By 1520, personal animosities that may have originated on the fringes of the Portuguese royal court at least twenty-five years earlier brought Marco Polo's geography back into play.
Starting in the days of Henry the Navigator, it took the Portuguese seventy years to feel their way down to the Cape of Good Hope, around it, and across to India.
Over the next twenty years, the Portuguese tried to establish a stranglehold on the Indian Ocean's seaborne trade. They seized control of southeast Asia's major entrepot in Malacca.
Further east, they reached the islands that produced the spices that passed through Malacca on their way west to the markets of Europe.
However, there was one slight catch. In venturing that far to the east, they must have been getting perilously close to an important boundary.
In the wake of Columbus' voyage across the Atlantic, it seemed his discoveries lay on the Portuguese side of the line of demarcation that gave Spain control of the Canary Islands.
So the Spanish king and queen appealed to a higher authority.
The pope of the day, who happened to be of Spanish extraction, thoughtfully changed the line.
Instead of running parallel to the Equator, it ran from pole to pole down the middle of the Atlantic.
For some unspecified reason, the Portuguese had the line shifted slightly to the west. As it turned out, when they 'discovered' Brazil, it lay in their hemisphere.