The World of Gerard Mercator: The Mapmaker Who Revolutionised Geography. Andrew Taylor

establishment of the university, by attracting scholars and businesses, had played its part in the rejuvenation of Leuven, and there was clearly much life in the town beyond the college walls. The university authorities took the possibility of youthful high spirits seriously enough to set down formal statutes banning students from bearing arms, dicing and gaming in public taverns, or even walking the streets after eight o’clock at night, and their rules were stricter still inside the college. Gerard apparently reveled in the austere, contemplative life of fasting, abstinence, and strict obedience to the pater of the college. The sole official record of his time at Leuven is his inscription as a “poor student” in the books of the College of the Castle, but his friends and contemporaries all spoke of a dedicated and high-minded academic, concentrating almost obsessively on his work.

      In that society, at least, there should have been no shame in his poverty. But even if the somber, monkish gown, which all the university’s pupils wore,³ disguised the differences between rich and poor, there was little fraternization between them. They all ate in the same hall, but the rich took the high table, while the poor sat at the far end of the hall; the rich students lived in private rooms, while the poor shared the dormitory in the College of the Castle. Few friendships crossed such a divide, but Mercator would have known the names of his rich colleagues, and one in particular would resonate for the rest of his life: Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, the son of Charles V’s trusted chancellor, Nicholas Perrenot de Granvelle, was starting on his rise to power.

      It was customary in scholastic circles, even among poor students, to add dignity to one’s name by translating it into Latin. Gerard’s schoolmaster at ’s Hertogenbosch, Georgius Macropedius, had started life as Joris van Lanckvelt. Gerrit Gerritszoon had already become known as the humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, and Mercator’s near contemporary Andries van Wesel would win fame as the anatomist and humanist Andreas Vesalius. The sonorous, Latinized Mercator, or merchant, suited Gerard’s own ambitions much better than de Cremer – pedlar in the vulgar Flemish. In choosing his new name as he started on his career at Leuven, he looked back to the place of his birth and the formative years of his childhood: Gerardus Mercator Rupelmundanus was born.

      The rigid timetable of his days was punctuated, as it had been in ’s Hertogenbosch, by celebrations of the Mass, and ran from dawn to dusk, with a brief rest period in the afternoon. His course of studies in the university’s Faculty of Arts was essentially the same logic, physics, metaphysics, mathematics, rhetoric, and moral philosophy that students had tackled for centuries, with attention fastened as firmly on the learning of hundreds of years ago as it had been at ’s Hertogenbosch. Observation, measurement, and independent thought were all dangerous steps on the road to heresy. First among the ancient masters was Aristotle, and it was expressly forbidden even to question his teaching.

      The eighteen-hundred-year-old writings of the pre-Christian Greek philosopher were used expressly to bolster and justify the position of the Catholic Church as guardian of thought and theology. The statutes of the university were strict and unambiguous about how religion, philosophy, and natural science should be approached: “You will uphold the teaching of Aristotle, except in cases which are contrary to faith. ... No-one will be allowed to reject the opinion of Aristotle as heretical ... unless it has previously been declared heretical by the Faculty of Theology.”

      That official position was strictly enforced by the university authorities, with the sinister power of the Inquisition always in the background. The university had done more than bring prestige and prosperity to Leuven; it had given the dukes of Brabant and their heirs – by then, the emperor Charles V – a powerful tool of religious and political repression. Though it had a degree of independence – one condition of the papal bull by which Pope Martin V had originally consented to its establishment had been that the rector should have full criminal and civil jurisdiction over its members – the university authorities nonetheless worked closely with the imperial government. There was no home within their walls for the reformist agitation so popular in ’s Hertogenbosch. In 1522, Charles V had established a state-run Inquisition to work alongside the Church in quashing the reform movement, and the university authorities took an active part in its investigations. Leuven’s Faculty of Theology was given the task of censoring and approving all newly printed books on behalf of Charles V, and various university officials took their places in the ponderous, awe-inspiring public processions in which the Inquisition’s victims were led to punishment or public repentance. At Leuven, Mercator was studying in one of the greatest strongholds of anti-Reformation learning of the sixteenth century.

      At the same time, the university boasted some of the finest teachers in Europe, who were making discoveries of their own while avoiding any direct confrontation with the authorities or the Inquisition. Erasmus had been a professor there, helping to found the Collegium Trilingue for the study of Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, and Adrian of Utrecht, one of the tutors of the young Charles V, had held the chair of philosophy, theology, and canon law before being elected pope in 1522.⁴ The renowned mathematician, astronomer, and physician Gemma Frisius, who taught Mercator about the movement of the planets and helped him as he grappled with classical geometry, was no backward-looking medieval scholar.

      Gemma was a sallow, thin-faced, lame, and asthmatic genius, who had taken his name from the windswept plains of Friesland where he came from, alongside the sandbanks and marshes of the Waddenzee. Like Mercator, he came from a poor family, and his parents had died during his childhood. Though only four years older than Mercator, by the time the latter arrived at Leuven, Gemma had already established a reputation across Europe as the leading mathematician and cosmographer of the Low Countries. A contemporary engraving shows him in his academic robe and bonnet, his long face impassive, with sunken cheeks and a slightly hooked nose. His eyes stare fixedly, challengingly from the frame, and his bony fingers, wrapped casually around a globe, are heavily ringed like a nobleman’s – a picture of a man beyond riches, a scholar literally holding the world in the palm of his hand. While still a student and barely out of his teens, he had produced his own corrected edition of the Cosmographia published five years earlier by the German scholar and sometime tutor of Charles V, Petrus Apianus. The book drew on traditional ancient sources but also, through Martin Waldseemüller’s world map of 1507 and the writings of other German scholars, on the transatlantic voyages of Amerigo Vespucci and the explorers of the previous forty years. The new edition had Gemma’s name on the title page alongside that of its author and was widely accepted as the most authoritative account of the known geography of the world, appearing in some thirty different editions over the next eighty years.

      Gemma’s own writings on astronomy and cosmography, De principiis astronomiae et cosmographiae, were published in 1530, the same year that Mercator joined the university. He was working on the practical application of mathematics to surveying and mapmaking, while at the same time following his medical studies, which would lead eventually to his appointment to the university’s medical faculty. He was a role model for the young Mercator, not just a scholar and polymath but a man who combined ancient learning with the most up-to-date research. Gemma was dedicated in particular to the practical application of his studies, the union of mathematics and geography. He had already started to produce the mathematical and scientific instruments for which he would become famous, and he was putting the finishing touches on his new technique of triangulation, the art of defining the location of a place by taking two separate sightings. His planimetrum, a flat wooden disk marked in degrees and fitted with a revolving pointer, could be aligned with magnetic north so that its user could take sightings of different towns across the flat Low Countries. The cathedral at Antwerp, he suggested, was an ideal place to start. First he would settle on a second fixed point nearby and walk the distance between it and the cathedral to check its measurement. Then, using his planimetrum, he would establish the angle between imaginary lines drawn from the cathedral to his observation point and from the observation point to a point of reference, such as a tower, in the distant town. He thus knew the size of one side and two angles of an imaginary triangle drawn between the cathedral, his fixed point, and the distant tower; working out the length of the other two sides, and thus the position of the distant tower, was then a matter of simple geometry. This proved the key to accurate surveying for centuries to come, and a technique which Mercator would master for his own mapmaking.