Kitabı oxu: «The World of Gerard Mercator: The Mapmaker Who Revolutionised Geography»

Dedication

FOR SAM, ABI, AND BEC,

and all the years they have to come.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE: Pushing Back Shadows

CHAPTER TWO: Forgotten Wisdom

CHAPTER THREE: A Small Town on the River Scheldt

CHAPTER FOUR: Among the Brethren of the Common Life

CHAPTER FIVE: At the College of the Castle

CHAPTER SIX: Doubts and Dangers

CHAPTER SEVEN: Gemma’s Globe

CHAPTER EIGHT: Craftsman and Cartographer

CHAPTER NINE: The Greatest Globe in the World

CHAPTER TEN: In the Hands of the Inquisition

CHAPTER ELEVEN: Two New Arrivals

CHAPTER TWELVE: A New Life

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Our Europe

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: A Mysterious Commission

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: In the Forests of Lorraine

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Tragedy

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: The Sum of Human Knowledge

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: The World Hung on the Wall: The Projection

CHAPTER NINETEEN: Presenting Ptolemy to the World

CHAPTER TWENTY: A “Thick Myste of Ignorance” Dispelled

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: The Geography of the World

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: The Gathering Dark

Afterword

Keep Reading

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

ONE OF MY earliest memories is of myself as a small boy sitting on a wide window ledge, with my whole world laid out around me. As I turned my head, I took in the comfortable, familiar room behind me, the door into the kitchen, and the wooden sideboard up against the wall, while outside I could see down the yard toward the joiner’s shop, which I knew was filled with sawdust and sharp blades. I could also see the familiar stone steps up to my front door, and another house across the way, where an old man used to sit in the doorway for hours on end, dozing.

That was about as far as my world stretched. I was aware, of course, of other worlds beyond, worlds I had heard about, half understood, or imagined for myself. Scattered among them were a few familiar islands that I had visited and knew fairly well – the stone-flagged floor of the greengrocer’s on the corner, for instance, the high wall on top of which I could walk up to the church, or the little vegetable garden where I used to watch my father as he worked – but for all intents and purposes, they were surrounded by darkness. Good things occasionally came in from those shadows outside – bars of chocolate brought by a kindly aunt, perhaps, or my mother’s shopping – but they were on the whole mysterious and unwelcoming, and if I occasionally peopled them with monsters, that was no more than any child does.

The story of discovery and mapmaking is one of pushing back shadows. The great explorers brought back undreamed-of riches and stories of unknown lands and peoples that were barely believable – the discovery of America, for instance, has been described as the greatest surprise in history – but their claims and discoveries had to be evaluated, laid out on paper, before they could form a coherent picture of the world. Much of that work was carried out by unknown figures, whose maps are lost, forgotten, or remembered only by passing mentions in ancient documents. Some were sailors or traders themselves, trying to prepare reliable charts for their own use and for those who came after them, but many were scholars who never went to sea. A few became famous and produced individual maps that stand out as landmarks in the history of the understanding of the planet. But none, in the last two thousand years, achieved as much as Gerard Mercator in extending the boundaries of what could be comprehended.

Mercator saw himself as a scholar in the ancient tradition, an uomo universale in the mold of the Renaissance – a seeker of truth to whom the whole of knowledge was a single book to be opened. His achievement was nothing less than to revolutionize the study of geography and redraw the map of the world.

Born near Antwerp in 1512, he lived through almost the entire turbulent sixteenth century – an age in which the known world grew year by year as new voyages made new discoveries, but one which also saw the Catholic Church and Europe itself torn apart by Martin Luther and the Protestant reformers. The sacking of cities, the smashing of statues by reformist zealots, and the religious savagery of Church authorities were all part of the temper of the times. This was the age of the Inquisition, whose power, as Mercator was to discover firsthand, extended across the Low Countries: The judicial torture and burning of the unfaithful were commonplace. But it was also an age of intellectual upheaval. Almost halfway through the century, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus published his revolutionary theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun – an idea that was confirmed some sixty-five years later by the observations of Galileo Galilei through his telescope. The Church, still clinging to the old idea of the Earth at the center of the universe, could make Galileo recant, but it could not erase the new thinking.

By the time Mercator was born, the printing press had made books readily available across Europe, but the language of religion and intellectual debate was the same as it had been in the days of the medieval copyists toiling over manuscripts in the monasteries. Not just the Bible but also scientific, medical, and philosophical texts were written in Latin. At the University of Leuven and later in Duisburg, Mercator’s conversation and correspondence were also in Latin. However, by 1594, the year he died, Bibles in the daily language of the people were commonplace. Galileo’s writings appeared in clear and lucid Italian. This signified more than a change of vocabulary or language; scientists, by the turn of the century, were gaining the confidence to rely on observation, measurement, and reasoning rather than looking into the past for inspiration.

Gerard Mercator

Science Photo Library, London

Mercator’s own life reflected the era of change in which he lived, being full of apparent contradictions and opportunism, and extending over one of civilization’s major crossroads. In many ways a child of the past, he was born into poverty and owed his first chances in life to the wealth of the traditional Catholic Church; yet his surviving letters are those of a tolerant reformist with Protestant leanings, who kept his religious views to himself. Like the artists of the Italian Renaissance, he relied on the favor of princes, dukes, and high dignitaries of the Church, but he also built a commercial business which depended on the new prosperous middle class that economic growth had created.

Mercator studied and created maps with a passionate attention to detail that would have been familiar to any of the scholars or artists of the Italian Renaissance. In his studies, he showed unswerving respect for the authority of Claudius Ptolemy of ancient Alexandria, who had proposed his own map projections – ways in which the Earth might be flattened out onto a sheet of paper. At the same time, Mercator did more than any other geographer of his day to demonstrate that Ptolemy’s classical ideas of the world were outdated, misleading, and often simply wrong. As a cartographer, Mercator spent his lifetime collecting, collating, and assessing the latest reports from explorers whose discoveries rendered Ptolemy’s ideas inadequate to describe the new world that was emerging; as a mathematician, he answered the problem of projection with his own solution, which has lasted for more than four hundred years.

