One letter in particular, written to Vermeulen in July of 1576, reveals his scholarly quibbling over the minutiae of his faith as well as his refusal to be drawn into the narrow bigotry of the time. It shows how open-minded he could be, even in the overheated atmosphere of the Reformation. In it, he discussed the doctrine of transubstantiation—the question of whether the bread and wine of the Communion literally become the body and blood of Christ. It was one of the most bitterly disputed issues between Catholics and Protestants, traditionalists and reformers, but Mercator's was a voice of easygoing pragmatism. He had the measured calm of Erasmus. It was nothing more than a fight about words, he said; picking over the detail of the argument would produce only useless quarrels.
"This is a bigger mystery than can be understood, and is not part of the necessary articles of faith.... Therefore if anyone thinks this or that, provided it is piously, he is not thinking heretically, and I am not convinced that he should be condemned, nor do I think he should be excommunicated," he wrote.13Elsewhere in Europe, people went to the stake over their beliefs in the "this or that" of religious dogma. The nub of the case made out by the Inquisition against the unfortunate priest Paul de Roovere all those years ago, at the time of Mercator's arrest, was that he had questioned the literal presence of the body of Christ in the Communion. Where de Roovere had crumpled in the face of threats, bullying, and constant questioning, Mercator's was the voice of calm tolerance and common sense. His final thought, though, was of discretion. "Don't communicate this to anyone, lest my enemies learn of it, and it be criticised," he cautioned, anxiously.14Such tolerance on either side of an argument over religious practice was rare, and even in Duisburg, he sensed, the slightest whiff of doctrinal scandal could be dangerous.
Over time, Mercator's skills were called upon in Duisburg as a surveyor, as an arbitrator in property disputes, and even as a representative of the town on formal occasions and delegations. He was a regular guest at official banquets and other civic occasions of a community that set great store by public service and public events. He began to be known, for all his sobriety, as an entertaining and expansive guest who could be relied on to enliven a late-night table. The town records for 1561 show Mercator presented with "a fine salmon of 35 pounds," presumably as a reward for his services in some semiofficial capacity; in the same year, he was awarded eleven and a half quarts of wine from the city's cellars, with which to welcome a visit from his married daughter Emerance.
IN 1552, HAVING DILIGENTLY fulfilled the order to replace the scientific instruments lost at Ingolstadt, and having moved to Duisburg, Mercator started work on a new imperial commission, a task of such importance and such delicate craftsmanship that Charles V would only entrust it to him. The emperor wanted a pair of globes for his collection— not the usual large instruments, which, placed in a wooden stand, would dominate the library, but a pair of tiny concentric models, terrestrial and celestial, one fitting snugly inside the other.15
Walter Ghim almost certainly watched his friend at work on these globes, and later, he described them in admiration. "One [was] of purest blown crystal, and one of wood. On the former, the planets and the more important constellations were engraved with a diamond and inlaid with shining gold; the latter, which was no bigger than the little ball with which boys play in a circle, depicted the world in so far as its small size permitted, in exact detail.""'16; Judging from Ghim's description of their size, the world presented on the smaller globe can have been little more than a sketch—certainly not detailed enough for serious study. With their shining gold inlay, they sound more like a rich man's toys than instruments of scientific precision.
Mercator carried the finished globes personally to the emperor in Brussels, so that he could gain the maximum personal advantage from the order. Because Charles was on the move for much of his life, in military campaigns or journeying between the different parts of his empire, he spent little time at his court in Brussels. In normal times that city was a glittering, luxurious place, its mood very different from the restrained atmosphere of Duisburg. The emperor gave lavish banquets and surrounded himself with fine paintings, famous choirs, and magnificent Flemish tapestries. This, though, was a somber occasion: Charles, broken in health and in spirit, was preparing his abdication.
