THE KNOWN WORLD was expanding in other directions as well in the years shortly before Mercators birth. Four years before Columbuss first voyage, the Portuguese navigator Bartholomeu Dias had rounded the southern tip of the African continent, overturning the accepted Ptolemaic wisdom that the African mainland was connected to a great southern landmass. As the fifteenth century drew to a close, the new Portuguese king Emmanuel Manuel o Venturoso, the Fortunate called on Dias to help with the construction of a flotilla of three ships to open a new trade route to India. Leadership of the new expedition was to have been offered to a military commander and government official named Estevão da Gama, but he died before the preparations were complete. Emmanuel turned to Estevãos twenty-eight-year-old son, who had already distinguished himself in naval engagements with the French in the defense of Portuguese settlements on the coast of Guinea. Vasco da Gama was entrusted with the voyage, which the king hoped would establish Portuguese trading supremacy for generations.
If the magnitude of Columbuss discovery was initially unappreciated, news of da Gamas return to Lisbon in September 1499 from Calicut on the west coast of India, more than two years after he had embarked, shook the commercial houses of Europe to their foundations. The Italian merchants who had made fortunes out of their control of the overland trade routes into the eastern Mediterranean faced imminent disaster. In this I clearly see the ruin of the City of Venice, declared the wealthy Venetian banker Girolamo Priuli in his diary,9 and he was not mistaken: The prosperity of Venice, which had controlled the European end of the great caravan routes across Asia and Arabia, was one of the casualties of a series of discoveries that continued over the following decades.
The expeditions were driven partly by religion by the desire to find more Christian communities to counterbalance the growing threat of militant Islam, whose soldiers still lined the southern and eastern borders of Christendom even after the expulsion of the Moors from Andalusia. But the prospect of trade, the quest for wealth, lay behind everything. King Emmanuel himself, writing to Ferdinand and Isabella after Vasco da Gamas return, declared that the motive of the voyage had been the service of the Lord our God, and our own advantage about nutmeg and the spice trade rather than knowledge.
For someone drawn to cartography, Mercator could hardly have been born at a more propitious moment in the history of geography and exploration. In the east, Dias and Vasco da Gama had shattered the old assumptions by sailing into a sea that should have been surrounded by land, while to the west, a new continent of undreamed-of size and wealth had been discovered, even if it was not yet appreciated.
For centuries, Europe had seemed, to Europeans at least, an oasis of certainty in a vast and unfriendly desert of ignorance. Following these voyages, the continent engaged in an unprecedentedly outward-looking period of exploration; where men had once dreamed of dragons and sea monsters, they found elephants and giraffes. A scramble for land, wealth, and influence that was to double the size of the known world within a few decades had begun.
Practically every voyage added more knowledge of new lands. Progress was faster to the east and in the Indian Ocean, where there was already a network of established trade routes and a ready supply of local guides and pilots, but along the coasts of America, too, the map began to take shape. In 1500, for instance, the Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral set out to follow da Gamas route to India but, in pushing even farther west in search of good winds, became the first mariner to sight the coast of Brazil.10
Europe was buzzing with gossip and speculation about the new discoveries, but the maps drawn during the early sixteenth century show how gradually geographic knowledge accumulated. The German clergyman-cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map in 1507 in which the coastlines of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East are all instantly recognizable today but to the east and west, those confident outlines faded into guesswork and supposition. Waldseemüller drew the Far East with little more accuracy than Ptolemy had managed fifteen hundred years earlier, and America clings to the maps left-hand edge, a long narrow strip of land that is evidently sketched in with only the skimpiest knowledge. For all the lack of detail and the unfamiliar outline, though, America is there a separate continent, divided from Asia by the waters of the Pacific Ocean. Waldseemüllers map was the first to suggest that what had been shown before as a collection of islands off the coast of Asia was actually a single landmass.
