Mercator said little about his decision to leave his old university town, other than to observe, years later, in a flattering message to Duke William, that Jiilich was where his life had truly begun. Rupelmonde in Flanders was his birthplace, but in the dedication written in the first volume of his Atlas in 1585, he told the duke, "I was conceived under your protection, in the territory of Jiilich, by parents from Jiilich."
But there was clearly more to his decision than a sentimental retracing of Hubert de Cremer's footsteps of nearly four decades before. There were clear practical reasons to go to Duisburg. Life in his old university town had been limiting. He had enjoyed the profits that instrument making brought him, but he had achieved no standing in the town, no position of social eminence. He could never be sure, but he must have wondered whether he was living all the time in the shadow of his past. Seven years had passed since he had crossed the wooden footbridge out of Rupelmonde Fort, but perhaps the taint of suspected heresy still hung about him. Under Duke William's protection, he could make a new start far away from the memory of the Inquisition.
His children had grown considerably by this time. Arnold, the eldest boy, born about a year after his marriage, was thirteen years old; in another couple of years, he would be the same age Mercator had been when he left for 's Hertogenbosch. The girls, Emerance, Dorothee, and Catherine, would stay with their mother, as was the custom, and Rumold and Bartholomew, at nine and ten years old respectively, could be taught at home for a while longer, but he would soon have to be thinking about their education.
For all that, it was not a straightforward decision. Uprooting himself, his family, and his business took some courage, but if he lacked Plantin's moral and political suppleness, he never had difficulty in showing a degree of adaptability. Mercator accepted Duke William's offer in 1551 and began the preparations to leave with his family for a new life in Duisburg. His was a well-planned and dignified departure, with all the precious engravings for his maps, all his books and documents, painstakingly packed up and prepared for the journey. In a very real sense, he was going home.
*Not content with such disrespect toward a figure who held the same eminence in medical studies as Ptolemy did in geography, in 1536 Vesalius had gone on to hold the first public dissection of a corpse in Leuven for nearly twenty years, and had then ridiculed the theologians for pontificating about the soul without understanding the body. There were unconfirmed stories after he died in 1564 that later in his life only the personal intervention of King Philip of Spain had saved him from the Inquisition.
Chapter Twelve
A New Life
TWELVE YEARS BEFORE Mercator's arrival at Duisburg, in the duchy of Cleves, Duke William's sister Anne had set off on her ill-fated mission to England to become King Henry VIII's fourth wife—a short-lived and unhappy adventure. The six-month queen had realized quickly that her best policy was to avoid confronting the powerful monarch, bow to his will, and reach the best deal she could, and as a result she lived on in comfortable seclusion in England, with the confusing title of King's Sister and a generous pension of five hundred pounds a year. This was the same lesson that her brother had eventually learned from Charles V His reward for accepting the power of the emperor after his adventure in Flanders was a quiet life for him and his dukedom.
Duisburg was a snug, backward-looking town of the old German Empire, clinging to the right bank of the Rhine where it was joined by the Ruhr, and filled with ancient buildings, fading memories of its former glories, and barely three thousand inhabitants—more than in Rupelmonde but less than a quarter the population of 's Hertogenbosch. It offered none of the cosmopolitan life of Leuven, nor of the hectic commerce of Antwerp. A bird's-eye view drawn later by Mercator's friend and fellow lowlander Johannes Corputius showed its compactness and neatness, with a network of narrow streets huddled around the great Salvatorkirche (Church of the Savior) and the central market, all protected by a defensive wall and a moat channeled from the river. Yet it gave no idea of the overwhelming scale of the Rhine,* on which Duisburg relied for its very existence. Like Rupelmonde, the town stood at the confluence of two rivers, but the Rhine, fed from the Swiss Alps some four hundred miles upstream, was vaster than anything Mercator had seen before.