The victories that followed the battle at Ingolstadt in 1546 had proved to be the high point of his military campaigns. In 1552, France declared war on Charles and occupied the ancient cities of Metz, Toul, and Verdun, on the French borders of the empire, and at the same time, the Protestant German princes formed a fresh alliance against him, spurring him back into military action. First, he was forced to flee humiliatingly from Innsbruck by the soldiers of the Protestant prince Maurice of Saxony, who declared derisively that he wanted "to seek an interview with the emperor." Then he gathered his army around the imposing fortifications of Metz, meaning to recapture it by siege from the French. He camped outside the walls with some one hundred thousand men in the middle of a cold November, but this time there was none of the jovial encouragement of his men's morale that had marked his conduct at Ingolstadt six years earlier. His Spanish and Italian troops, huddled miserably in open trenches in the freezing weather, died by the thousands of cold and disease, and on New Year's Day of 1553, he withdrew in confusion. Some thirty thousand of his men had lost their lives, and with them perished not only Charles's hopes of regaining the city of Metz but also any chance of imposing his will on the German princes.
Charles was still only in his early fifties, but he was worn, bent, white-haired, and prematurely aging. The gout that had troubled him for years had left him a virtual cripple, unable to grip with his hands and struggling to mount his horse. In this painful state, with one leg resting on cushions on his saddletree to ease the pain, the mightiest ruler of the world made his halting way across the frozen countryside back toward Brussels. A journey that usually lasted just over a week took him thirty-six days, and he arrived in Brussels early in February 1553. His main interest lay in making arrangements for his retirement to the remote Spanish monastery of San Jeronimo de Yuste in Estremadura. He had been planning this retirement for several years, and with his life there in mind, he had ordered the twin globes from Mercator. The Flemish-born emperor, rejected as a foreigner by the Spanish, the Germans, and the lowlanders as well, would return to Spain, where he spent his remaining years surrounded by his collection of scientific instruments, clocks, watches, maps, and globes.
Upon receipt of the globes, the weary emperor formally installed Mercator with the grandiloquent title of Imperatoris domesticus (member of the imperial household), an honor that is proudly listed on his memorial in Duisburg's Salvatorkirche. This final gesture of appreciation came, ironically, just as events were about to make clear how wise Mercator had been to leave Leuven.
Two years later, in the great hall of the castle of Brussels, Charles formally handed over rule of the Netherlands to his son, Philip, and within a few months added his possessions in Spain to the inheritance. When, in 1556, Charles's brother Ferdinand was named as the new Holy Roman Emperor to rule over the German and Austrian possessions, his withdrawal from power was complete—but his legacy to the Netherlands was a terrible one.
Over the coming years, Mercator would hear of the torments of his native land with horror. Between them, Philip and the egregious Granvelle, who slipped smoothly from one master to the next, would turn the country of broad horizons that Mercator remembered from his boyhood into a smoking wasteland.
*Even today, with the massive cranes and docks of the biggest inland harbor in the world, the black waters of the Rhine dominate the town.
†Two suggestions are that it derives from der Rinnende (the flowing) or from Rein (the clear).
*By the time Pope Pius VI did grant his license in 1576, Duke William was already crippled by ill health, and his enthusiasm for the project was gone. Mercator's only direct connection with it came more than three centuries later in 1972, when it was renamed
the Gerhard-Mercator-Universität.
*Plantin's accounts, quoted in Colin Clair's Christopher Plantin (London: Cassell, i960), show that a few years after Mercator's arrival in Duisburg, between 1558 and 1589, he supplied Plantin with a total of 1,150 maps and globes
Chapter Thirteen
Our Europe
CROWDS OF REFUGEES had been leaving Leuven, religious reformers and their families fleeing Granvelle's latest purges. Mercator's outspoken friend Jan Vermeulen had left a couple of years earlier, heading in abject poverty for Bremen, some 220 miles to the northeast, where his religious views would be more acceptable.1
The contrast with Mercator's position was marked. His business was flourishing, and he was enjoying the prosperity it brought him. The small globes he made for Charles V are lost, but other productions of his workshop demonstrate both his obsession with accuracy and the extent of his reputation. A magnificent pair of his globes, prepared as a gift for the Ottoman sultan Murad III, was auctioned in Europe in 1991 for over $1.8 million.* The globes, made in gilt metal and bearing the sultan's official tughra (imperial cipher), were less than twelve inches in diameter, standing in finely carved and precisely matching wooden stands—bigger, perhaps, than the ones he made for the emperor, but still too small for a serious scholar to use. The terrestrial globe, though, includes all the details of Mercator's own world map, while the celestial one is carefully based on the star map of Nicolaus Copernicus. His reputation rested not just on the beauty of his work but on its accuracy as well. For Mercator the perfectionist, scientific instruments had to be finely designed and articles of beauty, while the slightest conversation piece had to be as accurate as his skill and learning could make it. Commercial success and social standing came at a price, however. For more than twelve years, Mercator had produced no new maps.