Parts of the eastern coast of North America had been surveyed and mapped by the turn of the century, particularly by the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci, and the title Waldseemüller chose for his map indicates the two sources on which he relied. It was drawn, he said, secundum Ptolomei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes (according to the account of Ptolemy and the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci and others). By then, Vespucci had led several expeditions down the east coast of the vast new land, seeking financial backing wherever he could find it, and sailing sometimes under the Spanish flag, sometimes under that of Portugal. He had none of Columbuss obsessions with Cathay or the terrestrial Paradise, and declared that the lands far to the west were a discovery which it is proper to call a New World.11
No European had yet seen the west coast of the Americas, and in this section of the map, Waldseemüllers guesswork was amazingly accurate. Not until 1513, six years after it was published, did the Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa become the first European to set eyes on the Pacific Ocean from the famous peak in Darien,12 and another nine years passed before Ferdinand Magellans expedition arrived back in Spain after sailing across that ocean. The presence of the then-unknown Pacific on Waldseemüllers map is one of the great mysteries of cartographic history. Perhaps he had access to more information, now lost, from Vespuccis expeditions, or, more likely, perhaps he simply drew his conclusion from Vespuccis belief that America was a completely new world. Whatever his motive, Waldseemüller named the continent America on his map in Vespuccis honor. I do not see why anyone should object to calling it after Americus the discoverer, he declared in the book that accompanied his map.13 Waldseemüller sold more than a thousand copies of his map and his book enough to establish the name America in peoples minds, though when he realized his mistake a few years later, he tried to give Columbus the credit he deserved.*
Martin Waldseemüllers World Map, 1507
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Fifteen years after Waldseemüllers map, the first known circumnavigation of the globe was completed14 the crucial final proof, if any were needed, that the world was round. Ferdinand Magellan left Seville in late September 1519 with the commission of King Charles I later to be the emperor Charles V and a ragtag and bobtail fleet of five aging ships, crewed by the sweepings of the Spanish docks. As a young man, according to some reports, he had been a pupil of Martin Behaim; if so, the return of his expedition after a full three years at sea proved both the strengths and the shortcomings of his teachers ideas. Behaim had been right about the shape of the world but disastrously wrong about the lands that lay on its surface. Magellan had sailed around a continent that Behaim never dreamed existed. He died shortly afterward in a skirmish with natives on a Pacific island, but the return in 1522 of the Victoria, sole survivor of his flotilla, was the inspiration for a succession of Spanish probes up the western coast of South America.
WHEN MERCATOR was born in 1512, the known world was, thus, still surrounded by shadows. By the time he died eighty-two years later, merchants and bankers were making vast fortunes by bringing regular cargoes back from the East Indies by sea,* while the apparently limitless gold and silver plundered from the ancient civilizations of the New World to the west had turned the economies of Spain and Europe upside down. During his lifetime, the traders, financiers, and businessmen of Europe took control of the new lands that had been revealed, and they did so because mariners gradually took control of the seas.
In the Middle Ages, there had been no sense that knowledge could be outdated, that the wisdom of the ancients could be challenged by experiment, observation, or reason. Religion, too, had been buttressed by that same sense of stability. Suddenly, such challenges seemed to be happening all the time. Reflecting the frenetic pace of discovery, George Beste, who sailed the northern seas later in the sixteenth century with the English explorer and sometime pirate Martin Frobisher, would write with a mixture of awe and excitement: Within the memory of man, within these fourscore years, there hath been more new countries and regions discovered than in five thousand years before; yea, more than half the world hath been discovered by men that are yet (or may very well for their age be) alive.15 Within eight decades, in other words, the size of the known world had doubled.
FOR MORE THAN two hundred years, European mariners had prepared sketch maps to show the coastlines and the approaches to ports in Europe. But the maps that were available were virtually useless for long-distance navigation. The so-called portolan16 charts were often produced as an accompaniment to written descriptions of the coastal features, compiled by sailors for themselves or their close associates and based largely on their experience of the coasts that they illustrated. They were drawn by detailed observation and with careful reference to the mariners compass, but they had generally no lines of latitude and longitude, no learned references or legends. They took no interest in interior features; river mouths or distinctive skylines visible from the sea might be noted, but cities, inland roads, even mountain ranges were almost always omitted. They were maps by seamen, for seamen tools of the trade. Rough mapping was the stock-in-trade of any experienced mariner. The only surviving map drawn by Columbus himself, showing northwest Hispaniola, now the northern coast of Haiti, demonstrates how accurately a skilled seaman could make a running survey of an unknown coastline. But the sailors rough sketches, like the portolan maps, made no allowance for the curvature of the Earth.
