A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  The overriding interest in the practical (and particularly commercial) impact for science of these men was not lost on Blaeu, who understood that he could not sustain a living from simply endorsing the new scientific ideas of Brahe and Kepler. By 1605 he was in Amsterdam, the obvious destination of a young man interested in science and business. Blaeu soon became one of more than 250 booksellers and printers working in the city, which was now overtaking Venice as the centre of the European book trade. The capital drew on the Republic’s relative tolerance in matters of politics, religion and science to publish and sell books by figures like Stevin and Plancius on a wide variety of topics and printed in a bewildering number of languages, from Latin and Dutch to German, French, Spanish, English, Russian, Yiddish and even Armenian.14

  Blaeu opened his own printing business in Amsterdam, publishing poetry as well as practical seamen’s guides, including his bestselling Light of Navigation (1608), which again drew on Brahe’s astronomical observations to assist in more accurate seaborne navigation. But he also grasped the commercial potential for exploiting the growing market for a new kind of maps, and over the next three decades his business flourished. He employed copper engravers to make his maps and once his son Joan was old enough he increasingly delegated their editing to him. Willem only published maps for which there was an established demand. The most popular subjects were the world, Europe, the four continents, the Dutch Republic, Amsterdam, Spain, Italy and France. Despite his grasp of mathematical cartography learned from Brahe, and his obvious sympathy towards the new science, Willem was first and foremost an entrepreneur. Although he published approximately 200 maps, he signed himself as the actual creator of fewer than 20.

  Blaeu realized that if he was to establish himself as a cartographic printer of any significance, he needed to produce high-quality world maps that would excel those of competitors like Plancius, Claesz., Doetsz and Robaert. In 1604 he launched plans to publish no fewer than three distinct world maps, each on a different projection. Employing engravers to copy and amend maps still in circulation, he began by publishing a world map on a simple cylindrical projection, followed by one using a stereographic projection, and finally, in 1606–7, a beautifully engraved world map on four sheets using the Mercator projection. The map, which has since been lost and only survives in a poor photographic reproduction, is one of the most important world maps of seventeenth-century Dutch cartography. As well as acknowledging the influence of Plancius by using Mercator’s projection, it provides an encyclopedic portrayal of the political, economic and ethnographic preoccupations of the Dutch Republic at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

  The map’s representation of the world only takes up half of its printed surface. Across the top of the map ten of the most powerful emperors of the time are shown on horseback (including the Turkish, Persian, Russian and Chinese emperors); in the left- and right-hand borders are twenty-eight topographical views of the world’s major towns and cities, from Mexico in the west to Aden and Goa in the east. Next to these, running along the bottom of the map are thirty illustrations of local inhabitants of the regions depicted, including Congolese, Brazilians, Indonesians and Chinese, portrayed in what Blaeu imagined to be their national dress. Framing the world to the left, right and below is a Latin description of the earth, with ten further engravings depicting various scenes and figures from history.15

  Fig. 23 Willem Blaeu, world map drawn on the Mercator projection, 1606–7.

  The map’s title, NOVA ORBIS TERRARUM GEOGRAPHICA ac Hydrogr. Tabula, Ex Optimis in hoc opere auctorib’ desumpta auct. Gul. Ianssonio, or ‘New World Map by Willem Janszoon based on data borrowed from the best makers in this field’, suggests how Blaeu composed his map, a point on which he expanded in one of its many legends. ‘I thought it appropriate’, writes Blaeu, ‘to copy the best sea charts available from Portuguese, Spaniards and from our compatriots, and included all discoveries made hitherto. For decorative purposes and pleasure I filled the borders with pictures of the ten most powerful sovereigns ruling the world in our times, the principal towns and the large variety of costumes of the different peoples.’ Blaeu carefully describes the application of Mercator’s projection, conceding that it ‘did not enable me to represent the north and south part of the globe as a plane’. The result is a vast and largely speculative southern continent, the result of using Mercator’s projection, but also a response to the still uncharted territories of Antarctica and Australasia. To the left and right elaborately engraved cartouches explain the mathematical projection, while across the bottom lines in verse comment on the scene above, where Europe sits in majesty receiving gifts from her subject peoples:

