BY THE TIME the letters stopped coming, Mercator had suffered more personal tragedies—heart-wrenching reminders of individual mortality. The world that he had drawn on his maps was changing shape with almost every new voyage, but the world in which he lived in Europe could be horrifyingly like that of the Middle Ages.
Throughout his life, Mercator doted on his family. He had delighted in his children when they were small and ran errands around the workshop in Leuven, and had planned their upbringing meticulously; just as his great-uncle, Gisbert, had given him his grounding in Latin, grammar, and the basics of schooling, so he had looked after the education of his sons and daughters. They remained a close and affectionate family, even though by 1567 the six children were all in their twenties, well embarked on their own adult lives. All his three girls were respectably married, Dorothee to a merchant in Antwerp and Catherine, like Emerance, to a schoolmaster. His sons were following in their father's footsteps, carving out their own roles in the family business. They had their own children, too, running through the workshop as their parents once had. The future, it must have seemed to Mercator, was assured well into the next generation and beyond. The family's prosperity, though, rested ultimately on trade, and trade had always brought more than profits, spices, and fine silks to Europe.
Two centuries before Mercator's time, a flotilla of Italian merchant ships returning from the Black Sea had docked in Sicily with their crews raving with fever. The dying sailors were mottled with red and black spots, and they screamed with pain from the blisters and swellings around their armpits—symptoms that would become agonizingly familiar over the following months. There was no cure. This was the beginning of the most devastating epidemic ever to hit the Continent, either before or since. Within a few days, the mysterious disease had spread to the nearby city of Messina and the surrounding countryside:Bubonic plague, which in just five years was to claim more than 25 million lives across the Continent—a third of the population—had arrived in Europe.
Outbreaks continued for three hundred years, wiping out whole towns and villages. No one knew either cause or cure. Even in Mercator's day, bands of religious zealots still wandered from town to town flogging themselves to atone for the sins they believed must be responsible, while the less devout clutched nosegays before their faces, in the vain belief that the infection might be carried on the rank smells of the town. Others, still more desperate, tried to keep it at bay by breathing in the fumes from the festering contents of chamber pots. Prosperity was little protection; the plague killed rich and poor without distinction. During Mercator's own lifetime, one bout that struck the University of Leuven all but wiped out the professors of the Faculty of Medicine, who struggled heroically to care for their sick colleagues.*
The plague's course was well-known. It began with shivering and feeling cold; then came nausea and vomiting, deep sleep, and a high fever, sometimes followed by paroxysms, convulsions, and madness. There might be blisters and tumors or dark red spots on the skin. The pain could send victims into delirium, while such treatment as there was—lancing and cleaning the swellings, without any anesthetic—was as agonizing as it was fruitless. Some patients were dosed with laxatives, others made to vomit, and there were treacles and potions boiled up from exotic ingredients such as snakeskin. Yet almost everyone who showed the symptoms died. Each new outbreak, each new infection, was greeted with abject terror among the communities where it struck, making people brutal as well as fearful: Sufferers were often driven away from frightened communities, to die uncomforted and alone.
The overwhelming modern view is that the disease was a combination of bubonic and pneumonic plague, but the rats, which we now know carried the infected fleas that spread it, went unnoticed and unsuspected. The fleas, Xenopsylla chepsis, were riddled with the plague bacteria, which left them voraciously hungry. Every time they bit, they would vomit infected blood from their stomachs into the wound, a hideously efficient way to spread the disease. The busy docks of a trading port like Bremen in north Germany were an ideal breeding ground.8
Spring, when the fleas began to breed again after the cold of winter, was the worst time, and twenty-five or thirty people were dying each day in Bremen when, in mid-April of 1567, Mercator's eldest daughter, Emerance, and her young son arrived there to rejoin her husband. Disillusioned by the failure of the university project in Duisburg, Jan Vermeulen had left there four years before to reopen his school in Bremen. The staunchly Protestant town had sheltered him when he originally fled religious persecution in Leuven years before, and he hoped it might offer him a fresh start in life again.