Even Waldseemüllers groundbreaking world map was constructed on a projection originally devised by Ptolemy in the second century AD. Mariners knew that any accuracy in following the traditional maps with which they were provided over great distances was impossible, and cartographers understood why. Michiel Coignet, a chartmaker of Antwerp, pointed out later in the century17 that there was simply no point in laying off a course according to compass bearings as they appeared on a traditional map; the straight lines on the flat sheet of paper, transferred to the curved surface of the globe, would produce a series of spiral curves that would take a ship drastically off course.
The solution to this problem, navigators found, was a combination of dead reckoning estimating their position by judging the distance the ship had sailed along a known compass bearing and keeping as much of their course as possible due east or west. By sailing the latitudes, the parallel lines around the Earths surface, they could avoid the distorting effects of the curvature of the Earth. The traditional sailing directions for reaching the West Indies from Europe were south until the butter melts, then due west into the sunset.18
In practice, ships sailed miles out of their way, aiming far to the east or west of their chosen destination in order to find the correct latitude. The unreliability of navigational instruments, the difficulty of taking sightings to check latitude on the rolling deck of a ship, and the need for frequent tacking in contrary winds all made matters worse; but the underlying problem was that neither sailors nor scholars had tackled the problem of reproducing the curved surface of the spherical Earth on a flat map. While voyages were short and close to land, the problem of projection could be more or less ignored; following a line ruled straight on a map would simply result in a small navigational error. As the ships ranged farther from the well-known waters of the Mediterranean, though, the effects of this failing became more dramatic. Men could sail the seas of the world with greater confidence than ever before, but they could not map them accurately.
Chapter Three A Small Town on the River Scheldt
THE RESEARCHES OF SCHOLARS and geographers, the work of printers and booksellers, and the discoveries of hard-bitten sailors and explorers had combined to make the early sixteenth century the most favorable time in which a man of Mercators talents and interests could have been born. But the land in which he grew up was riven by political factions and smoldering with religious hatreds.
At the start of the new century, the birth in 1500 of the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the ancient merchant city of Ghent in Flanders marked the climax of more than 150 years of schemes, machinations, and marriages among the ruling families of Europe. While the adventurers of Spain and Portugal were discovering new worlds abroad, in Europe the dukes of Burgundy had been busily laying their hands on as much of the old one as they could, marrying their way into a realm that eventually stretched across the prosperous financial heartland of northern Europe. They turned marriage from a sacrament to a strategy. During a century and a half of buying, inheriting, and most of all marrying into new possessions, they could have taught the rest of Europe a lesson, had anyone thought to heed it: War could be profitable, but well-planned matrimony was infinitely more so.
Philip, one of the dukes of Burgundy, was a member of the powerful Habsburg family, who had been building up their own lands in Germany with similar determination throughout the fifteenth century, and he married Joanna of Spain, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, whose own marriage in 1469 had already united the Spanish kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Charles was the son of Philip and Joannas triumphal dynastic marriage, and he steadily inherited individual titles and honors throughout his childhood to make up a patchwork empire that would eventually stretch over more than half the known world.
He was shy and awkward, an unprepossessing figure with the long lower jaw and bulging eyes of the Habsburg line, but when his father died in 1506, he became ruler of the Netherlands and the rest of the Burgundian inheritance. He was just six years old, and his paternal aunt, Margaret of Austria, acted as regent. By the time he was sixteen, Charless inherited lands stretched not just through Spain and parts of Italy but also across the apparently limitless Spanish possessions in the Americas. Three years later, in 1519, the death of his paternal grandfather, Maximilian, pushed the borders of his realm farther to the east, where his Habsburg ancestors were the most powerful dynasty in central Europe, ruling lands in Austria, Carinthia, Slovenia, and the Tyrol.*