On August 3,1536, Mercator married Barbe Schellekens, the daughter of an eminently respectable Leuven widow. He had shown already, in his decision to adopt a formal, Latinized name, that appearances and social proprieties mattered to him, and, at least from Walter Ghim's description, Barbe was exactly the sort of wife that a man who was careful for his own position and his own comfort would desire. She was, said the effusive Ghim, a woman of "pure habits, submissive, and well-schooled in the care of the home, well suited to his manner of life."1 Barbe would show later that she had an inner steel to her character, but women in the Netherlands of the sixteenth century were valued for their deference rather than their determination. The two found a home in Leuven's Parish of St. Pierre, in a street behind an Augustinian monastery, and set out on their married life—Gerard concentrating on his studies, on the development of his business, and on the nurturing of his reputation, and Barbe on the scarcely less demanding task of producing six children in as many years, while still demonstrating her unswerving dedication to her husband's comfort.
Their first son was born in August 1537, just a year and four weeks after their marriage. They called him Arnold, and with his birth, Mercator, too, embarked on a new life. His prospect as a boy and a young man had been the cloistered, celibate life of a churchman, then the similar, solitary existence of a scholar; but the speed with which he added to his family suggests that Mercator was happiest with the role of paterfamilias, and what little evidence there is gives the impression of an affectionate husband and father. Those were not common attributes. His old schoolmaster, Macropedius, reflected a clear misogynistic streak in contemporary life when he described women as being "more dangerous than fire, ocean, wild animals, or an evil spirit,"2and there was enthusiastic applause for his plays when they showed his female characters benefiting just as much as the children from a good thrashing. Mercator, without doubt, shared his uncompromising views on the upbringing of children—he sent his own sons off to a schoolmaster with just as stern a reputation as that of Macropedius.
Nevertheless, there are occasional hints in his surviving correspondence of a gentle and attentive father. Although few of Mercator's own letters still exist, and none of them deal with his day-to-day life at home, one from the boys' teacher and Mercator's friend and son-in-law Jan Vermeulen, written when the boys were fully grown, commented on the affection the two younger boys in particular had for their father. Bartholomew had always shown a particular warmth for his father, Vermeulen reported, and he commented too on the dutiful way that Rumold, his third son, always put Mercator's needs first. "How agreeable it is to produce children—we see God's plan in the way they lighten their parents' troubles by their devotion and effort," he wrote.3Even if Mercator was a demanding father, he succeeded in winning his children's affection.
Mercator saw the opportunity to fill the huge demand for printed paper maps for travelers, wealthy individuals, and religious and civic institutions. Scores of copies could be run off from a single original, and they could not only be produced more quickly than globes, but also sold more cheaply and to more people. The main challenge was to choose a subject that would capture people's interest. Mercator would find his commercial inspiration in the most popular and controversial book of his day—the Bible.
In particular, the Church authorities feared the printed Bibles in the day-to-day language of the people that were flooding off the presses. They knew how inflammatory the Word of God could be, and the mere possession of a Bible written in Flemish rather than Latin could be enough to have a man dragged before the Inquisition. Yet despite the increasingly brutal response of Charles V, the reform movement and the new Bibles were more and more prevalent in the Netherlands. Midnight arrests, mass executions, secret hearings—nothing could stifle the demands for reform. There was widespread revulsion at the cruelty being visited on heretics, real or imagined: When guards arrived at Amsterdam just before Christmas in 1531 carrying ten severed heads to be impaled on stakes outside the town, local people refused to have anything to do with them. One of the town's burgomasters went so far as to declare bluntly that no more citizens would be delivered "to the butcher's block."
However much Mercator might have shared in this general horror at the savagery of the authorities, he was also aware that the piety of his countrymen offered an opportunity for business. In a country where people agonized over Holy Writ as the Netherlanders did, there could be only one choice for Mercator's first cartographical project: a map of the Holy Land that could be studied alongside the Bible.
In commercial terms at least, this was a safe, not an inspired, choice. More than sixty years before, Palestine had been the subject of the earliest printed regional map, included in an anonymous book titled Rudimentum Novitiorum, published at Liibeck in Germany; since then, generations of pilgrims and crusaders had left a legacy of itineraries, route maps, and travel books about the Holy Land. Many of them were distorted by inaccurate memories or observations and by garbled hearsay accounts, and most made no claim to precision. In 1483, the German nobleman Bernhard von Breydenbach, a deacon of Mainz Cathedral, had set off on his own pilgrimage, accompanied by a Dutch artist named Erhard Reuwich. Their intention from the start was to produce an account of their travels, and Reuwich's illustrations, based on his own observations on the journey, included a maplike panoramic view of the whole region from Damascus in the north to Alexandria in the south. Set in the center was a detailed picture of Jerusalem itself, seen from the Mount of Olives, with the holy sites marked with their biblical names.
The book, Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam* 4was an example of the popularity of the subject, still selling some fifty years later, in both Latin and German, when Mercator started work, just one of a vast number of sources on which he had to draw. Including the Bibles that had been appearing for decades with maps bound into them to illustrate different stories such as Exodus or the wanderings of St. Paul—even though many were inaccurate—the Holy Land was the most comprehensively mapped region in the world.
