The World of Gerard Mercator

by Andrew Taylor

  *This practice was first noted on Sunday, September 9: "He made that day 15 leagues and decided to reckon less than he made, so that if the voyage were long the people would not be frightened and dismayed." Columbus wrote many similar notes during the rest of the voyage.

  *St. Brendan's Island is mentioned in a ninth-century Latin manuscript titled Navigatio Santi Brendani Abatis (The Voyage of the Abbot St. Brendan). It describes a seven-year odyssey undertaken by Brendan in the sixth century that led ultimately to a beautiful and mystical island. Explorers tried in vain for centuries to find this island. There is a modern theory that Brendan could have landed on the coast of Newfoundland, more than four hundred years before any Viking expedition could possibly have reached it.

  †The true distance is approximately 11,000 miles; but Toscanelli's map of the world, drawn some twenty years before Columbus set sail, made it seem temptingly close.

  *The only known surviving copy of the map—twelve sheets printed by woodcut, adding up to a total of thirty-six square feet—was rediscovered in 1901 in the sixteenth-century south German castle of the magnificently named Prince Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg, and sold for $10 million to the U.S. Library of Congress a hundred years later—"America's birth certificate," according to the publicity at the time of the purchase.

  *In the early 1600s, merchants reckoned that the value of a cargo of spices could increase more than tenfold between its purchase in the Indies and its sale in the Mediterranean.

  †The value of the precious metals brought back to Europe grew rapidly throughout the sixteenth century, from around 195,000 ducats a year in the first decade to some 2.4 million a year in the '50s, and nearly 8.5 by the 1590s.

  Chapter Three

  A Small Town on the River Scheldt

  THE RESEARCHES OF SCHOLARS and geographers, the work of printers and booksellers, and the discoveries of hard-bitten sailors and explorers had combined to make the early sixteenth century the most favorable time in which a man of Mercator's talents and interests could have been born. But the land in which he grew up was riven by political factions and smoldering with religious hatreds.

  At the start of the new century, the birth in 1500 of the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the ancient merchant city of Ghent in Flanders marked the climax of more than 150 years of schemes, machinations, and marriages among the ruling families of Europe. While the adventurers of Spain and Portugal were discovering new worlds abroad, in Europe the dukes of Burgundy had been busily laying their hands on as much of the old one as they could, marrying their way into a realm that eventually stretched across the prosperous financial heartland of northern Europe. They turned marriage from a sacrament to a strategy. During a century and a half of buying, inheriting, and most of all marrying into new possessions, they could have taught the rest of Europe a lesson, had anyone thought to heed it: War could be profitable, but well-planned matrimony was infinitely more so.

  Philip, one of the dukes of Burgundy, was a member of the powerful Habsburg family, who had been building up their own lands in Germany with similar determination throughout the fifteenth century, and he married Joanna of Spain, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, whose own marriage in 1469 had already united the Spanish kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Charles was the son of Philip and Joanna's triumphal dynastic marriage, and he steadily inherited individual titles and honors throughout his childhood to make up a patchwork empire that would eventually stretch over more than half the known world.

  He was shy and awkward, an unprepossessing figure with the long lower jaw and bulging eyes of the Habsburg line, but when his father died in 1506, he became ruler of the Netherlands and the rest of the Bur-gundian inheritance. He was just six years old, and his paternal aunt, Margaret of Austria, acted as regent. By the time he was sixteen, Charles's inherited lands stretched not just through Spain and parts of Italy but also across the apparently limitless Spanish possessions in the Americas. Three years later, in 1519, the death of his paternal grandfather, Maximilian, pushed the borders of his realm farther to the east, where his Habsburg ancestors were the most powerful dynasty in central Europe, ruling lands in Austria, Carinthia, Slovenia, and the Tyrol.*

  The Habsburgs also held a virtually hereditary position in Germany as Holy Roman Emperors, but although they had occupied the imperial throne for nearly eighty years, t on his grandfather's death Charles still had to win the support of the seven electors, the German princes who formally approved the succession of the Holy Roman Empire. The successful but expensive campaign of bribery with which he secured the imperial crown left him crippled by debt throughout his reign,+ and he faced a constant struggle to raise money to pay the massive armies on which his grandiose campaigns to maintain his authority depended.

