At Gembloux, near Namur, he routed an army of twenty thousand men and then set about the towns of eastern Brabant. At Sichem, he massacred the garrison after it had surrendered, and hanged its commander from the town walls; after the fall of Maastricht, according to a later account, "the pavement ran red with blood. . . . eight thousand heretics lay unburied in the streets."4
For Mercator, reports of these and similar atrocities had an apocalyptic resonance, for his Chronologia had set his own time firmly in the third and final age of God's Creation. In a letter to the Swiss pastor Wolfgang Haller, he struggled to find an optimistic response: "I am convinced that the current war is that of the armies of the Lord, mentioned towards the end of Revelation 17, in which the Lamb and the elect will win the victory, and the church will flourish as never before." It was all far from the Rhine, but Mercator clearly felt some premonition that Duisburg was no longer the safe haven it once had been. "I fear that the nearby disturbances in Belgium will cause us grief," he admitted in the same letter.5
Nine months later, in December of 1582, Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg, who was elector and archbishop of Cologne, renounced his allegiance to the papacy and turned to the Dutch rebels for help in establishing the Protestant Reformation within his lands—a fresh challenge to the forces of Spain and Catholicism that brought the fighting perilously close to Duisburg. Once the rebellious cities of the Low Countries had been taken—Ghent in 1584, Brussels a few months later, and then Antwerp, after a siege of thirteen months, during which Mercator's hometown of Rupelmonde was laid waste—Parma turned to Cologne and the German Protestant towns.
Cologne, the wealthiest and most beautiful city on the Rhine, held fond memories for Mercator. He had passed through it often on his way to Frankfurt and had spent time there with a naturalist and humanist named Ludgerus Heresbachius, a councillor to Duke William. "My mind often turns to Cologne, where I delighted in . . . exploring the libraries," he wrote to him wistfully in 1583. "Sadly, my studies keep me away, as well as my age and sickness and the dangers of war."6
Boxes of globes were still being shipped upriver past the city. Mercator told Heresbachius that he was sending all the globes from his workshop to the Frankfurt fair, but traveling was riskier than it had ever been. For the next six years, Cologne and the area around it were ravaged by ill-disciplined and brutal troops as the Spanish forces lived off the land. Towns were sacked, defeated soldiers butchered, peasants plundered, killed, or forced to flee.
As the threat of war drew closer in the summer of 1586, Barbe, Mercator's wife of fifty years, died. She was an old woman,7and there is no record of what killed her, but conditions in Duisburg were becoming impossible. Business and trade were in turmoil, and the simplest foods were in short supply. When Mercator wrote to Henry of Rantzau a couple of months after her death, there is no mention of his grief, only a brief apology for his "long silence," but there is no hint, either, of the religious optimism of his earlier correspondence. "Everything is sad, in a place where there has usually been peace and tranquillity. It is a cruel war, in which no one is spared. Friend and neutral are treated the same—hunger and lack of bread are everywhere. Unless God shortens the war, we fear that many will die of famine.... May God grant an end to this war," he wrote.8
Rumors of impending disaster were rife. "We are pressed by armies, with Neuss besieged and captured.... everything is in disorder, and there is no safe road anywhere," he reported in the same letter. Neuss was less than twenty miles up the Rhine, and no one knew whether Duisburg might be next. Horrific stories were told of the collapse of Neuss's defenses, of Spanish soldiers running riot through the streets, of women and children massacred in their homes. Parma's forces began to move down the Rhine in earnest for what promised to be a bloody settling of accounts with the towns that had for years provided such a welcome shelter for Calvinists, Lutherans, and Protestants. As rumors spread through Duisburg, Mercator began packing up the contents of his study and workshop, getting ready to flee. Thirty-six years of security were at an end.
Even amid the chaos of an expected siege, neither the death of his wife nor the threat of conflict had distracted him from the task of gathering cartographic information. In his letter to Henry of Rantzau, he reported that the maps of Italy and Greece for the next collection of his maps were almost finished. "While these are being engraved for the press, I will attack the Sarmatian regions* and the northern kingdoms, and I have the Danish kingdom already drawn and prepared for the engraver. I am awaiting full descriptions of Poland and Livonia from a noble Pole at Cologne, and when I have received them, I will gird up my loins to start their accurate measurement," he wrote.'9
The Spanish advance was slow and deliberate, and by 1588 Duisburg was surrounded, with the soldiers drawing slowly closer. Passage down the Rhine was blocked by the troops who had plundered Neuss, and upstream, more Spanish troops were besieging the town of Berck. Little knots of people gathered in the empty market, passing stories of torture, killings, and bloodshed from one to another. There were outbreaks of disease in the town as the population, weakened with hunger, waited for the inevitable catastrophe. Outlying fortifications, well within sight of the town walls, were besieged and taken by Spanish troops. For the first time in a century and a half, Duisburg was under siege.
And then, inexplicably, the soldiers marched away. There was no assault, no surrender, no massacre.
