In 1520, Peter Martyr was appointed historiographer, an office yielding a revenue of eighty thousand maravedis.  The conscientious discharge of the duties of this congenial post, for which he was conspicuously fitted, won the approval of Mercurino Gattinara, the Italian chancellor of Charles V. Lucio Marineo Siculo speaks of Martyr as far back as December, 1510, as Consiliarius regius, though this title could, at that time, be given him only in his quality of chronicler of the India Council, his effective membership really dating from the year 1518.  He was later appointed secretary to that important body, which had control over all questions relating to colonial expansion in the new world.  In 1521 he renewed his efforts to obtain the abbacy of St. Gratian in Arona, which had been refused him ten years earlier.  To his friend, Giovanni di Forli, Archbishop of Cosenza, he wrote, protesting his disinterestedness, adding:  “Don’t be astonished that I covet this abbey:  you know I am drawn to it by love of my native soil.”  It was not to be, and his failure to obtain this benefice was one of the severest disappointments of his life.  The ambitions of Peter Martyr were never excessive, for he was in all things a man of moderation; the honours he obtained, though many, were sufficiently modest to protect him from the competition and jealousy of aspiring rivals, yet he would certainly not have refused a bishopric.  After seeing four royal confessors raised to episcopal rank, he slyly remarked that, “amongst so many confessors, it would have been well to have one Martyr."[6]

[Note 6:  “Tra tanti confessori, sarebbe stato ancora bene un Martire,” Chevroeana, p. 39.  Ed. 1697.]

Arriving in Spain a foreign scholar of modest repute, and dependent on the protection of his patron, the Count of Tendilla, Peter Martyr had risen in royal favour, until he came to occupy honourable positions in the State and numerous benefices in the Church.  His services to his protectors were valued and valuable.  His house, whereever he happened for the time to be, was the hospitable meeting-place where statesmen, noblemen, foreign envoys, great ecclesiastics, and papal legates came together with navigators and conquerors, cosmographers, colonial officials, and returning explorers from antipodal regions—­Spain’s empire builders.  It was in such society he collected the mass of first-hand information he sifted and chronicled in the Decades and the Opus Epistolarum, which have proven such an inexhaustible mine for students of Spanish and Spanish-American history.  Truly of him may it be said that nothing human was alien to his spirit.  Intercourse with him was prized as a privilege by the great men of his time, while he converted his association with them to his own and posterity’s profit.