There are few reliable contemporary descriptions of Mercator, few clues to the personality of the scholar who did more than anyone in the last two thousand years to turn mapmaking into a precise science. Moreover, many of his letters are lost. A number of the letters that do survive are appeals to dukes and princes of the German city-states, to dignitaries of the Catholic Church, even to the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V himself for support and sponsorship, for Mercator well understood the advantages of influential backing. Throughout his life, he was a driven man: Long hours at his desk as a student gave way to long hours at his workbench as he built the business that was to make his fortune, and the habit of study never left him. In the infirm years before his death, he would urge his children to carry him, chair and all, to his books.

Fear is an overpowering emotion in those of his letters that do survive – fear of death and damnation, fear of not completing the work he had begun, fear of failure. Orphaned at an early age, sent off to the harsh rigors of a monastic school, he knew little of maternal love or family stability, and his difficult childhood left him cautious and circumspect. In his business life, he was assiduous in appealing for official copyright protection for his maps and globes, and the careful investment of his profits in property and forestland showed his awareness of the importance of security.

He was also aware, as he had to be, of the value of silence. In the religious conflicts of his time, his principles were those of a reformer, but his arrest and imprisonment at the hands of the Inquisition clearly reinforced his instinct for caution. Even after he moved from Leuven to the more relaxed environment of Duisburg, in Germany, he avoided any involvement in religious argument. Rather than the perils of theological disputation, he enjoyed his reputation in the town as a good host and dinner guest. The handful of contemporary accounts speak of him as a witty and entertaining conversationalist, and gifts of food and wine from the city authorities suggest a man who was known to enjoy good company and a well-stocked table.

But more than anything else, he was a scholar. Though he never traveled beyond the well-known towns of northern Europe, never, so far as we know, even boarded a ship, his work, together with that of sea captains and explorers, allowed people of the sixteenth century and the generations who followed them accurately to imagine the world beyond the horizon.

He created his projection almost in passing and showed few signs of appreciating the importance of what he had done – and yet it has defined the shape of the world in the modern age. There is no doubt that it produced a distorted image, as any flat map of the spherical world must. As a result, Mercator himself has often been accused in the last few years of racism, because his projection makes the continent of Africa seem smaller than it really is, or of imperialism, because it appears to exaggerate the size and importance of Europe – accusations that a scholar of the sixteenth century would not even have understood. The challenge of spreading the globe out flat on a desk, of presenting the known world in a way that could readily be seen and comprehended, was one with which philosophers, travelers, and geographers had been struggling for thousands of years. By Mercator’s day, the time was ripe for a solution.

Chapter One Pushing Back Shadows

MERCATOR WAS BORN barely twenty years after Christopher Columbus first crossed the Atlantic. Yet even though the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are considered the great age of discoveries, an astonishing amount was known, or at least rumored, about North, South, East, and West before any of the memorable voyages of exploration ever left port.

Nearly two thousand years earlier, the Greek historian Herodotus was told of Phoenician sailors who claimed to have sailed around the southern tip of Africa.* A hundred years or so after his death, during the fourth century BC, another Greek explorer, Pytheas of Massilia, sailed into the far northern seas, to a country he called Thule, where he said the Sun went to sleep.† Still farther north, he said, land, sea, and air coalesced into a mixture on which people could neither walk nor sail. Ancient Norse sagas spoke of journeys to “a new land, extremely fertile and even having vines” that lay far to the west, beyond the setting Sun.¹ Claudius Ptolemy, the Alexandrian librarian and scholar of the first century AD, had heard about the island of Taprobane, or modern Sri Lanka.²

Commercial ambition drove travelers on over new horizons. From as early as 500 BC, trading caravans from China made their way along a variety of routes through central Asia, bringing bales of fine silk to be bartered for Persian warhorses or Arabian spices, frankincense, and myrrh. Lines of heavily laden camels followed secret and well-guarded tracks through the deserts of Arabia, carrying gold, ivory, rare woods, and the spices of Yemen to the trading centers of the Mediterranean. Elsewhere, Phoenician ships journeyed beyond the Pillars of Hercules at the mouth of the Mediterranean to the very edges of the known world, bringing back tin from the Scilly Isles off the southwest coast of Britain. The prophet Ezekiel described the goods carried by the Phoenician traders, and the towns to which they traveled. “Tarshish was thy merchant, by reason of the multitude of all kind of riches, with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded in thy fairs. Javan, Tubal, and Meshech, they were thy merchants: they traded the persons of men and vessels of brass in thy market. They of the house of Togarmah traded in thy fairs with horses and horsemen and mules.”³

The Phoenician capital Tyre, on the coast of what is now Lebanon, had trading links that extended through the entire eastern Mediterranean and far beyond. The places Ezekiel named in these verses as the Phoenicians’ trading partners in the sixth century BC were in central Asia, southern Arabia, Armenia, and the coast of Spain, and his list of the merchandise – slaves, animals, manufactures, luxuries, and other goods – that appeared in their marketplaces lasted for more than twenty biblical verses. Travel and its commercial benefits were common enough; from the earliest times, explorers and adventurers had returned with exotic cargoes, but the stories they brought back were confused and unreliable. The island of Taprobane that Ptolemy described was said to dwarf the Indian peninsula that lay to its north, while the great medieval map of the world, dating from the late thirteenth century and still on display at Hereford in England, shows two distinct Niles, one running into the eastern Mediterranean, the other snaking across almost the whole width of the African continent. The accounts of the early adventurers were neither more nor less believable than the grotesque creatures with which ancient Greek and Roman authors loved to people the unknown places. There was no agreed view of the world; anything was possible. Travelers had no reliable or accurate way to record what they had found, to set it out for people to see. To become part of a shared image of the world, their stories had to be written down, described, and mapped.

