The World of Gerard Mercator: The Mapmaker Who Revolutionised Geography. Andrew Taylor
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FOR SAM, ABI, AND BEC,
and all the years they have to come.
Contents
CHAPTER ONE: Pushing Back Shadows
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 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 FOURTEEN: A Mysterious Commission
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: In the Forests of Lorraine
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
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