Mercator

Gerard Mercator (1512-1594) was born at the dawn of the Age of Discovery, when the world was beginning to be discovered and carved up by navigators, geographers and cartographers. Mercator was the greatest and most ingenious cartographer of them all: it was he who coined the word 'atlas' and solved the riddle of converting the three-dimensional globe into a two-dimensional map while retaining true compass bearings. It is Mercator's Projection that NASA are using today to map Mars. How did Mercator reconcile his religious beliefs with a science that would make Christian maps obsolete? How did a man whose imagination roamed continents endure imprisonment by the Inquisition? Crane brings this great man vividly to life, underlying it with colour illustrations of the maps themselves: maps that brought to a rapt public wonders as remarkable as today's cyber-world.

Mercator is a vivid biography of the man who created the first modern map of the world.

Born into the age of discovery, Gerard Mercator lived through an extraordinary era of intellectual and scientific expansion. At the centre of this exploratory vortex were the cartographers who were painstakingly piecing together the evidence that would create a complete picture of the planet. Mercator was the greatest of them all - a poor cobbler's boy who attended one of Europe's top universities, was persecuted and imprisoned by the Inquisition, yet survived to produce his eponymous projection and to coin the term 'atlas'. Devoutly religious, yet gripped by the quest for geographical truth, Mercator struggled to reconcile the two, a conflict mirrored by the clash in Europe between humanism and the Church.

Mercator solved the dimensional riddle that had vexed cosmographers for so long: How could the three-dimensional globe be converted into a two-dimensional map while retaining true compass bearings? The Mercator Projection revolutionised navigation and has become the most common worldview.