The origins of the name of the Rhine are lost in its pre-Roman, Celtic history, t and it has always been one of Europe's great natural boundaries. To the conquering Romans, the river and the dense woods through which it ran had been as much a frontier of the known world as the mythical sea of Oceanus was to the Greeks. The Roman chronicler Tacitus, writing at the end of the first century AD, saw the Hyrca-nian Forest as marking the very edge of civilization. In Mercator's day, by contrast, Corputius showed the trees tidily dotting the riverbank outside the city walls, where they were carefully tended and felled for timber. Then, as now, the Rhine was an important trading route south into the heart of Europe, with barges carrying furs, rye, and wheat from Russia, grain and salted fish from the Baltic, and wool and linen cloth from as far away as Ireland. Back downstream came cargoes of delicate glassware from Venice, and silks and spices that had passed through the Italian cities from Arabia and the Ottoman possessions in the Balkans. There was an abundance offish in the river as well, and the floods that followed the spring thaw would leave a deposit of rich, fertile black silt for the local farmers. The forests supplied not just timber for building but also partridge and quail for Duisburg's marketplace. Thanks largely to the Rhine, Duisburg was not, at least when Mercator arrived, a town that knew privation.
Duke William's sharp reminder of the realities of power had been learned in the Low Countries, not Cleves, and Duisburg had been untouched by war. Behind its walls stood tiled houses, many of them with gardens and orchards, and all the institutions of a peaceful town: a Latin school, a corn mill, and a market. The trees outside, undamaged by rampaging armies for generations, were a mark of 140 years of quiet prosperity. Duisburg was dominated, literally and figuratively, by the spire of the towering Salvatorkirche; by the mid—sixteenth century, for all the tensions between different Protestant factions, Lutheranism was the accepted and settled religion. A welcoming calm greeted scholars and philosophers, and much that was familiar to a lowlander as well:Flourishing trade with the cloth manufacturers of Ghent and Bruges meant that the sounds of Flemish echoed in the marketplace as merchants haggled and shouted over their bales of cloth.
Not only traders traveled to Duisburg from the Low Countries. Soon after Mercator arrived, a well-known humanist and teacher from Ghent, Johannes Otho, set up a school for twenty-five "youngsters of good birth" in the town. He had left Ghent in a hurry with his wife and children, after a summons to appear before the Inquisition—one more heretic who had slipped away to the safety of Duke William's tolerant rule. The magistrates in Duisburg, well used to new arrivals with such problems behind them, wrote a formal note to Ghent, assuring the authorities there that Otho was a respectable Catholic, but it did no good. All the possessions he had left behind were seized, and his house in the town's Talboonstraet was sold off. His future depended on the school he had established in Duisburg, and Mercator's children were among his first pupils, working through the Latin grammar he had published in Flemish and poring over his learned translations of Plutarch.
Mercator's home in the Oberstrasse, a short distance to the northeast of the church, was destroyed by Allied bombing in World War II.1A model in the local museum, constructed from old photographs, suggests it was built around a central courtyard, with an office and a workshop facing the living quarters. A high stone wall with a thick wooden gate topped by an iron grille ran along the street frontage; even in peaceable Duisburg, a prosperous merchant and a man with a family—"an honest citizen of modest fortune," as Mercator described himself2—needed to protect himself against thieves and vagabonds. It was an old and spacious two-story house of stone, ideal for a man whose business and family life were closely intertwined. There was space for his growing collection of p
rinted books and manuscripts on history, philosophy, and theology— his "most amply furnished library," according to Walter Ghim.3Rolls of maps, sent from correspondents in Italy, Germany, England, France, and the Low Countries, lined the walls.
In marked contrast to the rambling rabbit-warren of rooms and alcoves in Antwerp's Vrijdagmarkt, where Christopher Plantin ran his printing works, the workshop in the Oberstrasse was small and compact. Where Plantin was an industrialist, Mercator remained a scholar and craftsman to the day he died. There, with the help of his sons as they grew older, and with a small team of artisans, he produced the globes and scientific instruments for which he was renowned.
