The World of Gerard Mercator

by Andrew Taylor

  WHATEVER THE DECLARED INTENTIONS of its title, "intended for the use of navigators," the world map of 1569 was more than a seaman's chart. Mercator was a landsman, with no firsthand knowledge of the cramped conditions of the navigator's table on board a ship. As far as we know, the only time he ever stepped off dry land was to board the barge going up the Rhine to the Frankfurt fairs. The deceptively simple alteration to the cylindrical projection that had served since Ptolemy's time presented a system that would enable sailors to plot a straight course on the map and steer the same straight course on the sea, but his map had developed far beyond his initial intentions. The detailed legends— fifteen of them, all in scholarly Latin—were never intended for sailors; the towns with which the interior of Europe, Asia, and North Africa were so closely packed, the rivers and mountains, would have had little relevance for a shipboard navigator.

  Some of Mercator's work, like the maps of Lorraine and England, or the map of Ghent presented to Emperor Charles V, had a steely political edge to it. The map of 1569, on the other hand, was created from the reconciliation of different ideas from Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, and even from beyond Europe. It was intended for sailors pushing back the boundaries of trade and knowledge, and for the peaceful contemplation of scholars. In that sense, it ran completely counter to the militaristic spirit of the times.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Presenting Ptolemy

  to the World

  WHEN CHARLES V handed over control of the Netherlands to his son Philip in 1555,* he instructed him to hold fast to the Catholic religion of his forefathers and show no toleration of heresy within his dominions. Protestantism and anti-Spanish feeling were gaining strength side by side, and Philip followed his father's advice with a policy of blood and fire. At his shoulder to deal with the heretics, as he had been at Charles's, was his most mighty subject, Mercator's former classmate Antoine de Granvelle, who took the lead in a renewed policy of judicial slaughter that lasted for years. One of Granvelle's purges had sent Jan Vermeulen scurrying for his life in 1553. There was a brief moment of hope in 1564: Hated, mocked, and lampooned by the people he oppressed, Granvelle himself was sent into exile by the king, who suggested that he should pay a lengthy visit to his mother in Besancon. Nationalists and Protestants, delighted at his disgrace, rose in revolt against the Catholic power of the king of Spain, and tens of thousands of people flocked out of the towns to take part in open-air religious services at which Catholic priests and rituals were mocked and lampooned; but, like the brief celebration of freedom in Ghent nearly thirty years earlier, it could not last. The killing in the Low Countries continued.

  Simple figures are hopelessly unreliable, twisted and inflated over the centuries by biased accounts and Protestant propagandists; but the laws passed during this bloodthirsty time give some idea of the atmosphere of fear. Shortly after Granvelle's departure, Philip's privy councillors in the Netherlands announced what they called a "moderation" of his decrees.

  The new laws, described by the Netherlanders as "murderation"rather than moderation,* were even more fierce than those that had swept up Mercator and the other forty-two suspects in the purge of 1543. Under this supposedly moderate policy, anyone who discussed religious matters might be executed. So might anyone who interpreted the Bible without having studied theology at a "renowned university,"anyone whose house was used by heretics, or who protected illegal ministers or teachers of religion. The popular rejoicing that had greeted the departure of the hated Granvelle was premature—the people had not yet heard of Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, duke of Alva.

  Alva arrived in the Netherlands (in 1567) at the head often thousand highly disciplined and professional Italian soldiers as effective ruler on the king's behalf, to instigate a reign of military terror that sent thousands more to the executioner's block. Alva was Philip's most loyal adviser, the snarling guard dog that he would unleash upon his enemies,1 and his record in the Netherlands speaks for itself: Over the next two years, he put down the Protestant revolt in a welter of blood and smoke. In January 1568, just five months after his arrival, 84 leading rebels died on the scaffold in a single day; the following month another 37 were condemned; in March, fifteen hundred people were arrested and charged with treason. There were secret accusations, midnight arrests, bodies hanging from trees to terrify the population, and even a new court to hurry through the rudimentary trials that preceded many of the killings. Alva named it the Council of Troubles, but it rapidly became known, more evocatively, as the Council of Blood.

  By 1569, the land of Mercator's birth had endured two of the bloodiest years it had known. Groups of refugees, their possessions piled onto carts or just bundled on their backs, began the long trek toward the cities of northwest Germany. Recent estimates suggest that as many as sixty thousand Protestants and reformists moved to the towns of Emden, Hamburg, Cologne, Bremen, Frankfurt, and Duisburg. They were safe enough there for the present, but there was a new atmosphere of unease, a sense that the fighting and brutality might still spread east and engulf the Rhinelands. The same forces that had blighted Mercator's youth were stirring again.

  THE BLOODLETTING in the Netherlands was still on the distant horizons of Mercator's life. Behind Duisburg's city walls, he was updating and redrawing the map of Europe he had published in 1564, getting it ready for a second edition that was to appear in 1572. Above all, he was anxious to press ahead with the mammoth task he had set himself in the Cosmographia.

