Diego Ribero created his world map in 1529 to celebrate Spanish global conquests. Ribero was a Portuguese artist who created this map to prove that the Moluccas islands in the Indonesian archipelago belonged to the Spanish in accordance with the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. The De Orbe Novo map used art and geography to give the Spanish an edge in the spice trade. It took hundreds of years to disprove Ribero’s work.
View the map from the Library of Congress.