Gerardus Mercator: the cobbler’s son who turned cartography from an art into a science

A complete copy of the first book of maps ever to be called an atlas — Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura — is offered in London

For most of 1544, Gerardus Mercator languished in a tiny, damp dungeon in Rupelmonde Castle. He had been arrested as part of a purge of Lutherans led by Maria, Governor of the Habsburg Netherlands, during the Inquisition.

Several of his fellow prisoners met grisly ends: from the haberdasher who was burned at the stake, to the furrier’s assistant who lost his head. Mercator, a father of six in his early thirties, looked set to meet a similar fate — notwithstanding the fact that he wasn’t actually a Lutheran. He was what might best be described as a freethinking humanist.

Ultimately, thanks to the intervention of a few well-placed friends, and after eight months of incarceration, Mercator was released. As he walked out of the castle gate, across the drawbridge to freedom, he was ready to relaunch his career.

Gerard Mercator (1512-1594), Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura

Gerard Mercator (1512-1594), Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura. Duisburg and Düsseldorf, 1585-95. Estimate: £300,000-500-000. Offered in Valuable Books and Manuscripts on 14 December 2022 at Christie’s in London

And what a career he ended up having. He lived till the age of 82 and is regarded today as one of the greatest mapmakers of all time — as someone who helped turned cartography from an art into a science.

A complete copy of his Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura — the first book of maps ever to be called an atlas — is being offered at Christie’s in the Valuable Books and Manuscripts sale on 14 December.

‘I suppose one might consider it the Google Earth of its time. The atlas provided knowledge of the world to a level that had never been seen before’ — senior specialist Julian Wilson

The son of a cobbler, Gerard Kremer was born in the small Flemish town of Rupelmonde, on the banks of the River Schelde, in 1512. He attended an ecclesiastical school and, on reaching adulthood, latinised his name to Gerardus Mercator as a way of declaring his intellectual aspirations.

He majored in philosophy at the prestigious University of Leuven, but it turned out to be geography where his passion lay. ‘This was the discipline best suited to explaining the structure and wonder of God’s creation at a time when the world was being revealed in a new splendour and diversity,’ wrote his biographer, Nicholas Crane, in Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet (2002).

By way of background, it’s worth noting that Mercator was a boy when a ship from Ferdinand Magellan’s fleet completed the first ever circumnavigation of the globe. He lived and worked at the height of the Age of Discovery.

After graduation, Mercator embarked on an apprenticeship in various disciplines: mathematics, copper-engraving, instrument-making and globe construction (much of the time under the guidance of the esteemed Leuven-based polymath Gemma Frisius).

A career in mapmaking followed. Early highlights included a wall map of the Holy Land and, in 1541, the largest printed globe that had ever been produced. He also pioneered the use of italic script on maps and globes, on grounds of its space-efficiency.

It was, however, a time of religious turmoil as well as intercontinental exploration. Indeed, the ongoing European discovery of new parts of the world (the Mississippi River in 1541, for example) fuelled debates about man’s place in the universe.

In such a context, Mercator’s arrest and imprisonment — though unjust — shouldn’t perhaps be seen as a surprise. After his release, he sought a peaceful new home away from the theological strife of Flanders, duly moving his family to the German town of Duisburg, where he spent the rest of his life.

Gerard Mercator (1512-1594), Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura

His achievements there are too numerous to mention. According to Crane, ‘in Mercator’s seclusion on the right bank of the Rhine, he [produced] the sequence of works which would place him at the centre of the cartographic pantheon’.

One masterstroke for which he is still feted to this day was the Mercator Projection of 1569. This was his solution to the long-held problem of how to translate the three-dimensional spheroid that is Earth onto a two-dimensional piece of paper.

At around the same time, he hit upon another groundbreaking idea: to gather a large set of maps together in one book and call it an ‘atlas’ (named after the Titan king from Greek mythology, condemned to carry the heavens on his shoulders).

Gerard Mercator (1512-1594), Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura

This consisted of 107 maps spread across 400 pages, and was so large an undertaking that Mercator didn’t actually see it completed in his lifetime. His son and fellow cartographer, Rumold, applied a few finishing touches and oversaw the atlas’s publication in 1595, a year after Gerardus’s death.

Included within are maps of numerous individual lands, such as France, Germany and the British Isles; maps of the continents of Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas; and a single map of the entire world — all of them beautifully hand-coloured. (There is also the bonus offering of a translation of Geographia, a cartographical treatise from classical antiquity by the ancient mathematician Ptolemy, complete with 28 maps showing the world based on his calculations.)

‘This was an enterprise of remarkable ambition,’ says Julian Wilson, senior specialist in Books & Manuscripts at Christie’s. ‘I suppose one might consider it the Google Earth of its time. The atlas provided knowledge of the world to a level that had never been seen before.’

Using the most up-to-date explorers’ accounts — as well as his own measurements pertaining to the curvature of the Earth — Mercator created a collection of maps that even today is impressive in its accuracy.

Although the initial owner of the atlas isn’t known, Wilson says that a large proportion of maps in the Renaissance were ‘purchased as status symbols by wealthy individuals keen to show off their learning and how globally minded they were’.

Gerard Mercator (1512-1594), Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura

It’s perhaps worth making a few supplementary points here. First, that some of the individual maps in the atlas had already been published in the final years of Mercator’s life — what was special was their being bound together in one volume.

A second point is that the centre of European cartography shifted somewhat in the latter part of the 16th century, from Italy to the Low Countries. Mercator was a friend of the Antwerp-based mapmaker Abraham Ortelius, who is credited by some with having produced the world’s first atlas: 1570’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.

It’s true that no previous work had consisted of map sheets collected together in a single book. However, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum was considerably smaller than Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura and was never referred to by Ortelius as an ‘atlas’, a term coined by Mercator. (The literal translation of the latter’s 1595 opus is ‘Atlas, or Cosmogaphic Meditations on the Fabric of the World and the Figures of the Fabric’.)

A final point is that Mercator’s atlas appeared in numerous editions, published across a number of decades. The example coming to auction is from the first edition and — by dint of having every page intact and being in excellent condition — is rare indeed.

As a rough estimate, perhaps a couple of hundred copies were run off the printing press in the first edition, many of which don’t survive at all, let alone in complete form. Fewer than 20 copies can be found in institutions worldwide today.

The first known owner of the atlas for sale was Graf Leopold Franz Maria von Thurn-Valsassina und Taxis (1688-1750), a member of the Thurn und Taxis family which for generations ran the Habsburgs’ imperial postal service. ‘It’s easy to see why he would have liked a good atlas,’ says Wilson.

Gerard Mercator (1512-1594), Atlas sive cosmographicae meditationes de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura

Mercator was by no means infallible. He depicts the North Pole, for example, as a large magnetic rock surrounded by four mountainous islands, and the waters around Iceland as filled with sea monsters spouting water into the air.

However, according to Crane, Mercator was ‘rigorously systematic’ in his approach overall — resulting in an atlas marked by its ‘clarity and accuracy’. He was an important Renaissance figure, who, in his biographer’s words, ensured that mapmaking ‘broke free from the imaginary lands of the Middle Ages’.

Put a different way, here was a cartographer who was in another world.