  The empire was vast and unwieldy, and his possessions were too far-flung to be governed. When Charles traveled to his Spanish kingdom to secure the succession there in 1517, he was thought of as a foreign interloper surrounded by boorish Flemish advisers who trampled over the country's aristocracy, while in the Netherlands he was reviled as a lover of Spanish luxury with an intolerable train of arrogant Castilian grandees. Had they ever heard it, his Netherlands subjects would have been less than amused by his famous boast, "To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse, German." His native Flemish was not even on the list.

  There was constant feuding in Spain, and near anarchy in Germany, where the great inheritance of the Holy Roman Empire was largely ruled by lawless and belligerent knights who accepted no authority but their own. The disparate duchies, counties, and cities of the Netherlands were racked with ancient feuds. The Hoeks of Holland, the Ka-beljaws of Zeeland, and the Lichtenbergers and Lockhorsts of Utrecht wrangled in a constant round of shifting alliances, betrayals, victories, and defeats. In Guelderland the Heckerens fought the Bronkhorsts, and in Friesland the Schieringers were the sworn enemies of the Vetkoopers. The great free cities of Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, and Brussels zealously guarded their ancient privileges against any attempt to impose central authority.

  In addition to this internecine violence, over the next half century Charles would face recurrent international wars with the French, and with the armies and navies of the Ottoman emperor Suleiman the Magnificent, massed on the eastern and southern borders of his empire. His reign was an endless round of revolts, rebellions, wars, and betrayed alliances.

  The imperial crown also involved him inextricably in the bloodletting of the Reformation. Bitterness over corruption in the Catholic Church had existed for as long as anyone could remember; to the reformists, the popes in Rome seemed more concerned with worldly show than piety. In the late 1470s and early 1480s, Sixtus IV built the Sistine Chapel; then Julius II and Leo X supported the work of Michelangelo and Raphael; in the following years, the supposedly celibate Alexander VI used bribery, corruption, and murder to advance the interests of his children, Lucrezia Borgia and Cesare Borgia. None of them seemed interested in the reforms for which many in the Church and among the laity were crying out. During Charles's reign, these demands developed into not only a religious challenge to the Church but also a political challenge to the Holy Roman Empire itself. Charles V—"God's standard bearer," as he grandly called himself—saw his duty as defending the Catholic faith not just from the Muslim Ottoman Empire across his borders but also from the reformists and Protestants within. In 1523, when Gerard Mercator was a boy of eleven, two young monks, Johann Esch and Heinrich Voes, were burned alive as heretics in the central square of Antwerp, the first of tens of thousands to go to the stake over the next half century as the Inquisition sought to root out heresy wherever it hid. The legacy of the complex genealogical maneuvering that had created Charles V's empire was one of political chaos and human misery across the Netherlands and the rest of Charles's domain.

  IN THE YEAR 1512, the artisan Hubert de Cremer was one of Charles's struggling subjects. His was the misery of poverty: His father had made the journey east from his nati
ve Flanders to Gangelt, in the German duchy of Jiilich, many years before, filled with hope and ambition for the future, but Hubert had become a cobbler scrabbling to find enough money to feed his wife and family. He already had five children, and his wife was expecting their sixth, but though he was willing to work, he had found few opportunities in Gangelt. His best hope of staving off poverty lay in returning to Rupelmonde, where his father's family still lived.

  The port of Antwerp, just a few miles downriver from the town of Rupelmonde, was one of the most affluent centers in the Low Countries, one of the largest cities of its day, where eighty thousand people lived in houses that were the envy of the rest of Europe. Antwerp had been a busy port on the River Scheldt for centuries—its name comes from the Flemish aan-de-werfen (on the wharves)—but the bales and baskets piled high on the docks were not just a sign of its prosperity; they were tangible evidence that the world was growing faster than it had ever done before. The ships that maneuvered for position brought cargoes not only from the Baltic, England, Spain, and Germany but from farther afield as well, from lands that were so distant, so newly discovered, they still seemed almost mythological to the laborers who sweated to unload the merchandise.