A perfectionist, Mercator liked to be closely involved at every stage of a job, but it was almost universal practice for the routine tasks to be carried out by apprentices. The new art of copperplate printing, for instance, involved a production line of ancillary tasks both before and after the delicate work of inscribing the lines of the map onto the metal plate. First, an assistant would spread a wafer-thin layer of wax over the heated surface of the plate to provide a suitable medium onto which the map could be copied in reverse for engraving. The copying, too, could be carried out with training and practice by one of the team, delicately tracing the lines of the original map onto the hardened wax. Mercator, though, remained the master craftsman: His hand was on the graver which moved across the wax surface to carve through into the copper beneath, and Mercator, too, cut out the place-names in the flowing italic script in which he took such pride. This was the traditional skill of the jewelers and craftsman-engravers on which Antwerp's early dominance of the printing industry had been based, the skill that Mercator had learned in Gemma's workshop.
Once the carving was complete, the copper plate had to be covered with ink, with an assistant squeezing the sticky black fluid into the incised lines before wiping away the excess, and cleaning and burnishing the face. Then the plate would be positioned in a wood frame over a sheet of paper that had been dampened so that it would squeeze into the depressions on the plate, and finally screwed firmly down in a press modeled on the machines that had squeezed olives and grapes for centuries. With the whole process of cleaning, inking, and polishing being repeated before each new impression was taken, there was plenty to occupy his team of craftsmen. For them, as for Mercator, the workday would have been long, starting as early as 5 AM in the summer, and lasting until the light began to fail at dusk. Wages in printing houses and workshops were small, and there were fines for unsatisfactory workmanship.
SUCH A STRICT REGIME would have won the approval of Walter Ghim, one of Duisburg's leading townsmen and civic dignitaries, who was to become Mercator's close friend and first biographer. Ghim lived close by and offered gushing descriptions of his friend in the life story he wrote shortly after Mercator died. "In time of good fortune, he behaved with moderation; in adversity, with great patience," said Ghim. He was calm of temperament and sedate and serious in his bearing—a model citizen. "During the 42 years that he resided here in Duisburg with his family he never exchanged a harsh word with any of his fellow citizens. . . . He paid the magistrates the honour and respect that was due to them. Wherever he lived, he always got on well with his neighbours; he crossed nobody's path; had proper regard to the interests of others; and did not put himself over anybody else."4
Duisburg, from Civitates Orbis Terrarum, 1572. Mercator's house was near the foot of Oberstrasse, which ran between the main square and its gate in the town wall.
Respect for the magistracy would have been a quality particularly dear to Ghim's heart—he was mayor of Duisburg no fewer than twelve times and obviously relished his position—but there is not a word of criticism, of controversy, anywhere in his account. He never mentioned Rupelmonde Fort and the Inquisition, nor hinted at any religious doubt or difficulty; Mercator's life, according to Ghim, was a serene tableau of intellectual rigor and bourgeois virtue. "From the time when Gerard Mercator came to live here, I saw a lot of him, but I never found him idle or unoccupied. He was always heavily engaged in reading one of the historians or other serious authors, of whom he had a fine stock in his library, or in writing or engraving, or was absorbed in profound meditation. Although he ate and drank very little, he kept an excellent table, well furnished with the necessaries of civilised living. He took the greatest care of his health. . . . He always did his best to help those who were poor and less fortunate than he, and throughout his life, he cultivated and cherished hospitality."5
Virtually nothing is known today of Ghim except for his twelve terms of office as mayor and his relationship with Mercator, and he survives only in the reflected light of his friend's renown. By his own account, he was a frequent visitor, and his conversations were detailed enough for his biography to remain one of the most important sources of information about Mercator's life. Even its omissions, like the story of the Inquisition, are significant: They show what Mercator wanted to cut out of his life and forget. Ghim did not write about them because Mercator no doubt did not talk about them. Ghim clearly revered his friend's learning and scholarship—and he, in return, represented the stability and social position that Mercator had lacked as a young man.