Emerance was returning from a few weeks with her father in Duisburg, where she had taken several of Vermeulen's pupils to escape the latest cases of plague. Like her grandmother arriving in Rupelmonde many years before, she was heavily pregnant as she returned to Bremen.
The letter that arrived at Duisburg from Mercator's son-in-law in May 1567 should have brought good news. Instead, it left him shattered and heartbroken. Only a few days after their arrival, Mercator's grandchild Jan—named after his father—was struck down by sickness. "For four days, while we looked on, the plague tormented my little son, the half of my soul, and on the fifth day, it took him," Vermeulen lamented."He died in our arms. No fear of danger or death could drag me or my wife from the needs of the child. He had scarcely died when I dragged my wife away into another house, having changed clothing. We arranged a funeral."9
All the clothes in the house were burned in case they carried the plague, and the grief-stricken parents fled to another lodging to try to escape the contagion. There, they found more misery: The plague had spread panic among the population, and they were forced out onto the streets again by the threats of a neighbor wielding a knife, who was terrified that they might have brought the disease with them. Vermeulen, at his wits' end, found shelter for himself elsewhere and hurried his wife away with some friends to the nearby town of Emden, which still seemed to be plague-free.
At first, Emerance's friends told themselves that her shivering fit might have been brought on by her pregnancy, by the journey, or by her experiences in Bremen, but first the plague struck one of her friends— sick on the seventh of May, dead on the eighth, and buried on the ninth—and a day later she was getting sick herself. The account Vermeulen sent his father-in-law and friend is heartrending in its bleakness:"A church woman sat with her; a doctor was there, and a surgeon.... On May 10 at 8.00 she delivered a male child, who lived only a few moments. The midwife was there with some ladies." Her "brothers and sisters"were with her too, and a Protestant minister, but they were too familiar with the course of the plague to have any real hope of her recovery, though they watched by her bed for three days. "At evening, she asked that Arnold [Mercator's oldest son] be summoned, since her time of death was at hand. Having talked about the faith and after some prayers, struggling a little with the pains of death, she slept in the Lord."10"
Emerance was only twenty-nine when she died. Mercator was distraught, and along with his grief he had a fear that it is almost impossible for a modern mind to comprehend. The Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio said the victims of the plague often "ate lunch with their friends and dinner with their ancestors in paradise";"11 they could be dead within a few hours, with all their sins upon them, and with no time for the confession or repentance that might save their immortal souls.
Mercator wrote an anguished letter to his son-in-law, begging for hope that her soul would have been saved. The letter is lost, but the reply, written two months after her death, survives. "I am in no doubt about your daughter's salvation," Vermeulen reassured him. "As long as I live, it will always be a pleasure to remember with what piety and entirety of faith Emerance, Mercator's daughter, lived with me. . . . She had learned to pray with tears, which are, they say, the blood of the soul."12Mercator may have stood at the doorway of the modern age, but at a time of crisis, he plunged back into the personal mental hell of the Middle Ages. Science
and scholarship were powerless before the awesome and incomprehensible power of God.
The plague in Bremen vanished as suddenly as it had struck. "The plague which raged seems to be buried in the same tomb as my heart," wrote Vermeulen just two months after Emerance's death. "No traces of it appear. Everything will be a burden with my wife gone, but what can I do?" Mercator, friend as well as father-in-law, had clearly attempted to encourage Vermeulen, even as he grieved for his daughter, as Vermeulen's reply, in the same letter, indicates. "I really wonder how at this time you can say that I should seek a remedy for my loneliness. . . . Loneliness is a trouble, especially when abroad, to a man like me who has neither friend here nor relative, nor anyone to close his dying eyes. But, since life is so short, and I see my grey hairs, I think of nothing less than trying my chances again."13
As some consolation, he sent his father-in-law the last letters Emerance had written during the few short days between the death of her son and her own sickness, but even that mournful comfort was snatched away. Perhaps the messenger he chose was nervous that the package might be infected with the plague; perhaps it was simply mislaid on the journey. Whatever the reason, the letters, at the time surely the most precious possessions either Vermeulen or Mercator could have had, were lost, and the bereaved father never saw them.
