Mercator received an exemplary humanist education: first at the ‘groote school’ in ’s-Hertogenbosch, one of the best secondary schools in Europe, where the great humanist Desiderius Erasmus (1466/9–1536) studied; then Louvain University, second only to Paris in size and prestige, where he read philosophy. A generation earlier, scholars like Martin Waldseemüller had embraced the new humanist learning offered by universities like Louvain and Freiburg and the challenge of studying classical authors like Aristotle, but by the time Mercator arrived in the 1520s, the excitement had hardened into orthodoxy. For Mercator’s philosophical curriculum, this meant a slavish adherence to Aristotle – apart from where the pagan philosopher’s doctrines were deemed to contradict established Christian belief.
Although he appears to have followed the usual humanistic fashions, including changing his name to ‘Mercator’, a Latinized version of the German ‘Kremer’ (‘trader’), the young scholar seems to have left the university with more questions than answers. The humanist study he pursued found it difficult to accommodate either the new reformed theology or the increasingly technical demands of subjects like geography, to which he was drawn as a way of exploring the idea of creation in all its theological, philosophical and practical dimensions. As well as reading authors like Cicero, Quintilian, Martianus Capella, Macrobius and Boethius, he studied Ptolemy and the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela. But it was Aristotle in particular who provided the pious but curious young Mercator with a series of problems: his belief in the eternity of the universe and the everlasting nature of time and matter was at odds with biblical teaching on the creation out of nothing. Louvain’s theologians skated over the fine detail of Aristotle’s arguments, insisting that his distinction between a mutable earth and fixed heaven corresponded well enough to their Christian equivalents. Within the changing field of geographical study, Aristotle’s view of a world separated into klimata or parallel zones was proving hard to defend in the wake of Portuguese and Spanish voyages to the New World and South-east Asia. Looking back later in life, Mercator admitted that such apparently irreconcilable differences between the Greek thinkers and Louvain’s theologians led him ‘to have doubts about the truth of all philosophers’.8
Few students were brave enough to challenge Aristotle’s authority at Louvain, and Mercator was no exception. A poor student of humble origins, a German native in a Dutch-speaking world with no influential connections, Mercator must have seen a potential career in speculative philosophy as limited. In his ‘Life of Mercator’, Walter Ghim recalled that ‘when it was clear that these studies would not enable him to support a family in the years to come’, Mercator ‘gave up philosophy for astronomy and mathematics’.9
By 1533 Mercator was in Antwerp, studying both disciplines and beginning his association with a group of men who would oversee his transformation from aspiring philosopher into geographer. These were the members of the first generation of Flemish geographers who, following Magellan’s voyage, were trying to project the terrestrial world onto globes as well as maps. Three men in particular would offer Mercator different possibilities in the pursuit of his newly chosen profession. The first, Franciscus Monachus, was a Franciscan monk trained at Louvain and living in Mechelen. He designed the earliest known terrestrial globe in the Low Countries (now lost), dedicated to the privy council of Mechelen and accompanied by a surviving pamphlet describing a pro-Habsburg globe (in terms of the Moluccas), in which ‘the nonsense of Ptolemy and other early geographers is refuted’.10 Mercator was also taught geometry and astronomy by Gemma Frisius, the brilliant Louvain-trained mathematician and instrument maker, who was already making a name for himself as a geographer, designing globes and making enormous advances in land surveying. In 1533 he published a treatise on the use of triangulation which used techniques evolved from repeated measurements taken across the flat, featureless landscape of the Low Countries. Frisius also developed new ways of measuring longitude. His terrestrial globes came with pamphlets explaining how to measure longitude at sea by using a timepiece, and although the technology for making such clocks was still rudimentary, he provided the first understanding of how the problem might be successfully resolved. The third figure who had a decisive influence on Mercator in the 1530s was the Louvain-based goldsmith and engraver Gaspar van der Heyden. Both Monachus and Frisius came to van der Heyden’s workshop when they needed an artisan to make and engrave their globes, and it was here that Mercator learnt the practical and technical skills involved in making globes, maps and scientific instruments, as well the art of copperplate engraving. A monk, a mathematician and a goldsmith: these three men and the vocations they pursued shaped Mercator’s subsequent career. From Monachus he saw that it might be possible to combine a religious life with a scholarly exploration of the boundaries of geography and cosmography; from Frisius he understood the need for mastery of mathematics and geometry in the pursuit of an accurate cosmography; and from van der Heyden he learnt the skills necessary to give physical form to the latest designs in mapmaking, globe construction and instrumentation.
