Mercator: History in the (Map)Making
Introduction
For this collection highlight, we present two atlases by one of the most important European cartographers of all time, Gerard Mercator.
- Mercator’s edition of Claudius Ptolemy’s ‘Geographia’ (1584), an homage to early geographical science
- Mercator’s 'Atlas sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura' (1595), his ground-breaking modern atlas
Together, these two seminal works serve as a bridge linking maps in The Sunderland Collection using the foundational principles of classical cartography, to those produced at the dawn of Western scientific mapmaking.
They illustrate the evolution of geography in Europe: a transition from theoretical - and often speculative - views of the Earth by ancient polymaths such as Ptolemy and Aristotle, to a mathematical and exact discipline of mapmaking anchored in intellectual exchange.
Who was Gerard Mercator?
Mercator was one of the most prominent figures in European cartography during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - a skilled cosmographer, geographer, historian, and a maker of maps, globes and scientific instruments.
Born ‘Geert De Kremer’ in Rupelmonde, Belgium in 1512, he was the youngest of seven children in a modest family. His father was a humble cobbler.
Mercator spent his formative years in Gangelt in modern North Rhine-Westphalia on the border between the Netherlands and Germany.
The town was situated on the high road connecting the economic giants Antwerp and Cologne, which formed part of the Hanseatic Trade route between the Low Countries and Italy.
Europe in the early sixteenth century was marked by the religious turmoil of the Reformation and plagued by disease. Due to worsening living conditions and famine in Gangelt, the De Kremer family moved back to Rupelmonde to live with Mercator’s uncle on the banks of the River Schelde southwest of Antwerp. This location was highly influential on the young Mercator: the river acted as a highway, allowing him to gather information from passing travellers and scholars.
Rupelmonde from ‘Flandria illustrata’ (1641) by Antonius Sanderus. Public domain.
Following the death of his father in 1526 and under the guardianship of his uncle who was a priest, Mercator was sent to Den Bosch to attend the Roman Catholic school of the Brethren of the Common Life. Here, he studied the Bible and Aristotle, and gained his new Latin name Gerard Mercator.
Mercator's Bible studies conflicted with the theories of philosophers like Aristotle as well as his own personal investigations of the world. This tension between faith and scientific understanding would be a thread throughout his life.
Public Domain via Smithsonian Libraries
In 1530, Mercator enrolled at the famous University of Leuven, where he studied philosophy and mathematics. He gained his master’s degree in 1532 and went on to study philosophy in Antwerp. On his return to Leuven in 1534, he advanced his studies in astronomy, geography and mathematics, and trained in globe and instrument making under the distinguished professor and polymath Gemma Frisius (1508-1555). He would also work alongside goldsmith Gaspar van der Heyden (c1496–c1549).
This experience provided Mercator with valuable skills and insights on running a business, and eventually secured him the patronage of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.
Mercator never ventured far from his birth place, but was an avid armchair traveller who meticulously gathered information. He had an extensive library with thousands of books, and maintained regular correspondence in many languages with scholars, explorers, religious figures and mapmakers. This allowed him to remain current with the newest ‘discoveries’ and ideas concerning contemporary society. He is known to have made an annual pilgrimage to the Frankfurt Book Fair to buy and exchange books, maps, manuscripts, and ideas.
Naturally, his involvement with Frisius and their successful globe production business taught Mercator how to compile and update geography using existing maps and travel accounts as well as how to market and sell the work.
World chronicles and books of knowledge in circulation at the time featured maps of the known world and of the Holy Land, as is the case with Lucas Brandis de Schass’ ‘Rudimentum Novitiorum’ (1475). These works inspired Mercator to create his first map which combined his two devotions: geography and religion. He published his map of Palestine and Egypt in 1537.
©Bibliothèque Nationale de France
©Library of Congress
A year after his map of the Holy Land, Mercator published his first world map which was directly inspired by the double-cordiform polar-projection map (1531) by pioneering French cartographer Oronce Fine (1494-1555).
Through this map Mercator became the first European cartographer to name both North and South America - distinguished as separate landmasses - on a printed map.
According to the Library of Congress, “Mercator shares [the] responsibility with Martin Waldseemüller for naming the Western Hemisphere.” The map survives today in only two copies (American Geographical Society Library and New York Public Library).
Mercator continued to see contradictions between biblical accounts of Creation and Aristotle’s writings. At the time, questioning the Bible could be dangerously construed as blasphemy. He also began corresponding with Franciscan preachers in nearby Antwerp and Mechelen, and visited them several times to discuss theology and science.
In 1544, he was arrested and imprisoned for several months in Rupelmonde Castle on a charge of heresy by the Spanish Inquisition. To escape religious persecution, Mercator moved to Duisburg in 1552. A tolerant enclave renowned for being a ‘sanctuary for scholars,’ it is here he continued his work producing globes and maps until the end of his life.
Pair of table globes created by Mercator (1551)
©National Maritime Museum, London
Like many mapmakers and cosmographers of the Early Modern period (1450-1750), Mercator was searching for a solution to the problem of accurately conveying the Earth's sphere in only two dimensions.
