The World of Gerard Mercator Read online

  The town's name means "woods of the duke," and the harsh guttural of the Flemish pronunciation reveals its sixteenth-century soul. It was already one of the oldest towns in the Low Countries when Gerard arrived— no balmy country retreat, but a fortress set up by Duke Henry I of Brabant more than three centuries earlier to protect the remote northern borders of his dukedom. The grim stone walls could keep out foreign enemies, but inside them, 's Hertogenbosch seethed with religious and political discontent that occasionally erupted in violence, as occurred in many Netherlands towns, 's Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, and most of Europe were in ferment. The trouble had been building for decades.

  Ten years earlier, when Gerard was still a young boy, stories had begun filtering back from Germany of a young priest who had issued a direct challenge to the Catholic Church on the need for reform and an end to corruption. In nailing his list of ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenburg, Martin Luther had ignited the first flames of a conflagration that would engulf much of Europe.

  Only God, he declared, and not papal authority, could forgive sin; the selling of indulgences by which divine forgiveness could supposedly be guaranteed in return for the payment of cash was a corrupt and cruel deception. Luther called for reform rather than revolution. "If the Pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St. Peter's church should go to ashes, than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh and bones of his sheep," he declared in one of his theses. Yet the whole of Christendom, not just the Catholic Church, threatened to go to ashes: Political dissatisfaction and growing national feeling in the Netherlands, Germany, and much of northern Europe had prepared the ground for a conflict that would tear the continent apart, leaving it split irrevocably between Catholics and Protestants.

  Johannes Gutenberg's first presses produced massive runs of printed papal indulgences, but they also turned out seemingly unlimited editions of non-Latin Bibles on which the faithful could rely. Alongside them were other religious texts, mystical books, and lives of the saints, many of them written in the day-to-day language of the people, breaking forever the Catholic Church's monopoly on Holy Writ. The anxieties of kings, emperors, and the Church itself could do nothing to hold back the rapid spread of movable type.

  Printed tracts showered from the new presses like sparks, lighting a thousand fires of heresy—fires that were fed among the German princes and nationalists in the Low Countries by resentment of the emperor's power. There was already bitterness over the harsh taxes with which Charles tried to claw back the massive debts he had incurred. Despite the treasure that was starting to flow into his coffers from the New World, he relied largely on the merchants of the Netherlands to finance his wars: For every hundred florins in gold and silver that fell into Charles's lap from the New World, four hundred were squeezed from the taxpayers of the Netherlands. The Venetian ambassador Antonio Soriano described the Low Countries as "the treasures of the King of Spain, his mines, his Indies which have sustained all the Emperor's enterprises." Others, more crudely, saw them as a cow to be milked to exhaustion.

  The merchants' pockets were not bottomless, though, and their goodwill was easily exhausted. Every new demand for tax was met by angry resistance, which often mingled with religious dissent and spilled over into fighting on the streets of towns in the Netherlands.

  In 's Hertogenbosch, angry crowds rampaged through the narrow streets while Gerard was at school; but the discontent was more often sullen and unspoken. The town had been home to the artist Hieronymus van Aken, better known today as Hieronymus Bosch.2His wild, tortured depictions of the sufferings of Hell were well known, apparently orthodox enough, and greatly appreciated by the Church authorities— Bosch had painted several altarpieces for the Cathedral of St. Jan in his hometown—but they had a subversive and less conventional secondary meaning.3Bosch was a reformist, possibly even an out-and-out heretic who saw the Catholic Church as Satan's embassy on Earth. The evidence is there in Bosch's works, a telling example of the double-edged, evasive atmosphere of the town where Gerard was growing up.

  Many of the symbols in Bosch's paintings seem now to be consistent with heretical thinking, and his anger over the corruption and avarice of the Church is even clearer. His massive triptych, The Hay wain,* 4shows a nun cradling the head of a sick or dying beggar in a conventional representation of the Church's Christian care for the poor. Elsewhere in the same painting, though, other nuns are sweeping the peasants' crop of hay into their own bags; in another vignette, one of them seems to be making sexual advances toward a musician. The Ship of Fools'5shows a nun and a monk picking over a dish of cherries, a common image of sexual gratification. Seen together, the symbols are unmistakable, but individually they are subtle enough not to offend.

  Bosch led a perilous double life, because he was also a leading member in 's Hertogenbosch of an orthodox and solemn religious fraternity, the Brotherhood of Our Lady. He was a respected figure in the town, as his father and grandfather had been before him, and even took the city's name for his own. He married a local woman, owned a house, and died. Little else is known about his life, but that is the point: He had avoided attracting attention.

  The school Gisbert chose for his young charge in 's Hertogenbosch revealed the private thoughts behind his own daily life. Like Hierony­mus Bosch, he had taken care not to provoke the Church authorities, but the hardworking Gisbert de Cremer had been leading something of a double life as well, building his career within the Church while discreetly supporting the agitation for reform. He handed Gerard over to a religious community known for their reformist zeal, the Brethren of the Common Life.

