The World of Gerard Mercator Read online

  The World of

  GERARD

  MERCATOR

  The Mapmaker Who

  Revolutionized Geography

  Andrew Taylor

  Copyright © 2004 by Andrew Taylor

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  First published in the United States of America in 2004 by

  Walker Publishing Company, Inc.

  Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry and Whiteside, Markham, Ontario L3R 4T8

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Walker & Company, 104 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011.

  Art Credits: Used by permission of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England. Used by permission of the Bibliotheque Royale Albert I, Brussels. Used by permission of the Science Photo Library, London. Used by permission of the British Library, London, Rare Books and Maps Collections. Used by permission of the Hereford Cathedral Library, Hereford, England. Used by permission of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Used by permission of Museo del Prado. Courtesy of Historic Cities Research Project http://historic-cities.huji.ac.il The Jewish National and University Library of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Used by permission of the National Gallery, London. Used by permission of the Bibliotheque National de France. Used by permission of the New York Public Library, Rare Books Division. Used by permission of the Royal Geographical Society, London. Used by permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, England.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Taylor, Andrew, 1951—

  The world of Gerard Mercator / Andrew Taylor,

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

  eISBN: 978-0-802-71806-8

  1. Mercator, Gerard, 1512—1594. 2. Cartographers—Netherlands— Biography. 3. Cartography—History—16th century. I. Title.

  GA923.M37T39 2004

  526'.092—dc22

  [B]

  2004043068

  Book design by Ralph L. Fowler

  Visit Walker & Company's Web site at www.walkerbooks.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR SAM, ABI, AND BEC,

  and all the years they have to come.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE

  Pushing Back Shadows

  CHAPTER TWO

  Forgotten Wisdom

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Small Town on the River Scheldt

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Among the Brethren of the Common Life

  CHAPTER FIVE

  At the College of the Castle

  CHAPTER SIX

  Doubts and Dangers

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Gemma's Globe

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Craftsman and Cartographer

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Greatest Globe in the World

  CHAPTER TEN

  In the Hands of the Inquisition

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Two New Arrivals

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A New Life

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Our Europe

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  A Mysterious Commission

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In the Forests of Lorraine

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Tragedy

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Sum of Human Knowledge

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The World Hung on the Wall: The Projection

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Presenting Ptolemy to the World

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A "Thick Myste of Ignorance" Dispelled

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Geography of the World

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The Gathering Dark

  AFTERWORD

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book started with a journey to Hereford in England, where one of the great treasures of medieval Europe is on permanent display in the cathedral's New Library Building. The Hereford mappamundi sparked my initial interest in maps as a way of glimpsing the past, and my first thanks should go to the dean and chapter of the cathedral. They have custody of an irreplaceable treasure which belongs to all of us, and they make it available to anyone who cares to see it. Without that first visit, I would never have found my way to Mercator of Rupelmonde.

  Because my grasp of foreign languages falls far short of Mercator's, I relied on several individuals to help me read letters and documents. Mark Riley, professor of classics at the California State University, Sacramento, was not only generous enough to translate Mercator's letters into English but also kind enough not to laugh outright at my own rusty Latin. Patrick Roberts of London similarly helped me with a number of French documents, and the late Dr, Dik ter Haar of Magdalen College, Oxford, welcomed me into his home and patiently guided me through many pages of Flemish. Any mistakes are mine; to all of them, my thanks.

  In London and Oxford, the staffs of the British Library, the London Library, and the Bodleian Library were unfailingly helpful. Peter Barber, of the British Library's Maps Department, was particularly generous with his time in discussing Mercator's map of Britain with me. I had unstinting help, too, from the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp, where it was a privilege to walk through Christopher Plantin's old workshops; from Duisburg's Kultur und Stadthistorisches Museum; the Mercator Museum in Sint Niklaas, Belgium; and the Cathedral of St. Jan, 's Hertogenbosch. A moment I shall never forget came in the Bib­liotheque Nationale, Paris, when I first saw the map that is at the heart of the book: Mercator's world map of 1569.

  Toby Eady and Mike Fishwick in London gave me the benefit of their professional help and advice in too many ways to list, and in New York, I had the good fortune to work with George Gibson. Every book needs the creative destruction of a good editor, and this volume had one of the best.

  Friends helped in various ways. Tony and Jean Conyers lent me books from their library and must have wondered if they would ever see them again; Alison Roberts joined me on the trip to see Mercator's map in Paris; Grenville Byford shared his experiences as an ocean sailor to help me understand the minutiae of navigation; and Julian Bene, who spent many late nights and lengthy e-mails discussing Mercator and his life, may well recognize some of his conclusions in the book. Penny Berry came with me on that first visit to Hereford and not only tolerated an interest that changed into an obsession, but shared in it wholeheartedly, in England, Belgium, and Germany. The book that resulted is hers as much as mine.

