A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  Having chosen a shape, the mapmaker was confronted with a further problem. As the margins of the known world were consistently changing, where was its natural centre? Where did the world map begin – and where did it end? One possible answer lay in an even older group of projections, used by the Greek astronomers, and known as azimuthal. An azimuth is an angular measurement within a spherical system, usually (for the Greeks and later mapmakers like Mercator) the cosmos. A common example of an azimuth is to identify the position of a star in relation to the horizon, which acts as the reference plane. If the observer knows where due north lies, the azimuth is the angle between the northern point and the perpendicular projection of the star all the way down to the horizon. From this basic method azimuthal projections can then build up a network of angles based on establishing direction, ensuring that all distances and directions are accurate from a central point, although size and shape are distorted from anywhere else. They came in a dizzying variety: the equidistant projection, which maintained consistent scale and distance between any two points or lines; the orthographic, which enabled a three-dimensional object to be drawn from different directions; the gnomonic, which shows all great circles as straight lines; and the stereographic, which projects the sphere onto an infinite plane from one point on the globe. As many of these names imply, they can be chosen depending on what the mapmaker wanted to highlight – and, by implication, to diminish.

  One of the advantages of an azimuthal projection was that it could focus on the equator, the poles, or whatever oblique angle was required by the mapmaker. Projections based on the poles became particularly fashionable, as they provided a new perspective on the recent voyages of discovery, as well as opening up a new area of potential exploration over the North Pole (the search for the North-west and North-east Passages). Placing one or the other pole at the centre of the map also held the distinct advantage of sidestepping the thorny political question of global ownership of the eastern and western hemispheres which had preoccupied mapmakers ever since the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.

  Fig. 20 Diagrams of different Renaissance map projections.

  One of the most extraordinary world maps to develop a double polar projection was the 1531 world map of the French mathematician, astrologer and mapmaker Oronce Finé’s. This held the added novel innovation of being shaped like a heart on a revised cordiform projection. On Finé’s map the equator runs vertically down the middle of the map, cutting it in half, with the North Pole to the left and the South Pole to the right. The two outermost circular arcs represent the equator, and are tangent to the central meridian that runs horizontally across the centre of the map. It was on Finé’s map that Mercator modelled his own – including, however, some changes in line with the latest discoveries. North America (shown by Mercator as ‘conquered by Spain’) is separated from Asia, but linked to South America, and both are described as ‘America’ for the very first time. The Malay peninsula shows evidence that Mercator might have seen some of Ribeiro’s maps of the region.20

  None of these geographical innovations take away from the sheer peculiarity of projecting the world onto the shape of a stylized heart. The projection emerged gradually from experiments with Ptolemy’s second projection, but in adopting the heart as a defining shape, Mercator was once again treading a dangerous philosophical and theological path. The world as a heart was a commonplace Renaissance metaphor, which played on the idea of the inner emotional life shaping the outer physical world. It would be taken up a century later by John Donne in his poem ‘The Good-Morrow’, where his lovers ‘discover’ new worlds of love, in a visual conceit that can only be fully understood in reference to cordiform maps:

  Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,

  Let Maps to other, worlds on worlds have showne,

  Let us possesse one world, each hath one, and is one.

  My face in thine eye, thine in mine appeares,

  And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;

  Where can we find two better hemispheres

  Without sharp North, without declining West?21

  But in the 1530s, the cordiform map projection was associated with controversial religious beliefs. Lutheran theologians like Melanchthon regarded the heart as the seat of human emotions, and as such it was seen as central to the transforming experience of scripture. Appropriating the Catholic symbolism of the heart, Lutheran thinking regarded its representation in books – and maps – as a devotional act of looking into one’s heart, or conscience, for signs of grace. While mere mortals could try and interpret their hearts, only God was kardiognostes (heart-knower), with the ability to see into the heart without the need for a commentary.22

