The World of Gerard Mercator: The Mapmaker Who Revolutionised Geography

Waldseemüller sold more than a thousand copies of his map and his book – enough to establish the name America in people’s minds, though when he realized his mistake a few years later, he tried to give Columbus the credit he deserved.* (#litres_trial_promo)

Martin Waldseemüller’s World Map, 1507

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Fifteen years after Waldseemüller’s map, the first known circumnavigation of the globe was completed

– the crucial final proof, if any were needed, that the world was round. Ferdinand Magellan left Seville in late September 1519 with the commission of King Charles I – later to be the emperor Charles V – and a ragtag and bobtail fleet of five aging ships, crewed by the sweepings of the Spanish docks. As a young man, according to some reports, he had been a pupil of Martin Behaim; if so, the return of his expedition after a full three years at sea proved both the strengths and the shortcomings of his teacher’s ideas. Behaim had been right about the shape of the world – but disastrously wrong about the lands that lay on its surface. Magellan had sailed around a continent that Behaim never dreamed existed. He died shortly afterward in a skirmish with natives on a Pacific island, but the return in 1522 of the Victoria, sole survivor of his flotilla, was the inspiration for a succession of Spanish probes up the western coast of South America.

WHEN MERCATOR was born in 1512, the known world was, thus, still surrounded by shadows. By the time he died eighty-two years later, merchants and bankers were making vast fortunes by bringing regular cargoes back from the East Indies by sea,* (#litres_trial_promo) while the apparently limitless gold and silver

plundered from the ancient civilizations of the New World to the west had turned the economies of Spain and Europe upside down. During his lifetime, the traders, financiers, and businessmen of Europe took control of the new lands that had been revealed, and they did so because mariners gradually took control of the seas.

In the Middle Ages, there had been no sense that knowledge could be outdated, that the wisdom of the ancients could be challenged by experiment, observation, or reason. Religion, too, had been buttressed by that same sense of stability. Suddenly, such challenges seemed to be happening all the time. Reflecting the frenetic pace of discovery, George Beste, who sailed the northern seas later in the sixteenth century with the English explorer and sometime pirate Martin Frobisher, would write with a mixture of awe and excitement: “Within the memory of man, within these fourscore years, there hath been more new countries and regions discovered than in five thousand years before; yea, more than half the world hath been discovered by men that are yet (or may very well for their age be) alive.”

Within eight decades, in other words, the size of the known world had doubled.

FOR MORE THAN two hundred years, European mariners had prepared sketch maps to show the coastlines and the approaches to ports in Europe. But the maps that were available were virtually useless for long-distance navigation. The so-called portolan

charts were often produced as an accompaniment to written descriptions of the coastal features, compiled by sailors for themselves or their close associates and based largely on their experience of the coasts that they illustrated. They were drawn by detailed observation and with careful reference to the mariner’s compass, but they had generally no lines of latitude and longitude, no learned references or legends. They took no interest in interior features; river mouths or distinctive skylines visible from the sea might be noted, but cities, inland roads, even mountain ranges were almost always omitted. They were maps by seamen, for seamen – tools of the trade. Rough mapping was the stock-in-trade of any experienced mariner. The only surviving map drawn by Columbus himself, showing northwest Hispaniola, now the northern coast of Haiti, demonstrates how accurately a skilled seaman could make a running survey of an unknown coastline. But the sailors’ rough sketches, like the portolan maps, made no allowance for the curvature of the Earth.

Even Waldseemüller’s groundbreaking world map was constructed on a projection originally devised by Ptolemy in the second century AD. Mariners knew that any accuracy in following the traditional maps with which they were provided over great distances was impossible, and cartographers understood why. Michiel Coignet, a chartmaker of Antwerp, pointed out later in the century

that there was simply no point in laying off a course according to compass bearings as they appeared on a traditional map; the straight lines on the flat sheet of paper, transferred to the curved surface of the globe, would produce a series of spiral curves that would take a ship drastically off course.

The solution to this problem, navigators found, was a combination of dead reckoning – estimating their position by judging the distance the ship had sailed along a known compass bearing – and keeping as much of their course as possible due east or west. By “sailing the latitudes,” the parallel lines around the Earth’s surface, they could avoid the distorting effects of the curvature of the Earth. The traditional sailing directions for reaching the West Indies from Europe were “south until the butter melts, then due west into the sunset.”

