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. Gemmas 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 also articles of intrinsic beauty. Manufacturing them, finely detailed and embellished as they were, was a job for highly skilled craftsmen capable both of precise engineering and delicate artistry a challenge to goldsmiths and engravers, for the finest examples would command a high price from scholars and collectors alike.
Charles was also one of many wealthy collectors to keep a library hung with maps. The patent he granted to protect the first globe to come from the new workshop, and to prevent unauthorized copying of Gemma, Gaspard, and Mercators work,* noted with some satisfaction that it would record for the admiration of future generations our own kingdom which, by the grace of God, encompasses many islands and territories practically unknown to any previous century. Where the emperor and aristocracy led, the newly prosperous middle classes were eager to follow. Geography had captured the popular imagination, and the prosperity of Flanders meant there was money to be spent.
Hans Holbeins famous picture The Ambassadors (1533) shows Jean de Dinteville, ambassador to London from the French king Francis I, posing grandly with his colleague, the bishop of Lavour. On the desk between them lie a terrestrial and a celestial globe, one depicting the Earth, the other the stars and the planets incontrovertible evidence of their own wealth, power, and wisdom. The globe was as much a fashion statement as the ambassadors richly furred gown, demonstrating the growing control of the environment that the maritime discoveries embodied confident symbols of the outward-looking spirit of the age.
Hans Holbein the Youngers The Ambassadors
National Gallery, London
The idea that the Earth was round had been widely accepted for centuries, but the full significance of it was just beginning to dawn as the trading implications of Vasco da Gamas voyage to India and Ferdinand Magellans rounding of Cape Horn became plain. It was no longer a matter of abstract theory; vast fortunes could be and were being made by exploiting the fact that the Earth was a sphere.
Gemma and Gaspard both had some experience in the manufacture of globes. Gemma had produced one on his own in 1529 and included a sketch of it as the frontispiece to one of his textbooks of astronomy, while Gaspard had engraved the globe that Mercators friend and mentor Franciscus Monachus had designed in Mechelen. The first globe that the three men produced together in 1535 was a delicate structure of papieren bert, or cardboard a flimsy sphere just over thirty-six centimeters in diameter, barely three millimeters thick, and coated with a thin layer of plaster for strength and smoothness. Onto that was pasted a map that Gemma had created, drawing, he said, on the works of Ptolemy, Marco Polo, and the Portuguese explorer Gaspar de Corte-Real, who had traveled along the coast of Newfoundland early in the century searching for slaves.
There was more than geography to the map. Gemma knew it would need the approval of Charless imperial court before he could offer it for sale, and he took care that Tunis, conquered by the emperors forces only a year earlier, should be clearly marked within his domains. That was a detail, a small piece of political flattery, but across the world, Gemma was anxious to draw on the latest information. It is clear from the one surviving copy of the globe, now in Viennas Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, that he consulted the reports of the Portuguese explorers in the East, so that the Indian peninsula, shriveled and flat on Ptolemys maps, showed its true triangular shape, and the island of Ceylon, whose size was so exaggerated by Ptolemy, was almost the correct shape and size. The outline of Africa, which only a few decades before had been a matter of conjecture, stretching southward to join the great undiscovered land around the South Pole, had been fixed by years of Portuguese trading. Where once had been tracts of empty space, dozens of islands, rivers, and countries were engraved by name the Sinus Barbaricus (Bay of Savages), off the northeast coast, or the Trogloditica Regio (Land of the Troglodytes), stretching inland. The island of Zandibar, known by repute for centuries because of the spices that were transported by camel through Arabia to Europe, carried a regretful note This island not yet certainly explored and lay far out in the Indian Ocean, hundreds of miles from its true position.
Ferdinand Magellans voyage had brought back more details of the islands of Southeast Asia, although that area is so damaged on the Vienna globe that much of it is obscure. To the west, Gemma accepted the amazing piece of guesswork if that is what it was by Martin Waldseemüller, supported by more recent Spanish vessels sailing regularly to the west coast of the Americas, and drew in a wide Pacific Ocean separating an abbreviated America from the Asian landmass. Gemmas map was a marked contrast both with the bulging Asian-American coastline of Franciscus Monachus and with Martin Behaims America-less world.
THE NEW TECHNIQUE OF PRINTING, as much as advances in geographic knowledge, had rendered Behaims unique, hand-painted globe of 1492 obsolete. By the early sixteenth century, most of the scores of printing houses scattered across northern Europe were producing not only typescript but also pictures and maps; the printed globe, like the book whose technology it had adapted, was sweeping across the continent. The roots of Mercators future commercial success lay in mastering this rapidly developing medium.
Printing had established itself in Leuven within twenty years after the first books came off the presses in Germany,* but the change from woodcuts to the more delicate copperplate in the mid sixteenth century transformed the Netherlands into Europes unchallenged center for mapmaking and map publishing. The jewelry trade, which had developed from Antwerps traditional commerce in gold and precious stones, had attracted the finest line engravers in the world to the city. Gaspard was only one of many goldsmiths who had adapted his traditional skills to the rapidly expanding and profitable business of printing.