Intrepid humanists began (re)discovering ancient manuscripts, and brought them out of obscurity with the help of those same printers. Ann Blair notes that the driving force behind it all was the Renaissance “info-lust that sought to gather and manage as much information as possible.” In a way that had never been possible in human history (and wouldn’t be again until the Internet), Europeans suddenly had access to an explosive amount of new information.
However, not everyone agreed that this flood of knowledge was beneficial. Some writers had been complaining for centuries that we already had “too many” books (a concept we fundamentally don’t understand, but that was nevertheless quite widespread). In the first century CE Roman philosopher Seneca declared that “the abundance of books is distraction.” Erasmus, the sixteenth-century scholar whose fame was spread far and wide by printing presses, infamously said, “Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books?”
The success with which Europe handled its first information age is decidedly mixed. On the one hand, it forced writers to develop more advanced methods of containing and organizing information. On the other, even writers with the best of intentions were sometimes unable to distinguish between trustworthy sources and (in retrospect) preposterous ones. More than anyone else, the perceptive and talented Gerard Mercator embodied this absurd challenge.
Mercator’s story really begins more than a thousand years before his birth, with a Greco-Egyptian geographer named Claudius Ptolemy. Ptolemy was to mapmaking what Isaac Newton would be to physics: the foundation. In the second century CE, Ptolemy tried to delineate a scientific geography based on observation. He adapted lines of longitude and latitude that stretched out over the world, dividing and organizing the globe so that coordinates could be taken and distances properly measured. Two dozen hand-drawn maps contained the entire planet, neatly described in Ptolemy’s groundbreaking work, the Geographia.
So important was the Geographia that fourteen centuries later, Mercator would build on it to spark a golden age of cartography. Fourteen centuries later. This is like ARPANET being created in 1977, but the Internet not existing until the year 3377. There is a fairly good reason for its taking fourteen hundred years to advance from Ptolemaic maps to Mercatorial maps. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Ptolemy’s work was lost and essentially forgotten in Europe. Luckily for civilization, Arab scientists were experiencing their own golden age, during the European “dark ages,” and were using and preserving manuscripts of Ptolemy’s work. If it weren’t for them, we may have lost Ptolemy entirely.
The Geographia was translated into Latin from a Greek manuscript as early as 1406, and Byzantine scholars began sharing it more widely with their Italian counterparts after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. However, it wasn’t until the invention of the printing press that Ptolemy’s work was introduced to Europe on a mass scale. With the Renaissance’s lust for information, the ancient geographer’s maps were re-created and published all over the Western world, ushering in a reawakening of cartographical methodology. The Geographia was first printed in Rome in 1469 by Sweynheim and Pannartz, two German printers who introduced the art to Italy. Today this edition of Geographia is incredibly rare: in the past seventy-five years, only one copy has ever appeared at auction. If you were to find a copy in your attic—you won’t, but let’s just say—you would probably be able to sell it for close to half a million dollars.
The Age of Discovery went hand in hand with the Ptolemaic revival. Columbus carried a copy of the Geographia on his first transatlantic voyage. The fact that he was carrying it with him in 1492 should raise a red flag, as his voyage is not necessarily a shining example of geographical understanding. On the reconstructions of Ptolemy’s maps, Africa resembled an amorphous blob rising out of a mythical southern continent, and Asia was close enough to Spain for Columbus to (as Sarah Palin might say) see it from his house.
Ptolemy’s geography was far from perfect, but unlike those who would follow, he tried to base his maps on reports from people who had actually been to the places he was drawing. While this may seem like an obvious, fundamental approach to making maps, we are assigning way too much credit to the human race.
In the centuries between 300 and 1300 CE, maps in the West were drawn less from basic observation and more from scriptural observation. The world was often depicted so that Jerusalem (or the Garden of Eden) lay at its center. This is why we talk about being “oriented”: it literally means “to the east,” or facing Jerusalem (from Europe). Biblical passages had a dramatic impact on mapmaking, such as a verse from II Esdras that required the land-to-water ratio to be a staggering six to one. While this would make the hurdle of reaching Asia require little more than a running leap from Spain, it would also spell the end of life as we know it, since we need water on three-quarters of our planet for things like rain to work. Yet an accurate depiction of the natural world wasn’t really the goal of these maps. As the historian Daniel Boorstin put it, “they were not so much maps of knowledge as maps of Scriptural dogma.”
