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Edutainment > Articles on Art > Historical Maps > Gerardus Mercator - 1512-1594

Gerardus Mercator was a geographer, cartographer and mathematician born in Flanders. He is best known for a new mapping technique that bears his name, the Mercator projection. The quality of his maps made them a copy source for generations of mapmakers.

Gerhard Kremer - alias Gerardius Mercator

Gerard Mercator is something like the grandfather of modern map making. His original name was Gerhard Kremer. Regarding his importance for the history of cartography, he is compared to Ptolemy, the ancient scholar from Alexandria in Egypt.

Mercator was born in Rupelmonde in Flanders and had studied geography, cartography and mathematics at the University of Leuven (Louvain) in Belgium. He published his first map in 1537 at the age of 25 - a map of Palestine. From 1537 to 1540 Gerardus Mercator surveyed and mapped Flanders. In 1538 he made and published his first world map. It was based on the Ptolemy map. The maps by Ptolemy had been completely lost in Europe during the dark Middle Ages. Thanks to Arab scholars, some of the Ptolemy maps were saved and came back to Europe during the Renaissance period.

The Mercator Projection

In 1552 Gerardius Mercator moved to Duisburg to evade religious persecution. In 1554 he produced a map of six panels of Europe. In 1568 Mercator used a new way of displaying a map with 90 degree parallel lines for the latitudes and meridians. This new technique was actually not invented by Mercator. But he was the first cartographer to apply it. The Mercator projection was a great progress for navigation on sea. Its disadvantage is the disproportion of size. The closer the area towards the poles, the larger it is in size. Greenland for instance is shown 16 times larges than in reality.

Mercator's main work, a three volume world atlas, was published in several editions from 1585 on and beyond his death in 1594. Mercator then was the first to use the word atlas. In 1604 another famous cartographer, Jodocus Hondius had acquired Mercator's original plates and published several more editions. The subsequent generation of mapmakers more or less copied from Mercator's world atlas.

Literature Sources for this article:

• "Carl Moreland and David Bannister: Antique Maps, Phaidon Press Limited, ISBN 0-7148 2954 4

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