  To whom do the Mexicans and Peruvians offer gold necklaces and shining silver jewels? To whom does the armadillo bring skins, sugar cane and spices? To Europe, enthroned on high, the supreme ruler with the world at her feet: most powerful on land and at sea through war and enterprise, she owns a wealth of all goods. O Queen, it is to you that the fortunate Indian brings gold and spices, while the Arabs bring balsamic resin; the Russian sends furs and his eastern neighbour embellishes your dress with silk. Finally, Africa offers you costly spices and fragrant balsam and also enriches you with shining white ivory, to which the dark coloured people of Guinea adds a great weight of gold.16

  Blaeu’s map, depicting the global imperial landscape, the world’s great commercial cities and its range of people, reflected the new mercantile imperatives of the Dutch Republic. Its coverage of the known world assessed everywhere and everyone for their commercial potential, from Europe as a personification of trade, to Africa and the Mexicans offering up their wares to enrich it as the globe’s pre-eminent continent.

  A measure of Blaeu’s success can be gauged by how far later maps, charts and globes were reproduced in the paintings of Dutch interiors and still lifes by a whole range of seventeenth-century Dutch painters. Of these, none was more fascinated by maps than Johannes Vermeer. At least nine of his surviving pictures painstakingly depict wall maps, sea charts and globes in the kind of exquisite detail that has led one critic to write about the painter’s ‘mania for maps’.17 Vermeer’s painting The Geographer, dated around 1688, shows a young man absorbed in the act of mapping, with the paraphernalia of his trade scattered all around him. On the cabinet behind him sits a globe, and on the wall hangs a sea chart which is identifiable as Willem Blaeu’s 1605 ‘Sea Chart of Europe’. In one of his earliest paintings, The Soldier and a Laughing Girl, dated around 1657, Vermeer depicts a map of Holland and West Friesland (oriented with west at the top), which hangs on the wall behind the domestic scene of a woman and a soldier; it is as visually arresting as the painting’s main subjects. As well as painting this map, Vermeer used a variety of other maps by Dutch mapmakers, including those of the seventeen provinces by Huyck Allart (fl. c. 1650–75) and Nicolaus Visscher (1618–79), and maps of Europe by Jodocus Hondius the Elder (1563–1612). Other artists shared Vermeer’s interest in maps – Nicolaes Maes (1634–93) and Jacob Ochtervelt (1634–1682) both featured maps in their paintings, although rarely with the obsessive precision of Vermeer. In choosing to reproduce a map of the Dutch provinces in The Soldier and a Laughing Girl, Vermeer followed his artistic contemporaries in displaying popular pride at the political and geographical unity of the recently independent Republic.

  So precise is Vermeer’s rendering of this particular map, even down to its title, that it is easily identified as the creation of a well-known contemporary Dutch mapmaker, Balthasar Florisz. van Berckenrode. In 1620 the States General granted Berckenrode a privilege to publish this map, which he then sold for 12 guilders a copy. In the seventeenth century, print privileges, which prevented the copying of particular texts or images for a specified period of time, represented the closest equivalent to modern-day copyright. Infringement of privileges was punishable by a substantial fine, and as such sanctions were enforced by the States General, which meant that they effectiv
ely represented a political endorsement of a printed work’s content.18 Granting a privilege did not automatically ensure commercial success: despite its patriotic appearance Berckenrode’s map was, according to written accounts, not terribly popular, and no copies of his 1620 edition are known to have survived. Perhaps as a result of its disappointing sales, Berckenrode sold the copper plates and publication privileges to the map in 1621 to Willem Blaeu, who seems to have had more success with it: he persuaded Berckenrode to remap its northern regions with greater accuracy, and it became increasingly popular throughout the 1620s.19 Blaeu proceeded to reproduce it until 1629, when the privilege expired, and it is an edition of this map with Blaeu’s name on it that Vermeer reproduces in his painting. Although Blaeu had no involvement in the map’s design or engraving, he effectively turned it into a Blaeu map by signing it, and this is probably how Vermeer understood it when he painted it in the late 1650s (and on at least two other occasions over the next fifteen years). This was not the first or the last time that Blaeu and his sons would appropriate maps for their own commercial advantage, but it is a telling example of the ways in which the family business prospered.