  The Brethren had a long tradition as teachers, but they were not a comfortable institution. For themselves, they had renounced the possession of property and embraced a life of simple obedience; their rule was self-denying and ascetic, and they expected the boys in their care to abide by it as well. One famous former pupil gave a glimpse of the harsh life the pupils could expect: The humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, who had written his own biting satires on Church corruption, In Praise of Folly and Colloquia, spoke of beatings and bullying at the school by overzealous teachers who wanted to direct their young charges toward the priesthood. His own youthful love of learning had been thrashed out of him for a time by their merciless severity, he said; his time at the school was nothing more than two years lost from his life. "Their chief care, should they see any youth of unusually high spirit and quick disposition . . . is to break his spirit and humble him by blows, threats, scoldings, and other devices," he told a friend.''6

  The Brethren were not monks and took no vows, but they were loyal to the memory of their fourteenth-century founder, Geert Groete, who had drawn crowds with his impassioned preaching against lax ecclesiastical discipline and the corruption of the clergy. They observed a rule of sobriety and chastity that was at least as strict as that in many monasteries. More than a thousand pupils were housed in separate dormitories according to social rank and economic status, ranging from rich to poor. Gerard de Cremer was numbered straightaway among the poor students, making their way each day from the domus pauperum to the school beneath the twisted cathedral gargoyles that Hieronymus Bosch had known so well.

  There he encountered the traditional three-branched humanist triv-ium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, all of which looked resolutely back toward the certainties and inspiration of the past. Poetry and philosophy came from Homer, Ovid, Plato, Aristotle, and other pagan authors, and theology from Christian divines such as Augustine, Origen, and St. Jerome. Geography, too, came from the distant past: In an age when knowledge of the world was increasing faster than ever before, Gerard and his classmates were pointed sternly toward the learning of Ptolemy and Pliny. All of it was sandwiched between two, sometimes three, daily celebrations of the Mass, and all of it was in Latin. That, not the crudity of workaday Flemish, was the language of the churchman and the scholar.

  Among Gerard's teachers was the grandly named author
and playwright Georgius Macropedius—a man already with a dangerous reputation of his own for sympathizing with reformers. Macropedius's character fitted well with the stern philosophy of the school. In his plays, which were often performed by his pupils for the townsfolk, only the rod and the lash saved boys from willfulness, whoring, theft, and a shameful death on the gallows. To the general approval of the rest of the cast, recalcitrant pupils were soundly whipped until they screamed, and when their mothers tried to intervene, much the same treatment was meted out to them.

  That would have been the regime in many schools, at least as far as the pupils were concerned. There was little room for sympathy or consolation. Thus, when news came that Gerard's mother had followed his father to the grave, the boy had to cope with it on his own. Her death, like that of her husband, did not merit any official record of its cause; death, like sickness, poverty, or disaster, was an ever-present threat. Within the space of two years, Gerard had lost both his parents, and Gisbert's generosity and his own talents were all he could rely on.

  He had clearly fitted in during his time in the ascetic world of the Brethren. Unlike Erasmus, he never complained later in his life of their harshness, and the rules that the Brethren applied to their traditional task of transcribing manuscripts show how diligently he learned their lessons. "You ought to attend in your copying to these things: that you make the letters properly and perfectly, that you copy without error, that you understand the sense of what you are copying, and that you concentrate your wandering mind on the task," said their rulebook. The art of copying was virtually destroyed by the new flood of printed books by the time Gerard was studying at 's Hertogenbosch, but as an adult he would become known throughout Europe for the precision of his engraved lettering and his obsession with accuracy, as well as for the single-minded concentration with which he applied himself to his books. He thrived on the traditional emphasis on ancient learning. Ptolemy, introduced to him by the teachers in the cathedral, would remain his scholastic guide and mentor throughout his life.

  Gerard also drew some lessons from his great-uncle and from his own earlier life: that the Church had always been a source of support and stability in the confusing world in which he was growing up, and that Gisbert's prosperity showed the material rewards that could come from not challenging the system openly. The Brethren were always careful to keep the sympathy for the reform movement which they had inherited from their founder within bounds that were acceptable to the Church authorities. In a town where dissent and dangerous opinions were common, Gerard no doubt saw the importance of discretion and the value of security. Inside the walls he had found scholarly disputation and strict discipline, symbolized by the monkish uniform of gray hooded gowns that the boys wore, "after the ancient usage of the Brethren," but he had also found stability.

  The old world of the Catholic Church had given him security, and for all the reformist leanings, the innovative thinking, and the fascination with new skills and techniques that would mark his adult life, he never lost his instinctive sense that stability would be found in the past, in the way things had always been.

  Unlike many of the Brethren's charges, however, Gerard still had no ambition for a prosperous and honorable career in the Church like his great-uncle's. The small boy remarkable for the dedication with which he closeted himself with his books became a serious and sober eighteen-year-old, with the prospect of a life dedicated to study. University life, just as much as that of the cloister, could offer support and a place to belong. The rich endowments and charitable foundations of the forty-three colleges of the University of Leuven meant that, as an impoverished but talented student, he could be excused payment of any fees there.* Although there were no formal requirements for admission, a prospective student would have to convince the doctors of his college that he was adequately prepared for the demanding course of study that the university would provide.7 Gerard's record of study at 's Hertogenbosch, together with the patronage and recommendation of his uncle, would have been enough to do that. He was ready to take a place in the ancient university.

