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Overview
An enthralling biography of the man who created the first real map of the world and changed civilization
Born at the dawn of the age of discovery, Gerhard Mercator lived in an era of formidable intellectual and scientific advances. At the center of these developments were the cartographers who painstakingly pieced together the evidence to create ever more accurate pictures of the planet. Mercator was the greatest of all of them-a poor farm boy who attended one of Europe's top universities, was persecuted and imprisoned by the Inquisition, but survived to coin the term "atlas" and to produce the so-called projection for which he is known. Devoutly religious, yet gripped by Aristotelian science, Mercator struggled to reconcile the two, a conflict mirrored by the growing clash in Europe between humanism and the Church.
Mercator solved the dimensional riddle that had vexed cosmographers for so long: How could the three-dimensional globe be converted into a two-dimensional map while retaining true compass bearings? The projection revolutionized navigation and has become the most common worldview.
Nicholas Crane-a fellow geographer-has combined a keen eye for historical detail with a gift for vivid storytelling to produce a masterful biography of the man who mapped the planet.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466880139 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 03/26/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 377 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Nicholas Crane, a geographer and adventurer, is the author of two acclaimed books, Two Degrees West and Clear Waters Rising. He lives in London.
Read an Excerpt
Mercator
The Man who Mapped the Planet
By Nicholas Crane
Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2002 Nicholas CraneAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8013-9
CHAPTER 1
A Little Town Called Gangelt
In the summer of 1511, Emerentia Kremer fell pregnant and the harvest failed. Rye rose to its highest price for a decade and plague returned to the lands of the lower Rhine.
Emerentia and Hubert set off towards the ocean. In the Low Countries they could find food, shelter and a place to lay the baby. For several days they travelled, over the river Maas and across the heaths of Kempen, where robbers lurked by stagnant meres.
When the sandy tracks gave way to clay, spires began to pierce the sky. On these seeping levels sprawled some of Europe's richest cities and towns: Antwerp and Mechelen, Louvain, Brussels, each of them arterially connected to the sea lanes of the world by the same deltaic river. It was to this river – the immeasurable Schelde – that the Kremers were bound.
On the west bank, where the shadow of a castle darkened the thatched roofs of a riverport called Rupelmonde, they sought Hubert's brother Gisbert, a priest in the hospice of St Johann.
It was a cold winter. February brought frosts and snow. At daybreak on the fifth day of March, Emerentia gave birth to a boy. The seventh and final child of the Kremers was given the name Gerard.
* * *
The end of winter brought floods as snow-melt and rain poured from the continental uplands into the brimming plains of Flanders and Brabant. When the time came for the Kremers to leave Rupelmonde, they recrossed the Schelde and took the familiar route east to the river Maas and the rising land of the duchy of Jülich.
Beyond the river, the road climbed between fields towards a small, walled town on the edge of a treeless plateau. Seen from afar, Gangelt looked formidably contained, an isolated disc of stone and brick punctuated by thirteen bastions whose firing points squinted into the distance. Steep-pitched slate roofs rose from the bastions, catching the light when the sun lay low.
From the blank plateau, the travellers passed through an arched gateway into an interior world seething with humans and animals. The space within the walls was so confined that a man could walk from one side of Gangelt to the other in four minutes. Hovels and byres were wedged into every stinking, clamorous crevice. The only open space lay in the centre of the town, where the road from Sittard met the road to Jülich at the marketplace. Here stood the church in whose sooted interior generations of Gangelt's peasants had raised their eyes to the Host.
Gangelt had been built by farmers. The town stood on the southern edge of a low, broad plateau that was part of the most productive tillage belt on the continent, a long band of fertile loess, glacial dust blown overland at the end of the last Ice Age and swept by meltwaters into a gentle reef along the northern edge of the continental uplands. Below Gangelt, a sea of meadows and trees reached all the way to the dark rim of hills behind Aachen, one day's ride to the south.
The strange stones that occasionally emerged from Gangelt's sanguine soils were tools and weapons left by the earliest hunters and farmers, who had found that the well-drained soil was light enough to be worked with a wooden plough. In the Kremers' day, flint arrowheads, pot fragments, axe-heads and the blue glass of Celts periodically came up with the clod. Rarer were the spatulas, bottlenecks and figurines dropped by Romans who had settled this sunny vantage point during their short and precarious toehold east of the Maas.
