Whatever the cause of Mercator's illness, it forced him to return to Duisburg and take to his bed for several months, and the duke's commission had to wait. Although Ghim says that from his first arrival in Duisburg his friend always "took the greatest care of his health,"3after the crisis of Lorraine Mercator started to mention bouts of illness in his own letters.
Of the map itself, nothing remains, apart from copies published many years later in Mercator's atlas, but he was evidently proud of his work and anxious to gain the maximum credit for it. Working from the observations he had completed, and from other readings taken by Bartholomew after he had returned home, he prepared "an exact pen-drawing."4Just as he had taken care whenever he could to present his commissions to Emperor Charles V in person at his court in Brussels, so, still weak from his illness, he set out for Duke Charles's palace in Nancy and delivered the map in October 1564.
Charles was duly grateful, though he never published Mercator's map. Lorraine, no less than Tudor England, was in constant danger of attack from outside, and the same considerations of security that made mapmaking such a sensitive operation for England's Queen Elizabeth were doubly applicable to a ruler in the delicate position of Duke Charles. Few items were more valuable to an invader than a detailed map; the information on this map could have affected the very survival of the dukedom. Such knowledge was a rare commodity in the sixteenth century, and the map stayed locked in the duke's library, where he could consult it, but where it would be safe from any potential enemies.
DESPITE THE HEALTH CRISIS precipitated by his trip to Lorraine, Mercator continued to travel far afield, marketing his globes and instruments. He remained a regular visitor to the trade fairs in the various German cities, where he met scholars and merchants who would sell his instruments, and especially to the book fair in Frankfurt.
The annual Frankfurt fair dates back at least to the twelfth century. For hundreds of years, apart from silks, wines, jewels, fine carvings, and other luxury items, there had been manuscripts for sale from monks who had traveled across Europe with their wares. From the moment the clanging bell at the fairground announced the start of trading, merchants were free to move about and trade as they wished. The city was also one of the main centers of the new printing trade in Germany, and by the end of the fifteenth century, so many booksellers were coming that an area close to the River Main became known as the Buchgasse, or Book Alley. By Mercator's time, it was firmly established as a separate book fair and provided fertile ground for finding new customers for his maps and globes—part of a network of trade that stretched across the continent and beyond.
Travel, though, was both wearying and dangerous. It was often difficult to tell the difference between gangs of bandits and the groups of unpaid and undisciplined soldiers and mercenaries who wandered the countryside. As a result, one of Christopher Plantin's agents, who had been seized by robbers as he traveled from Brussels to Namur, had a clause written into his contract requiring the bookseller to cover half the cost of any ransom demand. Merchants gathered in groups for protection, often with armed guards provided by the civic authorities for at least part of the way, but the risks and the hardships remained.
Mercator would have traveled either by horse-drawn wagon, with books, maps, globes, and other goods for the fair packed into barrels, or on board one of the creaking barges that plied regularly up the Rhine to Cologne and on to Frankfurt. At times, the fighting between the Spanish and Italian troops of King Philip and the rebels of the Low Countries made travel across country almost impossible. For example, in 1585, with Antwerp besieged by the Spanish, Plantin traveled with Ortelius from Amsterdam to Hamburg by sea, on to Frankfurt by stagecoach, and then back downriver to Cologne. It was a round-trip of about a thousand miles, either over unmade roads or on the bare boards of a Rhine barge, encumbered with barrels and boxes of merchandise, and under the constant threat of robbery.
There are no such detailed accounts of Mercator's traveling, but one small reference not only demonstrates how far he journeyed but also suggests that his expeditions were not all business and sober study. In 1560, Europe's leading cartographer was in the town of Poitiers, in western France—"a town of priests and monks," one later traveler5 said dismis-sively. However, it also had a flourishing printing industry, it boasted a university that had been established a century and a half before to rival the one in Paris, and it hosted the annual Fair of St. Luke—three good commercial reasons for Mercator to have made the six-hundred-mile journey. In addition, about half a mile outside the town stood the famous Pierre Levee, the Raised Stone, an ancient monument that was casually referred to as a Druids' stone or a Celtic antiquity. Today, the town has engulfed it, but the huge flat stone on five massive legs of rock—the word dolmen comes from the Breton for "stone table"—was there long before Poitiers, the Druids, or the Celts. Modern estimates suggest that the "tabletop," some twenty-two feet long by sixteen feet across, was maneuvered into position on its six-foot legs of rock more than three thousand years before Mercator's day, making it more or less contemporary with Stonehenge in England. Its original religious or ceremonial purpose is a mystery, but by the sixteenth century it had become not only the center of St. Luke's fair but also a rendezvous for townsmen and scholars from the university.
