A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  Mercator made his own geography, but not of his own free will. His 1569 map of the world on his now famous projection was determined by a very particular concatenation of forces, which allowed him to imagine cosmography as a scholarly discipline from which a more tolerant, harmonious vision of the individual’s place in the cosmos could be imagined. Ultimately, such a vision was unsustainable, and it hastened the decline of cosmography. But the 1569 projection would endure, shaped by the religious intolerance of European civilization, rather than its inherent superiority over the rest of God’s earth.

  8

  Money

  Joan Blaeu, Atlas maior, 1662

  Amsterdam, 1655

  On 29 July 1655 the new Amsterdam Town Hall was officially opened with a banquet attended by the city’s councillors and dignitaries. Designed by the Dutch architect Jacob van Campen, and taking over seven years to complete, the building was the largest architectural project ever undertaken by the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. Van Campen’s aim was to produce a building that would rival the Roman Forum, and announce to the world the emergence of Amsterdam as the new centre of political and commercial power in early modern Europe. Addressing the banquet, the renowned scholar and diplomat Constantijn Huygens recited a poem commissioned for the occasion, in which he extolled the city’s councillors as ‘the founders of the eighth wonder of the world’.1

  The building’s greatest wonder, as well as its most interesting innovation, lay at its heart, the vast Burgerzaal, or People’s Hall. At 46 metres long and 19 metres wide, with a height of 28 metres, the People’s Hall was the largest unsupported civic space then in existence. Unlike the great Renaissance royal palaces of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the People’s Hall was open to everyone. It also departed from earlier monumental built spaces for another reason. Rather than adorning its walls with tapestries or paintings, the principal decoration of the People’s Hall was on its polished marble floor in the form of three flat, hemispherical globes.

  As visitors walked into the hall, the first image showed the western terrestrial hemisphere, the second the northern hemisphere of the heavens, and the third the northern terrestrial hemisphere. Carefully inlaid into the marble floor, rather than hung on walls, enclosed in books or locked away by their owners, like so many earlier maps, the images in the People’s Hall were displayed for all to see. Amsterdam’s citizens, so many of whom had personal or indirect experience of long-distance seaborne travel, were now given the novel sensation of walking across the earth. The world, it seemed, had come to Amsterdam. Such was their confidence, the Dutch Republic’s burghers did not even feel the need to place their city in the middle of their marble hemispheres: for them, Amsterdam was the centre of the world.

  The three hemispheres were inlaid in the Hall’s floor by the Dutch artist Michiel Comans, but they are reproductions of a world map printed seven years earlier and made by arguably the greatest, certainly most influential, Dutch mapmaker in the history of cartography: Joan Blaeu (1598–1673). Printed on twenty-one sheets, more than 2 metres in length and nearly 3 metres high, Blaeu’s vast copperplate engraved world map, depicting the twin terrestrial hemispheres, was noticeably different from Mercator’s 1569 world map with its odd projection and speculative western and southern continents. Unlike Mercator, Blaeu was able to draw on his role as an institutional mapmaker: from 1638 he was the official cartographer to the Dutch East India Company, the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (otherwise known as the VOC), which allowed him unrivalled access to records of more than fifty years of Dutch commercial voyages to the west and east of Europe, as well as to the latest pilots’ maps and charts tracing the route to the Indies and beyond. This enabled him accurately to depict the tip of South America and New Zealand (‘Zeelandia Nova’). It was also the first world map to show both the west coast of Australia – labelled ‘Hollandia Nova detecta 1644’ – and Tasmania, named after Abel Janszoon Tasman, the first European to reach the island and claim formal possession of it in December 1642.2

  But Blaeu’s map was also created to celebrate a specific political event. It was dedicated to Don Casparo de Bracamonte y Guzman, count of Penaranda, the leading Spanish representative at the diplomatic negotiations which culminated in the Peace of Westphalia that ended both the Thirty Years War (1618–48) and the even longer-running Eighty Years War (also known as the Dutch War of Independence) between Spain and the territories that would eventually comprise the United Provinces. The peace agreement divided the northern (predominantly Protestant) republican provinces of today’s Netherlands from the southern (traditionally Spanish-dominated) regions of modern-day Belgium, granting the United Provinces independence as well as the right to freedom of religious expression for its Calvinist majority. The new Republic became the hub of the commercial world, with the VOC and its headquarters in Amsterdam at its centre. Blaeu’s map was a shrewdly pitched celebration of political independence, and a prefiguration of the Dutch domination of seaborne trade that would quickly follow the treaty’s ratification.3

