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Famous
Cartographers
Gerardus
Mercator
Gerardus Mercator was born 5th March 1512 in Rupelmonde, Flanders
(now Belgium); he was recognised as the cartographer of the mid 16th
century. Mercator produced his first map that was of Palestine in
1537; the first map of the world produced by Mercator used
projection due to Oronce fine and appeared in 1538. This map was
significant as it was the first to represent America as stretching
from the northern regions to the southern regions giving North
America that name.
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In 1540 Mercator produced a map of Flanders that was commissioned
for political purposes. He set on his long-term plan of making a map
of the world in the summer of 1540. However there were problems, the
rapid increase of information coming from exploration of the Earth
meant that maps became rapidly outdated.
There was often inaccurate
information given to the mapmaker which meant that had to decide
which they thought was correct. |
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Mercator realised this problem he
noticed that the sailors assumed that they were travelling in a
straight line however this was often not true. He realised that a
ship sailing towards the same point of the compass would follow a
curve called a Loxodrome, a curve that recently was studied by Pedro
Nunes who was a mathematician who Mercator admired. A new globe that
he produced in 1541 was the first to have rhomb lines shown on it.
Mercator worked on a celestial globe of the same size as his
terrestrial globe of 1541, which he finally completed in 1551. The
positions of the stars were correct using Copernicus’s model of the
universe. Mercator moved to Duisburg in 1552 and opened a
cartographic workshop. By October 1554 Mercator completed his
project of producing a map of Europe. This map had considerable
commercial value and his income became secure as him and his family
moved to the wealthy part of Duisburg.
He began the Mercator projection that was first used by him in 1569
for a map of the world on 18 separate sheets. The ‘Mercator
Projection’ had the property that lines of longitude, latitude and
rhomb lines that all appeared as straight lines on the map.
Mercator published corrected and updated versions of Ptolemy’s maps
in 1578 as the first part of his ‘atlases. The project continued
with a further series of maps of France, Germany and the Netherlands
in 1585. However the project was never completed on 5th May 1590
Mercator suffered a stroke, which left his left side paralysed,
which stopped him from his map making projects. By 1952 he was able
to do a small amount of work however by the end of 1953 he suffered
another stroke which robbed him of his speech, although he worked
hard to regain his speech the last stroke was too much and he died
2nd December 1594. Although most of maps were incomplete at his
death his son completed and published them in 1595.
Martin Behaim
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Martin Behaim (October 6, 1459 – July 29, 1507), or Behem, was a
navigator and geographer of great pretensions.
Behaim was born at Nuremberg, according to one tradition, about
1436; according to Ghiilany, as late as 1459. He was drawn to
Portugal by participation in Flanders trade, and acquired a
scientific reputation at the court of John II.
As a pupil, real or
supposed, of the astronomer Regiomontanus (i.e. Johann Müller of
Königsberg in Franconia) he became (c. 1480) a member of a council
appointed by King John for the furtherance of navigation. |
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His
alleged introduction of the cross-staff into Portugal (an invention
described by the Spanish Jew, Levi Ben Gerson, in the ~4th century)
is a matter of controversy; his improvements in the astrolabe were
perhaps limited to the introduction of handy brass instruments in
place of cumbrous wooden ones; it seems likely that he helped to
prepare better navigation tables than had yet been known in the
Peninsula.
Piri Reis
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Piri Reis (originally Hadji
Muhammad) was an Ottoman admiral born around 1465, in Gallipoli
on the Dardanelles. He began to serve as a privateer in the
Ottoman Navy as a youth and after many years of fighting against
Spanish, Genoese and Venetian navies, he rose to the rank of
Reis (admiral). Following his defeat in 1554 (when he was about
90 years old) against the Portuguese navy in the Red Sea, the
sultan ordered him beheaded. |
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He is best known for his maps and charts collected in his Kitab-i
Bahrieh or the Book of the Navy. He gained his fame as a
Cartographer after a small part of his world map (prepared in 1513)
was discovered in 1929, in Istanbul.
The Piri Reis map was not made like modern maps, with horizontal and
verticle grid for location purposes. They used an older method which
was perfected by Dulcert Portolano which instead had a series of
circles with lines radiating from them, maps made like this are
named ‘Portolan maps’. The purpose of these was to guide navigators
from port to port rather than to a position.