  This remained his overarching ambition, to such an extent that for the rest of his life he hardly even mentioned the world map from the day that it left his desk. Of the five individual volumes he had planned for the Cosmographia, the Chronologia was completed, and he had writings from earlier in his life that he would develop into another book describing the universe and the science of astronomy. The works on astrology and on the creation of the elements were important to him, but the geography of the world was closest to his heart. The information he had gathered together in producing the map of 1569 would form the basis of his description of the world as the explorers of the last hundred years had proved it to be. This would be the crowning glory of the Cosmographia— the work that would put him alongside Ptolemy as the undisputed geographer of his age.

  The globes that were still being turned out from his workshop for Christopher Plantin and other dealers all over Europe had brought the world into the library, while the world map of 1569 had hung it on the wall and spread it across the navigator's bench. The new project would present a collection of individual maps, bound together to show how the conception of the world had changed since Ptolemy's time, and place it in all its detail on the scholar's bookshelf, accessible to the reader. "Finally, I shall produce all the regions of the world, keeping repetition to a minimum, lest he who buys the book should be overloaded with too many maps," he wrote later.2

  That work had to wait. To show how the world had changed, he had first to show how it had been seen by the scholars of ancient times. Ptolemy had left projections, directions, and coordinates, and practically every map drawn in the sixteenth century owed some debt to his Geographia, but there were no maps in his own hand. Mercator's aim was to strip away the later additions and interpretations and base his version as closely as he could on the master's original writings, to produce a vision not of the world as he knew it to be, but of the world that Ptolemy had envisaged. Paradoxically, at a time when explorers from Portugal, Spain, Italy, and England were frantically extending the known limits of geography, Europe's leading cartographer concentrated on the best way of presenting knowledge that dated from fifteen hundred years earlier.

  MERCATOR WAS NOT the only one to have thought of producing a modern collection of maps. As his new map of the world was coming off the press in 1569, his friend Abraham Ortelius in Antwerp was about to make the change from colorist, map seller, and collector with a modest reputation to one of the most successful publishers of the century. He had also hit on the idea of a book of maps,
but he considered it with the eyes of a businessman rather than those of a scholar. As a craftsman and salesman, he had few equals; while Mercator turned to maps as a way of understanding the world, Ortelius saw them as merchandise to be sold as quickly and as profitably as possible.

  Born in 1527, he was fifteen years younger than Mercator, and at the age of seven he, too, had been orphaned and brought up by an uncle. The experience left him, like Mercator, with a lifelong appreciation of the value of money and a keen sense of the need for security. While still in his teens, he became a map seller and afsetter van caerten, or illuminator, to support his two sisters and later gathered influential friends of his own in the worlds of business and cartography in Antwerp and Leuven. He also made dangerous acquaintances, whose friendship brought him to the attention of the Inquisition; he is believed to have spent several months in England in his youth to avoid arrest. It is possible that Mercator met him in Leuven or Antwerp, but their close friendship developed after their meeting at the Frankfurt fair in 1554. Six years later, they traveled to Poitiers together, and the language they used in the letters they exchanged demonstrates how relaxed they felt in each other's company. These letters had a familiarity that was unique among Mercator's correspondence. In one of them, Mercator thanked Ortelius for some small gift,* which he said he "embrace[d] lovingly,"3and in another he observed almost bashfully, after praising his friend's work and talents, "I can babble on like this to you, my dear Ortelius."4

  Compared with Mercator, Ortelius did little original work as a geographer,5 and had none of Mercator's theoretical interest in the relevance of Ptolemy in the modern world to distract him from the more pressing business of making money. In the mid-1560s, one of his Antwerp business contacts, a successful merchant named Gilles Hooftman, gave him the idea for a collection of small, portable maps designed to be bound together as a book.

  Hooftman owned more than a hundred ships that traded in the Baltic and North Africa, dealing in timber and various imports and exports. Like Ortelius, Christopher Plantin, and Mercator himself, he had his troubles with the religious authorities—in 1566 he appeared on a list of riches calvinistes to be investigated—but he managed to avoid arrest and imprisonment. He was sufficiently rich and educated to share in the fashionable obsession with maps, and also astute enough to see how it could be turned to his advantage. At sea, Hooftman's merchant vessels might be delayed by winds, currents, and coastlines, while by land, shifting religious conflicts might make one road or another more or less hazardous from one day to the next. The ability to switch to alternate routes could pay significant dividends.

  Since the only copies of the maps he needed were huge and unwieldy, he suggested to Ortelius that they would be much more convenient if printed in some uniform way and bound as a single book. Hooftman was a good customer, and Ortelius made up a collection of some thirty maps that he had bound specially for him. They covered the Low Countries, Germany, France, and Italy, and each was printed on a single sheet of paper. As he worked, the idea formed in his head that a similar project might appeal to a wide range of potential customers.

  Books of maps had been sold before. In Italy, map sellers had bound together various items from their stock to make haphazard collections,* and innumerable editions of Ptolemy's Geographia had been issued, both with and without illustrations. Yet no one had hit on the simple idea of publishing a collection of contemporary maps drawn specifically to be bound in book form.