In practice, ships sailed miles out of their way, aiming far to the east or west of their chosen destination in order to find the correct latitude. The unreliability of navigational instruments, the difficulty of taking sightings to check latitude on the rolling deck of a ship, and the need for frequent tacking in contrary winds all made matters worse; but the underlying problem was that neither sailors nor scholars had tackled the problem of reproducing the curved surface of the spherical Earth on a flat map. While voyages were short and close to land, the problem of projection could be more or less ignored; following a line ruled straight on a map would simply result in a small navigational error. As the ships ranged farther from the well-known waters of the Mediterranean, though, the effects of this failing became more dramatic. Men could sail the seas of the world with greater confidence than ever before, but they could not map them accurately.

Chapter Three A Small Town on the River Scheldt (#ulink_80728ae4-a7d5-5b4d-8e54-10d1a289cfb4)

THE RESEARCHES OF SCHOLARS and geographers, the work of printers and booksellers, and the discoveries of hard-bitten sailors and explorers had combined to make the early sixteenth century the most favorable time in which a man of Mercator’s talents and interests could have been born. But the land in which he grew up was riven by political factions and smoldering with religious hatreds.

At the start of the new century, the birth in 1500 of the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the ancient merchant city of Ghent in Flanders marked the climax of more than 150 years of schemes, machinations, and marriages among the ruling families of Europe. While the adventurers of Spain and Portugal were discovering new worlds abroad, in Europe the dukes of Burgundy had been busily laying their hands on as much of the old one as they could, marrying their way into a realm that eventually stretched across the prosperous financial heartland of northern Europe. They turned marriage from a sacrament to a strategy. During a century and a half of buying, inheriting, and most of all marrying into new possessions, they could have taught the rest of Europe a lesson, had anyone thought to heed it: War could be profitable, but well-planned matrimony was infinitely more so.

Philip, one of the dukes of Burgundy, was a member of the powerful Habsburg family, who had been building up their own lands in Germany with similar determination throughout the fifteenth century, and he married Joanna of Spain, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, whose own marriage in 1469 had already united the Spanish kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Charles was the son of Philip and Joanna’s triumphal dynastic marriage, and he steadily inherited individual titles and honors throughout his childhood to make up a patchwork empire that would eventually stretch over more than half the known world.

He was shy and awkward, an unprepossessing figure with the long lower jaw and bulging eyes of the Habsburg line, but when his father died in 1506, he became ruler of the Netherlands and the rest of the Burgundian inheritance. He was just six years old, and his paternal aunt, Margaret of Austria, acted as regent. By the time he was sixteen, Charles’s inherited lands stretched not just through Spain and parts of Italy but also across the apparently limitless Spanish possessions in the Americas. Three years later, in 1519, the death of his paternal grandfather, Maximilian, pushed the borders of his realm farther to the east, where his Habsburg ancestors were the most powerful dynasty in central Europe, ruling lands in Austria, Carinthia, Slovenia, and the Tyrol.* (#litres_trial_promo)

The Habsburgs also held a virtually hereditary position in Germany as Holy Roman Emperors, but although they had occupied the imperial throne for nearly eighty years,† (#litres_trial_promo) on his grandfather’s death Charles still had to win the support of the seven electors, the German princes who formally approved the succession of the Holy Roman Empire. The successful but expensive campaign of bribery with which he secured the imperial crown left him crippled by debt throughout his reign,‡ (#litres_trial_promo) and he faced a constant struggle to raise money to pay the massive armies on which his grandiose campaigns to maintain his authority depended.

The empire was vast and unwieldy, and his possessions were too far-flung to be governed. When Charles traveled to his Spanish kingdom to secure the succession there in 1517, he was thought of as a foreign interloper surrounded by boorish Flemish advisers who trampled over the country’s aristocracy, while in the Netherlands he was reviled as a lover of Spanish luxury with an intolerable train of arrogant Castilian grandees. Had they ever heard it, his Netherlands subjects would have been less than amused by his famous boast, “To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse, German.” His native Flemish was not even on the list.

