In the sixteenth century, there were real-life consequences for anyone who drew, printed, or distributed maps. Mercator learned this firsthand in 1538, when he was roped into the power struggles of the Low Countries. The Flemish province of Ghent (in modern-day Belgium) had been in open rebellion to Emperor Charles V and his sister, Queen Mary of Hungary, since 1537. The flash point for this uprising was taxes. Of course.
In that same year, Queen Mary sent tax collectors to help finance her brother’s military campaigns to kick the merde out of godless France. Ghent’s guildsmen (your weavers, glaziers, locksmiths, jewelers, printers, and the like) thought the endeavor a waste of their money, so they took up arms and seized the gates. Because Charles V was off in Spain, too obsessed with force-feeding Protestant François I his own mille-feuille, the city of Ghent fantastically achieved a bloodless coup against the head of the Holy Roman Empire.
And what better way to celebrate independence than a huge block party? Just such a citywide festival was conducted over the spring and early summer of 1539. Poetry and theater and rousing oratories were performed that lambasted the Catholic Church and patted Ghent on the back for a revolution well done. Things did get a teensy bit out of hand when a seventy-five-year-old former politician was seized and forced to shave his head and beard—basic drunken party antics. Then the old man was ritually tortured to death on the rack; apparently the shaving was done to ensure that demons couldn’t hide in his hair and help ease the pain. When other former aldermen met similar fates, panic spread, and the upper crusts of Ghent fled the city.
Prior to the festival, an important part of the province’s declaration of a free Ghent had been the commission and printing of a new map of the Netherlands, one that depicted an independent and proud Flanders. With a few pen strokes, even eastern Flanders was swept up into the revolution with the label “Under Ghent.” The citizens of cities such as Leuven (where Mercator was living) and Antwerp were probably thinking, For the love of God, leave us out of this, but that was the political power inherent in mapmaking. No longer did you have to dust off your Zweihänder and march out to conquer a domain. You could just grab a printing press, draw some dotted lines, and proverbially call, “Shotgun!” on whatever you saw. (All levity aside, that is how maps were made in Europe for hundreds of years: powerful white men carving up the world with little regard for the potential fallout of their cartographical doodles. That never blows up in anyone’s face, as we know from indigenous peoples everywhere and the entire Middle East.)
Emperor Charles V, however, wasn’t about to honor squatters’ rights, even if they did have a nicely printed map to prove their claim. He gathered his army and set out from Spain to literally and figuratively tear that map to shreds. Suddenly realizing the lethal situation in which they’d placed themselves, the guildsmen of Ghent ran back to their printing presses to make restitution. They hired Mercator and gave him three months to fix the inflammatory map of Flanders, hoping this would appease the wrath of the Holy Roman Emperor. By all accounts, Mercator was happy to do it. Preventing the obliteration of a province in Flanders is a win-win for everyone in the Low Countries, especially when that province stupidly labeled your house “Under Ghent.”
Mercator’s 1540 map of Flanders was magnificent, not only in its technical advances—he worked with a surveyor who practiced a newfangled technique called triangulation, making it “the first truly accurate printed map in the Low Countries”—but also in its distinguished levels of back-pedaling and imperial ass-kissing. Borders were redrawn, banners from proud Flemish cities thrown out, and rebel strongholds erased, all to reinforce the idea that Flanders was an obedient imperial realm. The edges on the map of this once acerbically independent country were even ornamented with medallions and coats of arms that traced the genealogy of its royal succession, demonstrating clearly that Emperor Charles V was the rightful ruler. Slap a frilly dedication to the emperor at the bottom, and (brush the dust from your lapel): crisis averted.
It did not work. That bottle had been uncorked, and some things just can’t be unsaid . . . or redrawn . . . or unexecuted on the rack. Charles, with his sister, Mary, crushed Ghent using an army that took five hours just to march through the front gates. Thirteen instigators of the rebellion were ceremoniously beheaded, and droves of Gentenaar were draped in black and forced to walk through the city barefoot to beg the Holy Emperor’s forgiveness. Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword—it was English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton—Ghent has a middle finger with your name on it. In the end, Charles won his colony back, and he even got a new map to prove it.
Mercator escaped from the Ghent debacle fairly unscathed. In fact, it might even have been a net gain for him. After completing a globe of his own in 1541 (which made his 1538 world map look like a shitty iPhone 4), Mercator received a requisition for globes and geographical instruments from none other than Charles V. Mercator happily agreed. Having an emperor as a personal client in the sixteenth century was a ticket to stardom—which makes the next chapter of Mercator’s life all the more inexplicable.
IN 1543, Charles’s sister, Mary, along with the Inquisition, launched a new invasion of the Low Countries. This time they were ferreting out Lutherans and helping them see the error of their ways through the transformative power of Christ’s love. And also torture. Like Tyndale before him, Mercator ’s name ended up on a list of forty-three in the Low Countries sought as possible heretics.
