A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  Ribeiro died in Seville on 16 August 1533. The contemporary importance of his series of world maps drawn between 1525 and 1529 meant that their innovations, just like those of Waldseemüller, were quickly assimilated by younger mapmakers, who pieced together the mass of travellers’ reports and pilots’ charts that flooded into Europe from overseas discoveries around a world which first Waldseemüller and then Ribeiro had played such a part in shaping over two decades. Traces of Ribeiro’s influence endured, and they can still be seen today in one of the Renaissance’s most iconic images: Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, painted in the same year as the Portuguese cosmographer’s death.

  Fig. 18 Detail of Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors, 1533.

  Holbein’s painting depicts two French diplomats, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, at Henry VIII’s London court on the eve of the English king’s momentous decision to marry his mistress Anne Boleyn and sever England’s religious ties with the papacy in Rome for ever. The objects placed on the table in the centre of the composition provide a series of moralized allusions to some of the religious and political issues preoccupying the elite of Renaissance Europe. On the bottom shelf is a merchant’s arithmetic manual, a broken lute and a Lutheran hymn book, symbols of the commercial and religious discord of the time. In the corner sits a terrestrial globe, just one of the many in circulation since Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe. Looking more closely, it is possible to see the dividing line agreed at Tordesillas in 1494 running down the globe’s western hemisphere. We cannot see where this line falls in the eastern hemisphere, because it is tantalizingly obscured in shadow, but we do know that Holbein used a globe attributed to the German geographer and mathematician Schöner, and dated to the late 1520s. The globe itself is lost, but the original gores, the printed segments from which the globe was made, have survived, and are almost identical to the globe shown in Holbein’s painting. They trace the route taken by Magellan’s 1523 circumnavigation, and clearly show the Moluccas placed in the Castilian half of the globe, in line with Ribeiro’s own placement of the islands.

  It is a testament to the changes occurring in Europe as a consequence of long-distance travel, imperial rivalry, scientific learning and the religious turmoil of the first half of the sixteenth century that Holbein’s painting shares similarities with Ribeiro’s maps in placing globes, scientific instruments and mercantile textbooks before religious authority. Traditionally, the depiction of two prominent figures like de Dinteville and de Selve would show them between an object of religious devotion such as an altarpiece or a statue of the Virgin Mary. In Holbein’s painting, the central authority of religious belief is replaced by the worldly objects jostling for attention on the table. This is a world in transition, caught between the religious certainties of the past and the political, intellectual and commercial excitement of a rapidly changing present. Religion is quite literally sidelined, its remaining presence that of a silver crucifix barely visible behind a curtain in the top left-hand corner. The global interests of this new world of international diplomacy and imperial rivalry lie elsewhere, on the other side of a newly emerging globe, driven more by imperial and commercial imperatives than religious orthodoxy.41

  The terrestrial globe was simply too small to be useful in the kind of diplomacy practised by the two French ambassadors, or by the Castilian and Portuguese diplomats who struggled over ownership of the Moluccas throughout the 1520s. What was required to understand this enlarged global world were maps like Ribeiro’s, which turned away from the Greek projections of the inhabited world, and instead offered a 360-degree perspective of the entire globe. Unlike a globe, flat maps inevitably contain centres and margins. As the Portuguese and Castile fought over the Moluccas for global pre-eminence Ribeiro provided an object that could be divided according to their particular global interests. This map was flat, but its conception was global.

  For most people living in the early sixteenth-century world, like the young boy who bared his buttocks at the Portuguese delegation in Badajoz-Elvas, the dispute over the Moluccas was meaningless; it was a political dispute between two competing empires, with little relevance to most individuals and their everyday lives. Even to those who grasped something of the global implications of the conflict, drawing a line on a map or globe in Seville or Lisbon to represent the partition of the world on the other side of the earth bore little reality to the seaborne activity that continued regardless between Muslim, Christian, Hindu and Chinese pilots and merchants who criss-crossed the commercial worlds of the Indian and Pacific oceans. Both Portugal and Castile’s claims to territorial monopolies thousands of kilometres from their imperial centres would prove to be utterly unsustainable. But for the western European empires of first Portugal and Castile, then Holland and England, the act of drawing a line, first on a map, then on a terrestrial globe, and laying claim to places that their putative imperial lords never visited, set a precedent that would be followed through the centuries, and shape so much European colonial policy across the globe over the subsequent 500 years.

