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

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       Franciscus Monachus’s worldview

      British Library, London, Rare Books and Maps Collections

      Franciscus’s thoughts ran in more perilous channels as well. By the time Mercator met him he was in his midforties and was known as a critic of the Aristotelian ideas that were at the center of religious orthodoxy, a believer in the importance of observation and measurement, and a man who challenged accepted wisdom. The message of his map had been that exploration, pushing westward to the Indies, was a profitable enterprise, while in his book he had derided “the rubbish of Ptolemy,” and by implication denied the truth of Aristotle’s view of a five-zoned world.

      The jumble of fact, rumor, report, and conjecture that surrounded the emerging Americas, let alone Franciscus’s contemptuous view of the great Ptolemy, might have been meat enough for discussion between the two men, but their meetings seem to have ranged over the whole story of the Creation and the history of the world. These were more controversial studies by far than consideration of the coastline of the Americas.

      For obvious reasons, Mercator never spoke about his time at Mechelen. How often he traveled there, when or even whether he saw Franciscus, how long he stayed if they did meet, who else might have been with them, were all secrets he took to his grave. Despite the dangers involved, the two men did write to each other, though their letters have been lost. Events a decade later suggest that the religious authorities, at least, believed that their contents would have been enough to damn Mercator as a heretic.

      IN ANTWERP, days stretched into weeks, and weeks into months, and still Mercator stayed away from the university. He seems to have been deep in study, agonizing over the conflicts between the world he saw and the world Aristotle described, between reason and the Bible, no doubt debating whether he could return to an institution that stifled original thought as Leuven did. The pleas of the doctors and professors, instructing him to return, were all ignored. It is a mark of how much he was valued as a scholar that when he did eventually go back, they swallowed their pride and readmitted him into the university.¹

      The practicalities of making a living from his knowledge soon took hold. Even with the support of the University of Leuven, a delight in nature and in the order and proportion of Creation would never put bread on his table. Philosophy, as his friend and first biographer Walter Ghim put it, “would not enable him to support a family in the years to come.”² By contrast, geography – globes and maps, like those he had probably seen in Franciscus’s 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 СКАЧАТЬ