  Towards the end of the second decade of the seventeenth century Blaeu had established himself as one of Amsterdam’s leading printers and mapmakers. His success was partly due to his unique talents as an engraver, scientist and businessman, a combination that most of his rivals lacked, and which enabled him to produce distinctively beautiful and precisely engraved maps, but he was also fortunate to emerge at a particularly crucial moment in the young Republic’s history. Slightly younger than rivals like Claesz. and Plancius, he was also in a position to take advantage of the commercial opportunities provided by the twelve-year truce agreed between Spain and the Republic in 1609, which briefly allowed the Republic to pursue international trade unfettered by Spanish military and political opposition. But the decision to sign the truce had been extremely contentious, and caused a disastrous split between the Stadholder (the effective head of state) of the United Provinces, Prince Maurice of Orange, who opposed it, and the Land’s Advocate of Holland, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, who supported it. The settlement initially brought commercial prosperity, but it divided the provinces into two opposing camps. Their differences were intensified by a complex theological division between Calvinists (broadly supported by Prince Maurice and many of the directors of the VOC), and their opponents, the Arminians or ‘Remonstrants’ (supported by Oldenbarnevelt), who took their name from a petition known as the Remonstrance, which attempted to enshrine their theological differences from Calvinism. As tensions mounted and both sides took up arms, Maurice marched on Utrecht in July 1618. Oldenbarnevelt was arrested and, after being tried by a court led by the director of the VOC, Reynier Pauw, a staunch Calvinist and Contra-Remonstrant, he was beheaded in The Hague in May 1619.

  Blaeu suddenly found himself on the wrong side in the dispute. Born into the Mennonite movement, an offshoot of the sixteenth-century Anabaptists, with their strong tradition of personal spiritual responsibility and pacificism, his sympathies were decidedly libertarian, and many of his friends were Remonstrants or ‘Gomarists’ (named after the Dutch theologian Franciscus Gomarus, 1563–1641). Just as the Contra-Remonstrants were putting Oldenbarnevelt on trial for his life, the VOC was trying to limit the circulation of maps relating to Dutch overseas commercial navigation by appointing an official cartographer responsible for drawing up and correcting the company’s logbooks, charts and maps. Blaeu was the obvious candidate, but his political and religious persuasions meant that his appointment by the predominantly Contra-Remonstrant VOC was out of the question. The directors instead appointed one of his protégés, Hessel Gerritsz, who was regarded as a politically safer choice than his mentor.20