As he struggled to digest such disparate knowledge, Mercator identified one particular skill in which he could excel: copperplate engraving, using the Italian humanist style of italic, ‘chancery’ hand. Waldseemüller and his generation had relied on the medium of Gothic capitals cut into woodcut blocks when making maps, but, as we have seen, each letter took up a great deal of space, and their upright, square style could look clumsy and easily betray the insertion of different type. Mercator’s generation of humanist scholars, by contrast, had gradually adopted the Roman chancery style developed in fifteenth-century Italy, which looked elegant and compact and even had its own mathematical rules. Mercator quickly mastered the style and the skill with which to engrave it onto copper plates. Examples of the italic style used on maps printed in Rome and Venice were beginning to circulate among Antwerp’s legions of printers and booksellers, and some printers, seeing the advantages of copperplate engraving, were beginning to experiment with using italic script on their maps. Mercator saw his opportunity to make an impact on his chosen field, and he took it.
The effect on mapmaking was immediate. Copperplate engraving transformed the appearance of maps and globes. Gone were the awkward Gothic lettering and large blank spaces created by the imprint of the woodblock, replaced instead by graceful, intricate letter forms and the artistic rendition of sea and land from the engraver’s use of stippling. Engraving also allowed for speedy and virtually invisible corrections and revisions. A copper plate could be rubbed down and re-engraved in just a few hours, something that was physically impossible with woodcuts. Printed maps using the medium suddenly looked completely different; mapmakers now had a method by which to express (and revise) themselves cartographically, and Mercator had placed himself at the forefront of the shift in style. In the space of just four years between 1536 and 1540 Mercator went from an eager pupil of Monachus, Frisius and van der Heyden to one of the most respected geographers in the Low Countries. Four maps published in these crucial years, one in each current field of mapmaking – a terrestrial globe, a religious map, a world map and finally a regional map of Flanders – show him struggling to define his geographical vision even as he refined his distinctive cartographic style.
Having spent just a year in Antwerp, by 1534 Mercator was back in Louvain, and in 1536 he was involved in his first geographical publication, a terrestrial globe. Commissioned by the emperor Charles V, like many globes of its time, this was a collaborative affair, designed by Frisius, printed by van der Heyden, and engraved on copper plates by Mercator in what would become his distinctive elegant italic hand. The finished globe was dedicated to Maximilianus Transylvanus, adviser to the emperor and author of the pro-Habsburg treatise De Moluccis Insulis. It is hardly surprising to see that the globe reproduces Ribeiro’s political geography in claiming the Moluccas as a Habsburg possession. It also flies the imperial Habsburg eagle over Tunis, captured by Charles f
rom the Ottomans in July 1535, and shows recent Spanish settlements in the New World. Where politics mattered little (in most of Asia and Africa), the globe simply reproduced the traditional Ptolemaic outlines. America was dutifully labelled a Spanish possession but also represented separately from Asia, in line with Waldseemüller’s 1507 map, which Mercator probably saw around this time. The globe celebrated for its paymasters the international reach of Habsburg imperial power, but its significance for the scholarly community lay not in its political content but its form. This was the first known terrestrial globe to use copperplate engraving, and the first to use Mercator’s italic hand, which established its own geographical conventions, with capitals used for regions, roman script for places, and cursive for descriptive explanations.11 Nobody had seen anything quite like it before, and this was as much down to Mercator’s calligraphy as Frisius’s political geography.