  Not many years before, the ports of Venice and the other Italian city-states had been crowded with cargo ships, linking with the ancient overland routes from the East to bring spices, precious stones, silks, and finery to Europe. For centuries, all roads really had led to Rome. But by 1512, ships could follow Vasco da Gama's route to India around the southern tip of Africa and bring their cargoes straight back to the north and west of Europe. The rapidly growing trade with the New World, too, could be carried out more easily from western Europe than from Italy. The pattern of commerce was shifting: More than 2,500 ships might be crowded into Antwerp's port at any one time, and 500 vessels would come and go in a single day.

  With the cargoes came stories of new expeditions, and of the fresh discoveries that were being made in the New World and in the farthest reaches of Asia. Such talk, true and false alike, was devoured by the educated citizens; but the bales, bundles, and boxes were the real stimuli to anyone with imagination and curiosity about distant lands. The waters of the Scheldt flowed for hundreds of miles through a continent hungry for the goods that the ships had unloaded. Along the docks of Antwerp, the age of discoveries was a daily reality.

  When he arrived there late in February 1512, Hubert had four sons, a daughter, a pregnant wife, and no real prospects of employment. His one advantage was an uncle in the Catholic Church. Several years before, in Gangelt, Hubert had named his firstborn child after his father's brother, and he turned to that same Uncle Gisbert, the chaplain of Ru-pelmonde's Hospice of St. Jean. Gisbert was not wealthy but comfortably off, and he used his influence to find Hubert and his family a place in the monastery guesthouse. It would have been a simple, even spartan home, but still a welcome shelter for a family on the brink of penury. There, at six o'clock in the morning on March 5, 1512, only a few days after she had arrived in Flanders, Hubert's wife, Emerance, gave birth to their sixth child, Gerard. The anxious cobbler made a precise note of the date and time, as he had done for the birth of his other children.

  The town's tax records show Hubert, Emerance, and their six children lived on top of each other in a lodging half the size of the house his single uncle Gisbert kept for himself* Gisbert, a busy, energetic priest, filled with ambition for himself and his family, was the key to whatever future they would have. For him as for many others, the Church had been a route to worldly security as well as to salvation, and his post as chaplain at the hospice gave him financial independence, respectability, and a degree of influence. Well educated himself, he determined to do what he could for the rest of his family. Within a few months, his nephew Hubert was using his skills to produce shoes for the hospice and steadily building up his business in the town, while the older boys, with Gisbert's encouragement and influence, had started on careers of their own in the Church. Rupelmonde's church records show that Hubert's second son, Dominic, eventually followed his great-uncle into the post of chaplain at the hospice, while the eldest boy, Gisbert, named in his great-uncle's honor, became a priest in the nearby village of St. Nicholas. There was no doubt that they and the other two boys would do well, while their sister, Barbe, was being carefully prepared for the marriage that would secure her future.

  Gerard, like his brothers, received his education on the hard wooden benches of the local village school. The few hundred houses in Rupel­monde were huddled around the church, a short way from the river and the imposing black fort that glowered down upon it. Nearby was the ancient water mill where grain was brought from the surrounding fields, its great rough limestone grinders making the wooden structure groan and vibrate as they turned under the power of the rising and falling tides. Farmers brought their produce to a regular market on the riverbank, while barges would tie up to sell cheeses from Brussels, or herring, imported cloth, and ironware from the wharves of Antwerp. Bigger, seagoing ships often moored at the wharves, pausing on their journeys upriver to Brussels. Outside the village, the landscape stretched away for miles, flat and open.

  With its fields, mill, market, school, and church, the little town provided for every aspect of life, but the fort, with its high stone walls and seventeen towers, overshadowed everything. Built by Norman invaders in the eleventh century to overawe and terrify the local people, it was no mere monument to past brutality. Behind its bleak walls there still languished criminals, dissidents, traitors, and forgotten men.