In 1569, Mercator secured his name in the history books by producing an extraordinary new view of the world on his own projection - the Mercator Projection.
©Bibliothèque Nationale de France
Mercator's famed world map was titled 'Nova et Aucta Orbis Terrae Descriptio ad Usum Navigantium Emendate Accommodata' the Latin for 'A New and more Complete Representation of the Terrestrial Globe, properly adapted for navigation' (1569). It marked the turning point in the advancement of mapmaking, and has left an indelible mark on how Europeans viewed the world - although only two copies of this magnificent eighteen-sheet map are known to have survived.
In his model, Mercator treated the world as if were projected onto a cylinder, thus preserving straight and perpendicular lines of latitude and longitude so that they can be used for navigation. The map centres on Europe and includes a criss-cross of rhumb lines and useful annotations, theoretically enabling navigation on land or at sea.
Although the Mercator projection more accurately maintains the shape of landmasses that are close to Europe, it exaggerates the size of land the further away it is from the Equator, with extreme distortion seen at the North and South Poles.
Mercator would continue to study the Earth, and maps by the ancients and his peers, to finetune his work.
Mercator's 'Geographia' (1584)
Mercator’s edition of the iconic ‘Geographia’ was first published in 1578.
The ‘Geographia’ was originally written by Claudius Ptolemy in the second century BCE. The rediscovery and translation of this text in fifteenth-century Europe sparked a new era of mapmaking.
Cartographers began to redraw the world based on Ptolemy’s data, utilising the thousands of latitude and longitude coordinates he had gathered, despite some being rather inaccurate.
By the early 1500s, mariners could calculate latitude fairly confidently thanks to instruments like astrolabes and quadrants, which measured the altitude of the Sun at noon or the height of the North Star. However, the problem of determining longitude would remain unsolved until the eighteenth century. Mercator did his best to make necessary corrections to the degrees of latitude and implement longitude in his edition of the ‘Geographia.’
The work features a handsome Ptolemaic world map and twenty-seven maps of the known world: ten maps of Europe, four maps of Africa and thirteen maps of Asia. They were the truest renditions of Ptolemy’s maps to date, and Mercator went to great lengths to also include descriptions of the sources and projections he used in the five-page preface to the work. As well as adding a multitude of toponyms, embellishing the cartouches with ornate strapwork, fauna, flowers, and the occasional sea monster, Mercator also added an extra map - an enlargement of the Nile Delta.
Like the German cosmographer Sebastian Münster (1488–1552), who published his own edition of the 'Geographia' in 1540, Mercator's version used a Latin translation by Willibald Pirckheimer (1470–1530). This beautiful, faithful edition illustrates just how influential Ptolemy’s world view still was to cosmographers of the period.
Mercator’s work is particularly significant because all twenty-eight of the maps featured in the book were not only painstakingly researched and redrawn, but also engraved by the great cartographer himself. Mercator’s ‘Geographia’ was printed in seven editions between 1578 and 1730, speaking to his status as a Titan of cartographic history.
It is dedicated to his dear friend and main competitor Abraham Ortelius and in turn, Mercator was lauded by Ortelius in his own atlas as “the Ptolemy of [our] time.”
The 'Atlas' (1595)
After years of intense work - recovering from the monumental historical undertaking of 'Geoographia', its corrections, keeping up with correspondence about contemporary 'discoveries', and even helping Oxford scholar William Camden with his magnum opus 'Britannia' (1586) - Mercator began another seismic project of what he called his 'new geography'. It was over a decade in preparation and part of his master plan.
This is an extraordinary first complete edition of the 'Atlas sive Cosmographicae Meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et Fabricati Figura' (1595).
It is recognised as the first truly modern scientific atlas. The work was first released a year after Mercator’s death by his youngest son, Rumold (c.1541-1600) and comprised a monumental one hundred and seven maps.
Although Ortelius's ‘Theatrum Orbis Terrarum’ (1570) holds the distinction of being the first published uniform collection of world maps in a book, Gerard Mercator's meticulously crafted and ambitious work was the first to coin the name 'Atlas' for such a collection.
This name was chosen, as he wrote, ‘to honour the Titan, Atlas, King of Mauretania, a learned philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer’. In the frontispiece of the work, Atlas can be seen holding a celestial sphere
Although much of Mercator’s fame comes from his revolutionary 1569 map of the world, that map does not feature in his modern ‘Atlas’. Instead his son included his own double-hemisphere world map (1587) that he engraved using his father’s projection. The atlas also features continental maps after Mercator made by his nephews, Gerardus and Michael.
As with the ‘Geographia’, Mercator engraved the majority of the copperplates included in his ‘Atlas’ himself, and they were intended to be a part of a grand ‘Cosmography’ to be published in five volumes. The 'Atlas' includes maps of France, the Low Countries, Germany, Italy, the Balkans and Greece produced between 1585 and 1595.
Mercator laboured over political and administrative divisions before instructing his colourists to confirm the demarcations featured on his maps, and - recognising the nuances - each region was prefaced with commentary of its history and governance.