  But none of these people will object to the observation that the greatest thanks of all are due to Dr. Tim Little wood and his National Health Service team in the Hematology Department at Oxford's John Radcliffe Hospital. I owe them everything, and I don't forget.

  Introduction

  ONE OF MY earliest memories is of myself as a small boy sitting on a wide window ledge, with my whole world laid out around me. As I turned my head, I took in the comfortable, familiar room behind me, the door into the kitchen, and the wooden sideboard up against the wall, while outside I could see down the yard toward the joiner's shop, which I knew was filled with sawdust and sharp blades. I could also see the familiar stone steps up to my front door, and another house across the way, where an old man used to sit in the doorway for hours on end, dozing
.

  That was about as far as my world stretched. I was aware, of course, of other worlds beyond, worlds I had heard about, half understood, or imagined for myself. Scattered among them were a few familiar islands that I had visited and knew fairly well—the stone-flagged floor of the greengrocer's on the corner, for instance, the high wall on top of which I could walk up to the church, or the little vegetable garden where I used to watch my father as he worked—but for all intents and purposes, they were surrounded by darkness. Good things occasionally came in from those shadows outside—bars of chocolate brought by a kindly aunt, perhaps, or my mother's shopping—but they were on the whole mysterious and unwelcoming, and if I occasionally peopled them with monsters, that was no more than any child does.

  The story of discovery and mapmaking is one of pushing back shadows. The great explorers brought back undreamed-of riches and stories of unknown lands and peoples that were barely believable—the discovery of America, for instance, has been described as the greatest surprise in history—but their claims and discoveries had to be evaluated, laid out on paper, before they could form a coherent picture of the world. Much of that work was carried out by unknown figures, whose maps are lost, forgotten, or remembered only by passing mentions in ancient documents. Some were sailors or traders themselves, trying to prepare reliable charts for their own use and for those who came after them, but many were scholars who never went to sea. A few became famous and produced individual maps that stand out as landmarks in the history of the understanding of the planet. But none, in the last two thousand years, achieved as much as Gerard Mercator in extending the boundaries of what could be comprehended.

  Mercator saw himself as a scholar in the ancient tradition, an uomo universale in the mold of the Renaissance—a seeker of truth to whom the whole of knowledge was a single book to be opened. His achievement was nothing less than to revolutionize the study of geography and redraw the map of the world.

  Born near Antwerp in 1512, he lived through almost the entire turbulent sixteenth century—an age in which the known world grew year by year as new voyages made new discoveries, but one which also saw the Catholic Church and Europe itself torn apart by Martin Luther and the Protestant reformers. The sacking of cities, the smashing of statues by reformist zealots, and the religious savagery of Church authorities were all part of the temper of the times. This was the age of the Inquisition, whose power, as Mercator was to discover firsthand, extended across the Low Countries: The judicial torture and burning of the unfaithful were commonplace. But it was also an age of intellectual upheaval. Almost halfway through the century, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published his revolutionary theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun— an idea that was confirmed some sixty-five years later by the observations of Galileo Galilei through his telescope. The Church, still clinging to the old idea of the Earth at the center of the universe, could make Galileo recant, but it could not erase the new thinking.

  By the time Mercator was born, the printing press had made books readily available across Europe, but the language of religion and intellectual debate was the same as it had been in the days of the medieval copyists toiling over manuscripts in the monasteries. Not just the Bible but also scientific, medical, and philosophical texts were written in Latin. At the University of Leuven and later in Duisburg, Mercator's conversation and correspondence were also in Latin. However, by 1594, the year he died, Bibles in the daily language of the people were commonplace. Galileo's writings appeared in clear and lucid Italian. This signified more than a change of vocabulary or language; scientists, by the turn of the century, were gaining the confidence to rely on observation, measurement, and reasoning rather than looking into the past for inspiration.

  Mercator's own life reflected the era of change in which he lived, being full of apparent contradictions and opportunism, and extending over one of civilization's major crossroads. In many ways a child of the past, he was born into poverty and owed his first chances in life to the wealth of the traditional Catholic Church; yet his surviving letters are those of a tolerant reformist with Protestant leanings, who kept his religious views to himself. Like the artists of the Italian Renaissance, he relied on the favor of princes, dukes, and high dignitaries of the Church, but he also built a commercial business which depended on the new prosperous middle class that economic growth had created.