Saint Isidore of
Seville
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Saint Isidore of Seville (born 560bc - died April 4 636bc) was
Archbishop of Seville for more than three decades and has the
reputation of being one of the great scholars of the early middle
ages. All the later medieval history-writing of Spain was based on Isidore's histories.
Isidore was born in Cartagena, Spain, to an influential family who
were instrumental in the political-religious maneuvering that
converted the Visigoth kings from Arianism to Catholicism, and were
all awarded sainthoods: his brother Leander immediately preceded him
as Catholic bishop of Seville, the opponent of king Leovigild, his
younger brother was also awarded a bishopric at the start of the new
reign of Catholic Reccared, and their sister was an abbess in charge
of forty convents.
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Isidore's most important work was his encyclopaedia, the Etymologiae.
The work takes its title from the method he used in the
transcription of his time's knowledge. The encyclopaedia as a whole
was a huge compilation in 448 chapters, devoted to transmitting a
condensed epitome of the learning of antiquity. The depository of
classical culture in Isidore's compendium was so highly regarded
that in a great measure it superseded the use of the individual
works of the classics themselves, and many were not recopied and are
lost. The book not only was the most popular compendia in medieval
libraries but was printed in at least 10 editions between 1470 and
1530, showing Isidore's continued popularity in the Renaissance.
Until the 12th century brought translations from Arabic sources,
Isidore transmitted what western Europeans remembered of the works
of Aristotle and other Greeks, although he couldn't understand Greek
further than single words. This work was much copied, particularly
in the medieval bestiary.
He was canonized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church in 1598 and
declared a Doctor of the Church in 1722.
John Speed
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John Speed (1542-1629) was a historian, now best remembered as
the cartographer whose maps of English counties are often found
framed in homes throughout the UK. He was born at Farndon
in Cheshire, and went into his father's tailoring business where
he worked until he was about 50!
While
working in London, his knowledge of history led him into learned
circles and he joined the Society of Antiquaries where his interests
came to the attention of Sir Fulke Greville, who subsequently made
Speed an allowance to enable him to devote his whole attention
to research. |
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As a reward for his earlier efforts, Queen Elizabeth
granted him the use of a room in the Custom House. It was with the
encouragement of William Camden that he began his Historie of Great
Britaine, which was published in 1611. Although Speed probably had
access to historical sources that are now lost to us he certainly
used the work of Saxton and Norden, his work as a historian is
considered mediocre and secondary in importance to his map-making,
of which his most important contribution is probably his town plans,
many of which provide the first visual record of the British towns
they depict.
His atlas The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine was published
in 1610/11 and contained the first set of individual county maps of
England and Wales besides maps of Ireland [5 in all] and general
maps of Scotland. Most [but not all] of the county maps have town
plans on them; those showing a Scale of Passes being the places he
had mapped himself. Just before his death in 1627 Speed published A
Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World which was the first
world atlas produced by an Englishman. There is a fascinating text
describing the areas shown on the back of the maps in English
although a rare edition of 1616 of the British maps has a Latin text
- this is believed to have been produced for the Continental market.
Sebastian Münster
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Sebastian Münster was born in 1488 at Ingelheim near Mainz and died
in 1552 at Basel.
He was a cartographer, cosmographer and a Hebrew scholar. His work,
the Cosmographia from 1544 was the earliest German description of
the world.
It had numerous editions in different langues (e.g.
Latin, French, Italian, English and even Czech, the last - German -
edition was published 1628, long after his death). The Cosmographia
was one of the most successful and popular books of the 16th
century.
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This success was due to the fascinating woodcuts (some by
Hans Holbein the Younger, Urs Graf, Hans Rudolph Manuel Deutsch and
David Kandel). It was most important in reviving geography in 16th
century Europe.
Münster had been appointed to the University of Basel in 1527. As
Professor of Hebrew he edited the Hebrew Bible, accompanied by Latin
translation.
In 1540 he published a Latin edition of Ptolemy's Geographia with
illustrations. The 1550 edition contains cities, portraits and
costumes. These editions printed in Germany are the most valued of
the Cosmographias.
Münster also wrote the Dictionarium trilingue in Latin, Greek and
Hebrew and Mappa Europae or map of Europe in 1536.
He was pictured on the old 100 DM banknotes that were replaced at
the beginning of the 1990s.
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