Today, the oldest so-called maps look like little more than a few carved scratches, their meaning lost with the civilizations that created them. About four thousand years ago, craftsmen near the present-day village of Bedolina, some ten thousand feet high in the Italian Alps, set about carving the rock with rough bronze or iron tools. They drew pictures of animals, daggers, and suns, much as their cavemen ancestors elsewhere in Europe had done ten thousand years earlier. But the artists of Bedolina also produced one of the first known maps. The Mappa di Bedolina is approximately four yards wide and six yards high, an ambitious patchwork of carved lines and symbols, with a series of crudely drawn rectangles, most of them filled with carefully spaced dots and linked with snaking irregular lines. They seem to represent fields with paths, rivers, or irrigation canals running between them – a graphic illustration of a cultivated landscape in the Valley of Valcamonica below. Their carvings could have had some religious or magical purpose, but after four millennia, we can only guess at what it might have been. Armed figures, huts, and shapes like ladders were added to the map hundreds of years afterward, maybe adapting it for new mystical or ceremonial rites in a mixture of religious faith and straightforward observation that was to characterize mapmaking through the ages.

The Mappa di Bedolina in Italy.

Centuries later, merchants and travelers who were pushing farther and farther afield in the search for new markets brought back garbled reports of the mighty Rivers Don and Nile running south out of Asia and north out of Africa to form a T-shape with the well-traveled waters of the Mediterranean. The waters of the ocean were then thought to surround the world in a gigantic O, leading to the creation of the so-called T-O maps, which represented for ancient Greek, Roman, and even Arab seamen an agreed image of the outline of the world.

A T-O map from Etymologiarum by Isidore of Seville

British Library, London, Rare Books and Maps Collections

THAT WAS THE WORLDVIEW Claudius Ptolemy inherited as he worked in the great library of Alexandria around the middle of the second century AD. His name appropriately linked the Greek-Egyptian Ptolemy with the Latin Claudius, for Alexandria was a cosmopolitan place, more than five hundred miles from Greece, under Roman rule, and yet at the heart of Greek civilization. The city, with its port and its great lighthouse, was a triumphal expression of Greek civilization and Roman power. Like Antwerp in Mercator’s day, it was one of the world’s great cultural and commercial crossroads, with mineral ores and spices ferried down the Nile from the depths of Africa and along an elaborate network of canals, then traded along the waterfront with the day-to-day cargoes that had been brought into harbor from the busy eastern Mediterranean. Sailors and merchants brought with them tales of distant lands like Taprobane, half-digested stories that might conceal a thin vein of truth for scholars trying to extend their grasp of the unknown world. Busy ports have always been the mines of geographers; travelers’ gossip was the unsmelted ore of exploration for Ptolemy, as it was to be for Mercator.

The merchants brought wealth to Alexandria as well. In the days of its greatness, the story went, the buildings contained so much glistening marble that a tailor could thread his needle by the reflected light of the Moon. The library where Ptolemy worked, with its collection of some seven hundred thousand manuscripts in Hebrew, Greek, and Egyptian, was one of the most obvious expressions of that wealth. Just as the merchants in the port haggled and bargained over the commerce of the mightiest empire the world had ever seen, so Alexandria’s scholars swapped ideas and theories in the library and the museum associated with it.

There are no surviving original manuscripts of Ptolemy’s work, and hardly any facts known about his life, but it would be hard to exaggerate the effect of his books on the generations that followed him. For centuries after his death, they were largely forgotten in the West, but to Mercator, the writings of Ptolemy represented the fount of ancient knowledge, the standard by which new discoveries and theories should be measured. Apart from the eight books of the Geographia, the Almagest set out Ptolemy’s views on astronomy and the place of the Earth at the center of the universe, while his various other writings encompassed mathematics, music, and history.

Other writers had concentrated on stories of the wonders that lay at the farthest reaches of knowledge, but Ptolemy’s main interest lay in establishing a reliable and coherent system for showing the spherical Earth on a flat sheet of paper. Philosophers could only suggest what form the Earth took, while travelers either by land or by sea could do little more than estimate distances – in both cases, their contributions were merely elegant guesswork. The generally accepted image of the land surrounded and limited by the ebbing and flowing waters of the sea suggested a comfortingly finite world. Ptolemy raised the possibility of a world beyond those boundaries, basing his conclusions not just on the arguments of the philosophers and on the reports of travelers but also on exact astronomical measurements.

Ptolemy saw geography as a mathematical enterprise, a matter of measurement and calculation rather than the simple telling of stories. Like Mercator some fourteen centuries after him, he designed and made instruments for measuring angles and altitudes in the heavens; his Geographia includes descriptions of a brass astrolabe and a quadrant for calculating the height of the Sun in the sky.

Ptolemy knew the true location of a place could be fixed by taking precise sightings of the stars. The Geographia therefore included a catalog of some eight thousand place-names, rivers, mountains, and peninsulas, each of them with its position defined by degrees of latitude and longitude. It is a work of staggering ambition and exactitude – the first time anyone had attempted to use coordinates in such a precise way. Many of the observations Ptolemy needed to make the calculations had already been taken, but to place cities in remote or unexplored parts of the world, he had no choice but to rely on traditional accounts and the estimates of travelers. In such a case, he said, the mapmaker should use his judgment as to what figures to use, “deciding what is credible and what is incredible.”⁴

It is impossible to know whether Ptolemy drew any maps to go with his Geographia. The illustrations that adorned medieval versions of his books were additions by later copyists working to his descriptions and coordinates, but in them his worldview, with the traditional three continents of Europe, Asia, and part of Africa, can clearly be recognized. Taprobane is grotesquely out of proportion in comparison with the half-formed India that lies to its north, and the coastline of the Far East is clearly drawn largely from imagination, but the Arabian peninsula and the whole of the Mediterranean basin are presented in some detail.