The boy who would lead cartography back onto its observational course was raised in Antwerp twenty-five years after Columbus first landed in the Western Hemisphere. He was born as Geert (or Gerhard) de Kremer to a relatively poor family. This was a time when oats cost an incredible twenty-seven groats per viertel. For those who aren’t experts in sixteenth-century Flemish currency, food budgets could easily consume three-quarters of a worker’s total income. Fortunately for young Gerhard, his more affluent uncle sponsored him from early education to his entrance into the University of Leuven.
Of the many rules at this renowned university, one stood above them all: Thou shalt not question the ancients, and by “ancients,” they meant the Bible, and Aristotle, and Ptolemy. Dissecting the story of the Creation in the Book of Genesis or Aristotle’s corpus was tantamount to performing an actual dissection on an actual corpus. It was taboo and, most important, strictly forbidden.
This reverence for the ancients had created a fashion for academics to Latinize their given names. Theologian and humanist Desiderius Erasmus started life as Gerrit Gerritszoon, born to parents who obviously didn’t like him very much. The famous anatomist Andreas Vesalius was born Andries van Wesel for the same reason. Gerhard de Kremer tried to reinvent himself, too. Kremer is the Flemish word for “peddler,” so Gerhard significantly upgraded his name to Gerardus Mercator (mercator being Latin for “merchant,” specifically the booksellers who went from town to town).
While Mercator remade his name in the tongue of the ancients, he was slowly, and quietly, losing his faith in them. He once remarked about his time in the university, “When I saw that the world of Genesis according to Moses did not fit well in many ways with Aristotle, I began to doubt the truth of all philosophers.”
The authority of the ancients was beginning to crumble. Every year, explorers were bringing back information that seemed to fly in the face of previously authoritative statements. Thanks to the advent of the printing press, it was relatively easy to cross-reference new information with older sources. The inconsistencies started stacking up. Amerigo Vespucci, immortalized in the names of North and South America, had seen for himself that the claims of Aristotle and Ptolemy meant nothing when compared with actual evidence: “Let it be said in a whisper, experience is certainly worth more than theory.”
Mercator was an observer at heart, a critical skill for any geographer. Being skeptical of ancient authorities such as the Bible or the Corpus Aristotelicum was a dangerous undertaking at the conservative University of Leuven. Yet Mercator had the spirit of a modern scientist, valuing knowledge that came through direct, reproducible observation. And thus we arrive at one of the central struggles of Mercator’s life and work. Mercator was an appeaser. His sixteenth-century worldview demanded that all knowledge, both past and present, be circumscribed into one great whole. The Bible had its share of truth; Aristotle had some, too. So did other Greek, Roman, and contemporary philosophers,
historians, and academics. Even the sailor and the traveling merchant and the lowly farmhand carried valuable information that, if tapped and assembled in just the right way (Go, Voltron Force!), could bring the world into the palm of your hand.
Without printing, Mercator never would have had access to the vast amounts of information that revolutionized mapmaking. In many ways, the cartographic revolution was a reaction to that flood of information. On a scale beyond any previous period of human history, Mercator’s was awash with treatises and pamphlets and publications that flooded the reservoir of human knowledge. One of the great dilemmas of the sixteenth century was how the world was supposed to process this deluge. Access to copious amounts of data is one thing, but shaping that morass into a usable form is quite another. Mercator attempted to contain and redirect it into a single, clear, graceful picture of the natural world.
The ability to organize information and distribute it to the public is an incredibly powerful tool. Whether you’re the Catholic Church in the 1500s or megacorporations fighting Net neutrality in the 2000s, to prioritize information is to control information. And to control information is to control people.
