Piloto Mayor, in charge of supervising mapmaking and the quality of navigation instruments. He died in Seville on February 22, 1512.