How Mercator’s name got on that list is a bit of a mystery. The list mentioned litteres suspectes, “suspect letters,” as the only accusation against him. Officially he was charged with lutherye and evading arrest. Because Mercator was careful about what he said and did in public, any Lutheran leanings on his part would have been difficult to prove in court. The violent conflicts that accompanied the Reformation had been raging most of his life, and he knew how to keep his head down. The charge of evading arrest, however, appeared a little clearer cut.
In February 1544, officers of the Inquisition showed up on Mercator’s doorstep, but the famous cartographer wasn’t there. His uncle (the one who had overseen his education) had died and Mercator had traveled just that morning to his hometown of Rupelmonde to sort out the details of the inheritance. Your beloved uncle dies; that’s bad. He leaves you some inheritance; that’s . . . good? The Inquisition shows up at your door, doesn’t believe the coincidence, and declares you fugere; that’s bad. When it comes to the Inquisition, “going on the lam” and “entering a flagrant guilty plea” are the exact same thing.
Mercator was arrested in Rupelmonde and imprisoned in the castle there for seven months. During that time, he would have been in isolation and allowed no contact with the outside world. Seven months of solitary confinement is enough to break anyone’s soul, but Mercator wouldn’t even have known the charges against him, or have been informed of the efforts that his friends and family were making to secure his release. It would have been one long, hopeless night of despair.
Since Mercator “ran from the law” to his uncle’s house, he was presumed guilty, but even the Inquisition required some kind of actual evidence to execute him. Three months after his arrest, secret investigators were sent to the monastery of Franciscus Monachus, a monk and fellow cartographer who openly criticized ancient authorities such as Aristotle and Ptolemy (his actual name was Frans Smunck, but obviously he couldn’t be known as Smunck the Monk). Somehow, the investigators had come to the conclusion that incriminating letters could be discovered at the monastery that would implicate Mercator as a Lutheran. If there was any truth to the allegation—Mercator and Monachus had been friends and pen pals for years—those letters didn’t exist any longer, and the investigators came back empty-handed.
The Inquisition was one of the best record-keeping institutions of its time. Historian John Arnold writes that their records “permit[ed] the operations of various kinds of power: catching out suspects, permitting future investigations, constructing future transgression.”
Luckily for Mercator, that investigation faltered. In the margins of one document that contained his name and a reference to suspicious Franciscan letters, “no h” has been hastily scribbled. Presumably this means non habent (“they do not have them”). The evidence of Mercator’s treason was therefore lacking, and four months later he was finally released, after seven months’ imprisonment.
If the members of the Inquisition had found what they were looking for, Mercator’s greatest achievements would have been annihilated twenty years before going to print—or, more accurately, strangled, disemboweled, and then immolated twenty years before going to print. The Inquisition sought to obliterate not only the publications of heretics, but the heretics themselves. Of the people arrested at the same time as Mercator, at least two were buried alive, two were burned at the stake, and one was beheaded.
Considering the black comedy of errors that had to happen for Mercator to land in Rupelmonde Castle, the guards could have slapped him on the back and said, You’ll laugh about this later. But no, he wouldn’t. One of the conditions of his release was that he never speak about the case again. As far as we have on record, he stuck to that. In a letter to his friend Antoine Perronet, he wrote only that his time in Rupelmonde was “the most unjust persecution.” That was it. (Mostly, anyway; near the end of his life he would express his belief that the Catholic Church was the horned beast with iron teeth that ends the world in the Book of Daniel, but after seven months of false imprisonment in a castle dungeon, we’ll applaud him for his restraint.)
One of the great ironies of this wrongful imprisonment is that, at the time he was arrested for treason against Charles V, Mercator was under contract to produce surveying instruments for . . . Charles V. These instruments were being used to wage war against the very Lutherans with whom Mercator was accused of sympathizing. The instruments were so vital to Charles’s war efforts, in fact, that after getting melted in an artillery raid in Germany, the emperor would personally write Mercator to ask for more. Ten years later, Mercator would even be named Imperitus Domesticus (“member of the imperial household”) as a gesture of appreciation and, one hopes, a sorry for the whole business with the dungeon and the almost burning you alive. Our bad.
OVER THE next fifteen years, Mercator moved to the now-more-temperate political climate of Germany and worked on his maps, globes, and surveying instruments in relative quiet. When he wasn’t out in the field triangulating the planet, he was coordinating the printing of maps with his sons, who worked alongside him. Yep, things were pretty idyllic—except for one nagging issue that had been on the back burner of Mercator’s mind for more than thirty years.
Back in 1538, Mercator had tried to map the world. When you do this, you inevitably run into a thorny issue. How do you accurately represent the surface of a spherical object on a flat piece of paper? How do you take something 3D and make it 2D? Mathematically speaking, this comes with a whole mess of problems. You can make sure all the latitudes and longitudes match up, which forces the sphere’s land masses to flatten and distort. Or you can preserve the proportions of the land masses, but lose the technical accuracy of the latitudes and longitudes. There is no easy answer. Making a sphere into a sheet will always create distortions.
Creating a world map that enabled a sailor to draw a course and then follow that course on a round world was not commonly known before Mercator. Straightening a globe out and printing it on a piece of paper is serviceable for small journeys, such as crossing the Mediterranean, but in the sixteenth century, people were circumnavigating the planet. At such great distances, small miscalculations could put a navigator hundreds of miles from his intended destination.