Perhaps most important of all, though, Ptolemy left open the possibility that there were more lands to be discovered beyond the extent of his own knowledge. Where the Romans and Greeks who came before him had been content to keep their studies inside the limits of the habitable world, his interest was in the Earth as a whole, and geography, for him, was no more or less than the art of making maps. “It is the prerogative of Geography,” he said, “to show the known habitable earth as a unit in itself, how it is situated and what is its nature; and it deals with those features likely to be mentioned in a general description of the earth, such as larger towns and great cities, the mountain ranges and the principal rivers.”⁵

The circle of seas that surrounded the Earth in the early T-O maps was one way of suggesting a round world, but Ptolemy’s was the first serious attempt to deal with the problem of projection. He described two possible solutions, based on a simple rectangular grid that ancient Greek philosophers had already devised, but adapting it to take account of the fact that the Earth was curved, not flat.* The systems he suggested were, as they had to be, a compromise, and one which worked satisfactorily enough within the limits of the known world. Even in the sixteenth century, most maps were still produced on grids that were simple adaptations of Ptolemy’s projections. Mercator’s greatest achievement would lie in rethinking these fifteen-hundred-year-old proposals.

Ptolemy’s geographic writings are filled with errors of fact, many of them, as he engagingly admitted himself, due to a lack of basic information. Some, such as the “great southern continent” that he believed must balance the world on its axis, would endure, like the fabulous creatures described by Herodotus and other Greek writers, for centuries after Mercator.

For all its shortcomings, though, the rediscovery and publication of the Geographia in the West laid the foundations for the work of the great cartographers of the sixteenth century. The book traveled with Columbus to the New World; when Mercator compiled his great world map of 1569, he began with Ptolemy’s calculation of the position of Alexandria. The Geographia was still being treated as the ultimate authority fourteen hundred years after its author’s death. It shows a man trying to apply scientific methods to achieve a precise, objective representation of the world in a way that was unique in his time, and remained so until Mercator’s day.

IN THE EAST, the scanty records and remains of the work of the Chinese suggest that they had their own impressive tradition. Around the third century AD, a government minister of works named Phei Hsiu set out official principles for the making of maps under the Chin Dynasty. The most important of these was that they should be constructed on a rectangular grid in order to create a consistent scale and locate places accurately. There is no evidence that Ptolemy’s thinking had reached the Far East – a grid system had been introduced in China some two hundred years before Phei Hsiu by Ptolemy’s near-contemporary Chang Heng, an astronomer royal of the Han Dynasty.* He wrote of a spherical world suspended in infinity, like a yolk in an egg, and the system he introduced of building up a map by equal squares – “casting a net over the Earth,” in a contemporary phrase – was the basis of Chinese cartography for centuries.

Chang Heng’s grid made no allowance for the curvature of the Earth, and it is hard to know from what is left of ancient Eastern cartography whether his image of a spherical world had any effect on current thought. There are no indications that early Chinese mapmakers realized the world was a sphere, that the lands they were mapping were consequently curved, nor whether the challenge, which still fascinates cartographers, of representing such a three-dimensional world on a flat surface had even occurred to them as a problem.

In the Islamic world, Arab mapmakers drew on the ideas of Ptolemy and the Greeks to develop their own traditions. By the eighth century, they were compiling maps for overland diplomatic missions to China, military campaigns, and trading expeditions; the tales of Sindbad the Sailor, dating from some two hundred years earlier, are ample evidence of their seafaring traditions. Unlike the work produced by medieval monks in Europe, their maps seem to have been designed for use as much as for study, but they were still based mainly on copies of older European originals. There are early versions of the T-O maps, with south at the top and Mount Sinai in the center and, slightly later, more distinctively Arab interpretations in which a disk-shaped world, surrounded by water, is pierced from the east by the Arabian Gulf and the Red Sea, and from the west by the waters of the Mediterranean.

Later mapmakers of the tenth and eleventh centuries were often slave dealers or traders, making their way north to the shores of the Caspian Sea and up the Volga River deep into the heart of Asia. Asian tribesmen, Russians, Norsemen, and Arabs would meet on one of the medieval world’s great trading routes, exchanging goods, knowledge, and ideas.

One account, by the writer Ibn Haukal, author of The Book of Roads and Kingdoms, which contained a map of the Islamic world as it was then known, described a meeting toward the end of the tenth century with the great Arab cartographer al-Istakhri. “He showed me the geographical maps in his work, and, when I had commented on them, he gave me his work with the words, ‘I can see that you were born under a lucky star, therefore take my work and make such improvements as you think fit.’ I took it, altered it in several particulars, and returned it to him.”⁶

There was cooperation not just between individuals but between cultures. One of the greatest of all the Arab cartographers, Muhammed al-Idrisi, was born in Morocco, studied at Cordoba in Islamic Spain, and worked at the twelfth-century court of the Christian king Roger of Sicily. There, he produced several world maps that drew directly both on Ptolemy and on the observations of Arab travelers, and which were still being used as models by Islamic cartographers four hundred years later. Among them were a large rectangular map in seventy sheets, and a smaller, circular map, similar to the T-O maps of the West, but incorporating curved parallels, which suggest that al-Idrisi was aware of the spherical shape of the world. The maps and sources that he used are lost, but the geographic detail he provided was far in advance of anything that was being produced by the copyists in Europe’s monasteries. Al-Idrisi’s representation of Spain, for example, with the northern coast of Africa, the Straits of Gibraltar, and Bay of Biscay all clearly discernible, is far more detailed than the stylized version presented around the same time by European mapmakers. When Al-Idrisi described Britain as “a great island, shaped like the head of an ostrich,” and the peninsula of Cornwall as “like a bird’s beak,”⁷ he had evidently been studying more accurate maps than anything available in Europe.