Duisburg was saved by the ambition of King Philip. His eyes had turned toward a different conquest, and Parma's troops left the Rhine to return to the Netherlands, ready to join the great Spanish Armada in its ill-fated invasion of England. Thanks to Sir Francis Drake and his fellow sea captains, they never boarded the ships of the Armada, which was broken up and scattered in the Channel storms. But for the next five years, the threat of France and the rebellion of the Netherland provinces would keep Parma away from Germany.
While the Spanish troops were still rampaging through Neuss, Mercator had received another personal blow. In July of 1587, his son Arnold died at the age of forty-nine after an attack of pleurisy. If Bartholomew had been Mercator's intellectual heir, Arnold was the consummate craftsman, the surveyor and instrument maker, the engraver who had worked with his father on the map of Europe. Ghim said he "excelled his contemporaries with his keen intellect and good powers of judgement in mathematics. . . . If heaven had granted him a longer life, he would have won distinction as an architect of public buildings."10For the last seven years, Arnold had taken day-to-day control of his father's workshop; he had been a member of the town council in Duisburg and a father to nine sons and four daughters. With his death, only Mercator's youngest son, Rumold, was left of the three young men he had hoped might continue his work, and Rumold was often away in London still working for the Antwerp-based bookseller and publisher Arnold Birckman, and presumably still sending back to his father whatever geographic information he could glean. Perhaps Mercator's third daughter, Catherine, was still alive; there is no record of her death, and no mention of her in Mercator's correspondence. Mercator's grandsons, Arnold's boys Gerard and Jean, who were in their twenties, still worked as engravers in the workshop, but for a man who had taken such a delight in his family, he must have felt the losses keenly.
Nonetheless, infirm and aged as he was, Mercator took the practical advice for his own well-being that he had offered to his son-in-law more than twenty years before, and found himself a new wife. In 1589, he married Gertrude Vierlings, the widow of a prosperous friend of his. It was a family occasion—Rumold married Gertrude's daughter at the same time. Mercator was seventy-seven years old, and like most of the major decisions of his life, this one was based on good sense rather than passion: Gertrude was another hardworking woman on whom he would be able to rely. Neither one needed financial security; Gertrude's husband, who had been mayor of Duisburg, had left her comfortably enough provided for, and Mercator himself certainly had no need to marry for money. Presumably, they each wanted companionship.
> There were few celebrations. Mercator shrank increasingly into his inner life; what Ghim had earlier referred to as periods of "profound meditation" became more and more frequent, attacks of depression from which neither his new wife nor his family could rouse him. There were constant worries about sickness and ill health—he began to be troubled by gout, the same affliction that had crippled Charles V—but overshadowing everything else was a growing and morbid terror of imminent death and judgment. His letters made frequent mention of sickness getting in the way of his work, and that remained by far his greatest fear. If he were to die, his great projected masterpiece would die with him. William Tyndale, Pierre du Fiefs victim more than fifty years before, had died with his translation of the Bible unfinished; the same thing might happen to the grand scheme of the Cosmographia, the crown and justification of Mercator's own life's work.
His friends were dead or dying. Gemma Frisius, his teacher, mentor, friend, and contemporary, had been gone for nearly forty years. His book on the design and use of the astrolabe, De Astrolabio, was published after his death. Vermeulen had died in Bremen ten years before. Christopher Plantin went home to Antwerp to die in 1589. John Dee was still alive in England, but he was a sick man.
Within a few months of his marriage, in 1589 Mercator published the second volume of his maps of the modern world. Perhaps Henry of Rantzau's maps of Sweden had arrived too late, or perhaps they had been unsatisfactory; in any case, the collection of twenty-two maps that appeared was limited to Greece, Italy, and the Balkans. This was the book in which Mercator seized on the name of Atlas—not after the mythical Titan whose bent figure, carrying the world on his shoulders as a punishment from the gods, was already a commonplace among geographers and cartographers, but in memory of another ancient and equally mythical figure.
The word atlas would not be used to describe a collection of maps until the entire set of volumes was published after Mercator's death, but in the preface to this collection, Mercator told the story of another Atlas, a great philosopher-king from Phoenicia who ruled in North Africa and was reputed to be the first man to design a globe. "My purpose is to follow this Atlas, a man so excelling in erudition, humanity, and wisdom, as from a lofty watchtower to contemplate Cosmography, as much as my strength and ability will permit me, to see if peradventure, by my diligence, I may find out some truths in things yet unknown, which may serve to the study of wisdom," he declared."11It is as close as he came to offering a description of himself and his own talents and aspirations, and the old man's reservations about his strength and ability reflected his anxieties about his ebbing powers.