There was constant feuding in Spain, and near anarchy in Germany, where the great inheritance of the Holy Roman Empire was largely ruled by lawless and belligerent knights who accepted no authority but their own. The disparate duchies, counties, and cities of the Netherlands were racked with ancient feuds. The Hoeks of Holland, the Kabeljaws of Zeeland, and the Lichtenbergers and Lockhorsts of Utrecht wrangled in a constant round of shifting alliances, betrayals, victories, and defeats. In Guelderland the Heckerens fought the Bronkhorsts, and in Friesland the Schieringers were the sworn enemies of the Vetkoopers. The great free cities of Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, and Brussels zealously guarded their ancient privileges against any attempt to impose central authority.

In addition to this internecine violence, over the next half century Charles would face recurrent international wars with the French, and with the armies and navies of the Ottoman emperor Suleiman the Magnificent, massed on the eastern and southern borders of his empire. His reign was an endless round of revolts, rebellions, wars, and betrayed alliances.

The imperial crown also involved him inextricably in the bloodletting of the Reformation. Bitterness over corruption in the Catholic Church had existed for as long as anyone could remember; to the reformists, the popes in Rome seemed more concerned with worldly show than piety. In the late 1470s and early 1480s, Sixtus IV built the Sistine Chapel; then Julius II and Leo X supported the work of Michelangelo and Raphael; in the following years, the supposedly celibate Alexander VI used bribery, corruption, and murder to advance the interests of his children, Lucrezia Borgia and Cesare Borgia. None of them seemed interested in the reforms for which many in the Church and among the laity were crying out. During Charles’s reign, these demands developed into not only a religious challenge to the Church but also a political challenge to the Holy Roman Empire itself. Charles V – “God’s standard bearer,” as he grandly called himself – saw his duty as defending the Catholic faith not just from the Muslim Ottoman Empire across his borders but also from the reformists and Protestants within. In 1523, when Gerard Mercator was a boy of eleven, two young monks, Johann Esch and Heinrich Voes, were burned alive as heretics in the central square of Antwerp, the first of tens of thousands to go to the stake over the next half century as the Inquisition sought to root out heresy wherever it hid. The legacy of the complex genealogical maneuvering that had created Charles V’s empire was one of political chaos and human misery across the Netherlands and the rest of Charles’s domain.

Charles V by Titian

Museo del Prado

IN THE YEAR 1512, the artisan Hubert de Cremer was one of Charles’s struggling subjects. His was the misery of poverty: His father had made the journey east from his native Flanders to Gangelt, in the German duchy of Jülich, many years before, filled with hope and ambition for the future, but Hubert had become a cobbler scrabbling to find enough money to feed his wife and family. He already had five children, and his wife was expecting their sixth, but though he was willing to work, he had found few opportunities in Gangelt. His best hope of staving off poverty lay in returning to Rupelmonde, where his father’s family still lived.

The port of Antwerp, just a few miles downriver from the town of Rupelmonde, was one of the most affluent centers in the Low Countries, one of the largest cities of its day, where eighty thousand people lived in houses that were the envy of the rest of Europe. Antwerp had been a busy port on the River Scheldt for centuries – its name comes from the Flemish aan-de-werfen (on the wharves) – but the bales and baskets piled high on the docks were not just a sign of its prosperity; they were tangible evidence that the world was growing faster than it had ever done before. The ships that maneuvered for position brought cargoes not only from the Baltic, England, Spain, and Germany but from farther afield as well, from lands that were so distant, so newly discovered, they still seemed almost mythological to the laborers who sweated to unload the merchandise.

Not many years before, the ports of Venice and the other Italian city-states had been crowded with cargo ships, linking with the ancient overland routes from the East to bring spices, precious stones, silks, and finery to Europe. For centuries, all roads really had led to Rome. But by 1512, ships could follow Vasco da Gama’s route to India around the southern tip of Africa and bring their cargoes straight back to the north and west of Europe. The rapidly growing trade with the New World, too, could be carried out more easily from western Europe than from Italy. The pattern of commerce was shifting: More than 2,500 ships might be crowded into Antwerp’s port at any one time, and 500 vessels would come and go in a single day.