Reuwich's version was a panorama, and for all the detail of his observation, it lacked the accuracy of a map. By contrast, Mercator's offering of 1537, covering the region from the Nile Delta to Phoenicia, and including biblical place-names and details of the various tribes of Israel, was as precise as he could make it. Even cartographers who claimed to be exact were not to be trusted. In a letter many years later, looking back at his first venture into mapmaking, Mercator described how he referred to the work of a German geographer of the fifteenth century from the University of In-golstadt. Jacob Zeigler5 claimed to have plotted the longitude and latitude of hundreds of biblical sites, but Mercator found his work to be "without scale and confused."''6 Instead of simply accepting it as accurate, he tested each measurement it contained against other maps and sources—the start of a lifetime's work of synthesis, judgment, and assimilation.
Where he could not find a location to his satisfaction, he said so. Several of the camps named in Exodus as being on the route of the Israelites as they crossed into Israel are simply listed on the map as "unknown."The example of Gemma's honesty over the location of the "not yet certainly explored" island of Zanzibar was a good one to follow. Mercator's map—measuring some 43 Vi by 21/2 inches when the six sheets on which it was printed were assembled—rapidly became the standard work of reference on the Holy Land. Even at that size, names on it are hard to read, and it is clearly the map of a beginner rather than a master, turned at an angle so that northwest, rather than north, is at the top. Mercator explained that his aim was to reduce the amount of useless space on the sheets, but this was not a solution of which Ptolemy would have approved. Nevertheless, there was universal astonishment at the delicacy of the drawing and engraving. Ghim declared that the map was published "to the admiration of many."7Mercator was barely twenty-five years old, and this was the first positive proof that he was anything more than a journeyman engraver.
Carefully measured and calculated as the locations
on it were, the map was also firmly in the medieval tradition of the mappaemundi. The tents of the fleeing Israelites appeared close by the Red Sea, with the biblical pillar of cloud behind them. Like the Hereford mapmaker, Mercator presented the world of belief and faith as much as the physical landscape—but, 250 years on, he did so on a map that was as accurate and objective as he could make it.
For fifty years, it remained the standard map for serious students of the Bible. The Flemish Catholic Andreas Van Maes,8working on a commentary on the Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses, wrote urgently to one of Mercator's friends twenty-five years after the map's publication, begging him to send a copy. "I will happily pay whatever price you ask," he said.9His admiration was a tribute to Mercator's scholarship, and the continuing demand for the map vindication of his choice of subject. Yet Van Maes's difficulties with the Church show there were greater risks to be considered than simple commercial failure. When his book appeared, it was immediately placed on the Church's Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the list of books that were heretical to read or to possess. Theological speculation, biblical exegesis, and laying out the story of the Bible on a map for common people to see were all controversial activities, encouraged by books like Van Maes's and by maps like Mercator's. Laymen who could read their holy texts in their own language wanted information about the lands in which the stories were set. Such information could only threaten the Church's jealously guarded control over knowledge; the popularity of Mercator's map simply increased the likelihood that the Inquisition would eventually take an interest in it.
Mercator's skill aside, there was then no shortage of skillful artisans. To prosper, he needed to have friends as well as talent, and to cultivate the contacts he had made at Leuven—many of them through Gemma. The Palestine map was dedicated to Frans Craneveld, another former student at the University of Leuven, a member of the Grand Council of Mechelen, and a well-known patron of the arts. He was also, significantly, a friend of Antoine de Granvelle and was intimately involved with Charles's policy of violent repression against the reformers. Craneveld had influence, and Mercator hoped he would be susceptible to flattery and use that influence on his behalf.
IN 1538, BARBE PRESENTED Mercator with another child, a daughter whom they named Emerance, after his mother. As his responsibilities at home grew, so his reputation began to spread. Even while he had been working on the map of Palestine, he had also been pushing ahead with research for another, still more ambitious project: his first map of the world.
The shape of the known world had been changing with almost every voyage. Mapping these new discoveries, setting them in context, and showing the whole world on a sheet of paper were obvious challenges for a cartographer. Another challenge was gathering information that had never been revealed before. Both trade and politics offered sound reasons why royal sponsors of explorers should want to keep their new information to themselves, and why others should want to steal it, and the mapmakers' trade often meant stitching together scraps of information that had come from spies, informers, and indiscreet seamen.
Mercator was not working alone, of course. A series of geographers across Europe toiled independently of one another, the leaked information they gathered gradually seeping through into general knowledge. Sailors, by the very nature of their job, traveled from one ship to another and from one country to another, and keeping secrets was virtually impossible. Ferdinand and Isabella, in Spain, had done their best to conceal the extent of Columbus's discoveries in the West, but within twenty years the Turkish pirate, admiral, and cartographer Piri Re'is pieced together a strikingly accurate map on camel skin—much of it now lost— showing the Atlantic and the islands of the New World. It was based, according to Re'is himself, on the recollections of an Italian seaman who had sailed on three of Columbus's voyages before being captured by the Turks in the Mediterranean.