Around the time of Mercator's visit, a local writer described how people, "when they have nothing else to do, pass the time by climbing up onto the stone and banqueting there with large quantities of bottles, hams, and pastries, and inscribing their names in the capstone with a knife."6Mercator was traveling with three friends and professional colleagues, the cartographer Abraham Ortelius, the engraver Frans Hogenberg, who would later produce most of the maps in Ortelius's atlas, and his friend Filips Galle, another map engraver and publisher. Apparently, they left their inscriptions on the rock like hundreds of others, before and since. Hogenberg later collaborated with the book designer Georges Braun to produce a best-selling compendium of panoramas and sketches of European towns, the Theatrum Urbium—and in that book, on a sketch of the rock, appear the four names, with the date beside them, though no trace of the inscriptions survives today.7For all Walter Ghim's remarks about his hospitality and good humor, the picture of Mercator that emerges from his letters, from official documents, and from other descriptions is one of almost unleavened seriousness; the Pierre Levee incident presents a fleeting glimpse of a different, more relaxed character.
FOLLOWING HIS INTENSIVE WORK on the maps of Europe and Britain, and his surveying project in the forests of Lorraine, Mercator began to turn his attention to the skies, watching and predicting the movements and eclipses of stars and planets like many of his contemporaries. The first telescopes would not be devised for a good half century, but astronomy had a long history as a pastime for scholars, philosophers, and especially geographers.
The early geographers had developed their theories about the form and structure of the Earth from observations and measurements of the stars. The imaginary triangles with which Mercator surveyed the Earth could be constructed in the heavens as well. His earlier studies in Leuven had been based mainly on his readings of Ptolemy's words and his understanding of the new researches of Copernicus and other modern astronomers, but in the 1560s he began his own careful, systematic watching of the skies.
Perhaps Mercator built his own observatory in the house in the Oberstrasse, for his notebooks record an eclipse of the Sun in April 1564 and one of the Moon in October two years later. There was a religious motive in his work, as there was in his studies of cosmography, a feeling that gaining understanding of the workings of the universe was one way of paying homage to the great mystery of Creation, but plotting the movement of the planets was a challenge, an intellectual game as well as an act of religious piety. "How I delighted in making early predictions of the eclipses of the sun and the moon," he reminisced as an old man.8
In the sixteenth century there was little distinction between astronomy, the study of the stars and th
e planets, and astrology, the study of their supposed influence on life on Earth. Some of the most famous names of the century were involved in astrological predictions and interpretations. Copernicus himself learned mathematics and astronomy in preparation for the use of astrological charts in his medical career, and in England John Dee was a devoted adherent of astrology. He created several detailed birth charts, including one that plotted the positions of the planets at the time of his own birth. The charges of witchcraft and conjuring that led to his imprisonment under the Catholic queen Mary were based on allegations that he had drawn up similar horoscopes for the queen, her husband, Philip of Spain, and her sister, the future Elizabeth I.
Even the popes had relied on the interpreters of the stars for generations, and astrology remained for many people a respectable and trusted science. Yet to Mercator, astrology and the occult were nonsense and blasphemy. "They misunderstand the entire celestial system," he wrote of astrologers. "The purpose for which the lights of the sky are created is much greater than mere astrological prediction—it is to reveal to mankind the almighty power, the majesty, and the divinity of their Creator, not to be at the service of the vanity of the astrologers."9
Mercator rarely expressed his feelings so forcefully; even so, this was still not a modern response. Mercator asked the medieval question "Why?" rather than the modern scientific question "How?" and answered it with a conventional reliance on the might and majesty of God. He remained, to that extent at least, consistent with his age: In the sixteenth century, the word science carried none of its modern implications of dispassionate, empirical objectivity. On the other hand, his dismissal of astrology as superstition and vanity was the attitude of an individual thinker; in an age before science, Mercator's instincts were those of a scientist, not a magician.
Chapter Sixteen
Tragedy
EARLY IN MAY 1563, just as he was about to start on what would be the busiest period of his life, a sinister incident had occurred that would cast a shadow over Mercator for years to come. In his garden one morning, he found an unsigned letter, apparently thrown over the wall from the Oberstrasse, that threatened to shatter the comfortable respectability he had established for himself in the town. Exactly what it accused him of is now as uncertain as the name of his secret tormentor. The only surviving account is simply that it said he was "addicted to the most shameful practices,"1had published libels and satires about various important personages in the duchy, and had committed other, unspecified crimes.
He might have shrugged off a single note to himself as the work of some jealous enemy, but he found to his horror that a series of similar messages had gone to leading figures in Duisburg and elsewhere in the duchy. The precise charges are unlikely to have had any justification; for all Walter Ghim's enthusiasm about his friend's geniality, Mercator's surviving writings—letters and poems as well as his books and prefaces— are devoid of any sense of humor, let alone satire. In any case, it seems barely credible that a man so single-minded in his pursuit of the good opinion of the wealthy and influential should have put his position at risk by spreading gossip about them. He habitually larded his correspondence with such phrases as: "I will be eager to be worthy of the benefits granted to my work by your Roman Majesty"; "I congratulate myself that I have been considered worthy of [your] friendship"; and "I wished to gratify your Illustrious Majesty by first sharing this work with you and showing my eagerness to honour you." These are the words of a man whose fault, if he had one, was sycophancy, not disrespect.