DESPITE ITS ULTIMATE INFLUENCE in Europe, for hundreds of years after publication of the Geographia, Christian scholars turned their backs on Ptolemy’s knowledge. With the fall of the Roman Empire, the original manuscripts that Ptolemy had written in the second century were lost and forgotten. For the medieval scribes of the early Church, the old T-O maps compiled in the centuries before Ptolemy had the great advantage that they could easily be adapted to place the holy city of Jerusalem at the center of the world, as the Bible itself decreed.⁸ For them, as for the Greek philosophers, the sea was a fitting symbol to represent the mysteries that bounded man’s little area of knowledge on every side. What had not been established by exploration was supplied by imagination or faith; the maps that the medieval Christian scholars drew were therefore inaccurate, impressionistic expressions of belief, not descriptions of fact.

Some of these great mappaemundi, the medieval pictures of the world, were also works of art of staggering beauty. Most of them are lost, but in the English cathedral city of Hereford, it is still possible to glimpse the vision of the world that was in men’s minds on the eve of the age of discoveries. The great Hereford mappamundi dates from the last years of the thirteenth century.⁹ Even after a visitor to the cathedral has puzzled out the fact that, as on almost all early maps, east is to the top, and has spotted the outline of the Mediterranean Sea that divides the world down the middle, the coastlines and landforms are almost unrecognizable. There is no mistaking the traditional T-shape of great waters surrounded by the O of the ocean, although the lands are threaded with rivers. The British Isles clutch grimly to the perimeter of Europe, twisted and misshapen; instead of the familiar boot shape of Italy, there is a bloated peninsula, dotted with apparenty random cities and ribbed with unknown rivers. The names of Europe and Africa are transposed, probably a mistake by the copyist. Indeed, the map as a whole seems to be sketched more in hope than in conviction. Any modern classroom could produce a dozen more realistic views of the world. Ptolemy would have scoffed.

Yet the Hereford mappamundi has its own confidence, as befits the only complete wall map of the world known to have survived from the Middle Ages. It speaks the language of another age. What were once its bright colors are faded and browned into a dull ochre that challenges the eyes, while the drawings that crowd the map seem almost to jostle each other aside; it takes a while to focus on them individually, to see the delicacy and precision with which they are sketched in. Carefully drawn towers and turrets mark some of the cities of which the map-maker had heard: The familiar names of the Bible are clustered around Jerusalem, and, closer to home, Paris, Ghent, and even Hereford itself are marked. But it is a work to be interpreted, rather than simply consulted; a statement of belief.

Medieval library catalogs show that there were few monasteries or noble palaces without such maps in their stores of manuscripts. Charlemagne, at the end of the eighth century, had plans of Rome and Constantinople engraved on silver tablets among a comprehensive collection, and most great libraries would have included maps of the Holy Land as well as the great mappaemundi – triumphs and baubles for the rich and mighty, and reminders for the humble poor of their place in the great scheme of being. Few survived. A sister-map of the Hereford mappamundi, the Ebsdorf map, was rediscovered in a Benedictine monastery in the German town whose name it bears after being lost for six hundred years, only to be destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II. Now it survives only in modern copies and photographs. The history of cartography is the tantalizing study of what has been left behind.

The Hereford mappamundi

Hereford Cathedral Library, Hereford, England

The worldview of the mappaemundi encompassed the soul as well as time and space. The Hereford map, for example, shows not only the towns of the Holy Land but also the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden and Noah riding on the waters of the Flood. It admits no conflict between geographic accuracy and religious faith: The holy city of Jerusalem stands unchallenged at the center of the world, while Paradise itself is shown far away in the apparently unreachable East, a round island circled by flames that warn the importunate traveler not to dare too much.

The mappaemundi may have been used for planning journeys from town to town across Europe – marks over the great central city of Paris on the Hereford map suggest that fingernails may have traced a route through it at various times – but it mattered little to the mapmaker that the shape of the coastlines should be so inaccurate, or that the whole map should have been shoehorned so ruthlessly into an all-embracing circle of ocean. Much more important, from his standpoint, God had to be shown overseeing the whole of his kingdom, and the fabulous creatures described by the ancients, such as the bonnacan, with its bull’s head, horse’s mane, and ram’s horns, the screaming mandrake plant, and the death-dealing cockatrice, needed to be faithfully represented to demonstrate the awesome variety of his Creation.

The Hereford mappamundi laid out a world at once mysterious and threatening, where the only hope of safety was to be found in the majestic figure of Christ that dominates the map. To criticize it for inaccuracy would be as foolish as to find fault with Picasso’s famous painting as a street guide to Guernica. Yet for the rapidly growing world of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the mappaemundi were quickly proved inadequate. A new geography was needed to enable sailors to plot a reliable course across the oceans and to represent the world they were revealing.

Three events in the half century or so before Mercator’s birth made his achievement as a cartographer both possible and necessary. The first was the rediscovery of the geographic writings of Ptolemy, brought back into Europe after hundreds of years; the second was the development of printing, which meant that Ptolemy’s ideas could be spread more quickly and efficiently than the monks who had copied them by hand could ever have dreamed; and the third was the voyage of Christopher Columbus, who, looking for Asia, discovered America.

Other explorers had made great discoveries around the coast of Africa and in Asia about lands that were already dimly known about, but Columbus’s voyage proved that there really was a world elsewhere. The looming shadows that had marked the boundaries of geographic knowledge ever since man first looked about him were beginning to part, to reveal a reality far different from anything the ancient scholars had imagined.

Chapter Two Forgotten Wisdom

FOR THE SCHOLARS of fifteenth–and sixteenth-century Europe, who looked on the past with reverence, the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s writing in the early fifteenth century was a revelation and an inspiration. The task of translating the Geographia into Latin from an original Greek manuscript in Byzantium was begun by the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras and finished in 1406 by his pupil Jacobus Angelus in Tuscany.

