Every aspect of his craft fascinated him. Gemma had particularly wanted his help in producing the globe of 1535 because of the delicacy of his hand in the engraving of lettering, and Mercator had developed a keen interest in the script with which information was marked on his maps. In the original letter of 1540 to Antoine de Grenvelle about his planned globe, he had stressed his intention of making the words on it clear and uncluttered. Earlier cartographers had generally favored the thick, heavy strokes of the German alphabet, which could easily be carved out of the old woodcut blocks, even though such crude penmanship confused the design and obscured the meaning on maps whose small scale required names to fight for inclusion. The delicacy of copperplate engraving, compared to the old-fashioned woodcuts, meant that a skilled craftsman was no longer limited to the traditional letters.
On Gemma's globe, Mercator had used the italic script that had been developed during the previous century in Florence—the style of writing that Shakespeare mistakenly called the "sweet Roman hand"5—for its lightness and easy reading, and in his own work he was even more precise and painstaking. Roman capitals marked the different continents, empires, and oceans on Mercator's globe of 1541, and italic lettering designated kingdoms, provinces, and rivers, so that the significance of each word was immediately clear to the reader. One promontory extending north from the great southern continent was labeled psitacorum regio (region of parrots), while a key placed in the empty South Atlantic provided the names of some of the cities of Europe that could not be fitted onto the map itself. The italic script was concise, with an opportunity for some restrained decoration around the flourishes with which the words ended, but its main appeal for a cartographer was its clarity. Later map-makers increasingly followed his example. It was a small improvement but a significant one: Mercator wanted his maps to be used, and every element of their design that made it easier to do so was important.
Thus, amid the hard-pressed work for his various customers and sponsors, he had set himself to produce in 1546 a punctilious little book on the use of italic script in map work. It was almost comically finicky:"There is no art so simple that its exercise doesn't demand a little study first," he wrote. "It will always be worthwhile to reduce it to a few short notes so that the student need not spend too long away from his more useful studies."6There would be those, he said, who would criticize him for wasting his time on something so straightforward and so unimportant— but just think how unacceptable it would be to have the Latin language in the wrong style of lettering. The Greek or German letters that were commonly used were simply inappropriate, like a king dressing in the rags of a beggar rather than in his royal purple.
No detail was too small, no instruction too basic. There were twenty-four leaves of detailed instructions on how to construct a flowing, regular script and hold a pen, "in two fingers, the index and the thumb, gently supported by the middle finger so that it is enclosed by them in a sort of triangle." Mercator offered no advice that he was not prepared to take himself; the booklet demonstrated his own skill as a calligrapher, and its woodcuts provided further examples of his talent as a carver and illustrator. Even though he was working in wood rather than his preferred copper, his lines were delicate and precise—an example to students of the standard to which they might aspire with hard work.7The booklet was reprinted four times and started a Netherlands vogue for similar instruction books that lasted for several years.
Mercator was shrewd enough to know that long-term prosperity lay with official favor and the patronage of the mighty—and few were mightier than the emperor himself. Hence, no doubt, the dedication of his terrestrial globe to the elder Granvelle, Nicholas. The earlier letter to the son had been a tactful way of finding out whether such a dedication would be acceptable to the father, who, he hoped, would smooth the way to the imperial court.
The world globe of 1541 sold well for decades. A quarter of a century after the first one was produced, the Spanish scholar and poet Benito Arias Montano,8in Antwerp as the representative of King Philip II of Spain, wrote home to Madrid that the choice in the Netherlands was between Gemma's globe of 1535 at a price of eight escudos and Mercator's of 1541 at twelve. A tribute to Mercator's reputation as well as to his globe, the Spanish thought it well worthwhile to pay the extra 50 percent. In 1568, when a pressman in his printing works might earn around one hundred florins in a year, the dealer Christopher Plantin sold Gemma's globes for eleven florins and Mercator's for twenty-four. Together they were turning Leuven into an acknowledged center for the production of globes and scientific instruments that would come to rival the famous manufacturers of Nuremberg in southern Germany.
*Mary, Charles's sister, became regent on the death of his aunt, Margaret of Austria, in 1530.
*Around 1514, Copernicus distributed a small handwritten book, Commentariolus (Little Commentary), to a few of his friends from his home in Frombork. It spelled out his thinking in seven axioms, the most crucial of which were that the Earth was not the center of the universe, that the apparent daily rotation of the stars was caused by the rotation of the Earth, and that the distance from the Earth to the Sun was infinitely less than the distance to the stars. It is certain that, largely as a result of the Commentariolus, his ideas had already spread widely by 1539, when the German mathematics professor Georg Joachim Rheticus published a summary of them in Danzig.
Chapter Ten
In the Hands
of the Inquisition
EARLY IN 1542, the little workshop in St. Pierre was busier than it had ever been. The struggle to meet the demand for Mercator's new globe—constructing the plaster globes themselves, printing the gores, pasting them down, mounting them on their stands, and packing the finished articles in crates—was testing his capacity for hard work and concentration to its limit. The household was hectic too: In 1540, Barbe had given birth to another boy, Bartholomew, and in 1541 to Ru-mold, her fifth child. The following year she was pregnant with her sixth, so there could not have been a better time for Mercator to receive the most important order of his life so far.