However, the passion with which he responded to the letters showed how seriously he took this unexpected attack. He immediately visited Duke William to plead his innocence of the allegations and to press for an investigation into them. They would have been brought to the ducal court in any case, but Mercator judged it better to confront them and declare his loyalty in person, rather than allow them to go unchallenged.
In many other cities, Mercator might have faced sudden arrest, imprisonment, even execution after such an anonymous letter to the authorities. The secret denunciation, so popular with the Inquisition, had long been a favorite tool of both envious individuals and repressive governments. In Venice, for example, it had been formalized as a tool of state security, with confidential public letterboxes shaped like lions' mouths set into the walls of the streets for informants to drop in their unsigned accusations. Duisburg was not Venice, but at the very least a scandal could have turned Mercator's well-connected sponsors and clients away from his business, or worse, threatened his security.
The inquiry he begged for was held, and found no substance in any of the various allegations made against him, but Mercator's response did not end with the sensible step of clearing his name in official circles. He remained a welcome guest at the court and the trusted servant of the duke and his highest officials, yet even this reassurance could not ease his anxieties. The incident would prey on his mind for years; for all the self-assurance he had shown before, the letter writer had touched a vulnerable spot deep in his soul.
The secret malice behind the letters, rather than the allegations themselves, was what ate at him. Years before, in the dark months in Rupelmonde Fort, he had wondered bleakly for days on end whether he had a secret enemy and who it might be. This new campaign of malevolence was a cruel reminder of how fragile everything he had achieved might still prove to be.
For more than twelve years, fresh letters would appear sporadically, without warning, either sent to Mercator himself or passed to his friends or to leading figures at the court. None was signed, but each one contained the same allegations of shameful behavior and disloyalty to the duke. Even though there was relative harmony between Catholics and Protestants in Duisburg, the "shameful practices" that Mercator denied so vehemently obviously referred to religious or doctrinal matters. There was just enough truth in such suggestions to hurt; Mercator's tolerant attitude left him with a foot in each camp, vulnerable to attack from both sides. In letters to his friends, he gave his anonymous slanderer a name, calling him Flavius Dorpius—Flavius being the name of the Roman emperor Domitian, who "wallowed in noble blood,"2and Dorpius that of a professor of divinity at Leuven who had accused the humanist Erasmus of being insufficiently critical of Lutheranism.3In putting their names together, Mercator created a personality for his mysterious enemy that combined savage malice with religious bigotry.
The scandal itself extended no farther than Duisburg and the court in neighboring Diisseldorf, but six years after the first letter, Mercator was still printing impassioned denials in the prefaces to his books that would be bought and read across Europe. He was the victim of a calumny, of a campaign of secret plotting, he declared. "How could anyone suppose me capable of writing such libels and pamphlets—me, devoting myself as I do solely to the beautiful studies of geography, cosmography, and history? . . . Nothing in the world gives me greater pleasure, and other occupations, even when they are necessary, are a burden to me," he protested.4
He wrote poems—now lost—attacking "Flavius Dorpius" and returned again and again in his private letters to the theme of his injured probity. The obsession blighted Mercator's life. Vermeulen was astonished that "the hatred of one wretched man" could have such an effect and begged him not to take the matter further. "I ask you and beg and plead with you by our old friendship to stop torturing yourself, and cast aside as far as you can those unhappy thoughts about Flavius Dorpius,"he wrote in 1575. "It is a hallucination that you will receive help or protection from the advisors in the Court. . . . Whatever way you handle Flavius Dorpius, you will stain your name for posterity, and be smeared by the association."5
Yet Mercator would not be calmed. He was convinced that there was something more sinister to this mysterious enmity than jealous spite or religious prejudice: "I feel that those who don't know the nature of my conversations and studies are often led to suspicions of evil," he said.6 He lived in an age that burned heretics and witches with the same grisly enthusiasm, and al
though he was no dabbler in spells or summoner of spirits, many of his fellow scholars had been suspected of sorcery. John Dee, his house and library ransacked by the mob, had seen the passions such stories could arouse. Mercator's scholastic work and his delight in "the contemplation of nature . . . the causes of all things, the sources of all knowledge" seem blameless enough today, but experimenters and thinkers threatened the treasured myths and idols of the past; "suspicions of evil" could confuse natural science with necromancy, love of knowledge with love of the Devil.
In the mid-1570s, the anonymous letters ceased as abruptly as they had started. There are suggestions in Vermeulen's letters to Mercator that the man they suspected was behind them was leaving Cleves for Holland—where, Vermeulen added darkly, Mercator's friends would see to it that "Flavius Dorpius" would find "someone who both can and will bridle his insolence."7Whatever happened, he vanished from Mercator's life and was mentioned no more. The damage that had been done—and Mercator's old age was plagued by increasingly frequent periods of black depression—had been caused not by his malicious accusations but by Mercator's own obsessive response.
The World of Gerard Mercator Page 18