In the Arab world, the Almagest and the Geographia had both been known by then for some five hundred years, and practically every Islamic cartographer either mentioned, quoted, or silently borrowed from what they called the Kitab gagrafiya (Book of Geography). However, not until the fall of Byzantium to the Turks in 1453 did refugees bring the manuscripts to the West in any numbers. Monks in Florence translated them from Greek into Latin and wrote them out painstakingly by hand, making copies available over the following years, first without maps, then with regional maps, and finally with world maps drawn according to Ptolemy’s recommendations. At the time of Mercator’s birth, they were still fresh and exciting – a philosophical framework into which the new discoveries about the extent and shape of the world could be incorporated.

Ptolemy’s books had been copied and copied again in the Arab world for centuries prior to the time they resurfaced in Europe; by then, they almost certainly included the additions and amendments of generations of nameless and unknown thinkers. Nonetheless, however much or little of them had actually been written by Ptolemy himself, they were a virtual synthesis of classical scientific knowledge.

The Geographia concentrated on the arts and skills of mapmaking, discussing the comparative merits of flat maps and globes, and arguing through the mathematics of how a map should be constructed and how the world could be divided into the three continents of Europe, Asia, and northern Africa. The great undiscovered continent that Ptolemy believed lay to the south turned the Indian Ocean into an inland sea, and in the East, the known world petered out in the unexplored lands beyond the Ganges. West of the Pillars of Hercules, at the mouth of the Mediterranean, of course, he described nothing but sea and a few scattered islands.

Fresh versions appeared year by year, with cartographers adapting and expanding Ptolemy’s work. An edition was printed in Cologne in 1475 without maps; only two years later, the interest and the technology existed to prepare a version in Bologna that included twenty-six copper engravings based on Ptolemy’s text. By the time Mercator was working, the book’s reputation was established among scholars, even though the great voyages of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were already demonstrating its limitations.

For all the dedicated work of the monastic copyists, it was the development of printing that allowed Ptolemy’s work to be widely read in Europe. The impact of Johannes Gutenberg’s first press with movable type in the 1450s is hard to exaggerate. In the Low Countries alone, more than four thousand different books were produced in the first decades of the sixteenth century; there were in excess of 130 printers there, half of them in the thriving city of Antwerp.

Ptolemy’s Geographia was only one of a range of classical works that flooded off the new presses to feed the public’s apparently insatiable appetite. As these books were shipped around the continent, they invigorated and inspired learning not just in the palaces, monasteries, and great houses that had always collected rare and expensive manuscripts, but also in the studies of poor students. Without the explosion of printing, Mercator would never even have seen many of the books that enthused him at Leuven. He would certainly never have gathered around him the personal library in which he delighted in the German city of Duisburg.

However, for all the excitement that the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geographia stirred up, his three continents soon could no more be accepted as they stood than could the old T-O maps or the mappaemundi. There had been rumors for centuries of scattered islands far away to the west, but no one had any idea of the vast extent of the newly discovered land. Just twenty years before Mercator was born, the discovery of America had revealed a new world of which Ptolemy and his predecessors never dreamed, confounding the ancient view that the Earth was limited to the three continents of Europe, Asia, and the strange and mysterious Africa.

While the actual extent of the world would have astonished the ancients, its round shape had been known since well before Ptolemy’s time. Various early Greek philosophers had produced detailed arguments to prove that the Earth was cylindrical, disk-shaped, or rectangular, that it was cushioned in compressed air, or that it was floating on water. Yet by 250 BC, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, one of the scholars who devised a rudimentary grid of latitude and longitude, had not only accepted the idea of a spherical world but had studied the stars to calculate its circumference.¹

Strabo, another Greek geographer and historian, who worked before Ptolemy in the library of Alexandria in the last century BC, had a severely practical turn of mind. The world could be represented on a globe, he declared, but the globe would have to be ten feet across to show all the necessary detail. The work of Ptolemy himself a century or so later in devising projections shows that he had no doubts either about the curvature of the Earth. For accuracy, he concluded, there was no substitute for a globe.

Ptolemy had described in great detail how it should be done, with the globe suspended between two poles connected by a semicircle, which should almost touch its surface. Such an arrangement, he wrote, had advantages and disadvantages when compared to his own efforts at working out a way of projecting a map onto a flat surface: “It preserves the world’s shape, and avoids the need for any adjustment of it, but it hardly provides the size needed for containing most of the things that must be marked on it, nor can it allow the entire map to be shown from one vantage point.”²

Like his books, Ptolemy’s endorsement of the globe was lost to Europeans in the Middle Ages. There are tantalizing mentions in classical literature of various globes, including small representations of the Earth enclosed within glass spheres which showed the constellations, like the pair Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, would later demand from Mercator. But if the Greeks or Romans ever made large detailed models of the spherical Earth, in line with the recommendations of Ptolemy and Strabo, none of them survived. European craftsmen produced armillary spheres in which concentric metal rings would demonstrate the supposed motion of the planets around the Earth, but they showed no interest in the idea of a terrestrial globe.

The Arabs, on the other hand, turned Ptolemy’s words into reality. Many of them used his Almagest rather than the Geographia and showed the stars, not the Earth, in their work. In Florence’s Museum of the History of Science, there is an engraved metal sphere about eight inches in diameter, with 1,015 stars marked on it according to Ptolemy’s descriptions, made by Ibrahim ibn Said al-Sahli al Wazzan with his son Muhammed in Valencia, in Moorish Spain, in the late eleventh century.

Such magnificent celestial globes were often carved on brass or silver, intended for a study rather than the navigator’s desk, but the Arabs must have made terrestrial globes as well. None survives today, but Christopher Columbus said in his ship’s log that he had seen globes of the world on which the island of Cipangu, or Japan, was marked.