  The adoption by cosmographers of the cordiform projection would also become associated with a strand of Stoic philosophy that regarded humanity’s pursuit of earthly glory as vain and insignificant when set against the vastness of the larger cosmos. This Stoic version of cosmography drew on Roman writers like Seneca, Cicero, Posidonius and Strabo, and one of its most explicitly geographical expressions was to be found in Macrobius’ fifth-century Commentary on Scipio’s Dream (a text which Mercator would undoubtedly have read whilst studying at Louvain). In Macrobius, Scipio Africanus the Younger is drawn up to heaven in a dream, from where ‘the earth appeared so small that I was ashamed of our [Roman] empire which is, so to speak, but a point on its surface’. The lesson in Macrobius’ commentary is that ‘men of our race occupy only a minute portion of the whole earth, which in comparison with the sky is but a point’, revealing ‘that no man’s reputation can extend over the whole of even that small part’ claimed by the Roman Empire.23 Explaining the geographical power of Stoicism in the Augustan age, Christian Jacob argues such philosophical thinking ‘bears witness to the diffusion of the exercise of kataskopos, that “view from above” carried across the earthly globe that leads to a relativising of human values and achievements but also to the adoption of an intellectual perspective, the spiritual gaze that discloses the beauty and order of the world beyond the shimmering of appearances and the limitations of human knowledge’.24 By the early sixteenth century, as the world expanded but conflict and intolerance only intensified with religious turmoil and the pursuit of imperial power and glory, cosmographers like Finé, Abraham Ortelius and Mercator developed a Stoic contemplation of the harmonious relations between the individual and the cosmos in response to the bigotry and prejudice that seemed to be engulfing ‘that small part’ of the world called Europe.

  To make a heart-shaped map in the first half of the sixteenth century was a clear statement of religious dissent. It invited its viewer to look to their conscience, and to see it within the wider context of a Stoic universe. But such flirtations with ‘pagan’ philosophy were not always welcomed by Catholic or Protestant authorities. Oronce Finé was so involved in the study of occult philosophy that he was briefly arrested in 1523; indeed, virtually every sixteenth-century mapmaker who adopted the cordiform projection harboured hermetic and reformed sympathies.25 Mercator dedicated his world map to his friend Joannes Drosius, a cleric who, six years later, would be accused of heresy alongside him. Mercator chose a method of projection which, on mathematical, philosophical and theological grounds, could be interpreted as at least unorthodox, and at worst heretical.

  It was probably just as well that such a derivative and relatively unusual map was not a great success. Mercator never used it again, and did not even mention it in any of his subsequent publications and correspondence, and was probably anxious to distance himself from it as the work of a still relatively inexperienced mapmaker. Ghim’s ‘Life of Mercator’ passed over the 1538 world map in silence, recording instead that Mercator turned to the other growth area in early sixteenth-century geography, regional mapmaking. ‘Responding with enthusiasm to the urgent request of a number of merchants, he planned, undertook and, in a short space of time, completed a map of Flanders’.26 This map, completed in
1540, would prove to be one of Mercator’s most popular early maps, reprinted fifteen times over the next sixty years.

  The map was commissioned by a group of Flemish businessmen who wanted Mercator to replace a map of the region which appeared to challenge Habsburg rule. Pierre van der Beke’s map of Flanders, published in Ghent in 1538, seemed to side with the city’s rebellion against Queen Maria of Hungary’s attempt to raise funds for the Habsburg war effort by flagrantly refusing to endorse Habsburg sovereignty over the region. The map was lined with references to Ghent’s civic authorities, noble families and feudal rights, and represented an early appeal to a Flemish ‘patrie’, or Fatherland, in opposition to Habsburg rule.27 By 1539, as Ghent descended into rebellion and Charles V mobilized his army to march on the city, mercantile factions, horrified at the consequences, decided the least they could do was commission a map which took the opposite approach to van der Beke’s. Mercator’s map was finished so quickly that one of its decorative frames was left blank, but otherwise it excised every potentially patriotic reference contained in van der Beke, and made the region’s Habsburg allegiances as explicit as possible, culminating in a loyal dedication to the emperor who was bearing down on the city even as the map was nearing completion.28 Alas, it had no discernible impact. Charles entered Ghent with an army of 3,000 German mercenaries in February 1540, beheaded the rebellion’s ringleaders, stripped the guilds of their commercial privileges, and tore down the old abbey and city gates. The emperor was far more successful than Mercator and his map in leaving his mark on the civic spaces of Flemish cities like Ghent.29

