6. Columbus, Journal, cited in ibid., p. 54.
7. Christopher Columbus, letter of October 1498, cited in ibid., p. 287.
8. Christopher Columbus, entry for Wednesday, October 24, 1492, Journal, cited in ibid.
9. Cited in Donald Weinstein, ed., Ambassador from Venice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, i960). Priuli, who died in 1512, was a nephew of the ninety-fourth doge of Venice, Antonio Priuli. His diaries were republished by Citta de Castello, Bologna, in 1912.
10. Cabral spent ten days exploring the South American coastline and rivers, and then sailed on to India, having claimed the land for Portugal and named it Isla da Santa Cruz, or Island of the Holy Cross—a name which demonstrates that he had no idea that it was part of a continent. Some historians believe that Cabral sailed intentionally to Brazil, following earlier sightings of the land. Columbus, on his third voyage across the Atlantic in 1498, had sighted the northern coastline of South America.
11. The phrase occurs in a pamphlet, Mundus Novus (The New World), which Vespucci published in 1503 or 1504, after his second expedition to the Americas.
12. Keats's reference to "stout Cortez" in his sonnet was the poet's mistake.
13. Martin Waldseemiiller, Cosmographia, 1507, cited in John Noble Wilford, The Mapmakers (New York: Vintage, 1982), p. 84.
14. There has been considerable controversy over recent suggestions that a Chinese fleet circumnavigated the world, and also landed on the American mainland, as early as 1421.
15. George Beste,.4 True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discoverie... Under the Conduct of Martin Frobisher (1578), cited in James McDermott, Martin Frobisher, Elizabethan Privateer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 242.
16. From the Italian portolano, meaning "pilot-book," derived from the word porto, or port.
17. Michiel Coignet, "Instruction nouvelle . . . touchant l'art de naviguer" (Antwerp, 1581), cited in Lloyd A. Brown, The Story of Maps (London: Cresset Press, 1951).
18. Traditional seaman's saying, quoted in William Galvani, Mainsail to the Wind (New York: Sheridan House, 1999), p. 71.
CHAPTER FOUR. Among the Brethren of"the Common Life
1. Albrecht Diirer, Diary of a Journey in the Netherlands (1520—21).
2. The twentieth-century psychologist Carl Jung described Bosch as "master of monsters, discoverer of the unconscious."
3. Lynda Harris, in her book The Secret Heresy of Hieronymus Bosch (London: Floris Books, 1995), argues intriguingly that Bosch was a secret adherent of the heretical sect, the Cathars, who rejected the entire physical world as the kingdom of Satan, and the Roman Church as his embassy on Earth. They had been cruelly persecuted by the Inquisition for hundreds of years, so if Bosch had any connection with them, he would have been at pains to keep it hidden.
4. The painting is now in Madrid's Prado Museum.
5. Now in the Louvre, Paris.
6. Quoted in R. B. Drummond, Erasmus, His Life and Character (London: Smith, Elder, 1873), p. 7.
7. Some universities could be more demanding than others: Lynn Thorndike, in University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 353, quotes a fifteenth-century decree of the University of Heidelberg warning a student that "if he does not know how to read, he shall pay careful attention in other respects lest he annoy or impede the master or masters or scholars by clamour or insolence." Leuven, which already enjoyed a reputation as one of the most academically distinguished seats of learning of Europe, would have been less relaxed in its demands.
CHAPTER FIVE. At the College of the Castle
1. Nicolas Vernulaeus, Academia Lovaniesis (1667), cited in H. Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 263—68.
2. Erasmus to Guillaume Taleus, August 3,1521, cited in J. Van Raemdonck, Gerard Mercator, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Saint Nicolas, 1869), p. 19.
3. Leon van der Essen, in Une institution d'enseignement superieur (Brussels: University of Leuven Press, 1921), says no student was allowed to take part in any official activity unless he was wearing a long, sober gown that reached to his ankles.
4. Pope Adrian VI, as he became known, started a process of reform in the Catholic Church but died in September 1523 after only eighteen months. He was the last non-Italian pope for over 450 years.
5. Gemma Frisius, De usu globi, in De principiis astronomiae et cosmographiae (Antwerp, 1530).
6. Mercator to Wolfgang Haller, March 3, 1581. Mercator's surviving correspondence is edited by M. Van Durme in Correspondance Mercatorienne (Antwerp: De Neder-landsche Boekhandel, 1959), from which all his letters are quoted.
