The World of Gerard Mercator

by Andrew Taylor

  Whatever his secret bitterness over his treatment by the Inquisition, and whatever his reformist leanings, Mercator fulfilled his commissions for the emperor with enthusiasm. The imperial seal of approval was just the endorsement his workshop needed, and as word spread that no less a personage than the Holy Roman Emperor was one of his customers, the globes, astrolabes, and other precision instruments turned out by his team of craftsmen became more urgently sought after. If he had any private reservations about the surveying instruments he had made for Charles being used in campaigns against the Protestants, they were not strong enough to cause him any serious embarrassment.

  The thriving print industry in Antwerp and Leuven, the busy docks on the river, the flourishing trading companies, and the University of Leuven itself were all hallmarks of a busy, vibrant community that attracted determined people, whether they were scholars or businessmen.

  In the late 1540s, two men arrived there whose lives would become closely intertwined with Mercator's: John Dee and Christopher Plantin. They were dissimilar personalities, one an introspective and controversial scholar, the other an opportunistic businessman who battled determinedly throughout his life against a succession of setbacks and disasters. They had different talents and contrasting aspirations, and they faced the challenges of the sixteenth century in their own ways, but although their careers followed diverging paths, each of them remained a lifelong friend of Mercator's. His attitudes and achievements were illuminated by theirs; they reflected two distinct facets of his character. In early 1547 Dee, a tall, fair-haired young Englishman with a light brown fringe of beard and an enthusiastic manner, unpacked his bags in one of Leuven's many small rooming houses, at the end of a long journey over the rough and unmade roads from Cambridge. The trip had taken him several days, and although later in his life he would become a seasoned traveler through Europe, the voyage across the Channel had been the first time he had been out of sight of land. Dee, a brilliant classical student with six years' study in Cambridge already behind him even though he was barely out of his teens, had come to the Low Countries to walk in the streets of one of Europe's most famous university towns and sit at the feet of some of the leading philosophers and scholars of Christendom.

  For all its stern defense of orthodox Catholicism against the reform movement, the intellectual atmosphere at the University of Leuven was still one of inquiry, discussion, and discovery. The confidence of the town could be seen in the work that was just beginning on the new Voirste Huys, or town hall, one of the finest gothic buildings in the world, whose intricately carved arches and niches and six magnificent spires still dominate Leuven's central square. The university was home to some of the most highly regarded scientists and thinkers of the day, among them Mercator, Gemma Frisius, and the doctor and anatomist Andreas Vesalius, who had scandalized many traditionalists only a few years earlier by dismissing the ancient Greek physician Galen, the classical source of all medical knowledge, as little more than a fraud and a charlatan.*

  Many of the lectures given by professors at the university were open to anyone to attend, and learned debate drew scholars to Leuven from across Europe. Pedro Nunes, royal cosmographer to the king of Portugal and probably the world's leading authority on the Spanish and Portuguese discoveries in the New World, was a visitor; so was the map publisher Abraham Ortelius, who started in Antwerp while still a teenager as a colorist and map seller to support his sisters, and went on to win fame and riches as publisher in 1570 of the first great modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.

  Such men, wrote Dee, would write in a single day "matter enough to require the labour of a full year for comprehension while I formerly sat at home."1For Dee, the fame and distinction of the thirty-year-old Gerard Mercator were something to aspire to. He was a teacher in one of the leading universities of the age, with a reputation as a scholar and thinker; and apart from his academic standing, he had already produced maps that had won acclaim across Europe. Dee admired his intellect. Unlike the Cambridge philosophers of distinction Dee had mixed with before, Mercator was able, like Gemma, to put his studies to practical use in a way the young student found refreshing and challenging. In Mercator, dividing his time between his home, his studies, and the busy life of his workshop, Dee saw a figure he might emulate, one who could dedicate himself to the pursuit of knowledge and yet thrive in the real world.