  Mercator studied and created maps with a passionate attention to detail that would have been familiar to any of the scholars or artists of the Italian Renaissance. In his studies, he showed unswerving respect for the authority of Claudius Ptolemy of ancient Alexandria, who had proposed his own map projections—ways in which the Earth might be flattened out onto a sheet of paper. At the same time, Mercator did more than any other geographer of his day to demonstrate that Ptolemy's classical ideas of the world were outdated, misleading, and often simply wrong. As a cartographer, Mercator spent his lifetime collecting, collating, and assessing the latest reports from explorers whose discoveries rendered Ptolemy's ideas inadequate to describe the new world that was emerging; as a mathematician, he answered the problem of projection with his own solution, which has lasted for more than four hundred years. There are few reliable contemporary descriptions of Mercator, few clues to the personality of the scholar who did more than anyone in the last two thousand years to turn mapmaking into a precise science. Moreover, many of his letters are lost. A number of the letters that do survive are appeals to dukes and princes of the German city-states, to dignitaries of the Catholic Church, even to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V himself for support and sponsorship, for Mercator well understood the advantages of influential backing. Throughout his life, he was a driven man: Long hours at his desk as a student gave way to long hours at his workbench as he built the business that was to make his fortune, and the habit of study never left him. In the infirm years before his death, he would urge his children to carry him, chair and all, to his books. Fear is an overpowering emotion in those of his letters that do survive— fear of death and damnation, fear of not completing the work he had begun, fear of failure. Orphaned at an early age, sent off to the harsh rigors of a monastic school, he knew little of maternal love or family stability, and his difficult childhood left him cautious and circumspect. In his business life, he was assiduous in appealing for official copyright protection for his maps and globes, and the careful investment of his profits in property and forestland showed his awareness of the importance of security. He was also aware, as he had to be, of the value of silence. In the religious conflicts of his time, his principles were those of a reformer, but his arrest and imprisonment at the hands of the Inquisition clearly reinforced his instinct for caution. Even after he moved from Leuven to the more relaxed environment of Duisburg, in Germany, he avoided any involvement in religious argument. Rather than the perils of theological disputation, he enjoyed his reputation in the town as a good host and dinner guest. The handful of contemporary accounts speak of him as a witty and entertaining conversationalist, and gifts of food and wine from the city authorities suggest a man who was known to enjoy good company and a well-stocked table. But more than anything else, he was a scholar. Though he never traveled beyond the well-known towns of northern Europe, never, so far as we know, even boarded a ship, his work, together with that of sea captains and explorers, allowed people of the sixteenth century and the generations who followed them accurately to imagine the world beyond the horizon. He created his projection almost in passing and showed few signs of appreciating the importance of what he had done—and yet it has defined the shape of the world in the modern age. There is no doubt that it produced a distorted image, as any flat map of the spherical world must. As a result, Mercator himself has often been accused in the last few years of racism, because his projection makes the continent of Africa seem smaller than it really is, or of imperialism, because it appears to exaggerate the size and importance of Europe—accusations that a scholar of the sixteenth century would not even
have understood. The challenge of spreading the globe out flat on a desk, of presenting the known world in a way that could readily be seen and comprehended, was one with which philosophers, travelers, and geographers had been struggling for thousands of years. By Mercator's day, the time was ripe for a solution.

  Chapter One

  Pushing Back Shadows

  MERCATOR WAS BORN barely twenty years after Christopher Columbus first crossed the Atlantic. Yet even though the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are considered the great age of discoveries, an astonishing amount was known, or at least rumored, about North, South, East, and West before any of the memorable voyages of exploration ever left port.

  Nearly two thousand years earlier, the Greek historian Herodotus was told of Phoenician sailors who claimed to have sailed around the southern tip of Africa.* A hundred years or so after his death, during the fourth century BC, another Greek explorer, Pytheas of Massilia, sailed into the far northern seas, to a country he called Thule, where he said the Sun went to sleep.† Still farther north, he said, land, sea, and air coalesced into a mixture on which people could neither walk nor sail. Ancient Norse sagas spoke of journeys to "a new land, extremely fertile and even having vines" that lay far to the west, beyond the setting Sun.1 Claudius Ptolemy, the Alexandrian librarian and scholar of the first century AD, had heard about the island of Taprobane, or modern Sri Lanka.2

  Commercial ambition drove travelers on over new horizons. From as early as 500 BC, trading caravans from China made their way along a variety of routes through central Asia, bringing bales of fine silk to be bartered for Persian warhorses or Arabian spices, frankincense, and myrrh. Lines of heavily laden camels followed secret and well-guarded tracks through the deserts of Arabia, carrying gold, ivory, rare woods, and the spices of Yemen to the trading centers of the Mediterranean. Elsewhere, Phoenician ships journeyed beyond the Pillars of Hercules at the mouth of the Mediterranean to the very edges of the known world, bringing back tin from the Scilly Isles off the southwest coast of Britain. The prophet Ezekiel described the goods carried by the Phoenician traders, and the towns to which they traveled. "Tarshish was thy merchant, by reason of the multitude of all kind of riches, with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded in thy fairs. Javan, Tubal, and Meshech, they were thy merchants: they traded the persons of men and vessels of brass in thy market. They of the house of Togarmah traded in thy fairs with horses and horsemen and mules."3