7. Ibid.
8. Mercator, dedication to Evangelicae historiae quadriparta Monas..., (1592).
9. Martin Luther to John Lang, May 1517, in Preserved Smith, Life and Letters of Martin Luther (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), p. 26.
10. Mercator, dedication to Evangelicae historiae quadriparta Monas...
11. Ibid.
CHAPTER six. Doubts and Dangers
i. There are no detailed records of Mercator's visit to Antwerp and Mechelen. Walter Ghim says it lasted for "some years." J. Van Raemdonck, in his authoritative biography Gerard Mercator, sa vie et ses oeuvres, suggests that 1534 is the most likely date for his return, making his stay in Antwerp and Mechelen about two years. All that can be certain is that Mercator was back in Leuven before starting work with Gemma Frisius in 1535.
2. Walter Ghim, Vita Mercatoris, translation in A. S. Osley, Mercator: A Monograph on the Lettering of Maps, etc, in the 16th Century (London: Faber, 1969), p. 185.
CHAPTER SEVEN. Gemma's Globe
1. Granvelle left his paintings behind when he was sent away from Antwerp by Charles V in 1564. They were eventually looted by rioting Spanish troops in 1572.
2. Niclaes Jonghelinck was the brother of the successful sculptor and artist Jacob Jonghelinck.
CHAPTER EIGHT. Craftsman and Cartographer
1. Ghim, Vita Mercatoris.
2. Macropedius, The Rebels, chorus to act 3, 1535, in Yehudi Lindeman, Two Comedies of Macropedius (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1983), pp. 64-65.
3. Molanus (Jan Vermeulen) to Mercator, March 24, 1566. Vermeulen used his Latinized name, Molanus, in his correspondence.
4. Reuwich printed the first three editions of the Peregrinatio at his own house in Mainz between i486 and 1488.
5. Ziegler's book, Quae Intus Continentur, was published in 1532. It relied largely on Old Testament sources.
6. Mercator to Andreas Masius, May 22, 1567.
7. Ghim, Vita Mercatoris.
8. Van Maes's commentary controversially suggested that although Moses had been the author of the Pentateuch, later editors had added to his work.
9. Andreas Van Maes to Georges Cassander, 1563.
10. William Prescott's classic History of the Conquest of Peru (1847) explains: "The distance was so great, and opportunities for communication so rare, that the tidings were usually very long behind the occurrence of the events to which they related."
11. Werner's Libellus de quattuor terrarum orbis in piano figurationibus was published in 1514.
CHAPTER NINE. The Greatest Globe in the World
1. Mercator to Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, August 4,1540.
2. Ibid.
3. One of the gores carried the inscription "Edebat Gerardus Mercator Rupelmun-danus cum privilegio Ces Maiestatis as an sex Lovanii an 1541" (Published by Gerard Mercator of Rupemonde under the license of His Majesty for six years at Leuven in the year 1541).
4. During the 1540s, he also manufactured a pair of globes to fill an order from Charles V. The globes are lost, but it seems likely that the celestial globe would have been a prototype for the one he produced for sale in 1551.
5. "I think we do know the sweet Roman hand . . ."—Twelfth Night, act 3, scene 4.
6. Mercator, Literarum latinarum, quas italicas... (1539—40).
&
nbsp; 7. His pictures showing how to hold a quill pen were shamelessly plagiarized in another writing manual published in Zurich a few years later.
8. Benito Arias Montano oversaw the publication of Bibles in the Netherlands on behalf of the king. He later became royal librarian.
CHAPTER TEN. In the Hands of the Inquisition
1. In later official documents concerning his arrest, he is referred to as M. Gerard Mercatoris.
2. Pierre de Corte to Mary of Hungary, February 1543.
3. Pierre de Corte to Mary of Hungary, February 23, 1543.
4. Francisco de Enzinas, La chasse aux Lutheriens des Pays-Bas, ed. Albert Savine (Paris: Louis Michaud, 1910).
5. Francisco de Enzinas, La chasse aux Lutheriens des Pays Bas, ed. Albert Savine (Paris: Louis Michaud, 1910), p. 127.
6. The note was interpreted four centuries later by the Belgian historian Antoine de Smet, a former map curator at the Royal Library of Belgium.