With the cargoes came stories of new expeditions, and of the fresh discoveries that were being made in the New World and in the farthest reaches of Asia. Such talk, true and false alike, was devoured by the educated citizens; but the bales, bundles, and boxes were the real stimuli to anyone with imagination and curiosity about distant lands. The waters of the Scheldt flowed for hundreds of miles through a continent hungry for the goods that the ships had unloaded. Along the docks of Antwerp, the age of discoveries was a daily reality.

When he arrived there late in February 1512, Hubert had four sons, a daughter, a pregnant wife, and no real prospects of employment. His one advantage was an uncle in the Catholic Church. Several years before, in Gangelt, Hubert had named his firstborn child after his father’s brother, and he turned to that same Uncle Gisbert, the chaplain of Rupelmonde’s Hospice of St. Jean. Gisbert was not wealthy but comfortably off, and he used his influence to find Hubert and his family a place in the monastery guesthouse. It would have been a simple, even spartan home, but still a welcome shelter for a family on the brink of penury. There, at six o’clock in the morning on March 5, 1512, only a few days after she had arrived in Flanders, Hubert’s wife, Emerance, gave birth to their sixth child, Gerard. The anxious cobbler made a precise note of the date and time, as he had done for the birth of his other children.

The town’s tax records show Hubert, Emerance, and their six children lived on top of each other in a lodging half the size of the house his single uncle Gisbert kept for himself.* (#litres_trial_promo) Gisbert, a busy, energetic priest, filled with ambition for himself and his family, was the key to whatever future they would have. For him as for many others, the Church had been a route to worldly security as well as to salvation, and his post as chaplain at the hospice gave him financial independence, respectability, and a degree of influence. Well educated himself, he determined to do what he could for the rest of his family. Within a few months, his nephew Hubert was using his skills to produce shoes for the hospice and steadily building up his business in the town, while the older boys, with Gisbert’s encouragement and influence, had started on careers of their own in the Church. Rupelmonde’s church records show that Hubert’s second son, Dominic, eventually followed his great-uncle into the post of chaplain at the hospice, while the eldest boy, Gisbert, named in his great-uncle’s honor, became a priest in the nearby village of St. Nicholas. There was no doubt that they and the other two boys would do well, while their sister, Barbe, was being carefully prepared for the marriage that would secure her future.

Gerard, like his brothers, received his education on the hard wooden benches of the local village school. The few hundred houses in Rupelmonde were huddled around the church, a short way from the river and the imposing black fort that glowered down upon it. Nearby was the ancient water mill where grain was brought from the surrounding fields, its great rough limestone grinders making the wooden structure groan and vibrate as they turned under the power of the rising and falling tides. Farmers brought their produce to a regular market on the riverbank, while barges would tie up to sell cheeses from Brussels, or herring, imported cloth, and ironware from the wharves of Antwerp. Bigger, seagoing ships often moored at the wharves, pausing on their journeys upriver to Brussels. Outside the village, the landscape stretched away for miles, flat and open.

Rupelmonde

British Library, London, Rare Books and Maps Collections

With its fields, mill, market, school, and church, the little town provided for every aspect of life, but the fort, with its high stone walls and seventeen towers, overshadowed everything. Built by Norman invaders in the eleventh century to overawe and terrify the local people, it was no mere monument to past brutality. Behind its bleak walls there still languished criminals, dissidents, traitors, and forgotten men.

The young Gerard was apparently drawn to the sheer variety the landscape offered, for he developed a love of nature that would stay with him throughout his life. From his earliest days, at least according to the stories that grew up around him later, the schoolmaster had little need to encourage his pupil to greater effort in the classroom. Much of the work in the single schoolroom was learning by rote, the children chanting the Latin of the Lord’s Prayer or the Creed, or the questions and answers of the catechism. Every lesson, every moral precept, was based upon the Bible. At home, there was neither leisure nor privacy in the crowded and hardworking household, but the young boy usually managed to find a place to hide away with his books. Often, he would be huddled with them long into the night, forgetting to eat or sleep, and his potential was clearly recognized by his uncle.