The fruit of the early modern world’s attempts to organize all this information can be seen everywhere. One solution from the early 1600s endures today: alphabetization. Historically, information was often organized in encyclopedias and dictionaries based on subject matter. Religion would have come first, followed by law and medicine. Math and history would have been next. Frivolous works would have been branded “miscellany,” or of low priority.
After the invention of the printing press, there was just too much of that information coming in. The world needed a simple, universal system to organize its data. The alphabet provided just such an egalitarian tool for dealing with human knowledge. It’s why you can open a dictionary today and find restroom before resurrection, cronut before crucifix, and goatsucker before god. (It’s a bird. Look it up.)
It would take thirty-five years for Mercator to produce his magnum opus, but in the intervening time, he rubbed elbows with the brightest minds of Europe. He would also be hunted and imprisoned by the Inquisition. Throughout the highs and lows of an extraordinary life, the central struggle of his work remained: how to use all that glorious new knowledge.
MERCATOR’S VENTURE into mapmaking started with a globe. Gemma Frisius (given name Jemme Reinerszoon), a member of the Leuven faculty who taught advanced mathematics, took the young man under his wing. Up to that point, Mercator had been a philosophy major. Speaking as two proud holders of humanities degrees (including one philosophy minor), we can admit that it’s basically a worthless degree. (Economically speaking. Let’s say.) This has been true of philosophy majors for, no kidding, five hundred years. Mercator came to the same realization, so he changed course and taught himself math. Gemma Frisius eventually brought him on as an assistant engraver for his globe of 1536, which had been chartered by Charles V, emperor of Spain.
Before print, globes were a complex, inconsistent, and extremely expensive art form. The world had to be hand-carved, detail by tedious detail, onto every paper, wooden, or metallic sphere. After print, however, an artist could create a set of plates, which would then be used to print off hundreds, or even thousands, of new worlds. You still had to paste those printed paper sections (gores) onto spherical globes, which took a considerable amount of patience and skill, but the process had become practical for mass production.
Gemma’s globe was set to break new ground. According to the royal charter, it had to be “a sphere the likes of which nobody in the court of King Charles would have seen before; a globe of exquisite beauty . . .” Such a project required something far better than woodcuts as its primary medium for transferring images onto the globe. Unless you’re the Da Vinci of woodcuts, they tend to appear thick and clunky on paper. (Side note: the Da Vinci of woodcuts was not Da Vinci. It was Albrecht Dürer, who exceeded the Italian artist in just this one area. Single Dürer woodcuts consistently sell for prices in the thousands of dollars, and the right woodcut, such as his famous Rhinoceros print, will leap in price into the hundreds of thousands.)
When you have to cram a whole lot of information onto a relatively tiny sphere, woodcuts just don’t cut it. (Sorry for that, not sorry.) A relatively new innovation in printing was marshaled to meet this challenge: copper engraving. The difference between metal engravings and woodcuts was striking. Engraving was a sharper, more refined process. The amount of information that could be carved onto the same section of a globe was dramatically increased. In a word, the difference was resolution, and wood was the VHS of sixteenth-century printing.
But if you’re going to be the Blu-ray of your era, you need a font to match. That’s where Mercator came in. Over the course of a few days, he taught himself the newest fad in printing: italics. Italics (technically, cancelleresca, a cursive humanist script) took blocky, space-wasting Roman letters, slimmed them down, slanted them to the right, and made them sexy. Lest the reader think this an exaggeration, let it be observed that the Faculty of Theology at Leuven considered this sleek new writing style “a frivolous distraction,” which is shorthand theologian-speak for anything sexy throughout the ages.
For globe making, italic fonts were much more than simple frivolity. Copper-engraved plates had already bumped up the level of resolution in printing, and italics provided a compressed, precise, visually appealing script to complement that.
