The Plus Ultra reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Plus Ultra

The motto of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor was Plus Ultra, an expression of the dynamism of the new imperial Cosmopolitanism. Earl Rosenthal has uncovered in detailed work the origin of the motto. It comes from Charles' personal physician and counselor, the Milan humanist Luigi Marliano. He advised the young duke and later emperor, 1515 with his adulthood to Grand Master of the medal by the gold fleece had been appointed, to put his office under the French motto Plus Oultre. This Program meant challenging disregard of the warning of the antique myth Herkules had installed both pillars in the strait of Gibraltar to the navigators, that here the Border of the habitable world would be reached.

As Charles became the king of Spain this foreign motto and its implicit confession to the French culture was opposed in Spain and was transformed into an unshocking Plus Ultra (the learned grammarian Girolamo Ruscelli reproving bad Latin, because the correct form was ulterius). Rosenthal's searches prove, that the challenging Plus Ultra of Charles V is not possibly the bold retort on a previous "nec plus ultra", but that this itself only from Charles' motto "Plus Ultra" came out. With his motto Karl takes from Italy the new time mood expressed also in the the contemporary Italian poem (Ariosts "Orlando furioso " mentions the world discovered beyond the Gates of the Hercules repeatedly).

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