The World of Gerard Mercator: The Mapmaker Who Revolutionised Geography - Andrew Taylor

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nothing less than to revolutionize the study of geography and redraw the map of the world.

      Born near Antwerp in 1512, he lived through almost the entire turbulent sixteenth century – an age in which the known world grew year by year as new voyages made new discoveries, but one which also saw the Catholic Church and Europe itself torn apart by Martin Luther and the Protestant reformers. The sacking of cities, the smashing of statues by reformist zealots, and the religious savagery of Church authorities were all part of the temper of the times. This was the age of the Inquisition, whose power, as Mercator was to discover firsthand, extended across the Low Countries: The judicial torture and burning of the unfaithful were commonplace. But it was also an age of intellectual upheaval. Almost halfway through the century, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published his revolutionary theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun – an idea that was confirmed some sixty-five years later by the observations of Galileo Galilei through his telescope. The Church, still clinging to the old idea of the Earth at the center of the universe, could make Galileo recant, but it could not erase the new thinking.

      By the time Mercator was born, the printing press had made books readily available across Europe, but the language of religion and intellectual debate was the same as it had been in the days of the medieval copyists toiling over manuscripts in the monasteries. Not just the Bible but also scientific, medical, and philosophical texts were written in Latin. At the University of Leuven and later in Duisburg, Mercator’s conversation and correspondence were also in Latin. However, by 1594, the year he died, Bibles in the daily language of the people were commonplace. Galileo’s writings appeared in clear and lucid Italian. This signified more than a change of vocabulary or language; scientists, by the turn of the century, were gaining the confidence to rely on observation, measurement, and reasoning rather than looking into the past for inspiration.

       Gerard Mercator

      Science Photo Library, London

      Mercator’s own life reflected the era of change in which he lived, being full of apparent contradictions and opportunism, and extending over one of civilization’s major crossroads. In many ways a child of the past, he was born into poverty and owed his first chances in life to the wealth of the traditional Catholic Church; yet his surviving letters are those of a tolerant reformist with Protestant leanings, who kept his religious views to himself. Like the artists of the Italian Renaissance, he relied on the favor of princes, dukes, and high dignitaries of the Church, but he also built a commercial business which depended on the new prosperous middle class that economic growth had created.

      Mercator studied and created maps with a passionate attention to detail that would have been familiar to any of the scholars or artists of the Italian Renaissance. In his studies, he showed unswerving respect for the authority of Claudius Ptolemy of ancient Alexandria, who had proposed his own map projections – ways in which the Earth might be flattened out onto a sheet of paper. At the same time, Mercator did more than any other geographer of his day to demonstrate that Ptolemy’s classical ideas of the world were outdated, misleading, and often simply wrong. As a cartographer, Mercator spent his lifetime collecting, collating, and assessing the latest reports from explorers whose discoveries rendered Ptolemy’s ideas inadequate to describe the new world that was emerging; as a mathematician, he answered the problem of projection with his own solution, which has lasted for more than four hundred years.

      There are few reliable contemporary descriptions of Mercator, few clues to the personality of the scholar who did more than anyone in the last two thousand years to turn mapmaking into a precise science. Moreover, many of his letters are lost. A number of the letters that do survive are appeals to dukes and princes of the German city-states, to dignitaries of the Catholic Church, even to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V himself for support and sponsorship, for Mercator well understood the advantages of influential backing. Throughout his life, he was a driven man: Long hours at his desk as a student gave way to long hours at his workbench as he built the business that was to make his fortune, and the habit of study never left him. In the infirm years before his death, he would urge his children to carry him, chair and all, to his books.

      Fear is an overpowering emotion in those of his letters that do survive – fear of death and damnation, fear of not completing the work he had begun, fear of failure. Orphaned at an early age, sent off to the harsh rigors of a monastic school, he knew little of maternal love or family stability, and his difficult childhood left him cautious and circumspect. In his business life, he was assiduous in appealing for official copyright protection for his maps and globes, and the careful investment of his profits in property and forestland showed his awareness of the importance of security.

      He was also aware, as he had to be, of the value of silence. In the religious conflicts of his time, his principles were those of a reformer, but his arrest and imprisonment at the hands of the Inquisition clearly reinforced his instinct for caution. Even after he moved from Leuven to the more relaxed environment of Duisburg, in Germany, he avoided any involvement in religious argument. Rather than the perils of theological disputation, he enjoyed his reputation in the town as a good host and dinner guest. The handful of contemporary accounts speak of him as a witty and entertaining conversationalist, and gifts of food and wine from the city authorities suggest a man who was known to enjoy good company and a well-stocked table.

      But more than anything else, he was a scholar. Though he never traveled beyond the well-known towns of northern Europe, never, so far as we know, even boarded a ship, his work, together with that of sea captains and explorers, allowed people of the sixteenth century and the generations who followed them accurately to imagine the world beyond the horizon.

      He created his projection almost in passing and showed few signs of appreciating the importance of what he had done – and yet it has defined the shape of the world in the modern age. There is no doubt that it produced a distorted image, as any flat map of the spherical world must. As a result, Mercator himself has often been accused in the last few years of racism, because his projection makes the continent of Africa seem smaller than it really is, or of imperialism, because it appears to exaggerate the size and importance of Europe – accusations that a scholar of the sixteenth century would not even have understood. The challenge of spreading the globe out flat on a desk, of presenting the known world in a way that could readily be seen and comprehended, was one with which philosophers, travelers, and geographers had been struggling for thousands of years. By Mercator’s day, the time was ripe for a solution.

      MERCATOR WAS BORN barely twenty years after Christopher Columbus first crossed the Atlantic. Yet even though the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are considered the great age of discoveries, an astonishing amount was known, or at least rumored, about North, South, East, and West before any of the memorable voyages of exploration ever left port.

      Nearly two thousand years earlier, the Greek historian Herodotus was told of Phoenician sailors who claimed to have sailed around the southern tip of Africa.* A hundred years or so after his death, during the fourth century BC, another Greek explorer, Pytheas of Massilia, sailed into the far northern seas, to a country he called Thule, where he said the Sun went to sleep.† Still farther north, he said, land, sea, and air coalesced into a mixture on which people could neither walk nor sail. Ancient Norse sagas spoke of journeys to “a new land, extremely fertile and even having vines” that lay far to the west, beyond the setting Sun.1 Claudius Ptolemy, the Alexandrian librarian and scholar of the first century AD, had heard about the island of Taprobane, or modern Sri Lanka.2

      Commercial ambition drove travelers on over new horizons. From as early as 500 BC, trading caravans from China made their way along a variety of routes through central Asia, bringing bales of fine silk to be bartered for Persian warhorses or Arabian spices, frankincense, and myrrh. Lines of heavily laden camels followed secret and well-guarded tracks through the deserts of Arabia, carrying gold,

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