From his involvement in this project, Mercator would also have learned firsthand the value of eyewitness reports in cartography. There was another collaborator on Gemma’s globe, an older gentleman and lifelong diplomat named Maximilianus Transylvanus (originally Max von Sevenborgen). Transylvanus was best known for writing and publishing the first report of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the planet. He was basically brought onto the globe project as a fact-checker. Among other things, he completely discredited the existence of Taprobane, the world’s largest fake island, which had been cited by geographers as far back as Ptolemy. That’s like finding out Australia has been a lie this entire time. (Although, after being introduced to Vegemite, you might be willing to believe the whole continent is an elaborate hoax to get you to put something that tastes like koala scat into your mouth.)
Despite hitting delays and setbacks, Gemma finally completed his globe, in all its glory, in 1536. The success of that endeavor pushed Mercator to the next logical step, known in the sixteenth century as the Be-yon-cé: leaving his crew behind and going solo to create some of the most triumphant works of his time. For the subject of this cartographical debut, Mercator hedged his bets and started with the one place that had been mapped in the West more than any other: Europe. Just kidding, it was Palestine. Because the Bible.
The first Bibles with maps had arrived in Antwerp about a decade earlier. Affixing real-world coordinates to Bible stories such as the Exodus helped validate them in people’s minds. Mercator’s Palestine map was the best of its kind, and considered the gold standard of biblical mapmaking for five decades after its first printing. The standard before Mercator was to read the Bible, point at locations on a map, and say, This looks like a fine place for Sihon, King of the Amorites, who dwelt in Heshbon and ruled from Aroer. Hell, why not? I literally know what none of those words mean.
Besides actually checking his sources, Mercator also made a note when he was just guessing, thereby drawing a clear distinction between making shit up and making educated shit up. He was still rooted in a belief that the Bible and the natural sciences could be brought into harmony. It took time for him to let go of this inherent trust, even in the face of contrary evidence. As his maps progressed, however, this Palestine-centric view of the world gradually receded. When his magnum opus was published thirty years later, Jerusalem would be barely visible, the birthplace of Christianity reduced to a mere abbreviation among all the other place names.
Mercator’s 1537 Palestine put him on the map. (Sorry. Again.) Being the ambitious tw
enty-five-year-old he was, he next set his sights on the entire world. The map he created in 1538 would be the most detailed of its time. And by “time,” we mean two years. New information was being printed like a steady stream of machine-gun fire, shooting to pieces any maps that were more than a couple of years old. Mercator’s 1538 world map was based on Gemma’s 1536 globe, and both would be obsolete by 1540. As much as people find the sprint of modern technology absurd at times (a new iPhone every year?), the Age of Discovery saw a similar uptick in obsolescence. Maps became little more than decorative wall paneling after just a few years. (Not that there’s anything wrong with original Mercator wall paneling. We’d take that in a heartbeat.)
The consequences of the Age of Discovery had much in common with those of the invention of print: both provided unprecedented access to knowledge, and therefore both were subject to political and religious freak-outs. It was science versus authority. What happens when power and evidence collide?
Make no mistake, knowledge is power, and accurate maps had potentially devastating effects on the balance of power in Europe. Maps became “instruments of rule” and cartography “the science of princes.” Trade routes could make or break economies. For a Spanish or Portuguese sailor, sharing maps or charts outside the country was punishable by death. Publication of the maps of Francis Drake’s circumnavigation was initially prohibited. Even printed accounts of famous voyages could be heavily edited for state security, as the printer for the narrative of Frobisher’s voyages admitted in 1578: “I have in a few places somewhat altered from my copy, and wronged thereby the author, and have sought to conceal upon good causes some secrets not fit to be published or revealed to the world (as the degrees of longitude and latitude, the distance, and true position of places, and the variation of the compass).”
Military invasions could be planned, down to the most minute detail, from the comfort of one’s sitting room. As the moral backbone of the twentieth century has taught us, “Remember kids, knowing is half the battle.” Spies were dispatched across Europe specifically to bring home maps. Models of French eastern border towns were classified as state secrets well into the twentieth century. The entire continent of Africa was treated as a state secret by Portugal, which would have been a pretty impressive feat had it worked. Even a commentary on Roman architecture was considered too dangerous to print in Venice because its depictions of fortifications could have helped rival states undermine its defenses.
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