The Arab globes were also studied by Martin Behaim, a Nuremberg traveler and adventurer who set out to copy the technique and manufacture a globe of his own toward the end of the fifteenth century. Behaim claimed to have sailed the coasts of Africa with the Portuguese explorers, and to have seen the globes at the Royal Observatory, which had been established in about 1420 by Portugal’s Prince Henry the Navigator at the southern port of Sagres.³

One advantage that neither Strabo, Ptolemy, nor their Arab imitators had mentioned was that the globe offers a dramatic way of demonstrating the circularity of the Earth to a layman – an investor, for instance, who might be persuaded to put money into an expedition. The Portuguese had demonstrated that there were riches to be won in the East, and in order to show the wealthy financiers of Germany how easily the Indies could be reached by sailing west, Behaim constructed the first modern globe known to have been produced in Europe. It was intended not for scholars or sailors but for bankers.

Behaim, the son of a German nobleman, had been packed off to Portugal as a young man to gain experience as a businessman, but had spent more time there among the sailors and navigators around the docks than in import and export. He had a healthy disrespect for authority – in his youth, he was said to have served a month in prison for dancing at a Jew’s wedding during Lent – but he also had a shrewd commercial eye. He was fascinated not only by what he had seen of the voyages of discovery but also by Prince Henry’s Arab globes.

None of those globes is known to have survived, but the Arabs had proved that Ptolemy’s theory worked. A globe to show how the western ocean lay between the continents of Europe and Asia was clearly the way to impress a skeptical audience with the practicality of sailing west to reach the Spice Islands in the East. The Portuguese controlled the passage around the southern coast of Africa, and huge costs were involved in the ancient overland trails from Asia through Arabia to the Mediterranean. The globe – which Behaim called his erdapfel, his earth-apple – was a striking demonstration of another route.

Today, Behaim’s brainchild is the most famous exhibit in Nuremberg’s Germanisches Nationalmuseum,⁴ darkened by age and scarred by the attentions of well-meaning “restorers” in the nineteenth century – the oldest terrestrial globe in the world. It was a scientific wonder, an artistic triumph representing the best thinking of Behaim’s age about the shape of the world – and a commercial dead end. Unlike the globe manufacturers who followed him in the sixteenth century, Behaim could not profit from selling examples of his creation; his globe was, unavoidably, unique. He lived before the development of printing techniques enabled artisans and mapmakers to create limitless copies of their work, and his map had to be painted by hand onto sheets of thin, fine leather after they had been stuck to a twenty-inch papier-mâché shell and mounted on an elegant wooden stand. It was never designed for navigation. Apart from the equator, a single meridian, and the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, there were no longitudes and latitudes marked on it, although Behaim did include the constellations of the zodiac and an array of forty-eight flags of European nations and noble families, fifteen coats of arms, and forty-eight portraits of kings and rulers. The globe was a tool of commerce, and to catch the interest of the Nuremberg merchants, Behaim incorporated lengthy descriptions of what merchandise could be purchased in the various islands of the Far East, and how trade should be conducted. For the artist Behaim paid to paint his globe, it was a miniature masterpiece. But however much the burghers of the town admired the piece, it could never be reproduced, except by starting from scratch with a new map.

BEHAIM’S TIMING, though, was unfortunate from an even more important point of view. As he was completing his model of the world, the world itself was changing beyond recognition. In Spain, the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella finally drove the Moors out of Grenada, breaking their last fingerhold in Europe and ending an Islamic presence that had lasted nearly eight centuries and enriched the country with art, literature, science, and trade. The king and queen had united the great kingdoms of Aragon and Castile with their marriage in 1469, starting an era of increasing royal prestige and power, and the departure twenty-three years later of Muhammad XI, or Boabdil, the last Moorish ruler on Spanish soil, reflected a new confidence for Christendom and the end of any lingering Arab dreams of further European conquest.

Some years later, a by then noted traveler of the day looked back to record the scene in Grenada as Boabdil left. “On the second day of the month of January, I saw the royal banner of Your Highnesses raised by force of arms on the towers of the Alhambra, which is the fortress of the said city, and saw the Moorish king come to the gates of the said city and kiss the royal hands of Your Highnesses.”⁵ He could tell that he was witnessing one of history’s defining moments. This same traveler had several names during a seafaring life which took him from country to country in the west of Europe, seeking support and financial sponsorship to fulfill the dream that was to turn into the second great event of this annus mirabilis. To his Genoese parents, he was Cristoforo Colombo; to the Spanish who eventually supplied him with money and ships, he was Cristóbal Colón; and to English-speaking historians, he later became Christopher Columbus.

By comparison with the defeat of the Moors, his exploits in the Ocean Sea, the Atlantic, attracted little immediate attention; but they rendered Martin Behaim’s globe out of date almost before its paint was dry. Behaim’s masterpiece had not even been unveiled to the Nuremberg merchants in 1492, when on August 3 three small ships set sail from Palos de la Frontera in southern Spain on a secret mission to an unknown destination. Seventy days later, Columbus and the captains of his little fleet stood on the shore of an island he named San Salvador in honor of the Holy Savior he believed had blessed his voyage.

In theory, maintaining a course due west by keeping the Sun at a constant height in the sky was simple enough, but the voyage had tested contemporary seamanship and navigation to the limit. Columbus had found it impossible to record how far he was going, let alone log his course. In fact, the devious captain kept two logs, one to reassure the crew, by understating the distances the ship had traveled, and a second, secret one for his own use, which recorded how far he believed they had really gone.* Yet even his supposedly accurate private calculations of the expedition’s position were often wrong. His observations of flotsam, the behavior of birds and fishes, and the seaweed in the Sargasso Sea all seemed to indicate that the ship was coming close to land, but the helmsman failed to find bottom first with one plumb line, then with two tied together. The flotilla was still in deep water, far out at sea.

Navigation devices were notoriously untrustworthy, and the traditional astrolabe with which Columbus tried to take sightings of the Sun above the horizon was almost impossible to use accurately on the pitching and tossing deck of a ship. As the flotilla headed west into the unknown, even the compass seldom showed true north, and its increasing inaccuracy added considerably to the panic among his crew. “The pilots took the north, marking it, and they found that the needles declined north-west a full point, and the sailors were alarmed and depressed,” Columbus noted in his journal on September 17.⁶ Mariners had been aware for some time of the phenomenon of magnetic deviation – the way variations in the Earth’s magnetic field cause the compass needle to diverge from true north depending on the position of a vessel on the Earth’s surface – but they had no idea why or how it happened. The effect was much more pronounced as they headed west; even their instruments were betraying them. None of the old rules learned in years of sailing near to the coasts of Europe and Africa seemed to apply.