  Nevertheless, judging from its numerous reprints, Mercator’s map of Flanders was a commercial success, and brought him to the notice of Charles V again, thanks to the political support of his old university friend Antoine Perrenot, recently appointed bishop of Arras, whose father, Nicholas Perrenot de Granvelle, was the emperor’s first councillor. With their backing, Mercator began work on a series of globes and scientific instruments, including a terrestrial globe, completed in 1541, dedicated to Granvelle, which updated his previous collaborative effort with Frisius and van der Heyden. Everything seemed to be going well for Mercator, still in his thirties and a highly respected geographer with a growing reputation as an instrument maker. Then came the winter of 1544, and the accusation of heresy.

  The evidence of the time, as well as Mercator’s subsequent religious writings, suggests that his beliefs were far more complicated than simply ‘Lutheran’. From the late fifteenth century a more inward, private version of religious belief began to characterize the educated classes in the cities of northern Europe. Diarmaid MacCulloch has argued that such people associated ‘the more demonstrative, physical side of religion with rusticity and lack of education, and treat[ed] such religion with condescension or even distaste, seeing rituals and relics as less important than what texts can tell the believer seeking salvation’. Such believers became known as ‘spirituals’, and were characterized by ‘a conviction that religion or contact with the divine was something from within the individual: God’s spirit made direct contact with the human spirit’.30 If these spirituals were understandably sceptical about the rituals of Catholicism, they also eschewed the increasingly prescriptive teachings of Luther and certainly those of Calvin. In 1576 Mercator wrote to his son-in-law on the controversial subject of transubstantiation – a belief that the bread and wine of communion are the body and blood of Christ, which Lutheranism regarded as more of a symbolic union between Christ and his believers. For Mercator, ‘this mystery is greater than people can understand. Moreover, it is not reckoned under the articles of the faith which are necessary for salvation . . . Therefore, let anybody be of this opinion: so long as he is pious and does not utter any other heresy against the word of God, he should according to my conviction not be condemned. And I feel that one should not break community with such a man’.31 Such arguments lead us to believe that, from his Catholic rural background to his exposure to the learned environment of Louvain and thinkers like Frisius and Erasmus, Mercator should be considered a ‘spiritual’, who grasped the necessity of reform, but still expressed a pre-Reformation conviction that an individual’s religion was a private matter. His religious beliefs influenced everything he published (including his maps), but they were not defined by a public profession of faith. In the early 1520s, such beliefs might have gone unnoticed, but by 1544 they were easily interpreted as heretical.

  At a time when the Catholic Habsburg authorities were increasingly scrutinizing people’s religion, it seemed almost inevitable that Mercator’s unorthodox beliefs would finally catch up with him. The wider circumstances which led to his arrest were sparked by a conflict between the two patrons who would shape his career – the emperor Charles V and Wilhelm, duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg. Upon his accession to the duchy in 1539, Wilhelm inherited the duchy of Guelders on the north-eastern borders of the Low Countries, which lay outside the emperor’s inherited dominions, despite his ambition to unify the region under Habsburg rule. Having allied himself with German Lutheran principalities and France, Wilhelm marched into the Low Countries in the summer of 1542, and by July his forces were besieging Louvain, Mercator’s adopted home town. Once again Charles was forced to return from Spain at the head of a massive army. As French opposition evaporated, Charles attacked the duchy of Jülich, and Wilhelm quickly capitulated. In September 1543 he signed a peace in which he kept his Rhineland territories on the condition they remained Catholic, and relinquished his claim to Guelders, giving Charles effective control over the seventeen provinces that would eventually constitute the Netherlands.32

  The relief for the besieged citizens of Louvain was only temporary. Shaken by events, Charles’s sister Maria began rounding up those suspected of holding reformed religious sympathies. Within months Mercator was under arrest. The substance of the accusation of heresy remains obscure, although the surviving documents refer to ‘suspicious letters’ sent to Minorite friars in Mechelen (possibly Monachus). Perhaps the letters discussed theology, or geography, or both. Without any first-hand accounts of Mercator’s stated religious beliefs we shall probably never know if there were any real grounds for the accusations, but they left Mercator languishing in the castle at Rupelmonde for nearly eight months. Fortunately, both his local priest and the authorities at Louvain University petitioned for his release by late summer. As the executions of the condemned began, Mercator was suddenly freed and all charges against him were dropped.

