Hieronymus Münzer or Monetarius (1437/47 – 27 August 1508) was a Renaissance humanist, physician and geographer who made a famous grand tour of the Iberian Peninsula in 1494–95.
As a participant in the trading company of his brother Ludwig (died 1518) he was a rich man, using his money to establish amongst other things a comprehensive library.
In 1483 Münzer fled from the plague to Italy, bought numerous books in Rome, Naples and Milan, and returned home the following year.
Münzer was a friend of Hartmann Schedel (1440–1514) and contributed geographical sections to the latter's Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493, including the first printed map of Germany, which appeared in two-sided form.
They travelled from Nuremberg, largely on horseback, possibly for some 7,000 miles in all through Germany and Switzerland, down the Rhône to Provence, Languedoc and Roussillon, and across the Pyrenees.
Münzer's report of this trip is written in Latin, with the title Itinerarium siue peregrinatio excellentissimi viri artium ac vtriusque medicine doctoris Hieronimi Monetarii de Feltkirchen ciuis Nurembergensis.
The report exists today only as a copy and is preserved in a codex of Hartmann Schedel (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 431, fol.
Granada was the chief object of Münzer's tour and he met there both the royal governor, a distinguished diplomat and soldier, and the saintly new archbishop.
Over the border in Portugal he talked with John II in Évora and spent five days in Lisbon, learning what he wrote about in his Discovery of Guinea.
Further north, he entered Spain again, visiting Santiago de Compostela, the University at Salamanca and the great Jeronimite monastery at Guadalupe.
Down the Seine he commented on Rouen, the wine port, and then on Dieppe on the coast, and on the pirates in the English Channel and North Sea who caused him to abandon his planned visit to England.
He then went on to Bruges, where merchants of all northern lands had met and traded, but it rebelled against Archduke Maximilian, the young heir's father and guardian, and was about to lose its predominance to the great port city of Antwerp.
Münzer went on through Aachen to Cologne in German-speaking lands: the linguistic frontier ran north from Swiss Fribourg to Liège and the west to the sea at Boulogne.