Mercator--The Man Who Mapped the Planet by Nicholas Crane

Author:Nicholas Crane
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466880139
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

20

René’s Domain

The British Isles were barely off the copper before Mercator was precipitated into the map which pushed him to the brink. Again, there was a Guise connection. And again, Mercator’s motives remained unstated.

This was a place which had been plotted on Mercator’s mental map of the universe since his early days in Louvain. Lothairingia, Lothierrègne, Lorraine, the remnant of the kingdom which had been inherited by Charlemagne’s grandson, Lothaire, was also the cradle of modern cartography. For it was in this duchy, an ambiguous buffer between the warring giants of France and the Empire, that Duke René II of Lorraine, the titular King of Jerusalem, had fostered his school of cosmographers in the century’s opening decade.

The cosmographers had come to the town of St Dié, set in a cleft of the Vosges. Hidden by forest, and fenced each winter by snowfall, St Dié had grown from the monastic seed planted by St Deodatus eight hundred years earlier. Despite its mountain site, the town was well connected and served as a way-station on the road from the upper Rhine to Nancy and Paris. A two-day ride away lay Basle and Strasbourg, where merchandise and ideas from Italy and Germany and France met at one of Europe’s most invigorating crossroads.

In this secluded yet accessible sanctuary, a group of scholars had gathered around one of René’s secretaries, a canon called Walter Lud. Mathias Ringmann, a Heidelberg contemporary of Gregor Reisch was here, and Martin Waldseemüller. Encouraged (and financed) in their cosmography by Duke René, whose extensive library had recently received copies of the Vespucci letters, various nautical charts and a manuscript planisphere, the St Dié ‘school’ had set up a press to print scholarly books. The first had been the Cosmographiae introductio of 1507, the book which named America. This had been followed by the globe and the map of the world, and by Waldseemüller’s treatise on surveying and perspective, his booklet on globes and his map of Europe and eventually, the great work which would ensure his cartographic immortality – his new edition of Ptolemy.

Waldseemüller had been working on his Ptolemy for many years – indeed it was meant to have been the first item off the St Dié press. In words which anticipated Mercator’s later difficulties, Waldseemüller had written in April 1507 to the Basel printer Johann Amerbach describing the problems he faced with manuscripts which did not agree. There was, explained Waldseemüller, ‘a Greek manuscript of Ptolemy’ in the library of the Dominicans in Basel, ‘which I deem to be as correct as the original. I beg you’, implored the mapmaker, ‘to procure [it] by any means possible, either in your name or mine, that I may have this book for the space of a month.’1

Delayed by the death of René, the Ptolemy had appeared in 1513. The twenty-seven woodcut maps, tables of coordinates, index of over 7,000 place-names were a marvel of scholarship, and with Jacopo d’Angelo’s Latin translation of Ptolemy’s text, the St Dié geographers had produced a definitive edition.

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