Fourteen hundred years after Tacitus had complained about Germania's bristling forests and festering marshes, the crops beyond Gangelt's walls were being rotated on strip fields to a three-year cycle, from fallow to early planting of oats and then late planting of rye. Animals grazed – and fertilized – the fallow fields. The little river below the bluff had become the Rodebach – the 'Rode' derived from the local word for a place created from cleared woodland – and now formed one of the internal boundaries of the vast and unwieldy Holy Roman Empire, an ill-fitting jigsaw of hereditary princedoms, Imperial free cities and prince-bishoprics which occupied the heart of continental Europe. While Gangelt supposedly lay within the Christian protectorate of the Emperor Maximilian I, it was ruled by the Duke of Cleves and Mark, who had acquired the duchy of Jülich through marriage the year before Gerard was born. The Rodebach defined the border of the duchy of Jülich. On the other side of Gangelt's stream lay the duchy of Limburg. A short walk to the west lay the prince-bishopric of Liège.
To Gangelt's location on a political border and a geographical divide (between the southern forests and northern loess) could be added yet another fault-line, for the town marked the divide between German-speakers to the east and those to the west who spoke in Brabantine Dutch. Living on the edge gave Gangelt's citizens an unusual awareness of geographical, cultural and linguistic diversity, and a deep sense of insecurity.
But the town had an attribute which was shared by few others on the plateau, for the high road between Cologne and Antwerp passed through its walls. (A lower, longer route, involving more river crossings, passed to the south, through Aachen.) Not only were Cologne and Antwerp the economic giants of northern Europe, but they lay on the Hanseatic trade route between northern Italy and the Low Countries. Gangelt was quite used to merchants who might have begun their journey as far away as Genoa and Venice.
Against the backdrop of planting and harvesting, the dry months welcomed carnivals of passers-by: painters and puppeteers, tinkers, gypsies, wandering friars and itinerant teachers, beggars, tooth-drawers and tumblers, clowns who could juggle balls, fence and dance on a rope, charlatans and quacksalbers boasting salves and cures. Gerard grew up with the sound of bagpipes, flutes and fiddles; perhaps even heard 'Sourmilk', the professional lute-player, or Jörg Graff, the blind balladeer. Such men knew no borders. Gangelt was a natural way-station for men-of-the-road, who could find half a dozen venues between Cologne and Antwerp. Changing an audience was easier than changing an act.
Some of these passers-by told of strange, faraway lands. Gangelt may well have seen Savoyard organ-grinders and fortune-tellers, showmen with peep-box views of Constantinople, or mountain men with marmots on a leash; maybe a rare bearward from the mountains of Bilé Karpaty, leading a beast with drawn claws and a ring through its nose. Flageolet-players from southern Italy were known to travel as far as the Rhine and Spain. These perennial nomads were regarded with fascination and suspicion. With grave-diggers, hangmen (and sometimes shepherds too), the sons of German players were prohibited from membership of guilds; some were accused of witchcraft; they were unehrlich – shady, and of dubious honour. And so also – to some at least – were the hawkers of papal indulgences, agents of Pope Leo x, then touring the countryside selling remission from purgatory.
A couple of days ride to the east, 'Holy Cologne' was a keenly felt presence. With a population of 40,000, this university city was the largest in Germany, a theological bastion and a production centre for leather goods, textiles and metalware. Cologne was also one of the seed-beds of classical revivalism, humanism, the movement which could be traced back over a century to Francesco Petrarca's triumphant return to Avignon bearing the lost manuscripts of Cicero and Quintilian. The subsequent rise of the Italian umanista, the 'humanist' teacher whose ancient Greek and Roman texts described the human rather than the spiritual condition, ignited a demand for works of moral philosophy, of history and poetry, grammar and eloquence, of mathematics and astronomy – works which had suddenly become available to a mass audience with the invention of printing. Cologne had reacted with alacrity to the current passion for rediscovered ancient texts. Only a decade or so after a goldsmith called Gutenberg had begun printing in Mainz, Ulrich Zell set up a press in Cologne, and by 1466 he had printed Cicero's De Officiis. By 1500, Cologne was a leader among the continent's 250 print centres. The mercator – book carrier or dealer – would have been another of Gangelt's frequent callers.