  The young Gerard was apparently drawn to the sheer variety the landscape offered, for he developed a love of nature that would stay with him throughout his life. From his earliest days, at least according to the stories that grew up around him later, the schoolmaster had little need to encourage his pupil to greater effort in the classroom. Much of the work in the single schoolroom was learning by rote, the children chanting the Latin of the Lord's Prayer or the Creed, or the questions and answers of the catechism. Every lesson, every moral precept, was based upon the Bible. At home, there was neither leisure nor privacy in the crowded and hardworking household, but the young boy usually managed to find a place to hide away with his books. Often, he would be huddled with them long into the night, forgetting to eat or sleep, and his potential was clearly recognized by his uncle.

  In 1526, Hubert de Cremer died suddenly, and the family was threatened with disaster once again. (There is no record of what killed him.) Emerance was able to survive on the little money he had saved, and five of their children were almost old enough to look after themselves. However, Gerard was just fourteen, and if he had had to work in order to earn his keep, his family's hopes for his future would have been dashed. An apprenticeship could have led only to a life of unremitting toil like his father's; there would have been no time for learning.

  Once again, they had to rely on Gisbert. Three masses a week at the hospice brought him a regular income of some forty-three pounds a year—enough for him to have acquired two small farms as well as his own house, and enough, if he chose, to provide for the education of his great-nephew. The young boy was taken from his family and went to live with his great-uncle, who became not only his benefactor but also his adoptive father and his tutor. Yet if Gerard, like his two elder brothers, were to follow Gisbert into the Church, he would need more than a smattering of Latin grammar picked up at home and on the benches of Rupelmonde's school. The boy would have to be educated.

  *Charles's inheritances came in three strands. The Habsburg lands in Germany were inherited through his father's line; the duchy of Burgundy, which included the Low Countries, came through his paternal grandfather Maximilian's marriage to the daughter and heir of Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy; the Spanish kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, along with their possessions in southern Italy and the Mediterranean and their New World empire, came to him through his mother, Joanna.

  †The first Habsburg succeeded to the throne in
1273, but other families had intervened several times in the years up to 1440. After Charles, the unbroken Habsburg line continued until the mid—eighteenth century.

  ‡The Augsburg banker Jakob Fugger told him, with scant respect for his mighty office, "It is well known that Your Imperial Majesty could never have won the Imperial Crown without my help."

  *It is easy to miss the house now, an anonymous little end-of-terrace cottage of weathered brick beside the road that leads past the neatly fenced commuter homes into Rupel-monde's marketplace. There are lace curtains at the windows, a car parked in the road outside. Next door is a white-painted modern house; it takes a second glance to register the traces in the brickwork farther down the terrace where the main arched entrance into the hospice would have been, and to note the arched windows and the massive two-foot-thick walls. The street name, unchanged for centuries, is a clue as well: Klooster-straet, or Cloister Street. This is a hidden remnant of Rupelmonde's medieval past. The old lady who comes to the door peers suspiciously at camera and notebook, wondering what the interest might be. Not many people come here, she says dubiously, shaking her head; the house's disguise works well. Elsewhere in Rupelmonde, a statue of the village's only famous son has dominated the marketplace since 1871, and there are Mercator-waffles for sale, as well as trinkets and T-shirts in the tourist shop; but only a simple, Flemish plaque—"Gerardus Mercator is hier geboren in 1512"—marks the house.

  Chapter Four

  Among the Brethren of

  the Common Life

  THE ARTIST ALBRECHT DURER, journeying through the Nether­lands from his native Germany, described 's Hertogenbosch, stranded on the windswept and unwelcoming plains some seventy-five miles northeast of Antwerp, as "a fair city, with an extremely beautiful church and a strong fortress. . . ."'1 The Gothic ramparts of the Cathedral of St. Jan might have impressed a traveler, but the town itself was a bleak and forbidding place, a long way from the riverside idyll of Ru­pelmonde. Here, fifteen thousand people lived behind high stone walls, which would surround the young Gerard for the next three years.