THERE WAS STILL ONE MORE crushing blow to come. Mercator had watched with pride as his sons grew, taking their places in his workshop, each inheriting different skills. Arnold, the eldest, named for Mercator's brother, the innkeeper of Rupelmonde, was the practical artisan, the man to whom the burghers of Duisburg turned when they needed someone to repair the town clock, as well as a skilled manufacturer of scientific instruments. His work was compared with that of his father, and he was also becoming known as a meticulous surveyor in his own right. His youngest brother, Rumold, was an engraver, who had already worked alongside his father on the map of Europe, and who was being groomed to take over the commercial side of the family business. He worked with booksellers in Antwerp and London, learning the trade that had made his father's fortune.
In mapping Lorraine, Bartholomew, the middle son, had worked more closely and more consistently with his father than either of the others, promising from an early age to match Mercator's scholarship. After his schooling with Vermeulen, Mercator had sent him away to the Protestant college in Heidelberg to immerse himself in philosophy, Greek, and Hebrew, and he had returned to take over his father's teaching duties in the school at Duisburg. Yet it was in the field of geography that he was making his mark. He had already published his first book by the time he was twenty-three, a learned work describing the manufacture and use of terrestrial and celestial globes, based on Mercator's teaching and on the experience he had gleaned in the Duisburg workshop. He also had his father's unerring eye for a useful connection: He had dedicated the book, published in Cologne, to Mercator's own patron at the court of Duke William, the duke's chancellor, Henri Barsius Oliferius.
A few months after the tragedy of Emerance came news of the death of Bartholomew, just twenty-eight years old, who had so tried Vermeulen's schoolmasterly patience as a boy. Exactly what killed Bartholomew is unknown. It was probably another outbreak of the plague, though there were plenty of other diseases and infections in sixteenth-century Germany to carry off a young man in the prime of life.
For his father, still grieving the deaths of his daughter and grandson, it was another wholly unexpected disaster. After the struggles in Lorraine, Mercator had faced the possibility of his own death; with the loss of two of his children and a grandchild, mortality was all around him.
*This outbreak lasted from August 1578 to May 1579.
Chpater Seventeen
The Sum of
Human Knowledge
DETERMINED THAT TRAGEDY should not be allowed to triumph, Mercator spent much of a decade, starting in the mid-1560s, shut away in his room, focused on his researches and his books, his only complaint that business affairs and other worries interrupted his work. The day-to-day running of his business, the surveying tasks, and the management of his financial affairs in the town were delegated more and more to Arnold and Rumold.
He had been working sporadically for years on what would become a 450-page manuscript on the subject of chronology, endeavoring to establish the dates of historical and biblical events by making calculations on the basis of lunar and solar eclipses mentioned in ancient records.1Mercator's original seeds of doubt in Leuven over the compatibility of Aristotle and Genesis had led him through the years to ponder ways of synthesizing the various accounts of history, and during the 1560s he turned to these desultory researches more seriously. He brought together Bible stories from the Old and New Testaments, the dates included in Ptolemy's great astronomical work, the Almagest, and the writings of various diarists and historians from medieval times up to his own day. He was aiming to produce a study of the Creation of the world, blending the Old Testament account with the historical knowledge he had gleaned from his studies of ancient texts, and showing how all history led inexorably to the religious upheavals through which he had lived. He recorded the chaos across the Low Countries, where in Antwerp, 's Hertogenbosch, and the towns of Mercator's youth, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and reformers were even then smashing religious statues, ripping down pictures, and burning churches. He chronicled the eclipses of 1564 and 1566, which he had observed for himself in Duisburg. The stately movements of the planets in the heavens and the violent eruptions on Earth each in their own way figured the inexorable passing of time, which, he declared at the end of the book, would lead within a few short years to the long-predicted Apocalypse and the return of Christ to his kingdom on Earth. The world, he said, was 5,544 years old, and the whole of history fell neatly into three stages, as ordained by God. The first had led up to the birth of the prophet Abraham, the second to the coming of Christ, and the third would complete the work of Creation with the approaching end of time.