Before he left Leuven, he had engraved the plates for the first three or four sheets of a great map of Europe that he intended to be the definitive record of the continent. Carefully wrapped in cloth, they had been transported to his workshop in the Oberstrasse, where, soon after arriving in Duisburg, he resumed work on the biggest scheme he had undertaken so far.
He had described his plans to Antoine de Granvelle as early as 1540, with his usual overconfidence about the speed with which he could complete the work: "My next job is to put in order our Europe, and the most part is done, except Spain, but since it is a huge work, it will take much time, at least one year in the fabrication."2In fact, the first edition of the map appeared fourteen years after that letter, so clearly "the most part" must have been an optimistic exaggeration. It was planned in fifteen separate sheets, which would eventually be pasted together in three rows of five sheets each, to form a map some 65 inches wide and 5234 inches high, covering an area that stretched from Iceland in the north to western Morocco and the Nile Delta in the south, and from the Atlantic coastline and the British Isles in the west to the upper Volga and the Syrian desert in the east.
From the start, there had been little doubt that it would sell. Martin Waldseemiiller had produced the first map of the whole continent as a woodcut in 1511, and it was still selling well, though much of it had been rendered out-of-date by a great surge in regional mapmaking across the continent. As Mercator set himself to complete his own work, he had four more decades of research by geographers, scholars, and printers on which to draw. Even the work that he had described to Granvelle as finished in 1540 was revised and improved over the years as Mercator gathered new information from other mapmakers, from ancient sources, and from mariners. Where Mercator's map required fifteen sheets to include all the names and other information he had gathered, Waldseemiiller's had been completed on just four.
Apart from the many maps of the various regions of Europe, there had been several attempts at a map of the whole continent in the years following Waldseemiiller. In 1535, the German cartographer Heinrich Zell had published an eight-sheet woodcut map of Europe with a descriptive commentary, and nine years later, the young French nobleman Nicolas de Nicolay d'Arfeville, court geographer to King Charles IX, produced a map on four sheets that showed Europe and the north African coastline. Both mapmakers were primarily interested in regional cartography—Nicolay later made the first marine chart of the coast of Scotland—and their maps of Europe were highly derivative of Waldseemiiller's work. Neither of them attempted the detail with which Mercator filled his map.
The new interest in making local and regional maps had been inspired by the techniques of triangulation and surveying that Mercator's friend and teacher Gemma Frisius had introduced in the early 1530s. Mercator's map of Flanders in 1540 was part of the explosion of cartography across the continent. In Mechelen, Jacob van Deventer produced a series in which he surveyed, measured, and mapped the lowland provinces of Brabant, Holland, Zeeland, and Frisia in intricate detail, while in Paris a mathematics professor, Oronce Fine, had surveyed and mapped the whole of France. The Paris booksellers encouraged a brisk trade in other regional maps by craftsmen such as Jean Jolivet, Jean Chaumeau, and Gabriel Symeone.
The breadth of knowledge of the mapmakers all over Europe was astonishing. They were not only polymaths, but scholars who had the same quality that John Dee had noted in Leuven—the ability to turn their learning to practical effect. One of them, a professor of Hebrew and an amateur mathematician from the Rhineland named Sebastian Miinster, had established himself at Basel University in Switzerland as the leading German geographer of his day with an edition of Ptolemy's Geographia, supplemented with original maps of European regions. He had worked in the printing industry and published his own works on Hebrew, cosmography, geography, and applied mathematics.