  *Gisbert would have been expected to stand ready to pay his fees until he had satisfied the university authorities that he was entitled to be treated as one of ihcpaupeers ex castro, the poor students of the castle.

  Chapter Five

  At the College of the Castle

  JOINING THE UNIVERSITY of Leuven was a solemn moment, a commitment like joining a monastery. On August 29, 1530, Gerard de Cremer knelt before the rector, Pierre de Corte—a man who would later prove his courage and friendship by standing up to the Inquisition on his former pupil's behalf—to take the oath of matriculation, the pupil's hands clasped between the master's in prayer and supplication. The university was a cosmopolitan place, with more than five thousand students and scholars from France, Germany, England, Scotland, and the farthest reaches of Europe—enough to create their own distinct community. The Faculty of Arts, which Gerard joined, was divided into four colleges scattered through the town. The Colleges of the Pig, the Lily, and the Hawk were all named after ancient houses in Leuven, while the College of the Castle, in the street that led up to the duke's old residence, was where Mercator received his board and lodging and most of his tuition.

  When Duke John IV of Brabant had applied for papal approval to found the university early in the fifteenth Century, Leuven, some twenty-five miles southeast of Rupelmonde, was in decline. Many of the weavers whose labors had made it prosperous had left for England, frightened by the latest spasm of riots and fighting, and attracted by the lure of better profits in the growing English wool trade. Other cities had flourishing universities: Bologna, Paris, and Oxford had been attracting students for two centuries or more, and similar institutions were opening all over northern Europe. France had twenty universities in the fifteenth century, and the German-speaking countries about the same. A new university in Leuven brought not only prestige to the duke but prosperity to the town.

  By the early sixteenth century, its reputation was growing. Its former rector, Nicolas Vernulaeus,1wrote a history of the university that described a peaceful academic town, with quiet fields and vineyards sheltered from the north winds by the hills around, and with well-swept and respectable houses—the very place, he enthused, for students seeking calm to pursue their studies. Even Erasmus had found it more congenial than the grammar school at's Hertogenbosch. Its students, he observed, were well taught, courteous, and mature. "No-one could graduate at Leuven without knowledge, manners, and age," he declared. He had written to assure a friend: "Its agreeable and healthy climate is conducive to quiet and peaceful study; no other university can rival its intellectual life, nor the number and quality of its academic staff."2

  The establishment of the university, by attracting scholars and businesses, had played its part in the rejuvenation of Leuven, and there was clearly much life in the town beyond the college walls. The university authorities took the possibility of youthful high spirits seriously enough to set down formal statutes banning students from bearing arms, dicing and gaming in public taverns, or even walking the streets after eight o'clock at night, and their rules were stricter still inside the college. Gerard apparently reveled in the austere, contemplative life of fasting, abstinence, and strict obedience to the pater of the college. The sole official record of his time at Leuven is his inscription as a "poor student" in the books of the College of the Castle, but his friends and contemporaries all spoke of a dedicated and high-minded academic, concentrating almost obsessively on his work.

  In that society, at least, there should have been no shame in his poverty. But even if the somber, monkish gown, which all the university's pupils wore,3disguised the differences between rich and poor, there was little fraternization between them. They all ate in the same hall, but the rich took the high table, while the poor sat at the far end of the hall; the rich students lived in private rooms, while the poor shared the dormitory in the College of the Castle. Few friendships crossed such a
divide, but Mercator would have known the names of his rich colleagues, and one in particular would resonate for the rest of his life: Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, the son of Charles V's trusted chancellor, Nicholas Perrenot de Granvelle, was starting on his rise to power.

  It was customary in scholastic circles, even among poor students, to add dignity to one's name by translating it into Latin. Gerard's schoolmaster at 's Hertogenbosch, Georgius Macropedius, had started life as Joris van Lanckvelt. Gerrit Gerritszoon had already become known as the humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, and Mercator's near contemporary Andries van Wesel would win fame as the anatomist and humanist Andreas Vesalius. The sonorous, Latinized Mercator, or merchant, suited Gerard's own ambitions much better than de Cremer— pedlar in the vulgar Flemish. In choosing his new name as he started on his career at Leuven, he looked back to the place of his birth and the formative years of his childhood: Gerardus Mercator Rupelmundanus was born.

  The rigid timetable of his days was punctuated, as it had been in 's Hertogenbosch, by celebrations of the Mass, and ran from dawn to dusk, with a brief rest period in the afternoon. His course of studies in the university's Faculty of Arts was essentially the same logic, physics, metaphysics, mathematics, rhetoric, and moral philosophy that students had tackled for centuries, with attention fastened as firmly on the learning of hundreds of years ago as it had been at's Hertogenbosch. Observation, measurement, and independent thought were all dangerous steps on the road to heresy. First among the ancient masters was Aristotle, and it was expressly forbidden even to question his teaching.