Antoine de Granvelle must have been pleased with his calvaria, for he had recommended Mercator's craftsmanship to the emperor himself. Charles V was away in Spain, but from his court in Brussels came an order for a selection of globes and mathematical instruments for the imperial collection. Mercator was required to produce terrestrial and celestial globes, a miniature quadrant for navigation and observing the stars, an astronomical ring to show the planets in their orbits, an ingenious pocket-sized sundial, and various simpler instruments such as compass and dividers for drawing maps and plans.
He started work straightaway, but even by the time he received the order, the emperor was preoccupied with more pressing and dangerous matters. His debts were mounting and his revenues falling, and his old French enemies were moving against his possessions in the Low Countries. He looked weak, and on the banks of the River Meuse, the lesson of Ghent's crushed rebellion was beginning to fade.
The swaggering young duke of Jiilich, Cleves, and Burg, William IV, had inherited the province of Guelderland and saw the opportunity for conquest and greatness. His sympathies were Lutheran, his ambitions unlimited—and Charles V's hold on the neighboring lands of Brabant and Flanders seemed temptingly insecure. The emperor's armies were once again far away in Spain, and when in the spring of 1542 William's army swept across the Meuse, it descended upon an undefended countryside. Farms and villages that stood in its way were burned, peasants and farmers put to the sword. William's aim was to reach the French armies in the west and drive a wedge through Charles's possessions in the Low Countries.
The killing was not confined to the countryside over which the soldiers trampled. In the great towns of Antwerp and Leuven, panic-stricken city authorities hurriedly seized anyone they suspected might side with the invaders. They were determined not to lose control again, as they had done in Ghent only four years before. While the townsmen were armed and sent to the city walls as an unlikely l
ooking defense force, the soldiers rounded up anyone with Lutheran sympathies who might aid the invader.
For months, fire and bloodshed swirled this way and that across the Low Countries. The city walls held firm, but outside them Duke William's savage forces stole whatever they could move. What they could not steal, they burned or butchered. In time, Charles left Spain and made the long march to assert his authority, with nearly forty thousand Italian, Spanish, and German troops. As they approached, the myth of his weakness evaporated, and along with it, Duke William's ravaging army. The duke finished his rebellion on his knees, begging the emperor's forgiveness, just as the burghers of Ghent had done. The old lesson had been taught again.
Charles could afford to be magnanimous. William surrendered Guelderland but was allowed to keep his own lands in Germany in return for his personal commitment to Catholicism, while Charles could be well satisfied that he had imposed his power so forcefully. But it was the Inquisition that gained most from the months of violence.
It was feared as much as it was hated. In 1522, when Mercator was ten, Charles V and one of his former tutors, the new pope, Adrian VI, had brought the Inquisition to the Netherlands in a determined attempt to quash the reform movement. Pope Adrian was a lowlander himself, born in Utrecht, and like Mercator a former pupil of the Brethren of the Common Life and a teacher at the University of Leuven, but the institution he set up rode roughshod from the start over the traditional legal rights of his countrymen. Individual towns in the Netherlands had always tried criminal cases on their own authority, but the Inquisition could arrest and question anyone, even magistrates, and commit them for trial before its own courts in any town it chose. It was, Charles's successor, Philip, observed some years later, even more pitiless than its feared counterpart in Spain. Its method was terror, in particular, the terror of the stake. Purge followed purge, apparently at whim. Many died in agony, as the flames slowly blistered and burned their flesh; the lucky or repentant ones were spared the worst agonies by being strangled before the fagots were lit. Other victims were either banished or condemned to a lifetime of beggary as all their possessions were confiscated. There had been one wave of trials in the mid-1530s, when Mercator was starting to produce his globes and instruments in Leuven. Almost a decade later, another began, fueled by the political fear that Duke William and his plundering soldiers had excited.
IN FEBRUARY OF 1543, a month of biting cold, Mercator heard of the death of Gisbert, the great-uncle who had been mother and father to him, who had educated him, supported him, and believed in him. He laid aside his tools and packed his clothes into a bundle for the journey to attend Gisbert's funeral and take part in the settlement of his inheritance. Barbe would stay at home with their six children, all under eight years old. (The couple's last child, Catherine, had been born while Duke William's soldiers were rampaging over the countryside.)
Shortly after Mercator had left for Rupelmonde, Barbe was summoned by a knock on her door. She would not have recognized Pierre du Fief, although her husband would have known his name. He was the procurator general, loyal servant and theological witchfinder-in-chief to Charles's regent in the Netherlands, Mary of Hungary, and one of the most feared men in her service. In his hand was a list with Barbe's husband's name on it, using her family name to identify him: "Meester Gheert Scellekens, woenende achter den Augsteynen" (Master Gerard Schellekens, living behind the Augustinians).1Similar searches were going on all over Leuven: Forty-two other names appeared on the list besides Mercator's, and twenty-eight of the wanted men and women were seized in a single night.