Christopher Columbus

Science Photo Library, London

The areas in which Columbus had complete and unquestioning faith proved to be even more deceptive. He was sailing with all the preconceptions of a medieval Christian – the same preoccupations as the creators of the outdated mappaemundi. Many of the maps he had consulted as he planned his journey not only showed the lands that the cartographer believed existed, but also related them to the faith of the Catholic Church; the Bible was as much a source of geography as Ptolemy or the accounts of ancient travelers. Their reports were woven together with biblical tradition, so that, for example, the Rivers Ganges, Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates were identified as the four rivers said by Genesis to flow from Paradise. None of the maps Columbus consulted gave any hint of a vast new continent over the horizon.

Columbus, a devout Catholic who believed that he was on a special mission from God, never saw any reason to doubt the authority of the Bible. The medieval mapmakers, on the impeccable authority of St. Augustine, had placed the earthly Paradise in the farthest east of Asia, and when in 1498, on the third of the four voyages he made across the Atlantic, he found freshwater, not salt, out at sea off the northeast coast of South America where the Orinoco River pours into the ocean, his mind was made up. He declared that he was approaching the four heavenly rivers. “I say that if this river does not originate in the Terrestrial Paradise, it comes and flows from a land of infinite size to the south, of which we have no knowledge as yet. But I am completely persuaded in my own mind that the Terrestrial Paradise is the place I have described,” he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella.⁷

Such a huge outpouring of freshwater could only come from a vast area of land, and he was convinced by this time that he had reached a stretch of the mainland that had never before been discovered by Europeans. His argument was faultless, but his conclusion was wrong. The Bible had said nothing about a great and unknown continent to the west, and Columbus found it easier to believe that he was approaching the gates of Paradise than that he was standing at the threshold of a new world.

He had the same misconceptions about the world as Martin Behaim, although there is no evidence that they ever met or corresponded. “This is the island of Cipangu of which so many marvellous tales are told,” Columbus declared confidently in his journal, as he sailed northwest from San Salvador to Cuba. “On the globes which I have seen, and on the drawings of mappamondes, it is in this region.”⁸ It is still there on Behaim’s globe. Halfway across the great Ocean Sea is shown St. Brendan’s Island,* the “Promised Land of the Saints” that fascinated generations of mapmakers, and about the same distance farther on, the island of Cipangu, or Japan, with its temples and palaces of gold. Between them the globe shows nothing but sea.

In planning his original voyage, Columbus relied heavily on the mistaken observations of Marco Polo, who had reached the court of Kublai khan by traveling overland through Asia more than two hundred years before, but had exaggerated the distance he had covered. Columbus’s logic was faultless – the longer the journey by land to the east, the shorter the route by sea to the west – and it led him to underestimate the circumference of the world by about 25 percent.

Once he left the well-charted waters east of the Canary Islands, he had guidance, and probably a roughly drawn map, from a Florentine physician, astronomer, and geographer named Paolo Toscanelli dal Pozzo. Toscanelli, like Columbus, had studied the travels of Marco Polo, and had a thorough knowledge of the writings of Ptolemy. He had talked to European travelers to India and the Far East, and also to at least one ambassador from India who had visited Pope Eugenius in Rome. All his researches led him to the conclusion that the landmass of Europe and Asia spread across nearly two-thirds of the globe, so that the western route across the ocean to Asia could cover no more than 130 degrees of longitude. If Ptolemy’s estimate of 500 miles for each degree was correct, the journey to the land of the great khan should have been no more than 6,500 miles.†

THE KNOWN WORLD was expanding in other directions as well in the years shortly before Mercator’s birth. Four years before Columbus’s first voyage, the Portuguese navigator Bartholomeu Dias had rounded the southern tip of the African continent, overturning the accepted Ptolemaic wisdom that the African mainland was connected to a great southern landmass. As the fifteenth century drew to a close, the new Portuguese king Emmanuel – Manuel o Venturoso, the Fortunate – called on Dias to help with the construction of a flotilla of three ships to open a new trade route to India. Leadership of the new expedition was to have been offered to a military commander and government official named Estevão da Gama, but he died before the preparations were complete. Emmanuel turned to Estevão’s twenty-eight-year-old son, who had already distinguished himself in naval engagements with the French in the defense of Portuguese settlements on the coast of Guinea. Vasco da Gama was entrusted with the voyage, which the king hoped would establish Portuguese trading supremacy for generations.

If the magnitude of Columbus’s discovery was initially unappreciated, news of da Gama’s return to Lisbon in September 1499 from Calicut on the west coast of India, more than two years after he had embarked, shook the commercial houses of Europe to their foundations. The Italian merchants who had made fortunes out of their control of the overland trade routes into the eastern Mediterranean faced imminent disaster. “In this I clearly see the ruin of the City of Venice,” declared the wealthy Venetian banker Girolamo Priuli in his diary,⁹ and he was not mistaken: The prosperity of Venice, which had controlled the European end of the great caravan routes across Asia and Arabia, was one of the casualties of a series of discoveries that continued over the following decades.

The expeditions were driven partly by religion – by the desire to find more Christian communities to counterbalance the growing threat of militant Islam, whose soldiers still lined the southern and eastern borders of Christendom even after the expulsion of the Moors from Andalusia. But the prospect of trade, the quest for wealth, lay behind everything. King Emmanuel himself, writing to Ferdinand and Isabella after Vasco da Gama’s return, declared that the motive of the voyage had been “the service of the Lord our God, and our own advantage” – about nutmeg and the spice trade rather than knowledge.