Editing Criteria:

1. Punctuation has been modified where necessary to achieve a more fluid reading;

2. for the letters in Castilian, the rules of accentuation laid down by the Real Academia have been applied;

3. the use of initial capitals has been limited to the names of people, places, ships and institutions;

4. the names of people and places have been updated, while in all other cases variants and orthographic idiosyncrasies have been allowed to remain;

5. in the Italian and Spanish, all abbreviations have been unpacked, except sig. and sr. (for signore, señor), Vm. (for Usted), V. E. (for Vuestra Exelencia), S. M. (for Su Majestad); in the case of proper names, ellipses have been completed in square brackets, but only in the cases in which, at least in theory, there is some doubt as to correctness (e.g. Gr[avin]a); in the English translations, some of these abbreviations have been replaced by the closest English equivalents;

6. no account is taken of third-party corrections;

7. the names of ships have been placed in inverted commas (in the English translations in italic script) and the titles of books have been set in italic script;

8. at the end of each letter, the writer's name has been omitted.

Updated: June 13, 2018