To complete the ‘Atlas’, Rumold added an introduction describing the Creation of the world, his famous double-hemisphere world map, maps of the four continents, and ‘new’ maps of the British Isles, Iceland, Scandinavia, Prussia, Russia, the Baltic countries, Transylvania, and Ukraine. Of particular note is the map of North Pole.
This unusual but highly attractive depiction shows the Arctic, which Gerard Mercator crafted using existing maps and travel accounts, and his own speculations on the magnetic North Pole. Curiously, four mountainous islands surround the Pole - this derived from Aristotle’s theory that there must be landmasses in the North to counterbalance the large but unknown Southern Continent.
Another feature is the phantom island of Friesland, which also appears in an inset in the upper left. This originates from the voyage of Venetian explorers Nicolò and Antonio Zeno in 1558. This account turned out to be fraudulent but was copied onto many maps of the period, including Girolamo Ruscelli’s map of Scandinavia (1561).
The ’Atlas’ was seminal in European cartography. Utilising scientific techniques such as triangulation, Mercator’s work significantly advanced the precision of maps which was embraced by later mapmakers. Innovatively, viewers of the Atlas were also presented with three levels of scale to provide better detail - an early ‘zoom’ function. In the ‘Atlas’ he hoped to create display ‘continuous map [with which] a politician and scholar could roam the globe from home.’
Here, you can see here a map of Europe, a map of the Low Countries and part of Germany, and a regional map of Brabant marking Rupelmonde, Gangelt, Leuven, Den Bosch and Duisburg.
The ‘Atlas’ faced fierce competition from Ortelius’ ‘Theatrum’ which in the last quarter of the sixteenth century had achieved near-divine status. This unfortunately set Mercator’s firm on a path of decline until Rumold’s death in 1599.
In 1604, Flemish map engraver and publisher Jodocus Hondius (1563-1612) purchased all of the plates from the Mercator estate. Hondius was based in Belgium until 1584, when he moved to London to avoid religious persecution. In 1593, Hondius settled in Amsterdam - the undisputed capital of map production in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - where he remained until his death.
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Following the purchase of Mercator’s plates, Hondius continued to publish editions of the ‘Atlas’ and by 1633, there were fourteen editions. The 'Mercator-Hondius’ atlases elaborated on Mercator’s work by including up to thirty-six new maps.
In an attempt to also inherit Mercator’s reputation, Hondius included this friendly dual portrait, although it is likely the two never met!
Hondius was notable for having been the first to publish a map on Mercator's Projection after the death of its inventor. This highly influential work is known as the 'Christian Knight Map' (c.1597) and it inspired cartographers to adopt the projection.
In addition to the ‘Christian Knight Map’, both atlases by Mercator connect many of the cornerstone works in the Collection, including important early editions of Ptolemy’s ‘Geographia’ by Berlinghieri (1482), Ruysch (1507), Servetus (1541) and Ruscelli (1561), through to works that championed and popularised Mercator’s ground-breaking projection.
A notable example is Robert Dudley's ‘Dell’Arcano del Mare’ (1647), which was the first comprehensive atlas of sea charts utilising the projection and was instrumental in teaching a generation of navigators how to create their own charts based on Mercator’s mapmaking method.
Walter Ghim, Mercator’s neighbour and the Mayor in Duisburg wrote a touching eulogy for Mercator which was included in the posthumously published 'Atlas’. Titled ‘Vita Celeberrimi Clarissimique viri Gerardi Mercatoris Rupelmundani’ (Life of the Celebrated and Most Famous Gerard Mercator of Rupelmonde), Ghim praised him as a “remarkable man" with a "mild character and honest way of life."
Legacy
The enduring nature of Mercator’s legacy is demonstrated by the continued relevance of his work today. International mapping agencies NASA, GoogleMaps, Ordnance Survey and the British Admiralty as well as a multitude of digital mapping applications all use the Mercator projection for its navigational properties and clearer representation of localised geography.
Modern classrooms however have recently moved away from the Mercator projection and instead use the Peters, Winkel Tripel or Robinson projections for their more accurate representations of global landmasses and their relative sizes, although some compromise in accuracy is still unavoidable.
Click the links below to explore these atlases in brilliant detail. You can also enjoy two WHAT’S YOUR MAP? podcast episodes to learn more about Mercator’s work in the Collection.
What's Your Map? Episodes
Select References
Nicholas Crane. ‘Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet.’ Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2002
Mark Monmonier. ‘Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection.’ University of Chicago Press, 2004
The Forum Podcast - ‘Gerard Mercator: The man who revolutionised mapmaking’ Mon 27 Apr 2020. Rajan Datar with Nicholas Crane, Emily Thomas and Philippe De Maeyer.
Johannes Keuning. ‘The History of an Atlas: Mercator-Hondius.’ Imago Mundi, 4, 37-62. (1947) from Jstor
Jerry Brotton. ‘A History of the World in Twelve Maps.’ Penguin, 2012.
Cornelis Koeman, Günter Schilder, Marco van Egmond, and Peter van der Krogt. ‘Commercial Cartography and Map Production in the Low Countries, 1500–ca. 1672’ History of Cartography Project, Volume 3, University of Chicago Press.