Image depicting tributes given to the Spanish, including a feather painting of the Virgin and Child (Huejotzingo Codex, painting 5)

In 1535 the young Felipe de Guevara accompanied Carlos V on his successful campaign to recapture Tunis from the Turks, an event that was financed by the ransom of the Inca sovereign Atahualpa. Guevara also traveled with and observed the Flemish artist Jan de Vermeyn, who recorded visually the entire expedition so that it might be turned into the greatest tapestries of the Spanish royal...

~Early modern rag paper contains a pictorial language that historians rarely address unless they want to place a work within a chronology. This idiom is called the watermark. Thanks to the exhaustive cataloguing by scholars such as Charles-Moïse Briquet in Les filigranes: Historique des marques du papier dès leur...