  Blaeu’s map of 1648 is probably the first to be reproduced in this book that is immediately recognizable as a modern map of the world. Even though it remains sketchy on the topography of the Pacific, and the mapping of Australia’s coastline is incomplete, it is more familiar to us than Ribeiro’s seemingly unfinished map, or Mercator’s projection. The Blaeu map’s familiarity is partly based on its incremental accumulation of geographical data, which by the mid-seventeenth century had produced a reasonable consensus among European mapmakers about what the world looked like. But if we look more closely at its six inset images, the map appears to be celebrating more than just a new era of peace in Europe and the standardization of a particular image of the world. In the top left- and right-hand corners, Blaeu has represented the northern and southern celestial hemispheres. Between these two images, just below the Latin word ‘terrarum’ in the map’s title, is another inset diagram. This depicts the solar system according to the heliocentric theories of Nicolaus Copernicus, which show the earth revolving around the sun, overturning centuries of first Greek then Christian belief in a geocentric universe. Although Copernicus’s groundbreaking book On the Revolutions of the Spheres had been first printed in 1543, just over a century earlier, Blaeu was the first mapmaker to incorporate his revolutionary heliocentric theory into a map of the world. As if to emphasize the point, an inset diagram at the bottom of the map shows a map of the world as it looked in 1490 in the middle, with a diagram portraying the Ptolemaic cosmos on the left, contrasted with the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe’s diagram of a ‘geo-heliocentric’ cosmos (first published in 1588) on the right.

  In reproducing Blaeu’s 1648 world map on the floor of the People’s Hall, the city’s councillors were self-consciously creating a whole new world picture, one that effectively signalled the end of the European Renaissance. They were paying not only for a new kind of map, but for a new philosophy of the world, in which the earth, and by implication humanity, was no longer to be found at the centre of the universe. It was also a world in which the scholarly pursuit of geography and mapmaking were now fully institutionalized within the apparatus of the state and its commercial organizations – which in the Dutch Republic meant the VOC.

  The VOC transformed the practice of trade and the involvement of the public in funding commercial activities. Managed by a board of seventeen directors known as the Heeren XVII, the company was divided into six chambers across the seventeen Provinces. As a joint-stock company, the VOC offered any Dutch citizen the opportunity to invest and claim a share of its profits. This proved to be very attractive: in 1602 the Amsterdam chamber attracted more than 1,000 initial subscribers from a population of just 50,000. With an average dividend of over 20 per cent on an investor’s initial investment, and a growth in public subscriptions from 6.4 million guilders at its inception, to more than 40 million by 1660, the VOC’s methods revolutionized European c
ommercial practice, valorizing risk and encouraging the monopolization of trade in a way never seen before.4

  One consequence of these changing methods of financing long-distance trade was a transformation of the role of maps. The Portuguese and Spanish empires had established their commercial importance as route-finding devices, and tried to standardize them through the creation of organizations like the Casa de la Contratación. But these initiatives, like all overseas activities, were controlled by the crown. The maps they produced were invariably hand-drawn in a futile attempt to limit their circulation, and because the Iberian peninsula did not have the extensive printing industry that emerged in northern Europe from the late fifteenth century. Although the Dutch commercial companies that were founded in the 1590s lacked the money and manpower commanded by their Spanish and Portuguese rivals, they were able to draw on an established body of printers, engravers and scholars experienced in collating the latest geographical information on maps, charts, globes and atlases. Mapmakers like Waldseemüller, Mercator and Ortelius had already turned mapmaking into a profitable business, selling authoritative and beautiful maps on the open market to anyone that could afford them. The Dutch commercial companies saw the opportunity to capitalize on this development by employing mapmakers to create manuscript charts and printed maps providing the safest, quickest and most profitable routes from one commercial location to another. It also made sense to bring together teams of mapmakers to standardize information and encourage commercial collaboration and competition.