Miinster died in 1552, a victim of one of the outbreaks of plague that periodically swept through European cities, but he had maintained a widespread network of correspondents and had appealed to scholars, princes, and burgomasters for descriptions and sketch maps to be incorporated into a detailed study of the region. Much of that legacy of research, surveying, and measurement, incorporated into the 649-page Cosmographia that Miinster published in 1544, almost certainly found its way to Mercator's desk.
Among the maps on which Miinster drew was an anonymous woodcut, produced as early as 1499 to guide pilgrims heading through central Europe on the way to Rome for the papal Holy Year celebrations of 1500—Das ist der Rom Weg, as its title explained. Its printer, according to a note below the map, was the Nuremberg illuminator Georg Glock-endon— the same artist who painted Martin Behaim's globe—but the map itself is usually ascribed to a craftsman in the same town named Er-hard Etzlaub. He was an instrument maker and engraver, like Mercator, and he also produced two compasses with sundials that have maps of Europe, the Mediterranean, and North Africa engraved on them. What is most immediately striking about these apparently crude and simple maps, engraved in 1511 and 1513, is the way they are drawn with south at the top. But for all the roughness of their lines, they were constructed to a revolutionary and deceptively simple design. Etzlaub's lines of latitude were drawn progressively farther apart the farther north they moved.
There is nothing to suggest that Mercator ever saw Etzlaub's maps, let alone modeled his famous projection on them—they were one-of-a-kind metal artifacts, not printed maps, copies of which might have been sent to him—but the interest in regional cartography across Europe did present him with a flood of new information that had to be assimilated into his map of the continent. The development of printing meant that he could pore over many of the maps at his own desk; others were described to him in letters from scholars across the continent. Judging from his letter to Antoine de Granvelle in 1540, he had been studying such maps and reports on and off for more than ten years, first in Leuven and then in Duisburg, his problem as much one of evaluating information as of gathering it.
Often, the new maps were unsatisfactory: Other mapmakers, he grumbled, were less conscientious than he was and ignorantly reproduced the false along with the true. "This is obvious in the map
s which have come to us from Italy," he wrote testily to his friend Abraham Ortelius some years later. "The later works are more corrupt than the earlier ones even though they are made by the same author. If one follows this thread, then all of geography must be entangled and obscured in inextricable error."3Even accurate descriptions could be corrupted by careless copyists and engravers.
Mercator's own map of Europe finally appeared in 1554. He had kept Antoine de Granvelle informed about its progress from the start, and he dedicated the finished map to him, in return for an honorarium that, says Ghim, amply demonstrated "the magnanimity and exceptional generosity of this magnificent personage."4The Baltic area and the far north of Scandinavia were still uncertainly sketched in, but due to the work that had been done by regional mapmakers like Fine, Miinster, and their collaborators and correspondents, towns and cities were marked much more accurately, as were the great rivers such as the Rhine, the Danube, the Loire, and the Volga. The entire map was surrounded by a two-inch decorative border of human figures, animals, and mythical beasts, maintaining the medieval tradition of using the map to exemplify the variety of God's Creation.
The printed sheets would leave Mercator's workshop in bundles of fifteen, ready to be pasted together to hang on the wall. Some dealers, like Ortelius, who branched out into selling maps soon after starting work as a colorist and illuminator, would color them by hand for their customers; some would paste them together and sell them as a completed, rolled-up map. However it was offered for sale, the map of Europe was a huge success and continued selling briskly for years. In 1566, for example, Christopher Plantin's records show more than four hundred copies sold from his Antwerp bookshop—nearly half the sales in a single year that Waldseemiiller's map had achieved over four decades. Its immediate effect was to reinforce Mercator's position as the unchallenged leader among the geographers and mapmakers of his generation. It was his most important creation so far: From the multiplicity of information on which he had drawn, he had produced a map that showed almost every part of the continent with greater accuracy than had ever been achieved before. For example, Ptolemy had given the length of the Mediterranean Sea as sixty-two degrees, an estimate that Mercator had reduced to fifty-eight degrees on his globe of 1541. On the new map, shifting Cape Finisterre and the adjacent Spanish coast eastward, he reduced it farther to fifty-three degrees—longer than the forty-one degrees shown on modern maps but a considerable improvement.
The World of Gerard Mercator Page 15