7. Mercator to Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, October 9, 1544.
CHAPTER ELEVEN. Two New Arrivals
1. John Dee to Mercator, July 20,1558.
2. Quoted in W. H. Sherman, John Dee (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).
3. John Dee to Mercator, July 20,1558.
4. John Dee, The Compendious Rehearsal.... 1592, cited in E. G. R. Taylor, Tudor Geography, 1485—1583 (London: Methuen, 1930).
5. Ibid.
6. Acts of Privy Council NS 5, no. 261, cited in Benjamin Woolley, The Queen's Conjuror (London: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 310.
7. Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr Faustus, prologue to scene 1, 120.
8. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1971), p. 90.
9. All personal correspondence between the two men has been lost to history.
10. Colin Clair, in Christopher Plantin (London: Cassell, i960), p. 12, quotes an entry in the register of the burgesses of Antwerp that notes the arrival of "Christoffel Plantyn . . . van Tours en Franche" in that year.
11. When the Spanish left Antwerp in 1576 Plantin changed sides again. The same presses that had been printing Bibles turned out virulent nationalist pamphlets for the States General that ruled the city. The man who had kept King Philip so well supplied with Catholic prayer-books and hymnals then dedicated one of his books to William of Orange, the leader of the nationalist cause and the king's bitterest enemy, and he became the most loyal supporter of the new regime. In 1579, with the Spanish beginning the systematic task of reconquering the lowland cities they had left, he finally slipped out of the town where he had made his home and his fortune in thirty-five years of shifting alliances, friendships, and loyalties. Thirteen months of siege, in which the River Scheldt was blockaded by the Spanish, saw Antwerp starved into surrender, while Plantin stayed safely in Leyden, some seventy miles to the north. Three years later, the danger past, he returned quietly to Antwerp, where he died in 1589 at the age of seventy-five.
12. Mercator, dedication to Evangelicae historiae quadripartita Monas...
CHAPTER TWELVE. A New Life
1. The massive, square blocks of the new church with its high, arched Gothic windows, its steep pitched roof, and its intricate carved pinnacles, stained today with the grime of a heavy industrial past, still look over the carefully preserved ruins of the ancient town square in Duisburg. Twin steel frameworks mark the position of the fourteenth-century market-hall, its foundations revealed by modern archaeologists exactly where Corputius depicted them. But the spire of the church, which is the focal point of his view of the town, is missing; only a curiously stumplike tower remains. The church, a triumph of the sixteenth century, was a victim of the twentieth, targeted by Allied bombers during World War II.
2. Mercator, "Dedicatory Letter to John William the Younger, Duke of Jiilich, Cleves, and Berg," Atlas, sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura (1594).
3. Ghim, Vita Mercatoris, p. 192.
4. Ibid., p. 193.
5. Ibid., p. 192.
6. It is not clear how much of this plan was ever completed. Mercator's dedication to his atlas of 1595 suggests that the work went on for years.
7. In Van Durme's Correspondance Mercatorienne, the first letter to Vermeulen is dated May 1559 and the last October 1577, but the tone of the first letter suggests they had already been corresponding for some time.
8. Molanus to Mercator, September 1,1575.
9. Molanus to Mercator, March 24,1566.
10. Mercator to Wolfgang Haller, March 23, 1582.
11. Molanus to Mercator, September 1,1575.
12. Molanus to Mercator, April 8, 1575.
13. Mercator to Molanus, July 27, 1576.
14. Ibid.
15. Charles had probably read references to similar globes owned by Archimedes in the third century BC and by the mathematician and inventor Hero of Alexandria in the first century.
16. Ghim, Vita Mercatoris, pp. 186—87.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN. Our Europe
1. The Dictionary of Belgian Biography notes that Vermeulen left the Neatherlands for Bremen in 1553. It is not clear whether he was banished or simply fled to escape the threat of arrest.