  As a result, by the early 1590s a variety of Dutch mapmakers were competing to provide commercial companies with maps to assist in developing overseas trade. In 1592 the States General, the body of the elected legislative delegates from the Republic’s provinces, granted the mapmaker Cornelis Claesz. (c. 1551–1609) a twelve-year privilege to sell a variety of charts and wall maps that could be bought for anything from 1 guilder for a map of Europe, to 8 guilders for a bound collection of maps of the East and West Indies. In 1602 the mapmaker Augustijn Robaert began supplying charts to the VOC, sometimes charging up to 75 guilders for each one with their comprehensive depiction of these newly discovered regions.5 Maps were becoming a relatively profitable trade, and their makers were being gradually institutionalized by the companies that needed them. With money to be made, a new generation of talented mapmakers emerged, sometimes collaborating but also competing with each other for patronage of the new commercial companies as well as merchants and pilots working independently of organizations like the VOC. Petrus Plancius, Cornelisz Doetsz, Adriaen Veen, Johan Baptista Vrient and Jodocus Hondius the Elder all sold maps, charts, atlases and globes to the VOC as well as to private individuals according to their particular needs. Maps were now being reproduced, bought and sold for specific commercial purposes.6 The Portuguese had introduced the scientific craft of modern mapmaking, but it was the Dutch who turned it into an industry.

  On the new Dutch maps, far-flung territories no longer simply faded away on the margins, nor were the world’s edges fearful, mythical places full of monstrous people to be avoided wherever possible. Instead, on maps like Petrus Plancius’s map of the Moluccas (1592), the world’s borders and margins were clearly defined and identified as places for financial exploitation, with its regions labelled according to markets and raw materials, and its inhabitants often identified according to their commercial interests. Every corner of the earth was being mapped and assessed for its commercial possibilities. A new world was being defined by new ways of making money.

  The world map that expressed the concerns of the time was not, like Blaeu’s 1648 publication, laid on a floor or put on a wall. Instead it was to be found in a book or, more precisely, an atlas. The 1648 map was just one of many Blaeu made in preparation for his greatest cartographic publication, one of the largest books produced in the seventeenth century. This was the Atlas maior sive cosmographia Blaviana, or ‘Large Atlas or Blaeu’s Cosmography’, published in 1662, and which has been described as ‘the greatest and finest atlas ever published’.7 In its sheer size and scale it surpassed all other atlases then in circulation, including the efforts of his great predecessors Ortelius and Mercator. It was a truly baroque creation. The first edition alone ran to eleven volumes containing 3,368 pages written in Latin, with 21 frontispieces and a staggering 594 maps, giving a total of 4,608 pages across the eleven volumes. Subsequent editions were published in French, Dutch, Spanish and German throughout the 1660s, adding even more maps and text. The Atlas was not necessarily the most up-to-date geographical survey of the world, but it was certainly the most comprehensive, and established the format of the atlas as the primary vehicle for disseminating standardized geographical information about the shape and scale of the world and its regions. It finally achieved what mapmakers had tried but failed to do for decades since the first printed editions of Ptolemy’s Geography were published in the late fifteenth century: it bound the world in a book (or in this case, many books), and it would never be equalled.

  The Atlas was partly the product of the emergence of a Dutch Calvinist culture that celebrated the pursuit and acquisition of material wealth while also fearing the shame of its possession and consumption – what Simon Schama has famously described as an ‘embarrassment of riches’.8 It was also shaped by a specifically Dutch visual tradition that Svetlana Alpers has called ‘the art of describing’ – the impulse to observe, record and define individuals, objects and places as real, without the kind of moral or symbolic associations which shaped Italian Renaissance art.9 But the detail of the Atlas’s creation, and the part played by the Blaeu dynasty throughout the first half of the seventeenth century in establishing it as Europe’s premier geographical atlas, reveals other facets of a story characterized by religious conflict, intellectual rivalry, commercial innovation and financial investment in a new scientific conception of the earth’s place in the wider cosmos. The result was a change in the perception of the role of geography and the status of the mapmaker within Dutch culture and society, first developed by figures like Claesz. and Plancius, and cemented by the Blaeus. As mapmakers were increasingly institutionalized, they were granted unprecedented political influence and wealth. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the case of the Blaeu dynasty.

