Mapping a map-maker

Mercator is a name synonymous with maps and mapping

Mercator is a name synonymous with maps and mapping. The rectangular projection associated with it has long since become one of the abiding laws of cartography and with it, of navigation, international geography and ultimately of space exploration. Nicholas Crane's excitingly informed and textured study tells the very human, inspiring and often sad story of Gerard Kremer, later Mercator, the northern European genius behind this most famous name.

Brilliantly plotted in a relaxed and deceptively organised narrative are Mercator's struggles and his dreams, as well as the constant flux of the chaotic Europe in which he lived. It was a world in which daily life was acted out against overwhelming poverty, despair, disease, famine, brutality, great deeds of exploration and discovery, the whims of kings and the vicious decrees of religion.

Considering that a yawning gap of almost 500 years separates us from then, Crane evokes a profound and humane sense of Mercator, the most sympathetic and humble of men who was also a practical dreamer of great ambition. This son of a cobbler is revered as the father of modern map-making, yet he began his intellectual life as a philosopher before turning to mathematics. He created world globes while also crafting several forms of scientific instruments, had many followers and yet lived in a turmoil of missed deadlines and ongoing fear. He worked all his life, fulfilling commissions while pursuing astounding projects of his own and like many a journeyman sent his work to the Frankfurt Book Fair, the market place for books and maps.

As Crane makes clear, Mercator although for a time patronised by Emperor Charles V, never really enjoyed patronage as such. There was no university post, no intellectual debate, no ease; for all the admiration, there were also doubters. His long life - of 82 years, double the expectancy of his time - and of his parents, was hard; his work invariably carried under the fear of persecution. Mercator was a child of the Reformation, he too suffered the barbarism of the Inquisition, was imprisoned and was lucky to escape with his life and sanity. It is a book of ironies and revelations, particularly the fact that although Mercator opened up the world for man, his explorations carried out in his mind were conducted through scholarship and research - he never travelled, his entire life consisted of a handful of reluctant, migratory journeys within the Low Countries region of his native Flanders.

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There is also the irony that because of the ongoing political changes, that while Mercator mapped the world, it is difficult to map exactly where he was born and so he remains caught between German and Flemish cultures.

Although this is a biography of one remarkable man - and Crane creates an effective portrait of Mercator who emerges as a very real person - the book also succeeds as atmospheric medieval history. It is well researched and indexed, there is no sloppy supposition. Crane unlike so many biographers, never presumes to read Mercator's mind. Instead, he allows his subject's words and achievements speak for themselves, and they do. Adding to the cohesion of the text is Crane's grasp of a period in which science and religion were at war.

Also very much part of the story are the other giants who walk through it - Luther, Erasmus, Albrecht Dürer, Emperor Charles V, Elizabeth I as well as a range of scientists and pioneering geographers such as Franciscus Monachus. This was a time, as Crane points out, "when most geographers were theologians". Monachus, a Franciscan monk and globe maker, was one of the first geographers in the Low Countries to break with the synthetic mix of biblical cosmogony and Arisotelianism that had characterised orthodox geography for centuries.

Educated at Louvain University - where the young Mercator would later study - Monachus "practised a geography which drew on investigation; on experience and observation. His terrestrial globe had been the first to be constructed in the Low Countries".

Another major presence presides over the book as well as over Mercator's life and career, that of the towering achievement of the second century Egyptian astronomer and cartographer, Ptolemy. Contained within the opening lines of Ptolemy's Geography, his 'Guide to Drawing a World Map' was a vital defining distinction between two forms of cartography. Firstly, as Crane interprets it, "there was geographia, or world cartography, which was 'an imitation through drawing of the entire known part of the world together with the things that are, broadly speaking, connected with it'. Then there was chorographia, or regional geography, 'an independent discipline' which 'sets out the individual localities'."

Translated into Latin and printed in several editions throughout Italy some 1,200 years after Ptolemy had first written it, the Alexandrian's cartographic thesis became, as Crane notes, "a template for modern mapmakers". Its influence on Mercator was immense.

It is this sense of the chronology and cohesion of learning, a continuity of vision, that informs Crane's approach throughout. He has worked hard at unravelling the science and the various methodologies. It becomes possible to imagine the excitement created when Ptolemy's ancient, yet still radical theories first appeared in a new translation by a pioneering German geographer, Johannes Regiomontanus, on a printing press in his Nuremberg house.

By 1514, two years after the birth of Mercator, Johann Werner having translated Ptolemy and Euclid, "published a work on map projections which would give Mercator a platform for his own cartographic career". Such attention to the thinkers that preceded Mercator is one of the many strengths of Crane's book. Mercator and his work is never seen in isolation. Just as Monachus introduced Mercator to the principles of geography, another monk, the crippled Frieslander Gemma Frisius, a mathematician, became his mentor and played a vital part in his life. That life, of course began in 1512, and Crane does very well with his material, describing the journey of desperation undertaken by Mercator's parents in flight from the plague spreading across the lands of the lower Rhine. His mother was preparing to give birth to him, her seventh and final child.

He was born in a hospice in Rupelmonde, where his grand uncle was a priest. Shortly afterwards the family travelled to the little town of Gangelt, a place balanced between German speakers to the east, and Dutch to the west. A couple of day's ride to the east lay Holy Cologne. The other centres of axis for Mercator's world were Antwerp and Louvain. By the age of six, Mercator was on the move again, as the family returned to Rupelmonde, the river port of his birth. It was expected he would be a priest, like his grand uncle.

His schooling in Latin, the common European language, began. During this time, Flanders became subsumed into the Holy Roman Empire, ruled over by Charles V. Upheaval became a way of life. Crane follows Mercator through his early education and the point at which he forsakes his German ancestry, and his name Kremer, to become the Latinised Mercator, arriving at Louvain University in the Summer of 1530. Slowly the philosopher becomes the mathematician, who then turns to geography.

We see him studying the first regional map printed, a woodcut of Palestine. Again, as throughout the book, there is this balancing of religion and science. It is this dualism which leads him to the attention of the Inquisition. There are the friendships and rivalries, the arrival of characters such as John Dee and Abraham Ortelius - an editor not a map-maker - the slow creation of Mercator's world maps, the calligraphy, beautiful engraved globes including the great terrestrial globe of 1541, his coining of the word "atlas" and his mighty Atlas of the world of 73 finished maps and the 29 he had been working on at the time of his final collapse.

But before all that, at 40, with half his life still to live, the most reluctant of travellers, moved again, this time to Duisburg, "the outer reaches of the commercial, theological and humanist firmament". Within two years, he produced his new map of Europe. Crane is very good on Mercator's maps, the artistry, the science, changing scales and styles.

Politics and suspicion, hope and wonder, and above all, discovery, shape the book. Mercator did not delegate, he did all his work. Outliving his wife of some 50 years, and most of his children, he died at 82. My one confusion with Crane's wonderful book is that he refers several times to Mercator dying in 1594, the accepted date published in all reference works, and yet describes the great cartographer's death occurring on December 2nd, 1593. It is a quibble, but why such a basic factual discrepancy? As a portrait of a genius, as a biography, as a history, as a rich, lively though dignified narrative and as a colourful adventure, this story of the stoic individual who not only mapped the planet but opened man's eyes, is a marvellous, unforgettable book. It is also one that everyone with an interest in history, the world, in life, should - no must - read.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times