2. Mercator to Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, August 4,1540.
3. Mercator to Abraham Ortelius, November 22, 1570.
4. Ghim, Vita Mercatoris, p. 187.
5. John Dee and Christopher Plantin were also important contacts of Ortelius.
6. Ghim, Vita Mercatoris, p. 187.
7. The second edition of the map was also believed to have vanished completely until a single copy was discovered in 1898 in the library of Basle University. Another was found some years later in the library of the grand duke of Weimar, and a third in 1936 in the Italian city of Perugia. These are now believed to be the only surviving copies.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN. A Mysterious Commission
1. Mercator to Wolfgang Haller, March 23, 1582. Haller had a reputation of his own for his avid collecting of details of weather patterns in his native Switzerland.
2. Molanus to Mercator, August 10,1559.
3. Molanus to Bartholomew Mercator, 1560. Like his father, Bartholomew used the name Mercator in his correspondence.
4. Molanus to Mercator, August 10, 1559.
5. Peter Barber, in The Mercator Atlas of Europe, ed. M. Watelet (Pleasant Hill, Oregon: Walking Tree Press, 1998), suggests that the map was probably delivered to Mercator during 1561.
6. The only printed maps of Britain to be had were a twenty-year-old version drawn in Italy by a Catholic exile named George Lily and various unsatisfactory copies of an anonymous and unfinished map drawn on two parchment skins in the mid-fourteenth century.
7. Letter to Sir William Cecil, 1559. Quoted by Barber in The Mercator Atlas of Europe, p. 70.
8. Letter from Thomas Byschop to Sir William Cecil (1561 or 1562), quoted in D. G. Moir et al., The Early Maps of Scotland to 1850 (Edinburgh: Scottish Geographical Society, 1973), vol. 1, p. 13.
9. The pope's line was moved westward to the meridian 46°37' W by agreement between the two nations a few months later in the Treaty of Tordesillas—a change that gave the newly discovered land of Brazil to Portugal just six years later. There was bitter argument over the effect of extending the line to the other side of the world, where it proved impossible to agree on which side of it the Spice Islands were situated. Modern explorers, ancient geographers, and travelers' tales were all called in evidence by the Spanish and Portuguese claimants, but in the end, politics and hard cash ended the dispute. Charles V, Holy Roman emperor and also king of Spain, desperately needed funds for his wars with the French and sold his claim to the islands in 1529 for 350,000 ducats. It was not a high price—twenty-four years later, still chronically short of money, Charles spent six times that sum on the disastrous siege of Metz alone—but a modern atlas shows that the islands did in fact lie comfortably on the Portuguese side.
10. A
ttributed in German Arciniegas, Caribbean Sea of the New World, trans. Harriet de Onis (New York: Knopf, 1946), p. 118.
11. Quoted in Taylor, Tudor Geography, p. 121.
12. Quoted in Richard Hakluyt, Divers Voyages (1582).
13. In Mercator's later world map of 1569, he followed other cartographers in naming this passage the Strait of Anian, after a kingdom called Anan by Marco Polo. Modern research suggests that this may be the island of Hainan, off the southern coast of China. Efforts to find the mythical strait, which Jonathan Swift placed close to his equally mythical kingdom of Brobdingnag, continued well into the nineteenth century.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN. In the Forests of Lorraine
1. Duke Charles's maternal grandmother, Isabella Habsburg, was Charles V's sister.
2. Ghim, Vita Mercatoris, p. 187.
3. Ibid., p. 192.
4. Ibid., p. 187.
5. The French poet and storyteller Jean La Fontaine, in 1633.
6. Georg Hoefnagel's Civitates orbis terrarum (1561) quotes an anonymous author, writing in 1532.
7. The story is mentioned in the edition of Mercator's atlas published by Jodocus Hondius in 1606. The prefect of Poitiers was fascinated enough by the story in the late nineteenth century to mount an unsuccessful search for the inscriptions.
8. Gerard Mercator, Ptolemy's Geographia (1584).
9. Gerard Mercator, Chronologia (1569).
CHAPTER SIXTEEN. Tragedy
1. Van Raemdonck, Gerard Mercator, sa vie et ses oeuvres, p. 92.
2. Juvenal, Satires, 4,1. no.
3. Martin Dorpius complained in 1515 about a Greek edition of the New Testament that Erasmus had prepared, and later challenged him to speak out against Luther. Sir Thomas More later wrote to him in Erasmus's defense. Dorpius is a Latin word meaning "from Dusseldorf."
4. Mercator, preface to the Chronologia.
5. Molanus to Mercator, February 8,1575.
The World of Gerard Mercator Page 27