  Joan Blaeu was part of a line of mapmakers that spanned three generations, beginning with his father, Willem Janszoon (1572–1638), and ending with Joan’s son Joan II (1650–1712). At the heart of the dynasty stands Joan Blaeu, who collaborated with his father to build up the family business, before its gradual decline in the hands of his three sons Willem (1635–1701), Pieter (1637–1706) and Joan II. In 1703 Blaeu control of Dutch mapmaking came to an end when the VOC stopped using the family’s name on its maps.10

  The origins of the Atlas maior lay in the remarkable career of Joan’s father, Willem. Born Willem Janszoon in Alkmaar or Uitgeest, around 40 kilometres north of Amsterdam, Willem adopted the surname ‘Blaeu’ from his grandfather’s nickname, ‘blaeuwe Willem’ (‘blue William’), although he only began to sign maps with his adopted surname from 1621.11 Born into a prosperous but undistinguished merchant family, Willem began his working life as clerk to a local herring dealer. But his ambition and aptitude for mathematics soon led him to leave the business and by 1596 he was studying under Tycho Brahe on Hven (an island situated between Denmark and Sweden). Brahe was one of the most innovative and admired astronomers of his time, who had established a research institute and astronomical observatory on Hven in 1576, from where he conducted some of the most accurate observations of the planets of the time. His work led him to produce a modified geocentric model of the solar system, which he rather immodestly called the Tychonic system. Poised between Ptolemy’s geocentric theories and Copernicus’s heliocentric beliefs, Tycho posited a compromise whereby the earth still remains at the centre of the universe, with the moon and sun orbiting it, while the other planets circle the sun.

  Although Blaeu spent only a fe
w months on the island, he appears to have assisted Brahe in his astronomical observations, learning basic skills in celestial cosmography and mapmaking.12 As well as developing the practical skills that would sustain him for the rest of his life, Blaeu also inherited from Brahe scepticism towards Ptolemy’s geocentric universe. Over the next few years he gradually embraced the new heliocentric model developed by Brahe’s most famous student, Johannes Kepler. By 1599 Blaeu was back in the Netherlands, where he made one of his first scientific objects, a celestial globe based on Brahe’s star catalogue. Strangely overlooked by historians of science, Blaeu’s globe is the first known non-Ptolemaic representation of the heavens.

  It was an ambitious beginning for a young man starting out in a scientific world which prized empirical research and practical outcomes over more speculative approaches to the natural sciences. The struggle for independence from Spain had led many craftsmen, merchants, printers, artists and religious dissidents to leave the southern Spanish-controlled provinces, especially following the sack of Antwerp in 1585, and move north to cities like Amsterdam. The result was a sudden influx of new religious, philosophical and scientific ideas. From the 1580s the Flemish mathematician and engineer Simon Stevin (1548–1620) worked in Leiden as a military engineer to the army of Prince Maurice of Orange in its struggle against the Spanish, as well as writing a series of innovative works in Dutch on mathematics, geometry and engineering. Stevin pioneered the use of decimal fractions in coinage and weights, and was the first scientist to understand tides according to the attraction of the moon. A variety of other books on compound interest, trigonometry, algebraic equations, hydrostatics, fortifications and navigation were all aimed at specific practical applications – ‘at which’, Stevin wrote, ‘theory should always aim’.13 In astronomy the Dutch reformed minister Philips Lansbergen (1561–1632), who moved north after the sack of Antwerp, settled in Middleburg and began working on a set of astronomical tables and observations on the motion of the earth. His works, which supported Copernicus’s heliocentric theories, soon became bestsellers, and were used subsequently by Kepler and Galileo in their astronomical writings. Another reformed minister, Petrus Plancius (1552–1622), yet another who fled north and settled in Amsterdam, not only worked alongside commercial mapmakers like Cornelis Claesz., but also pioneered astronomical observations in an attempt to determine longitude. Plancius invested heavily in the VOC, advised them on emerging overseas markets, named new constellations, and adopted Mercator’s projection in a series of regional and world maps that championed Dutch commercial interests.