In 1526, Hubert de Cremer died suddenly, and the family was threatened with disaster once again. (There is no record of what killed him.) Emerance was able to survive on the little money he had saved, and five of their children were almost old enough to look after themselves. However, Gerard was just fourteen, and if he had had to work in order to earn his keep, his family’s hopes for his future would have been dashed. An apprenticeship could have led only to a life of unremitting toil like his father’s; there would have been no time for learning.

Once again, they had to rely on Gisbert. Three masses a week at the hospice brought him a regular income of some forty-three pounds a year – enough for him to have acquired two small farms as well as his own house, and enough, if he chose, to provide for the education of his great-nephew. The young boy was taken from his family and went to live with his great-uncle, who became not only his benefactor but also his adoptive father and his tutor. Yet if Gerard, like his two elder brothers, were to follow Gisbert into the Church, he would need more than a smattering of Latin grammar picked up at home and on the benches of Rupelmonde’s school. The boy would have to be educated.

Chapter Four Among the Brethren of the Common Life (#ulink_711878a9-3ccc-5c64-9ae8-62b289724f51)

THE ARTIST ALBRECHT DüRER, journeying through the Netherlands from his native Germany, described ’s Hertogenbosch, stranded on the windswept and unwelcoming plains some seventy-five miles northeast of Antwerp, as “a fair city, with an extremely beautiful church and a strong fortress. …”

The Gothic ramparts of the Cathedral of St. Jan might have impressed a traveler, but the town itself was a bleak and forbidding place, a long way from the riverside idyll of Rupelmonde. Here, fifteen thousand people lived behind high stone walls, which would surround the young Gerard for the next three years.

The town’s name means “woods of the duke,” and the harsh guttural of the Flemish pronunciation reveals its sixteenth-century soul. It was already one of the oldest towns in the Low Countries when Gerard arrived – no balmy country retreat, but a fortress set up by Duke Henry I of Brabant more than three centuries earlier to protect the remote northern borders of his dukedom. The grim stone walls could keep out foreign enemies, but inside them, ’s Hertogenbosch seethed with religious and political discontent that occasionally erupted in violence, as occurred in many Netherlands towns. ’s Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands, and most of Europe were in ferment. The trouble had been building for decades.

Ten years earlier, when Gerard was still a young boy, stories had begun filtering back from Germany of a young priest who had issued a direct challenge to the Catholic Church on the need for reform and an end to corruption. In nailing his list of ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenburg, Martin Luther had ignited the first flames of a conflagration that would engulf much of Europe.

Martin Luther

Science Photo Library, London

Only God, he declared, and not papal authority, could forgive sin; the selling of indulgences by which divine forgiveness could supposedly be guaranteed in return for the payment of cash was a corrupt and cruel deception. Luther called for reform rather than revolution. “If the Pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St. Peter’s church should go to ashes, than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh and bones of his sheep,” he declared in one of his theses. Yet the whole of Christendom, not just the Catholic Church, threatened to go to ashes: Political dissatisfaction and growing national feeling in the Netherlands, Germany, and much of northern Europe had prepared the ground for a conflict that would tear the continent apart, leaving it split irrevocably between Catholics and Protestants.

Johannes Gutenberg’s first presses produced massive runs of printed papal indulgences, but they also turned out seemingly unlimited editions of non-Latin Bibles on which the faithful could rely. Alongside them were other religious texts, mystical books, and lives of the saints, many of them written in the day-to-day language of the people, breaking forever the Catholic Church’s monopoly on Holy Writ. The anxieties of kings, emperors, and the Church itself could do nothing to hold back the rapid spread of movable type.

Printed tracts showered from the new presses like sparks, lighting a thousand fires of heresy – fires that were fed among the German princes and nationalists in the Low Countries by resentment of the emperor’s power. There was already bitterness over the harsh taxes with which Charles tried to claw back the massive debts he had incurred. Despite the treasure that was starting to flow into his coffers from the New World, he relied largely on the merchants of the Netherlands to finance his wars: For every hundred florins in gold and silver that fell into Charles’s lap from the New World, four hundred were squeezed from the taxpayers of the Netherlands. The Venetian ambassador Antonio Soriano described the Low Countries as “the treasures of the King of Spain, his mines, his Indies which have sustained all the Emperor’s enterprises.” Others, more crudely, saw them as a cow to be milked to exhaustion.