  The advantages of such a collection were clear enough. Sheet maps were bulky and inconvenient when rolled up for storage, and likely to be damaged however carefully they were handled. When the eighteen sheets of Mercator's world map were pasted together, they formed a map of around thirty square feet, while Waldseemiiller's giant map earlier in the century had been a full thirty-six square feet. Impressive as they might have been—Ptolemy himself had said that a map should be as big as possible—the new maps were impossible to use. Few houses, except for those of the very wealthy, could provide the space to unroll them or the light by which to consult them. They were too big to frame, constant rolling and unrolling damaged them, and hanging them on the wall left them vulnerable to accidental tears, dirt, and fire, so they could not be stored safely even in the most meticulously ordered library. For merchants and travelers trying to find their way from town to town across Europe, all the problems were compounded: The maps that were big enough to include the details they needed were too big to be carried or unrolled. In any case, as Mercator had found out for himself, the advance of regional cartography across Europe had produced more information than could easily be incorporated on a single map of the entire continent.

  As he started work on the new venture that Hooftman's project had inspired, Ortelius had published only two or three maps of his own, although he had embellished and colored hundreds of printed maps for sale. His plan was to collect the work of other cartographers, not to produce the maps himself. He was an unlikely rival for Mercator, known rather as a student of classical history and a collector of books and old coins than as a geographer, and it is clear from the surviving letters between them6 that they exchanged suggestions and ideas freely, helping each other where they could. New maps were found more easily in the busy shops of Antwerp than in Duisburg, and in one letter Mercator asked Ortelius to buy him a copy of the latest work on the Holy Land.

  From the start, Mercator allowed his own maps to be used in the new collection, and he also recommended the work of Wolfgang Lazius, an Austrian professor of medicine who was official historian at the court of Emperor Ferdinand. "I could wish that you add the most recent works of Lazius, who described the area subject to the King of Hungary, which Johannes Maior of Vienna sells, and certain other works," he suggested7 after looking through the first edition of Ortelius's atlas.

  Ortelius expected that his new book would attract more customers and bring maps within reach of those who might not otherwise be able to afford them. "There are many that are much delighted with Geography or Chorography, and especially with Mappes or Tables contayning the plottes and descriptions of Countreys, [who] . . . would willlingly lay out the money [for them] were it not, by reason of the narrowness of the roomes and places, broad and large Mappes cannot be opened and spread, that everything on them may easily and well be seene and discerned," he wrote in the introduction to the English edition.8His book, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, would solve these problems, he said. It would be a "well-furnished shoppe,"9so arranged that geographer, scholar, or dilettante could find whatever map he wanted quickly and easily.

  When the book appeared in 1570, Ortelius made no claims of originality. It was made up of seventy maps on fifty-three sheets, all of them copied or adapted from the work of other cartographers, and accompanied by a detailed explanatory text. At least eight plates, including a magnificent representation of Southeast Asia, were based on Mercator's world map, and his map of Europe was also used. Ortelius's contribution was to collect and select the maps, and redraw them to fit the 22/2-by-i6'/ 2-inch size of his pages. Authors and others in the sixteenth century rarely acknowledged sources or references, but Ortelius's first edition included a Catalogus Auctorum listing a total of eighty-seven leading geographers who were known to him, including thirty-three cartographers whose maps he had consulted.10Among them were Mercator's friends from years ago, Gemma Frisius and Franciscus Monachus. Humfrey Lhuyd, a Welsh physician and amateur cartographer, provided maps of England and Wales, and there were contributions from the Nuremberg engraver Christopher Zell and from Jacob Van Deventer, the Flemish cartographer who worked exclusively on maps of the Netherlands."11

  The Theatrum was a compendium of the new mapmaking, the first serious work to turn its back on Ptolemy as the ultimate geographic authority. It made Ortelius's name and his fortune, enabling him to move into a palatial new house in Antwerp. He was appointed royal geographer to King Philip II of Spain three years after its publication, and the massive success of his book began to eclipse even Mer
cator's reputation. As it went through its successive editions, Ortelius began to be seen by his contemporaries as the most successful geographer of the age.

  The Theatrum was an improbable success, reversing the trend of the previous century toward ever-bigger, more detailed maps, and sparking a demand for similar collections which could be taken from the shelf and consulted at one's desk. Such collections offered more than just convenience; they encouraged the reader both to concentrate on a single geographic area and to compare the maps one with another. Their effect was immense: Comparative geography, once the preserve of the specialist and the scholar, was available to everyone. "You have made the earth portable," one delighted owner wrote to him.

  There was cordiality rather than rivalry between Ortelius and his old friend Mercator—at least on the surface. Mercator had inspired and encouraged Ortelius's project from the start, and he wrote to congratulate him on the appearance of the Theatrum. The pair corresponded as professional colleagues, secure in their mutual regard and in their contempt for the efforts of other mapmakers who, Mercator said, merely entangled and obscured the whole of geography.12In the Theatrum, Or­telius described him as "the Ptolemy of our days," and in his letter, Mercator responded in kind. He declared the book to be a triumph, but his praise had an edge to it: "[The Theatrum] may be bought for a low price, kept in a small place, and even carried about wherever we wish.... I am certain that this work of yours will be saleable whatever maps may in the course of time be reprinted by others."13