Astronomers were describing the regular movements of the stars, and the shape of the world was being discovered and set out for study, so logically time itself should have a pattern, a beginning, a middle, and an end, which could be revealed and admired in all its awe-inspiring symmetry. The message of the Chronologia was that humanity, like individual humans, had a birth, a life, and a death—a beguiling, if somber train of thought that had added poignancy for Mercator as he mourned the deaths of Emerance, Jan, and Bartholomew.
When the time came, he could hardly bear to send the Chronologia to be published. Ghim declared later that only under the greatest of pressure from his friends and the printer would he let the manuscript out of his hands. When the book appeared in 1569, it was a personal triumph— his favorite, the one he preferred "to all the other brain-children which he had sired in his life."2In the preface, he declared proudly, "I have succeeded in discovering a variety of things which, if I go more deeply into them and put the finishing touches to them, will be found worthy of immortality."
Not only Mercator's resolute perfectionism made him unwilling to release his manuscript. While he was raking over the writings of his youth, bringing them up-to-date with new researches, and compiling the detailed list of dates that would appear in the book, he had conceived the idea of a great new work that would bind together his life's studies. Preparing the Chronologia opened his eyes to the possibility of preparing an even wider-ranging study of the growth of human understanding. The original idea of an all-embracing history of the world had grown into the vision of an encyclopedic Cosmographia, in which he would present the synthesis of existing knowledge of geography, history, and the creation of the world. This, he believed, was his life's great purpose, which would secure his enduring fame.
The task he set himself was both awe-inspiring and essentially medieval. For centuries, monks and scholars had toiled to fit their knowledge of the world and the entire body of learning contained in ancient literature into a single Christian framework. Ptolemy's Geographia was the
universal source for the cosmographers of Mercator's day, but there were attempts even before the rediscovery of his work in the fifteenth century. In the seventh century, for example, St. Isidore of Spain had produced his twenty-volume Etymologiae,* also known as the Origines, which claimed to trace the whole history of human development. Only one of the twenty volumes was devoted to the origins of words; the rest dealt with a vast range of subjects, including languages, peoples, kingdoms, medicine, law, rhetoric, and the history of war. In the twelfth century, a monk from the French cathedral town of Tours named Bernardus Sil-vestris wrote his Cosmographia, which attempted to fuse Christian, pre-Christian, and pagan stories into a long poetic account of the Creation.†
The aim of the cosmographers was to justify the medieval conception of a world under the overarching control of God, in much the same way as the Hereford mappamundi. The Christian emphasis on Aristotie's geocentric view of the universe was the product of a similar attitude of mind: an attempt to reason out a system that would explain the whole of Creation.
The doubts that grew out of Mercator's efforts to reconcile Aristotle and Genesis, pre-Christian and Christian accounts of the Creation, had been at the root of the youthful rebellion that had taken him out of Leuven and onto the road to Antwerp, Mechelen, and Franciscus Monachus. More than three decades later, he confronted those doubts directly, drawing together all his learning about geography, history, astronomy, and the creation of the world, all for the glory of God. He aimed, he said, "to celebrate the work of God, to make the infinite wisdom and the eternal goodness burst out afresh. . . . That is the end to which I will direct all my efforts, all my reading, all my thoughts."3
In this, as in so much else, he followed the examples not just of Ptolemy and the medieval cosmographers but of his old friend and teacher Gemma Frisius, who had first made his name forty years before with his reworking of the Cosmographia of Petrus Apianus. Apianus, too, had sought to produce a universal digest of knowledge, which included a map of the world as it was known in the 1520s. His Cosmographia had also included ingenious working paper instruments, enabling the user to find the positions of the Sun, the Moon, and the planets at various times—in its way, the first pop-up book.4
The World of Gerard Mercator Page 19