  Where Mercator had been the son of a poor cobbler, John Dee's father was a successful dealer in silks and fine cloths at the court of King Henry VIII—yet their lives had followed similar paths. Mercator had sat on the benches at's Hertogenbosch, Dee at the little chantry school at Chelms-ford in England; just as Mercator had studied through the night as a boy, Dee claimed that at Cambridge he had spent eighteen hours of every day closeted with his books. While attending the university, Dee, like Mercator, had begun to accumulate the circle of friends who would help him prosper throughout his life—men like William Cecil, later to become Queen Elizabeth's powerful treasurer, Lord Burghley.

  Even so, it was at Leuven rather than at Cambridge, Dee said later, that he learned to think, that his whole philosophical system "laid down its first and deepest roots."2In the dusty halls and studies where the scholars met with students, he formed lifelong alliances. For three years, he said later, he and Mercator were hardly out of each other's company. "Such was the eagerness of both of us for learning and philosophising that, after we had come together, we scarcely left off the investigation of difficult and useful problems for three minutes of an hour."3That the twenty-year-old John Dee should show such youthful enthusiasm is only to be expected; but that Mercator, fifteen years his senior and already well established within the university hierarchy, should share in it shows not only how committed he was to intellectual inquiry but also what an impressive mind the young Dee had.

  Later in his career, when he published his own maps, Dee was meticulous in deferring to both Mercator and Ortelius, "the two most celebrated geographers of this age, and both of them my singular good friends." In his famous library at Mortlake near London, where some four thousand books covering virtually every aspect of classical, medieval, and Renaissance learning were crowded onto the shelves, he would delight years later in showing occasional visitors Mercator's twin globes, which his friend had either sent to England or given to him on one of his later visits to Leuven. Dee, who saw himself as an English Mercator with his own contributions to make to the science of cartography, had carefully added his "divers reformations, both geographical and celestial." He also had a "theoric of the eighth sphere, the ninth, and the tenth, with a horizon and meridian of copper, of Gerardus Mercator his own making for me purposely."4The "theoric" was designed to show the movements of the different planets in their various orbits about the Earth, but since both it and the globes vanished when Dee's house was ransacked years later, there is no way of knowing exactly how it worked. Other instruments he possessed, he lamented, were "most barbarously spoiled and with hammers smit in pieces."5Doubtless the globes and the theoric went the same way.

  Thirty years after he left Leuven, as Queen Elizabeth's court intellectual, consulted for advice on astrology, astronomy, medicine, history, and the law, Dee still wrote of and to the "honest philosopher and mathematicien Gerardus Mercator," and boasted that "sufficient Record is publisshed of our great familiarity." Dee, like Mercator, became known as one of the wisest scholars in Europe, and their lives continued to run along curiously parallel lines. During the 1550s, he was imprisoned for several months in England under the Catholic queen Mary for his alleged involvement in "the lewd and vain practices of calculing and conjuring,"6and, like Mercator, he would involve himself later in his life in the practical side of geography and cartography, advising on the planning of new voyages of discovery in the New World and in the northern seas.

  FOR ALL THEIR CLOSENESS, Dee had a passion that Mercator did not share, to which the charges against him under Queen Mary give some clue. Apart from his standing as a scholar, m
athematician, and geographer, he developed another, more controversial, reputation as a magus, a philosopher-magician, who had mysterious and even unsavory relations with the spirit world. Many people believed that Dee was the model for Ben Jonson's Faustus, "swollen with cunning of a self-conceit"7and hauled off by fiends because of his pact with the devil. The old gossip and diarist John Aubrey declared that he had been told "of John Dee conjuring at a pool in Brecknockshire, and that they found a wedge of gold; and that they were troubled and indicted as Conjurors at the Assizes; that a mighty storme and tempest was raysed in harvest time."8

  The stories say more about the malice of those who told them and the gullibility of those who listened than about Dee, but there was reason for them. Dee was irresistibly drawn toward necromancy and magic. In his later life, he spent several years in earnest communion with angels, with the help of a crystal ball and a mysterious scryer, or medium. For all his protestations that he was innocent of witchcraft, he certainly believed that he, or at least his scryer, had the mystical power to summon spirits.

