A Brill Calendar: December 2

The Remarkable Mercator

Few tricks in the trade of writing about the past, especially those embodied by remarkable people and events, are as effective as contrasting birth with death.

A striking example is provided by the life & times of Gerardus Mercator, cartographer. In 1512, the year he was born – in Flanders, where his German parents had just settled – Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian explorer who gave the American continent its name, parted from life; and when Mercator died, on December 2, 1594 in Duisburg, in the Duchy of Cleve, Giordano Bruno languished, incarcerated in Rome, due to his stolid belief in the Copernican perspective on the solar system; half a century after the publication of the book by the learned Pole.

Between Amerigo and Giordano evolved the existence of the man who tried to describe creation of the world totally; in a work he called ‘Atlas – sive Cosmographicae meditationes de Fabrica Mundi et fabricate figura’ (printed in instalments from 1569 to ’89; the final one posthumously, in 1595). It is an intellectual exploration of the face of the globe creating a new concept: an ‘Atlas’ – Mercator coined the word – as a comprehensive survey in a printed document; and a mathematical projection of the surface of a sphere unto a flat, two-dimensional surface. This transformation enabling mariners of later centuries to consistently map an ever-increasing world.

It is seldom that we see a self-made genius (called ‘Mercator’, or ‘Kremer’, or ‘Cramer’), lionized in so many different regions as a national hero: whether of Flanders, of Holland, of Germany; or even of Belgium. But Gerard Kramer studied in Louvain/Leuven and became a court dignitary in a modest Duchy in the Rhineland; admittedly nearby Nijmegen, but far from Antwerp, Leyden and Amsterdam. A man for all seasons and for Europe, rather than for one nation.