News of Vasco da Gama's exploration to the east leaked out too. King Emmanuel declared that betraying information about Portuguese voyages would be punished by death, but his determination to keep da Gama's voyage secret was matched by efforts in Italy to find out all about it. The duke of Ferrara commissioned the diplomat Alberto Cantino to use all his influence and spare no expense in acquiring a map of da Gama's voyages, and within two years of the expedition's return to Portugal, the map was safely in his possession. Whom the diplomat bribed, bullied, or inveigled into making the duke's illicit copy will never be known, but the Cantino map, showing Africa, India, and also much of the eastern coast of America with remarkable precision, now lies in the Biblioteca Estense in Modena, Italy, known to posterity not by the name of its originator or its engraver but by that of the man who sneaked it out of Portugal.
Although kings and captains failed to keep their secrets, distance, greed, ignorance, and chance could conspire more successfully to keep information from mapmakers. The Cantino map showed nothing of the interior of America, for example, or its western coast, and even when exploration started there, it was in the hands of hard-bitten soldiers, with no interest in geography or discovery unless gold was in prospect. Spanish conquistadores set out during the 1520s from their bridgehead in Mexico toward the north and south on a savage mission of conquest and destruction in which sickness and the sword between them killed some 23 million of a native population of around 25 million. Little news of their discoveries leaked out in Europe until the private papers of Bernal Diaz, one of the Spanish soldiers, were found unread in a private library in Spain more than a hundred years later. Farther south, in Peru, the forces of Francisco Pizarro were similarly laying waste to the great Inca empire with a force of less than two hundred men, and once again, they had no interest in geographic exploration. News of their exploits, too, filtered back very slowly to Europe.10
Mercator's map of the world, published in 1538, showed his continuing debt to Gemma—it was clearly based on the globe they had produced together three years before—but it also demonstrated how much had leaked out, and how radically the view of the world had developed from the versions of Ptolemy that were still being circulated at the end of the sixteenth century. It was a small, single-sheet map, but Vasco da Gama's voyage and the expeditions that followed it enabled Mercator to show the true peninsular shape of India, even though the southern tip was much narrower than it ought to have been. Mercator's coastline of Africa had been well charted by various Portuguese mariners, and his American continent was clearly separated from Asia by what he called the Oceanus Orientalis Indicus (Eastern Indian Ocean).
His map still showed America as a long, thin continent, but its basic shape, at least down the eastern coastline, was easily recognizable. Unlike Waldseemiiller before him, Mercator clearly distinguished between North and South America, naming each one individually—his acceptance of the word America confirming once and for all the honor that his predecessor had mistakenly bestowed upon Amerigo Vespucci.
Mercator's world map, with its confident drawing of the east and west coastlines of South America, showed how much information had been assimilated into the accepted view of the world by 1538. But it also showed the limit of what was known. Magellan had proved in 1520 that America did not form part of some still-undiscovered great southern continent, and that there was a sea passage through the straits that now bear his name; yet Mercator, in common with other geographers of his time, still imagined the vast Terra Australis Incognita stretching up to form the southern edge of the Strait of Magellan. Ptolemy had described such a continent, and Mercator and his contemporaries saw no reason to disbelieve him. All Magellan had done, it seemed at the time, was demonstrate that the great continent was not connected to America.
In addition to incorporating the newly discovered lands into his first map of the world, Mercator was concerned with how best to project a spherical world onto a flat surface—a challenge that would absorb him all his life. The peculiar double-heart shape of the 1538 map was his first attempt to deal with the problem of projection. It was not a success. Mercator rel
ied on a system that had been described more than twenty years before by a Nuremberg mathematician, Johann Werner,"11 a friend and patron of the artist and engraver Albrecht Diirer. Werner had produced an edition of Ptolemy in which he set out the projection, which had been designed around 1500 by another mathematician, Johannes Stabius of Austria. The two men had worked together on a sundial in Nuremberg's St. Lorenz Church—a task which, in presenting the circular movement of the Sun on a flat surface, was similar to that of reproducing the globe on a sheet of paper. The sundial had horizontal curved lines to mark the length of the shadow cast by the Sun as it changed through the day, cut by straight lines to mark the hours; the projection Stabius designed similarly had arcs centered on the North Pole for lines of latitude, cut by lines of longitude that gradually curved away to east and west from a single vertical prime meridian.
The most obvious feature of this projection was the way it presented the Northern and Southern Hemispheres separately, in a matching pair of heart-shaped frames—the so-called double-cordiform projection. It produced a very pleasing, symmetrical design and focused attention on the continent of Europe at the center of one frame, but there were serious disadvantages to it as a way of depicting the whole world. It is hard to see the relationship between Asia and the American continent, or the form of Africa and America, both of which are broken in two. The maker of any map has to choose whether to present the shape of the continents accurately or to show them the right size in proportion to each other. The adjustments necessary to reproduce the globe on a flat sheet make it mathematically impossible to do both. Mercator, following the example of Stabius and Werner, sacrificed shape. The coastlines are distorted, so that North America, for instance, can hardly be seen at all on Mercator's map.
The World of Gerard Mercator Page 9