  Such activities, like astrology and alchemy, sometimes teetered on the brink of heresy and were often the stock-in-trade of the charlatan, but they remained an obsession in sixteenth-century Europe. The boundary between science and superstition was hard to define. Stories of trickery, spirit-raising, and magic gathered around the lives of men like Dee, although he always protested that there was nothing blasphemous or heretical in his dealings with the unseen, that his work was another way of interpreting a divine plan of Creation.

  Mercator, like Dee, was fascinated throughout his life by the natural world, by what he could see and interpret, and by its place in God's aweinspiring plan, but he believed that astrology misrepresented the mystery of Creation. His approach of constant measurement, checking, and interpretation fitted into the scientific revolution that would dominate the seventeenth century rather than the tradition of mysticism that lingered on from the Middle Ages. Many of Dee's interests, by contrast, over the next few decades would come to seem shady, disreputable, and even fraudulent. Even so, this difference in philosophical approach did not stand in the way of a lasting understanding between the two men:Mercator never criticized Dee's interest in the occult, and for the rest of his life he remained a regular correspondent and a close friend.

  THE OTHER NEW ARRIVAL in Antwerp, Christopher Plantin, was a business partner rather than a close friend,'9 but he faced the same great dilemma as Mercator as the 1540s drew to an end: how to live and prosper under the increasingly savage religious persecutions of Charles V and the Catholic Church. Plantin was a reformist by conviction, and a devotee of several heretical Anabaptist sects, but he was also a master of the art of supporting two sides at once, and he stayed in Antwerp to make his fortune.

  When he arrived with his wife from the French town of St. Avertin, near the city of Tours, the prospects for a peaceful life in Antwerp could hardly have been worse for a printer and would-be publisher. In the early 1520s, Charles had issued the first of a series of edicts, or plakkaten, threatening "loss of life and property" for a range of religious crimes, and in the second half of the 1540s, they were renewed no fewer than six times, with copies posted in public places as a terrible warning. All signs suggested that purges like the one that had swept up Mercator would get worse—and for anyone concerned with the printing of books, as Plantin was, the bloody campaign against heresy was close to home.

  In 1546, the Leuven theologians issued a preliminary list of forbidden books, and four years later, Charles's notorious Edict of Blood decreed that the possession, selling, or copying of any heretical work would be punished by death. Supporting the decree was Antoine de Granvelle, whose influence continued to grow: In 1550, on the death of his father, he slipped effortlessly into his place as keeper of the emperor's great seal.

  Plantin had arrived with his wife a couple of years earlier, in 1548.10 Two years younger than Mercator, as a young child he showed a remarkable aptitude for Latin and astounded his teachers by his appetite for scientific books. In Antwerp he set up a bookbindery, and then, in 1550, he was listed as a boeckprinter in the register of the city's Guild of St. Luke. At first, he survived on the money from a small haberdashery business run by his wife, but within five years he had established his own printing works, and by 1563 he had five presses turning out books in one of the most profitable enterprises in Europe.

  Like Mercator, he spent his life building up a thriving family business; Plantin's personal motto, labore et constantia (by hard work and tenacity), could have applied just as well to Mercator, whose maps he supplied to clients in the Low Countries, Germany, France, and England. His records show that apart from selling Mercator's maps and globes, he provided him in return with some twenty-two thousand sheets of the best-quality paper over a five-year period. Theirs was a mutually profitable partnership—though they, too, had different priorities.

  Plantin's success was built on trimming, switching loyalties, and watching for the sudden changes in power that could lead either to prison or to profit. He began by printing clandestine broadsheets with secret funding from the reformers, avoiding arrest in 1561 only by being away in France on a lucky business trip when the soldiers came for him. Unlike Mercator, he had traveled far enough to be out of their reach, and he stayed in France for nearly two years. All his goods were confiscated and sold, but when he came back in 1562, he set about cultivating rich merchants and political contacts, among them Antoine de Granvelle. Plantin abandoned his old reformist friends and attached himself unashamedly to people in power. Within a few years, he had a dozen printing presses turning out not inflammatory reformist pamphlets but prayer books, Bibles, and other religious tracts with such success that he was named arch-typographer to the king of Spain. Plantin had not just shifted loyalties; he had immersed himself in the profitable trappings of Catholicism.

