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

cell among the Minorite Friars – was of continuing interest to wealthy sponsors. Mercator’s religious anxieties, his fascination with new ideas, his interest in the developing picture of the world were all genuine enough, but his later business career showed that he had a shrewd idea of where his own material interests lay – and it was not with the study of philosophy.

      Mercator had been granted a license by the university to teach his own classes to young students, but private tuition was never more than a temporary way to support oneself. Through Gemma Frisius, he began to establish contacts and friendships of his own, developing his acquaintance with the young Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, who was clearly a valuable patron for the future. Mercator needed little instruction in how to make himself agreeable to such an influential figure. “Your Grace,” “Your Reverence,” and “most reverend master” are among the phrases with which his correspondence with the young bishop of Arras was larded. Throughout his career, the effusive dedications of maps, globes, and books to powerful sponsors like Granvelle and his father would bear witness to Mercator’s passion for developing a network of influential friends. Such contacts were invaluable to a talented and ambitious man with a career to find and no wealth on which to establish it.

      Gemma, with the help of a local goldsmith, Gaspard van der Heyden, had established a workshop in Leuven several years before, to design and make scientific instruments and globes, and in the early 1530s he invited Mercator to join them. Such an invitation was immensely flattering, a mark of considerable respect from someone whose good opinion was valuable, and Mercator had no hesitation in accepting it.

Chapter Seven Gemma’s Globe

      UNDER THE INFLUENCE of the painters, philosophers, and thinkers who thronged his aunt’s court in Mechelen, the awkward young Charles V grew into a cultured and sophisticated patron of artists and craftsmen, with his own collection of paintings and works of art. Other leading figures in the Low Countries followed his example. Antoine de Granvelle built a collection in the archbishop’s palace in Mechelen that eventually included at least seven paintings by Peter Brueghel, already one of the most popular artists of his day.¹ Prosperous local merchants and government officials bought paintings as well: The royal tax collector Niclaes Jonghelinck² outdid even Granvelle with a collection of sixteen or more Brueghels, and when Jean Noirot, a former minister of the mint, was declared bankrupt in 1572, his creditors were able to auction off dozens of paintings by leading Flemish artists. Art was a flourishing business: The guild lists in sixteenth-century Antwerp show no fewer than 300 artists and 124 goldsmiths living and working in a city of around 150,000 people.

      The emperor and his acolytes had, following decades of exploration, developed a passionate interest in science and discovery. Charles was fascinated by scientific and surveying instruments, partly for their practical use in assessing the contours of a battlefield, and partly as beautiful artifacts in their own right. Gemma and Gaspard had been making such instruments for several years. Gemma’s planimetrum for surveying the flat lowland landscape worked on very similar principles to those of the traditional astrolabes such as Columbus had used to measure the elevation of the Sun or the planets above the horizon, and thus calculate his latitude, and their workshop turned out both devices. Gemma also produced his own version of the astrolabe, known as the Catholicon, which simplified the calculations, as well as quadrants for telling the time by the Sun or the stars, various tools for mariners and surveyors, and armillary spheres, whose concentric rings around a central globe could be used to demonstrate the great circles of the heavens.

      These were practical tools for navigation or study but also articles of intrinsic beauty. Manufacturing them, finely detailed and embellished as they were, was a job for highly skilled craftsmen capable both of precise engineering and delicate artistry – a challenge to goldsmiths and engravers, for the finest examples would command a high price from scholars and collectors alike.

      Charles was also one of many wealthy collectors to keep a library hung with maps. The patent he granted to protect the first globe to come from the new workshop, and to prevent unauthorized copying of Gemma, Gaspard, and Mercator’s work,^* noted with some satisfaction that it would record for the admiration of future generations “our own kingdom which, by the grace of God, encompasses many islands and territories practically unknown to any previous century.” Where the emperor and aristocracy led, the newly prosperous middle classes were eager to follow. Geography had captured the popular imagination, and the prosperity of Flanders meant there was money to be spent.

      Hans Holbein’s famous picture The Ambassadors (1533) shows Jean de Dinteville, ambassador to London from the French king Francis I, posing grandly with his colleague, the bishop of Lavour. On the desk between them lie a terrestrial and a celestial globe, one depicting the Earth, the other the stars and the planets – incontrovertible evidence of their own wealth, power, and wisdom. The globe was as much a fashion statement as the ambassador’s richly furred gown, demonstrating the growing control of the environment that the maritime discoveries embodied – confident symbols of the outward-looking spirit of the age.

      Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors

      National Gallery, London

      The idea that the Earth was round had been widely accepted for centuries, but the full significance of it was just beginning to dawn as the trading implications of Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India and Ferdinand Magellan’s rounding of Cape Horn became plain. It was no longer a matter of abstract theory; vast fortunes could be and were being made by exploiting the fact that the Earth was a sphere.

      Gemma and Gaspard both had some experience in the manufacture of globes. Gemma had produced one on his own in 1529 and included a sketch of it as the frontispiece to one of his textbooks of astronomy, while Gaspard had engraved the globe that Mercator’s friend and mentor Franciscus Monachus had designed in Mechelen. The first globe that the three men produced together in 1535 was a delicate structure of papieren bert, or cardboard – a flimsy sphere just over thirty-six centimeters in diameter, barely three millimeters thick, and coated with a thin layer of plaster for strength and smoothness. Onto that was pasted a map that Gemma had created, drawing, he said, on the works of Ptolemy, Marco Polo, and the Portuguese explorer Gaspar de Corte-Real, who had traveled along the coast of Newfoundland early in the century searching for slaves.

      There was more than geography to the map. Gemma knew it would need the approval of Charles’s imperial court before he could offer it for sale, and he took care that Tunis, conquered by the emperor’s forces only a year earlier, should be clearly marked within his domains. That was a detail, a small piece of political flattery, but across the world, Gemma was anxious to draw on the latest information. It is clear from the one surviving copy of the globe, now in Vienna’s Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, that he consulted the reports of the Portuguese explorers in the East, so that the Indian peninsula, shriveled and flat on Ptolemy’s maps, showed its true triangular shape, and the island of Ceylon, whose size was so exaggerated by Ptolemy, was almost the correct shape and size. The outline of Africa, which only a few decades before had been a matter of conjecture, stretching southward to join the “great undiscovered land” around the South Pole, had been fixed by years of Portuguese trading. Where once had been tracts of empty space, dozens of islands, rivers, and countries were engraved by name – the Sinus Barbaricus (Bay of Savages), off the northeast coast, or the Trogloditica Regio (Land of the Troglodytes), stretching inland. The island of “Zandibar,” known by repute for centuries because of the spices that were transported by camel through Arabia to Europe, carried a regretful note – “This island not yet certainly explored” – and lay far out in the Indian Ocean, hundreds of miles from its true position.

      Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage had brought back more details of the islands of Southeast Asia, although that area is so damaged on the Vienna globe that much of it is obscure. To the west, Gemma accepted the amazing piece of guesswork – if that is what it was – by Martin Waldseemüller, supported by more recent Spanish vessels sailing regularly