  He returned to Louvain, where he found the atmosphere more threatening than ever. The taint of imprisonment still hung over him, and was reinforced by the news of the execution in November 1545 of the printer Jacob van Liesvelt, found guilty of publishing heretical works. As the wave of persecution increased during the following months and years, it became obvious that, despite their intellectual and cosmopolitan attractions, cities like Antwerp and Louvain were no longer safe for spiritual thinkers interested in the foundational questions of cosmography.

  It was clearly time to leave, but Mercator still needed to make a living. Over the next six years there were no maps, just a handful of dutiful but uninspiring mathematical instruments dedicated to the emperor Charles V (accidentally destroyed in one of the early clashes between the emperor’s Catholic armies and the Schmalkaldic League of Lutheran Princes in 1548). Mercator began to retreat into a Stoic contemplation of the stars. In the spring of 1551, ten years since his last cartographic publication, Mercator published a celestial globe to sit alongside his earlier terrestrial globe. It would be the last thing he made in Louvain. Less than a year later, as war and rebellion threatened to engulf the region yet again, he finally left for good and headed back towards the Rhine.

  Mercator probably never grasped the irony that the man whose actions in 1543 indirectly led to his imprisonment in 1544 was responsible for providing a refuge in 1552. Following his humiliation at the hands of Charles V, Duke Wilhelm of Jülich-Cleves-Berg had return
ed to his ducal lands to recover his pride and invest in building, learning and education. He designed Italianate palaces at his residences in Jülich and Düsseldorf, and in Duisburg, 30 kilometres north of Düsseldorf, Wilhelm planned to build a new university. In 1551 he invited Mercator there, and although details of his offer remain obscure, it seems he wanted Mercator to take the chair of cosmography.33 For Wilhelm, the attraction of luring one of Europe’s leading cosmographers to his new centre of learning was obvious; for Mercator, the opportunity of securing an academic position and the chance to escape the oppressive atmosphere of Louvain was too good to miss. In 1552 he set off on the 200 kilometre journey to Duisburg, via his parents’ home town of Gangelt almost halfway along the route. Compared to Antwerp and even Louvain, Duisburg was a small, insignificant town, but it enjoyed the tolerant rule of a duke who resisted the demands for theological conformity of either Rome or, increasingly, of Geneva, embracing instead an Erasmian pursuit of a ‘middle way’ that regarded faith as a strictly private matter.

  Secure in the protection of a benign patron, Mercator resumed his mapmaking. In 1554 he published an enormous, fifteen-sheet wall map of contemporary Europe based on the latest surveying methods, which finally turned its back on the Ptolemaic understanding of European geography by reducing the continent’s dimensions by nine degrees from the Greek geographer’s overestimation. It proved to be his most successful map to date, selling 208 copies in 1566 alone, and was lauded by Walter Ghim as drawing ‘more praise from scholars everywhere than any similar geographical work which has ever been brought out’.34 It was followed in 1564 by another popular map, this time of the British Isles, published in the same year that Mercator was named as Wilhelm’s official cosmographer.35

  Confident in his new home and free from financial or theological worries, Mercator was finally able to pursue the career for which his theological interests and academic training had prepared him. In the mid-1540s he began to plan an extraordinarily ambitious cosmography ‘of the whole universal scheme uniting the heavens and the earth and of the position, motion, and order of its parts’.36 It would involve the study of creation, heaven, earth and what he called ‘the history of the first and greatest parts of the universe’: in other words, a chronology of the universe from its creation. The plan would revolve around a world map, but, unlike Mercator’s earlier derivative cordiform world map, this one, by a completely different method, would ensure its distinctiveness. But before he could embark on it, he needed to complete his proposed chronology of the world.