For his first independent map, Mercator turned from political geography to religion. In 1538 he published an engraved wall map of the Holy Land which was designed, according to its title, ‘for the better understanding of the Bible’.12 It allowed Mercator to continue his interest in theology, but it also offered him the possibility of urgently needed financial success – no regional maps sold better than those of the Holy Land. Mercator drew on a series of incomplete maps of the Holy Land published by the German humanist Jacob Ziegler five years earlier in Strasbourg, which had provided only a partial historical geography of the region; his beautifully engraved map updated and expanded Ziegler’s geography, and added one of the central stories of the Old Testament, the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt to Canaan.
Fig. 19 Lucas Cranach, ‘The Position and Borders of the Promised Land’, 1520s.
There was historical precedent for portraying biblical scenes on maps. Medieval mappaemundi like the one at Hereford also showed such scenes, including Exodus, and early printed editions of Ptolemy contained maps of the Holy Land too. But Luther’s ideas led to a new conception of the place of geography within theology. Before the 1520s, the task of the Christian mapmaker was quite clear: it was to describe the world created by God, and to anticipate the Last Judgement. But one of the many consequences of Luther’s challenge to orthodox Christian belief was a different emphasis on the geography of the created world. Lutheran mapmakers no longer emphasized God as a distant Creator of the world that could be understood only through intercession. Instead they wanted a more personal God whose Divine Providence was present in the here and now of people’s lives. As a result, Lutheran statements on geography tended to downplay both Creation and Church history after the peregrinations of the Apostles, choosing instead to show how the world of God functioned. In 1549 Luther’s friend Philipp Melanchthon published Initia doctrinae physicae (‘The Origins of Physics’), in which he wrote:
This magnificent theatre – the sky, lights, stars, earth – is proof of God the Ruler and Former of the world. Whoever casts his eyes around will recognise in the order of things God the architect who is permanently at work, preserving and protecting everything. In accordance with God’s will we may trace His footprints in this world by studying the sciences.13
Melanchthon avoided describing God as Creator, calling him instead the ‘Former of the world’, the divine architect whose hand can be discerned through careful study of the sciences, and geography in particular. God’s providential governance of the world can be revealed through empirical scientific study, independent of biblical exegesis. Inadvertently, Melanchthon’s arguments would enable later sceptical geographers and mapmakers to question the validity of the Bible’s geography.
By the 1530s these reformed beliefs were already affecting maps and their makers, and inspired a completely new genre of maps in Lutheran Bibles.14 Luther took a more literal approach to geography than Melanchthon, writing that he wanted ‘a good geography and more correct map of the Land of Promise’ of the Israelites.15 He tried to obtain maps to illustrate his German translation of the New Testament in 1522, and although this failed, three years later the Zurich printer Christopher Froschauer (who was closely associated with the leader of the Swiss reformed church, Huldrych Zwingli) published an Old Testament based on Luther’s translations, illustrated with the first map ever published in a Bible. The subject was the Exodus from Egypt.
In 1526 the Antwerp printer Jacob van Liesvelt reproduced a version of the same map in the first Dutch edition of a Lutheran Bible, which was in turn copied by at least two other local printers prior to the publication of Mercator’s map. The map copied in all these Lutheran Bibles was Lucas Cranach’s ‘The Position and Borders of the Promised Land’, a woodblock made in the early 1520s. Like Ziegler, Cranach was a convert to Lutheranism, a close personal friend of Luther, and one of the most prolific and celebrated painters of the German Reformation. Mapping the story of Exodus had particular theological significance for Luther and his followers, because they saw themselves as latter-day Israelites, escaping the corruption and persecution of Rome. Luther interpreted Exodus as representing fidelity to God and the power of personal faith, in contrast to the traditional interpretations (as seen on the Hereford mappamundi) of the prefiguration of the resurrection or the importance of baptism.