  7

  Toleration

  Gerard Mercator, World Map, 1569

  Louvain, Belgium, 1544

  The arrests began in the February of 1544. During the previous weeks a list of fifty-two names had been drafted in Louvain by Pierre Dufief, the procurer-general of Brabant. Dufief had already established his credentials as a fiercely conservative theologian for his interrogation and execution of the English exile and religious reformer William Tyndale, who had been charged with heresy, condemned, then strangled and burnt at the stake near Brussels in 1536. Forty-three of the names on Dufief’s list came from Louvain, the rest from cities and towns – Brussels, Antwerp, Groenendael, Engien – all within a 50 kilometre radius. The list included people from all walks of life – priests, artists and scholars, as well as cobblers, tailors, midwives and widows – all united by the accusation of ‘heresy’. Over the next few days Dufief’s bailiffs began to round up the accused. Some confessed to denying the existence of Purgatory; others questioned transubstantiation (the belief that the bread and wine of the communion become the body and blood of Christ) and admitted to acts of iconoclasm (destroying images of Christ and his saints). Dufief’s interrogation was thorough, and by late spring, although many were released or escaped with banishment and the confiscation of property, a handful had been found guilty of heresy and sentenced: one woman was buried alive, two men were beheaded and one burnt at the stake. Nobody watching their public executions was left in any doubt about the penalty for questioning the religious or political authority of Habsburg rule.1

  Ever since the Habsburg emperor Charles V had inherited the Low Countries from his Burgundian ancestors in 1519, this fiercely independent patchwork of cities and municipalities had refused to accept what it regarded as the centralization of government and taxation by a foreign power, which ruled through governors-general based in Brussels. Four years before the arrests of 1544, Ghent refused to contribute to the Habsburg war effort against neighbouring France. The subsequent revolt was ruthlessly suppressed by Charles and his sister, Queen Maria of Hungary, governor and regent of the Low Countries. Two years later, anti-Habsburg factions from the eastern region of Gelderland again challenged the authorities, besieging Louvain and forcing Charles to return from Spain and assemble an army to rout his opponents. It was clear to Charles and his sister that the greatest challenge to their authority was not dynastic, but religious. By 1523, Dutch translations of the New Testament based on Martin Luther’s writings had been published in Antwerp and Amsterdam, and commentaries on his work published in the same year were banned.2 The region had a long history of tolerance and plurality in matters of theology and devotional practice, but both Charles and Mary came from a very different Christian tradition. Habsburg experience of the Jewish and Muslim communities in late fifteenth-century Castile helped convince them that any theological deviation from their own part
icularly orthodox version of Catholicism was a direct challenge to their authority. The arrests and subsequent executions of 1544 represented only a small fraction of an estimated 500 deaths officially sanctioned under Maria’s twenty-five- year-long rule, and the estimated 3,000 people who were condemned because of their religious beliefs across Europe between 1520 and 1565.3

  The lives of many of Dufief’s accused are sketchy or non-existent, but records survive of one particular figure, identified on Dufief’s list as ‘Meester Gheert Schellekens’, a resident of Louvain, who was accused of the particularly grave heresy of ‘lutherye’, or Lutheranism. When Dufief’s men came knocking at Schellekens’s Louvain home, he was nowhere to be found: he was a fugitive as well as a heretic, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Within days he was apprehended by the bailiff of Waas, in the nearby town of Rupelmonde, and incarcerated in its castle. Among the many accounts of cruelty, persecution, torture and death during the history of the European Reformation, the arrests and executions of 1544 would be sadly unremarkable were it not for the fact that Schellekens was his wife’s maiden name, and ‘Meester Gheert’ is better known to history as the mapmaker Gerard Mercator (1512–94).

  When pressed to identify a famous cartographer, most people will name Gerard Mercator and the map projection to which he gave his name, his 1569 world map, and which continues to define global mapmaking even today. Variously described as a cosmographer, geographer, philosopher, mathematician, instrument maker and engraver, Mercator was responsible for inventing not only his famed map projection, but also the first collection of maps to use the term ‘atlas’. He created one of the first modern maps of Europe, overtook the influence of Ptolemy’s Geography, and effectively superseded woodcut mapmaking by taking the art of copperplate map engraving to unparalleled heights of beauty and sophistication. We know more about Mercator’s life than any of his predecessors because of the increasing professionalization of cosmography and mapmaking. He was one of the first mapmakers to merit his own admiring biography, Vita Mercatoris (‘Life of Mercator’), published posthumously by his friend Walter Ghim in 1595. His name has become synonymous with his projection, which has been unfairly castigated as the ultimate symbol of Eurocentric imperial domination over the rest of the globe, placing Europe at its centre and diminishing the size of Asia, Africa and the Americas.

  To adapt Marx, men make their own geography, but not of their own free will, and not under circumstances they have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.4 The formulation could apply to many of the maps and their makers described in this book, but it applies most directly to the life and works of Gerard Mercator. The age of the Renaissance and Reformation in which Mercator lived is regarded as the great century of individuality, of the rise of biography, the lives of famous men exemplified by Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1572) and what has become known as ‘Renaissance self-fashioning’, the ability of individuals artfully to shape their identity by adapting to and exploiting their particular circumstances. Whenever individuals assert themselves, they tend to experience the assaults and limitations of institutions such as Church, State and family; and where they reach for novel and alternative ways of imagining their personal and social existence, these institutions often endeavour to proscribe such alternatives.5 If the sixteenth century was the great age of selfhood, it was also one of Europe’s most intense periods of religious conflict and repression, an era when both Church and State imposed limitations on what people could think and how they should live in pursuit of their own religious, political and imperial goals.