  His company's records show that between 1571 and 1576 he shipped 18,370 breviaries, 16,735 rnissals, 9,120 Books of Hours, and 3,200 hymnals to Madrid. A business that had started on the fringes of the law became the trusted collaborator of the Spanish monarchy and the Catholic Church. The portrait by Peter Paul Rubens in Antwerp's Plantin-Moretus Museum shows him as a successful businessman, clutching a book and the golden compasses that he had adopted as the symbol of his company. He is a thin-faced figure, with the sidelong, calculating glance of a man who has taken risks and until then emerged triumphant.

  When Spanish soldiers mutinied and rampaged through Antwerp, burning, raping, and ransacking buildings, Plantin paid out a fortune in bribes to save his new business premises in the Friday Market, the Vrij-dagmarkt. "Nine times did I have to pay ransom to save my property from destruction; it would have been cheaper to have abandoned it," he declared ruefully."11

  For more than fifty years, the shifting rivalries between Catholics and reformers, between Spaniards and nationalists, meant for Plantin a lifetime of delicate maneuvering and frantic tacking against the changing winds. His nature was to adapt, not abandon; Mercator could never have done the same.

  As the 1540s drew to an end, neither man had any immediate reason for fear, but Mercator's whole career shows that, whereas Plantin seemed to revel in courting danger and avoiding arrest, he sought peace and security to pursue his studies and bring up his family. Life in Leu­ven would have been uncertain and threatening, even though he was too cautious to allow himself to be trapped with forbidden books or to consort with suspected heretics. The contact with Franciscus Monachus and the "suspect letters" had been a young man's careless slip that would not be repeated. Though the Inquisition had cleared him, though he had kept the oath of secrecy that had been the price of his freedom, and had powerful friends and contacts, the times were ever more threatening. Plantin stayed, and bent with each fresh wind; Mercator left.

  In 1551 William, duke of Jiilich, Cleves, and Berg—the same Duke William whose soldiers had ravaged Flanders not ten years before—invited Mercator to take the chair of cosmogr
aphy in a new university he was planning to open in the German town of Duisburg. Time and the humiliation of his defeat by Charles had tamed the blustering young adventurer whose army had swarmed across the border; the old lesson of Ghent had been learned afresh. He was a tolerant and enlightened ruler, who had been performing his own religious and political balancing act for years. For himself, he maintained the nominal Catholicism that Charles had demanded, but the reformed Church that had been established in his dukedom since his father's time remained unaffected. In the three duchies that lay astride the lower Rhine, Lutheranism and Calvinism were both flourishing. Compared to the constant vulnerability of existence in the Low Countries, his realm was a haven of religious freedom.

  The new role that Mercator was offered was appealing as well. The Oxford English Dictionary notes the first use of the word cosmography in 1519—a new name in Mercator's day for an ancient discipline, the study of the Earth and the universe and their relation to each other. The cos-mographer could take virtually the whole field of natural science for his own, looking back to the ancients and forward to the new discoveries that were being made both on Earth and in the heavens. There was, or there seemed to be, no conflict between the quest for knowledge and Mercator's deep religious sense. Cosmography was the homage of the intellect to God's Creation, a study which, in its breadth and depth, was made for a man who declared himself to be so fascinated by "the most beautiful order, the most harmonious proportion, and that singular beauty which is admirable in all created things."12

  From Duke William's point of view, the presence in Duisburg of the leading geographer of his generation would reflect greatly to his own credit and bring prestige and renown to the university he planned; Mercator had the prospect of a new life in which he could devote himself to the intellectual challenge of his studies and enjoy the standing to which his learning entitled him. There was no reason why involvement with Duke William's new university should threaten his growing prosperity; the duke's backing and sponsorship would be assured, and Mercator's study and workshop could support each other. Although Leuven had become Europe's center for the production of globes and scientific instruments, Mercator's reputation already spread far beyond the town. He traveled to the trade fairs around the Low Countries, France, and Northern Germany, and had built up such a range of patrons and customers that he could work just as profitably from Duisburg as from Leuven.