Mercator had authority: not that of simple physical size—Walter Ghim says he was a small man, well-formed and good-looking—but the confidence of a man at ease with himself. These early years in Duisburg were probably the happiest, most contented period of Mercator's life, even though the project for which he had originally come to Duisburg foundered in financial and political problems. Duke William had been premature in planning a university without having received formal approval from the pope, and twelve more years passed before the official license was granted. By that time, the scheme had lost its impetus, and the university would not ultimately open for another ninety years.*
Even without the university, Mercator had plenty to occupy his time. He manufactured mathematical and astronomical instruments, but the terrestrial globe that he had originally designed ten years before, coupled with its new celestial counterpart, was still the most important product of his workshop. He was gradually building up production; apart from consignments he regularly sent to Christopher Plantin in Antwerp,* globes were sold at the annual fairs in various German and French cities, and also shipped off to individual buyers across northern Europe. In addition, Mercator had ambitious plans for the expansion of his house in the Oberstrasse, with porticos, halls, courts, dining rooms, gardens, and orchards.6He spent long evenings in his library, discussing the finer points of science or theology with Ghim and other townsmen, and wrote detailed exchanges by letter with scholars all over Europe and beyond.
One of Mercator's most regular correspondents was a friend from Leuven, Jan Vermeulen, well known by the Latinized name Molanus, who was a humanist and a historian. As a young man, he had staggered his examiners at the university by reciting an entire book of Aristotelian philosophy by heart, without a pause or a stumble; but he had another, more controversial, reputation as a passionate champion of religious reform. He had been forced to flee the Low Countries during Granvelle's religious purges and established himself in the Protestant town of Bremen in north Germany, where he ran a school for orphans. Ten years younger than Mercator, over the years he became not only his friend, confidant, and correspondent but also the teacher of his sons and eventually his son-in-law.
The two men wrote to each other regularly for at least two decades.7 Most of their private letters are lost, but those that remain show something of the similarities and differences in their characters. Their religious devotion was clear—"Remember you are a citizen of heaven, and must live by heavenly laws," Vermeulen exhorted his friend in one letter.8 "The will of the Father should be stronger in us than the injuries of all the wicked." On another occasion, writing in reply to a letter from Mercator, he told him ardently, "Your letter burns with your eagerness to celebrate the divine goodness."'9 Only a single letter survives from Mercator's side of the correspondence, bu
t he fell as naturally as his friend into formal Christian expressions such as "Greetings in Christ"or "Brother in Christ." Another surviving letter, written to a Protestant pastor in Zurich later in his life, shows how comfortable Mercator felt in the company of reformers whose friendship in Leuven would have been enough to have him convicted by the Inquisition. With the solemn devotion of his friend Vermeulen, Mercator wrote: "I thank God that He bound me in friendship with such good men of great piety. What can be more sweet in life than to enjoy the company of those whom we know to be superior members of the body of Christ?"10
Mercator was calm and measured in contrast to the fervent religiosity of his friend. Vermeulen seethed with anger against a society that he believed rejected the teaching of the Bible—"The sons of men are liars and more fickle than vanity," he told Mercator"11—and he had no hesitation in confronting the politics of religion head-on. "The tyranny of the Pope is like the devastation of the Turk," he declared angrily12—a remark that gives some clue to the shared attitudes of the two friends. Vermeulen had the reputation of an outspoken critic of the Church, and as a result he spent much of his life on the run. Such high-principled recklessness was not for Mercator, who, in any case, lacked the angry dogmatism that characterized much religious discussion. However much he may have privately sympathized with Vermeulen's position, his public instincts were those of a conformist, a man who was unwilling to involve himself in controversy.
The World of Gerard Mercator Page 14