With new translations of Greek and Roman works, and pamphlets attacking the ailing Church and Empire, Gangelt was also familiar with current affairs 'broadsides', printed sheets sold from trays carried by sellers wearing broad-brimmed feather hats with newsprint pinned to the crown. In Latin and German, the broadsides were headed by a three-line motto and (for the illiterate) an explanatory woodcut picture. Among the woodcuts to have passed this way were those of Germany's most acclaimed painter and engraver, Albrecht Dürer. A friend to leading humanists, Dürer had championed the power of the word in a print which showed the 'Son of Man' with flaming eyes, stars and a sword-hilt to his lips. (Two years after the Kremers were driven from Gangelt, Dürer would come this way while travelling from Nuremberg to the Low Countries to confirm his post as painter to the Imperial court; in his travel journal, the artist would merely note that he had 'passed the little town of Gangelt'.)
* * *
So Gerard Kremer spent the first five or six years of his life in a bustling, anxious rural town on the road between two of Europe's fastest-growing cities. For a developing mind, it was stimulating, uneasy theatre. Beyond the walls, the landscape he knew was richly patterned, with strip fields of ripening crops rimmed with cornflowers and poppies. On roads and tracks moved carts and coaches, solitary horsemen and alarming Landsknechte, mercenary soldiers in looted finery and Pludderhosen, bag trousers drawn together at the knees and waist. The towns he knew rose spired above sawtooth walls.
Too young to attend school, Gerard would have been a regular visitor to the church. Steeped in ceremony and sacramental symbols, Mass was an impenetrable spectacle. In puddles cast by flickering wicks, the boy would have heard the disembodied voice of the priest from behind the rood screen, conducting the liturgy in a strange and unintelligible tongue. Gazing up at the Host, he waited for the 'many graces' which William of Auxerre had promised to those who prayed 'while looking at the Lord's body'.
And there was much to pray for. On God's providence depended the Kremer family's survival. Wheat thrived or failed with the weather. Low temperatures reduced yields and so could dry springs, wet summers, damp autumns, long frosts or rainy winters. Storms could flatten a ripening crop. Too much rain would prevent the hay from drying, cause ploughs to stick, and rot the spring sowings. Summers had to be dry and warm, yet not too hot. Heatwaves were as lethal as winter freezes. Yields could quadruple – or halve – from year to year, while a sequence of bad seasons would lead to a famine and the spectre of skeletal peasants grubbing for rape and roots, flower bulbs, grass, leaves, an overlooked turnip.
Fortunately, the Kremers did not rely entirely upon the land. As a cobbler, Hubert had dual means. For a family which carried the migratory instinct, there was a grim symbolism in this source of income. Mobility was the temporal saviour of peasants on the edge, and mobility needed boots, boots which could walk to fields and markets and, in desperation, to new lands. Everybody needed boots. The Bundschuh, a rawhide boot bound to the calf with strips of leather, was the peasants' defining article: clumsy, mud-clogged and quickly stitched from untreated skins. The cobbler's craft demanded few tools and elementary skills. But it was one that could make a difference between survival and starvation: the cobbler could carry his skills from town to town, while a commission to make a pair of riding boots might be worth as much as 1 gulden, enough to buy ten geese or 35 gallons of wine.
Much of Gerard's later character can be ascribed to his father's trade: cobblers belonged to a culture that had ancient associations. Since Lucian wrote of the shoemaker-philosopher back when Romans occupied Gangelt's heights, this had been a noble, mysterious craft. Shoemakers and shepherds had much in common. They followed solitary, meditative lives; they were loners, outsiders. They had time for thinking. But there was one crucial difference: where the shepherd in his upland fastness communed with his flute, the urban shoemaker accumulated human nature, and read. Some of the stories and songs sold for coins in Gangelt's streets were popular German ballads in praise of shoemakers, whose Bundschuh was also an emblem of insurrection, the word Bund being used to describe both a shoe fastening and an alliance of rebelling communes.