  Although the charge of heresy was not explicitly related to Mercator’s mapmaking, his career as a cosmographer inevitably asked the kind of questions about creation and the heavens above that brought him into conflict with orthodox religious beliefs of the sixteenth century – both Catholic and Lutheran. Like Martin Waldseemüller, Mercator regarded himself as a cosmographer. He saw his profession as ‘a study of the whole universal scheme uniting the heavens of the earth and of the position, motion and order of its parts’.6 Cosmography was the foundation of all knowledge and ‘of the first merit amongst all of the principles and beginnings of natural philosophy’. Mercator defined it as the analysis of ‘the disposition, dimensions and organisation of the whole machine of the world’, and mapmaking was just one of its elements.

  Such an approach to cosmography and geography involved an investigation into the very origins of creation, what Mercator called ‘the history of the first and greatest parts of the universe’, and ‘the first origin of this mechanism [the world] and the genesis of particular parts of it’.7 This was hugely ambitious – and potentially very dangerous. Neither the Greeks nor later mapmakers like Waldseemüller faced religious injunctions in their quest for the origins of creation through the study of cosmography and mapmaking. But by the mid-sixteenth century, anyone addressing such questions risked incurring the wrath of the righteous on both sides of the religious divide. The problem was that the cosmographer – and by implication his reader – cast his eye across the globe and history, and risked charges of adopting a god-like perspective. The self-belief required to represent divinity was in stark contrast to a reformed religion that stressed humility before Creation. As a result, any cosmographer making a world map in the mid-sixteenth century found it difficult to avoid taking a position on the increasingly contested versions of Christian Creation and some, including Mercator, faced accusations of heresy from religious authorities who were anxious to control anyone who offered a geographical perspective on what the world looked like, and by implication what kind of God created it.

  Mercator’s career and his mapmaking were indelibly shaped by the Reformation. Following a series of brilliant but ill-advised forays into political and religious mapmaking which possibly contributed to the charge of heresy in 1544, Mercator’s 1569 map projection offered navigators a groundbreaking method of sailing across the earth’s surface. But seen within the context of the religious conflicts of his time, it also represented an idealistic desire to rise above the persecution and intolerance that touched him and many of those around him, and to establish a harmonious cosmography implicitly critical of the religious discord that threatened to tear Europe apart in the second half of the sixteenth century. Somewhere in the narrow and contested space between social determinism and autonomous free will Mercator managed to transcend the conflicts around him and create one of the most famous maps in the history of cartography, but one which had very different origins from the confident belief in European superiority which it is commonly believed shaped it.

  • • •

  Just like his maps, Mercator was defined by borders and boundaries. Throughout his long life, his travels never took him further than a 200 kilometre radius away from his birthplace of Rupelmonde, a small town on the bank of the River Scheldt in the modern-day Belgian region of East Flanders, where he was born in 1512 and named Gerard Kremer. The region he traversed was (and remains) one of the most densely populated regions in Europe, characterized not only by diversity and artistic creativity, but also by conflict and the competition for scarce resources. His father (a cobbler) and mother both hailed from the German-speaking town of Gangelt in the duchy of Jülich, 100 kilometres west of Cologne, one of the largest and oldest cities in Europe, which lay on the Rhine. To the west of Gangelt lay the Dutch-speaking lands of Flanders, and the continent’s commercial hub of Antwerp on the Scheldt. The physical geography of Mercator’s early life was shaped by the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta, and the towns, cities and rhythms of life built on the confluence of these three mighty European rivers.

  As Mercator grew up, the physical geography of the region was being transformed by the volatile imperatives of human geography. Less than 20 kilometres north of Rupelmonde, Antwerp was growing rich from its traffic in goods from as far away as the New World and Asia. East of the Rhine, Martin Luther was launching his
challenge to the papacy, a reformed approach to Christian belief that would quickly spread westwards into the Low Countries. Three years after Luther issued his first public challenge to papal indulgences in Wittenberg, Charles V was elected Holy Roman Emperor by the German princes in the small town of Aachen 600 kilometres to the west, and 100 kilometres from Mercator’s home town of Rupelmonde. It was an aggressive statement of imperial intent: Aachen had been the favourite residence of Charlemagne, king of the Franks from 768 and the greatest of all the early Christian post-Roman emperors. By choosing Aachen for his coronation, Charles was signalling his desire to emulate Charlemagne, as well as to extend the geographical limits of the Holy Roman Empire, which traditionally reached as far west as the River Meuse. Charles’s coronation not only entitled him emperor of the old western Roman Empire, as well as king of Castile, Aragon and the Low Countries, but also required him to defend the Catholic faith. His religious responsibilities and imperial ambition would place him on a violent collision course with the religious reformers living in the German principalities east of the Rhine.

  Mercator’s career fell into two halves: the first was shaped by his education and early work in the towns and cities of the Low Countries; the second, following his incarceration in 1544, was spent in Duisburg, a small town in the duchy of Cleves in modern-day western Germany, where he spent the rest of his life, from 1552 until his death in 1594. With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to see that his career pivoted on the traumatic and near-fatal accusation of heresy. Whatever Mercator might have thought at the time, the ideas and attitudes which brought it down on him can be traced throughout his early years, and its impact is discernible in the maps and geographical books he produced over his four decades in Duisburg.