Where was he? The question would have been short, brutal, the answers treated with contempt; the search of the house, the workshop, and the outbuildings would have started almost before Barbe had finished speaking. Arrests generally followed a pattern, a bullying tumult of soldiers swarming through the house, smashing their way inside with swords drawn, in their search for evidence against the supposed heretics. The soldiers would turn out room after room as they searched for books, documents, or letters that might help make a case against the unfortunate accused man. One of the new reformist Bibles written in Flemish rather than Latin would be enough. Women would be elbowed to one side, children savagely beaten if they dared to interfere.
When the searchers found nothing—no trembling fugitive cowering in a cupboard or under a bed—du Fief accepted Barbe's word that Mercator was gone. He had heard too many stories of convenient departures to believe her claims of a coincidental death in the family, though; if Mercator had gone to Rupelmonde, he reasoned, it was because there had been some secret tip-off about the arrest. Any attempt to flee from the Inquisition was always seen as a tacit admission of guilt, and du Fief went straight to Louis de Steelant, bailiff of the Waas region, to demand a warrant for the fugitive's arrest in Rupelmonde.
Du Fief's reputation was built partly on his brutality and partly on his thoroughness. While the doctors and scholars of the Inquisition tried to trap their victims with subtle intellectual arguments, he oversaw the process of breaking them down with physical intimidation and torture. He had headed the interrogation, trial, and execution of the English Bible scholar William Tyndale eight years before.* Tyndale, as Mercator knew well, had been hauled into the courtyard of Vilvorde Prison, strangled, and burned.
Twenty-five miles away in Rupelmonde, Mercator could not have known what danger he was in, that his fate lay in du Fief's hand. He probably stayed with his older brother Arnold, who managed the Golden Lion Inn, where the townsmen occasionally gathered for public sales; that would have been the obvious place for the soldiers to go, clutching de Steelant's warrant. The Inquisition always came in force; there was no possibility of resistance, no chance to escape, and little explanation. All he was told was that he was suspected of involvement with Lutheran heresies, that he would be investigated by the judges of the Inquisition, and that until they were ready to see him, he would be locked away in Rupelmonde Fort.
In the marketplace, and down the sloping lane that led to the river and the fort, a small crowd of locals gathered. While none wanted to attract the attention of the religious authorities, or to seem too concerned for those who had been chosen for interrogation, a low murmur of sympathy might well have arisen as the bailiff's soldiers hustled their new prisoner into view. Many of the crowd would have recognized Gerard de Cremer, the cobbler's boy. He had left Rupelmonde nearly twenty years earlier, but he had been back to visit the town since. In any case, his fame had spread. Academic, philosopher, prosperous businessman—Rupelmonde had produced few people who could claim that sort of progression. His was one of the success stories that the poor of the town might tell each other, either in hope or in envy.
From its position towering over the River Scheldt, the ancient fort at Rupelmonde brooded over the riverbank and the neighboring fields. It had already stood for more than five centuries, a blunt assertion of military might, uncompromising as a mailed fist. The arched entrance lay on the other side of a narrow timber bridge that sloped on stilts up toward the heavy wooden gates. The towers were dark and threatening; no one could tell who was looking out from the arrow-slits that pierced the heavy stone walls. Outside the fort, the Scheldt was frozen over.
The military governor of the fortress was formally instructed that nobody was to speak to the prisoner or to give him private letters, and that any messages he received were to be handed straight to the bailiff. Until the judges were ready to hear his case, Mercator was to be kept locked up, alone.
Barbe, miles away in Leuven, had no way of knowing what might be happening to her husband, but while he languished in irons, she proved to be an altogether doughtier figure than she had ever had a chance to show. Walter Ghim, who made no mention of this terrifying episode in his hero's life, pictured her as little more than a doting mother and meek housewife, bustling around in silent awe of her eminent husband; but she did not wilt under the pressure. Rather, she set about the business of winning Mercator's freedom. She mi
ght have been browbeaten, tricked, or cajoled into telling the officers where her husband was, but once she realized what danger he was in, she rallied valiantly to his defense. Finding favorable witnesses to a suspect's character was one of the most common ways of responding to allegations by the Inquisition, and the more impeccable the religious standing of the witnesses, the more persuasive their evidence would be. Barbe went first to the local priest in Leuven, Pierre de Corte, cure of the Church of St. Peter and former rector of the university, to ask him to plead her husband's case.
Though he never wrote about his experiences in his prison cell, Mercator must have dragged his mind back again and again over the previous weeks and months. He knew nothing of Barbe's efforts on his behalf. All he could do was repeat the same questions: Whom had he seen? What visits had he made? What information could have been passed to the authorities? What did he have to hide?
De Corte did what he could. Fourteen years before, in one of the last acts before his period as rector expired, he had welcomed Mercator to Leuven in his matriculation ceremony. His later career shows that he was no friend to the reform movement—two years afterward, he was appointed as an inquisitor by Charles V and given the duty of overseeing and approving new editions of the Bible published in Leuven and Antwerp—but he responded to Barbe's pleas by writing directly to Mary of Hungary herself, Charles's sister and regent, and the ultimate authority in the Low Countries.
The World of Gerard Mercator Page 11