If his father imbued the boy with a predilection for reflection, it was surely his mother Emerentia who bestowed Gerard with extraordinary doggedness. Feminine fortitude had a history on the plateau, for it was a Gangelt mother who walked with her sick daughter all the way to Aachen in AD 828, so that she could pray in the cathedral. Her daughter was miraculously cured and Gangelt earned its first written record, in a Vatican manuscript.
But in young Gerard's life there was a third, absent 'parent': the uncle who had escaped from Gangelt to university and then secured a priesthood in Rupelmonde. In Gisbert, the family had proof that there was an alternative to rural poverty. And it was Gisbert's encouragement that must have been behind Hubert's decision to provide the family with a fallback plan should life in Gangelt prove impossible; before leaving Rupelmonde with their baby Gerard, Hubert had taken a lease on a homestead.
For a family of such slender means, Gerard had been a reckless conception. In richer, urban Flanders, families were smaller than those in rural Germany. With seven children to feed, Hubert and Emerentia knew that Gangelt offered little hope for the future. They had neither the land nor the skills to provide for so many. Over three-quarters of their erratic income was required for food, nearly half of which consisted of bread. They rarely tasted meat. In Gangelt, they were locked to the fate of the peasant, who was currently enduring rural Europe's transition from an ancient feudal system to a money economy, where the freedom to work for a wage came at the cost of dispossession from the land, as owners consolidated their estates for commercial production. The rising prices of farm produce benefitted the large farmers and estate owners, but crippled the peasants, who were forced to work more, for lower wages, growing crops which were not theirs. As larger farms became more viable, the ancient privileges which gave peasants the wherewithal to live off the land were eroded. A new term emerged, roboten, meaning drudge, toil, slave, fag, sweat. The peasant became a wage slave, a Robot. To the daily drudgery were added punitive taxes and periodic demands for men and horses to fight the emperor's campaigns.
But of the multitude of forces conspiring to make the Kremers' toehold in Gangelt so precarious, the most alarming was space. Space was disappearing. Since the great pestilence of 1347–51, the population had bounced back into over-productive recoil. In awe, and then alarm, German chroniclers recorded that couples seldom had less than 'eight, nine, or ten children' and that 'landed property and rents for dwellings be become so very dear that they can hardly go any higher ... rather all villages are so full of people that no one is admitted. The whole of Germany is teeming with children.'
Fields that had run to scrub since the pestilence were put back under the plough, and houses reappeared from the hummocks of crumbled villages. The best land reclaimed, colonists moved to the margins. The land, recorded one chronicle, 'has been opened up more than within the memory of men; and hardly a nook, even in the bleakest woods and on the highest mountains, is left uncleared and uninhabited'.
As space was consumed, those who owned it began to take a keener interest in its dimensions. Landowners seeking to maximize their rents and dues consolidated their holdings. Surveyors appeared, pacing boundaries, sketching perimeters, making maps.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mercator by Nicholas Crane. Copyright © 2002 Nicholas Crane. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
List of Illustrations,
A Personal Note to the Reader,
1. A Little Town Called Gangelt,
2. Promised Lands,
3. To the Water Margin,
4. The Castle,
5. Triangulation,
6. The Mathematical Jewel and Other Suitable Tools,
7. Neither Known Nor Explored,
8. Celestial Maidens,
9. Terrae Sanctae,
10. Naming America,
11. The Fall of Ghent,
12. Latin Letters,
13. A More Complete Globe,
14. Enemy at the Ramparts,
15. The Most Unjust Persecution,
16. The Slight Youth from the North,
17. Somewhere Worthy of the Muses,
18. Frankfurt Fair,
19. Spies and Cardinals,
20. René's Domain,
21. Hunters in the Snow,
22. A Study of the Whole Universe,
23. Time ...,
24. ... and Place,
25. 'liketh, loveth, getteth and useth',
26. Ptolemy Corrected,
27. Adorn your Britannia!,
28. The New Geography,
29. Apocalypse,
30. Atlas,
31. Creation,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Chronology of Mercator's Principal Works,
Select Bibliography,
Index,
Also by Nicholas Crane,
Copyright,