  Blaeu continued to build his business throughout the 1620s, by now with the help of his son Joan. At the end of the decade he began to broaden his cartographic range even further. Having risen to prominence by producing single-sheet maps as well as globes, composite wall maps and travel writing, he now diversified into atlases, making an acquisition that sparked one of the bitterest rivalries in seventeenth-century mapmaking, and which ultimately led to the creation of Joan Blaeu’s Atlas maior. In 1629 Blaeu acquired around forty copperplate maps from the estate of the recently deceased Jodocus Hondius the Younger. Hondius was himself part of a mapmaking dynasty started by his father, one of the early suppliers of maps to the VOC. In 1604 Jodocus Hondius the Elder spent what he described as ‘a considerable sum’ buying the copper plates for Mercator’s Atlas from the cartographer’s surviving relatives at an auction in Leiden. It was a publishing coup for Hondius, and within two years he published a revised and updated version of the Atlas in Amsterdam. It boasted 143 maps, including 36 new ones, some made by Hondius, but most acquired from other mapmakers, and a dedication to the States General of the United Provinces. Although he destroyed the design and integrity of Mercator’s original Atlas by trading on the great cartographer’s name (and what he had produced) Hondius achieved immediate financial success. The new atlas was so popular that in just six years prior to his death in 1612, he issued seven editions in Latin, French and German.21 He even authorized an engraving in the Atlas’s opening pages showing himself sitting opposite Mercator, both happily working on a pair of globes, even though Mercator had by this time been dead for nearly twenty years. What is today known as the Mercator-Hondius Atlas was far from comprehensive in its geographical scope, and its additional maps varied in quality. But it became the leading atlas of its day by virtue of its appropriation of Mercator’s imprimatur, and because its only competitor, Ortelius’s Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570), which was no longer being updated, appeared terribly old-fashioned; it was also too costly for potential rivals to compete with Hondius’s Atlas by making nearly 150 new maps from scratch.

  When Hondius died in 1612, the business was taken over by his widow, Coletta van den Keere, and their two sons Jodocus Hondius the Younger and Henricus Hondius. Sometime around 1620 the brothers fell out and went their separate ways. Jodocus began to prepare maps for a new atlas, while Henricus went into business with his brother-in-law, the publisher Johannes Janssonius.22 Before he was able to publish his new atlas, Jodocus died suddenly in 1629, aged just 36. Blaeu now saw his opportunity. Though the Hondius atlas had come to dominate the market, the family squabble prevented subsequent editions from incorporating any new maps, and it was effectively stagnating. As the family tussled over the estate, Blaeu seized the chance to acquire Henricus’s new maps and launch his own rival work.

  How Blaeu managed to acquire the maps is unknown, but it is clear how he used them. His first atlas, entitled Atlantis Appendix – literally an atlas that supplemented the work of Mercator and Hondius – published in 1630, contained sixty maps, mostly of Europe and with virtually no regional coverage of Africa and Asia. Of these sixty maps, no fewer than thirty-seven came from Hondius, whose name was simply deleted and replaced with Blaeu’s imprint. It was an audacious move, compounded by Blaeu’s cheeky refusal to even acknowledge Hondius’s maps in his preface to the reader. ‘I admit’, wrote Blaeu in acknowledging the precedence of the works of Ortelius and Mercator, ‘that herein figure some maps, which have already been published either in the Theatrum, or in the Atlas, or in both, but we give these maps in another form and with another appearance, and made, augmented and supplemented with greater diligence, care, and accuracy, so that, with the rest, they may be called almost new.’ Blaeu grandly concluded with almost comical disingenuousness that his maps ‘have been composed with diligence, truthfulness, and correct judgement’.23

  Blaeu’s actions were in part motivated by a longer history of commercial conflict with Janssonius. As early as 1608 he had addressed a plea to the States of Holland and West Friesland, demanding security against the loss of income caused by pirated editions of his maps, a thinly veiled attack on Janssonius for the striking resemblance between his 1611 world map and
Blaeu’s 1605 map.24 In 1620 Janssonius struck again, printing copies of Blaeu’s Light of Navigation with plates designed by Pieter van der Keere, Jodocus Hondius the Elder’s brother-in-law. As Blaeu’s privilege to print his book had run out, his only way to defend himself against Janssonius’s flagrant piracy was to publish a new pilot’s guide, at great expense.25 Until 1629, it must have seemed to Blaeu that Janssonius, now helped by Henricus Hondius, was commercially unassailable. To have apparently triumphed now over his adversary with the publication of the Appendix must have brought Blaeu a degree of personal satisfaction, even though it also magnified the professional rivalry between the two families that would last for more than thirty years.26