Included in this latest volume of maps was a promise to the reader that Mercator would not fail to complete his task: "Finally, we will present all the regions of the world."12He was still working on twenty-nine maps that would cover the northern lands, and the maps that were planned for Spain and Portugal were still unstarted. Piled about his desk were maps of England, northern Europe, and the Arctic regions. A few, such as the map of England and Wales drawn by the Welsh physician, antiquarian, and cartographer Humfrey Lhuyd, were the same sources as those Ortelius had used in the first edition of the Theatrum nearly twenty years earlier, but many had been researched and drawn within the last few years. A Danish historian named Anders Sørensen Vedel13 had published a new map of Iceland in 1585 with more than two hundred place-names, all of which were carefully transcribed onto Mercator's version. The hopes of startling new private information from the English explorations in the Far North had been largely disappointed, but there were many changes to be compared, reconciled one with another, and incorporated into the new maps. The coastline of northern Scandinavia and Russia was radically different both from Mercator's earlier map of Europe and from his world map of 1569, with rivers, inlets, and peninsulas newly marked and named. Mercator was making no concessions to age or infirmity in his determination to produce the most up-to-date version possible.14
Then, on May 5, 1590, came the blow that made the threat of failure real and imminent: A stroke left him paralyzed on his left side. Not even Ghim could miss the anguish in his soul. "Often he complained with great sorrow in his heart that his illness would prevent him from finishing the works which . . . he had conceived in his mind, and in a sense had at his fingertips," Ghim wrote later.15For several weeks he was not only paralyzed but also unable to speak. His new daughter-in-law massaged his arms and legs, and he slept for hours at a time during the day, trying to recover his strength.
Reiner Solenander, one of the team of personal physicians who were treating Duke William at the ducal court in Diisseldorf, sent his advice and prescriptions in a last gesture of respect from the court to the old duke's faithful servant, but he could neither cure him nor ease the ultimate dread Mercator shared with so many of his contemporaries: the fear of hell and eternal damnation. He had feared this for his daughter Emerance, and he feared it for himself. Even the mercy he hoped for from his religion took on a brutal edge. Ghim could only look on in horror. "When the full use of speech had been restored to him, I saw him weep and strike his breast two or three times with his fist, saying 'Hit, burn, cut your servant, O Lord, and if you have not hit him hard enough, strike harder and sharper according to your will, so that I may be spared in the life to come!'"16
There was a fresh desperation about his studies: Unable to walk, and with his left arm useless, he had his family carry him, chair and all, into the study, where his books awaited him. He worked, Ghim said, with "his small store of strength," struggling to complete not only the final maps of his modern collection but also a commentary that would place his geographic work in the context of eternity. He wrote of "the beautiful order, the harmonious proportion, and the singular beauty" of Creation with the dignified wonder that had marked his writings about religion since he was a young man, and he also set out his justification for his life's work in geography. The title of this book, finally published after his death as the preface to the final volume of his atlas, was Cosmo-graphical Meditations Upon the Creation of the Universe, and the Universe as Created. It is a phrase that could have been applied to the Hereford mappamundi more than three centuries earlier, or to any of the hundreds of maps that preceded it—a view of mapmaking as a subjective, impressionistic, and imaginative art rather than the precise, scientific operation to which Mercator actually aspired in his work.
His fingers trembled, his hands were weak, and his eyes were sometimes struck blind, he explained to Haller, apologizing for writing that was occasionally illegible—but his words could have come from the days of his clear-eyed strength and confidence. His work, he declared, was intended for the world, for navigators, explorers, merchants, and great princes. Scholarship was a matter for the study, but the man of the world should look to politics and trade, he wrote. Maps were the eyewitness of empire, and without them, not just trade but also good government would be impossible. "Without geographical maps," he declared in his atlas, "merchants could not journey to the greatest and richest countries to trade with their inhabitants and make all the world the partners of Europe. Without maps, princes would know only with difficulty and through unreliable reports how they could best govern their domains with unwavering confidence."
Maybe those words would have had some resonance in the court of Charles V, the first emperor of an empire on which the Sun literally never set, but Charles had been dead for nearly forty years, and there was little grandeur left at the court of Mercator's protector and patron, Duke William. He had been reduced by a series of strokes to a pathetic, shambling figure, slumped awkwardly in his chair and slurring his words—a bitter parallel to Mercator's own situation. His son and heir, John William, suffered from bouts of madness that were becoming steadily more frequent and more serious.17The noble house that had promised so much, that had planned the university on which the young scholar from Leuven had built his unrewarded hopes, that had stood by him and supported him, seemed to be collapsing in madness and disgrace.
He was working on the final volume of the Atlas that would bring all his geographic work together, but his friends could tell that he had not long to live. "When I delight myself with reading your meditations, it is as if I heard the song of the swan," wrote Reiner Solenander from the ducal court in Dusseldorf—the swan, that is, that was reputed to sing before it died. "I wish that I could depart from my decrepit and unhealthy prince, and run to you for the sake of your health," he said.18
Solenander did come to treat his friend, but it was too late. A sudden and overwhelming cerebral hemorrhage finally killed him on December 2,1594, blood gushing from his mouth. A Lutheran priest was called, and the dying man struggled through the night, begging his family to arrange for public prayers to be said for him in the Salvatorkirche where he was to be buried. In death, as in life, he was thinking both of his religion and his place in society. When the end came, it was peaceful. The bookseller Arnold Mylius, who had heard the news in Cologne, described the moment of his death to Abraham Ortelius in a short, simple, and somber letter: "Dr Gerard Mercator died on 2nd of December. . . . Thus, little by little we all move on." He died about midday, "sitting in his chair before the hearth, as though dropping off to sleep."19
The World of Gerard Mercator Page 25