Mercator’s world map of 1538 attempted to address this issue, known as a projection, by making the map image heart-shaped. It was a striking piece of work, but it failed miserably. Not only could you not plot a straight course to your destination, but the heart shape warped and distorted the continents unnecessarily. Beautiful yet useless.
Thirty years later, Mercator had a breakthrough. It was a simple breakthrough, but a profound advancement for modern cartography. On a globe, the spaces between latitudes shrink the closer you get to the poles. If you were to cover a balloon with vertical lines, you’d see that the lines get more and more crammed as they reach the bottom and top of the balloon. Mercator realized that if you simply straightened everything out in equal proportions in all directions, you could maintain a flat, gridlike map that didn’t lose its global integrity. This revolutionary technique would later be dubbed the Mercator Projection.
When discussing the fallibility of scientific discovery, some people like to trot out the old “people in Columbus’s day thought the world was flat” story. Not only is that just plain wrong—Columbus thought he could sail to India precisely because he knew the world to be round—but mathematicians for thousands of years before Columbus knew that their world was a sphere, and they attempted to map it accordingly. In fact, Columbus used Ptolemy’s calculations of the size of the earth to demonstrate how short he believed the voyage to be. It wasn’t until Mercator and his projection that the human race finally figured out how to make their round world flat.
Stretching everything out equally allows a sailor to accurately plot a course, but there is a drawback: that equal spacing also means that the land masses near the poles are going to have to stretch in order to compensate. How far might they have to stretch, you ask? Well, infinitely.
You may remember seeing a Mercator Projection map like the one on the following page in pretty much every elementary school classroom you’ve ever entered.
Land masses at the equator are relatively normal-size, but the farther north and south you go, the more they stretch. Greenland is a large island, but it certainly isn’t larger than South America. In reality Greenland is about two million square miles smaller than Australia. Eight Greenlands could fit into South America, with about two hundred thousand square miles to spare. No matter what those elementary school maps tell you, Alaska is not that big. Neither is Canada or Russia. And Antarctica? That’s what it looks like when you stretch a continent to infinity.
THE MERCATOR PROJECTION, USED IN A 2011 MAP OF THE WORLD. Courtesy Daniel R. Strebe.
As we’ve seen with other accidents of misinformation, these distortions can have surprisingly far-reaching consequences. In the twentieth century, the Mercator Projection was a favorite of the anticommunist John Birch Society, which would use copies of the projection to illustrate its lectures. The enormously inflated areas of Russia and China created a deep red wave that seemed to bleed across the whole world. Maps are extremely effective propaganda tools because they are both visually impactful and terrifically easy to manipulate.
Still, no matter what kind of Violet Beauregarde Wonkaesque treatment you give those continents, their positions on the grid are 100 percent accurate to real life. You can plot a course from Tunisia to Chile using that image, and mathematically, the latitudes and longitudes will all work out. That is the simple and somewhat counterintuitive brilliance of the Mercator Projection.
Mercator’s revolutionary map of 1569 is not only his magnum opus, but the very embodiment of practical mapmaking (well, except for the Arctic insert with its nonexistent islands of healthy, happy pygmies). The map is a sight to behold. Gone are the fancy symbolic designs and cartouches of Middle Age maps. The biblical decorations disappear, and the birthplace of Christianity is reduced to an abbreviation. True, there are the occasional flourishes, such as the painfully racist drawings of cannibals from South America preparing a human smorgasbord (nobody’s perfect), but the purpose of the 1569 map was practicality. Unlike most sixteenth-century mapmakers, who made up coastlines as they went along, Mercator meticulously checked and rechecked his sources, built on the knowledge that had come before, and worked tirelessly to marry the old data to the new.
He could do this only because of the printing press, which allowed him access to sources on a scale that had been practically impo
ssible before. This makes his maps some of the most dazzling historical artifacts from the dawn of modern science.
Unfortunately, since sailors initially didn’t know how to use the new projection—this was a time when directions for sailing from Europe to the East Indies included sailing “south until the butter melts, then due west into the sunset”—Mercator’s literally earth-changing map gathered figurative dust for decades after the mapmaker’s death. Not until 1599 did an English mathematician, Edward Wright, explain the projection and publish charts to counter the inevitable land mass distortions.
In modern times, this projection holds a place of cartographic royalty. It was officially used to survey both England and America in the twentieth century. Mercator is even now contributing to the space age with Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Io, and Titan each mapped with his projection. Watch out, Red Planet, the Sino-Russian distortion is coming for you.
As forward-thinking as Mercator was, however, he still fell victim to one of the ailments of any information age. In addition to the interesting but totally wrong curiosities of the Arctic Circle, chunks of misinformation made their way onto his 1569 map. For example, he dropped the mythical Christian kingdom of Prester John right into the middle of Africa. And why not? Africa is goddamn huge. Who is going to prove that an imaginary Christian nation hasn’t been hiding out in Ethiopia for fifteen hundred years? (The answer is Portuguese scholar Manoel de Almeida, about a hundred years later.)
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