Page:History of the German people at the close of the Middle Ages vol1.djvu/156

 144 HISTORY OF THE GERMAN PEOPLE former was enabled to foretell an eclipse of the moon in the West Indies. On their very first appearance in the year 1475 they had excited such interest in all countries that they could command any price. The Venetians trafficked with them in Greece, and any library which contained even a fragment of them was looked upon with envy. Among those who prided themselves on being pupils of Eegiomontanus, Martin Behaim of Nuremberg gained a high reputation as- cosmographer and navigator. He took a personal share in voyages of discovery, and marked out on his terrestrial globe the way to the East Indies round Africa six years before its discovery by Vasco da Grama. The first steps to the discovery of the Straits of Magellan are also to be attributed to Behaim. Masfel- Ian himself says unmistakably over and over again that he found this passage, afterwards called after him, on a map of Behaim's, and that it was this map which suggested to him the idea of sailing this way to the Molucca Islands. Eegiomontanus had already achieved European renown when Pope Sixtus IV. appointed him bishop of Eatisbon, and by a letter in his own handwriting sum- moned him to Eome to take part in the revision of the Julian Calendar. In obedience to this call he left Nuremberg in 1475. At Eome he was received every- where with marked honour, but the following year he died prematurely at the age of forty-one. The import- ance that was attached to his personality may be to some extent estimated from the fact that the apparition of a comet at the time of his death was supposed to be closely connected with his departure from life. In 1507 Wimpheling wrote as follows to a Eoman