Lutheran biblical maps concentrated on particular places and stories from the Bible that exemplified the reformed teaching. Maps of Eden, the division of Canaan, the Holy Land in the time of Christ, and the eastern Mediterranean of Paul and the Apostles account for nearly 80 per cent of sixteenth-century Bible maps.16 In 1549 the English printer Reyner Wolfe published the first New Testament to include maps, telling his readers that ‘the knowledge of Cosmography’ was essential to ‘well read the Bible’. On the map describing St Paul’s travels, Wolfe observed that ‘by the distance of the miles, thou mayest easily perceive what painful travaile St Paul took in preaching the word of God through the regions of Asia, Africa, and Europe’.17 Where medieval maps prefigured the end of the world, those of the reformed religion were more interested in tracing the visible signs of God’s providence. As Luther continued to stress the importance of the private reading of Scripture over the official doctrine of theological institutions, maps became vital adjuncts to such reading, providing ways of illuminating the Scriptures. They gave the reader a more immediate experience of the literal truth of the biblical events described and provided the faithful with directed readings of the Bible in line with Luther’s (or in some cases Calvin’s) interpretations.
By the late 1530s maps of the Holy Land portraying the Exodus were exclusively the preserve of Lutheran mapmakers. So why was Mercator, with his close links with the Catholic Habsburgs, drawing so explicitly on not only the geography but also the theology of such maps? The title of his map stated that it was designed for ‘the better understanding of both testaments’, a typically Lutheran statement. Was this indeed a sign of Mercator’s Lutheran sympathies, or simply the enthusiastic naivety of a brilliant young mapmaker caught up in the excitement of a new direction in mapmaking? Flirting with religion on maps was a dangerous business, with potentially fatal consequences. The Spanish scholar Miguel Servetus was condemned repeatedly by both Catholic and Protestant authorities for his ‘heretical’ publications throughout the 1530s, which included an edition of Ptolemy’s Geography (1535) that contained a map of the Holy Land on which the Spaniard criticized the fertility of Palestine.18 Servetus was burned at the stake by the Calvinist authorities of Geneva in 1553.
If Mercator realized the potential dangers of his first independent map, he showed no signs of it. He started work on a second map, using his knowledge of mathematics to design a map of the whole world. Just as Luther’s theology had affected mapmaking, so were the seaborne discoveries, already recorded by a number of Portuguese, Spanish and German mapmakers. The surge of interest in representing the globe following Magellan’s circumnavigation in 1522 (and discussed in the previous chapter) captured the increasing global awareness of the earth, and gave
its rulers a powerful object to hold in their hands as they proclaimed dominion over the whole world. But globe-making only sidestepped the perennial problem of how to project this spherical globe onto a plane surface, which was necessary for accurate navigation right round the globe – a pressing requirement now the Spanish and Portuguese had divided the earth in two. Waldseemüller had tried to do so by returning to Ptolemy’s projections, but these methods only covered the , the inhabited world, not the earth’s whole 360 degrees of longitude and 180 degrees of latitude. Mapmakers like Mercator now faced the challenge of formulating a completely new projection using mathematical rules.
In designing their projections, mapmakers were confronted with three possible options. They could adopt Monachus’s solution, of simply doubling the classic circular representation of the , to show hemispheres, using straight parallels and curved meridians. They could divide the world into discrete shapes to produce globe gores of the kind designed by Waldseemüller and Frisius. Or they could project the whole globe onto a flat surface using a geometric figure, such as a cylinder, a cone or a rectangle. Each method had its drawbacks. Double hemispheres and globe gores needed to be on an enormous scale to be of any real use. Ptolemy and his predecessor Marinus of Tyre had already struggled with cylindrical and conical projections, and their distortion of size, shape or direction. Initially, Renaissance mapmakers reproduced modified versions of both these projections. But as the new discoveries breached the parameters of the known world and mapmakers like Mercator came into ever closer contact with mathematicians like Frisius, new shapes were proposed to represent the earth: the world became oval, trapezoidal, sinusoidal, even cordiform (heart-shaped).19 Altogether, at least sixteen methods of projection were in use by the end of the sixteenth century.
A History of the World in 12 Maps Page 29