years, the supposedly celibate Alexander VI used bribery, corruption, and murder to advance the interests of his children, Lucrezia Borgia and Cesare Borgia. None of them seemed interested in the reforms for which many in the Church and among the laity were crying out. During Charles’s reign, these demands developed into not only a religious challenge to the Church but also a political challenge to the Holy Roman Empire itself. Charles V – “God’s standard bearer,” as he grandly called himself – saw his duty as defending the Catholic faith not just from the Muslim Ottoman Empire across his borders but also from the reformists and Protestants within. In 1523, when Gerard Mercator was a boy of eleven, two young monks, Johann Esch and Heinrich Voes, were burned alive as heretics in the central square of Antwerp, the first of tens of thousands to go to the stake over the next half century as the Inquisition sought to root out heresy wherever it hid. The legacy of the complex genealogical maneuvering that had created Charles V’s empire was one of political chaos and human misery across the Netherlands and the rest of Charles’s domain.
Charles V by Titian
Museo del Prado
IN THE YEAR 1512, the artisan Hubert de Cremer was one of Charles’s struggling subjects. His was the misery of poverty: His father had made the journey east from his native Flanders to Gangelt, in the German duchy of Jülich, many years before, filled with hope and ambition for the future, but Hubert had become a cobbler scrabbling to find enough money to feed his wife and family. He already had five children, and his wife was expecting their sixth, but though he was willing to work, he had found few opportunities in Gangelt. His best hope of staving off poverty lay in returning to Rupelmonde, where his father’s family still lived.
The port of Antwerp, just a few miles downriver from the town of Rupelmonde, was one of the most affluent centers in the Low Countries, one of the largest cities of its day, where eighty thousand people lived in houses that were the envy of the rest of Europe. Antwerp had been a busy port on the River Scheldt for centuries – its name comes from the Flemish aan-de-werfen (on the wharves) – but the bales and baskets piled high on the docks were not just a sign of its prosperity; they were tangible evidence that the world was growing faster than it had ever done before. The ships that maneuvered for position brought cargoes not only from the Baltic, England, Spain, and Germany but from farther afield as well, from lands that were so distant, so newly discovered, they still seemed almost mythological to the laborers who sweated to unload the merchandise.
Not many years before, the ports of Venice and the other Italian city-states had been crowded with cargo ships, linking with the ancient overland routes from the East to bring spices, precious stones, silks, and finery to Europe. For centuries, all roads really had led to Rome. But by 1512, ships could follow Vasco da Gama’s route to India around the southern tip of Africa and bring their cargoes straight back to the north and west of Europe. The rapidly growing trade with the New World, too, could be carried out more easily from western Europe than from Italy. The pattern of commerce was shifting: More than 2,500 ships might be crowded into Antwerp’s port at any one time, and 500 vessels would come and go in a single day.
With the cargoes came stories of new expeditions, and of the fresh discoveries that were being made in the New World and in the farthest reaches of Asia. Such talk, true and false alike, was devoured by the educated citizens; but the bales, bundles, and boxes were the real stimuli to anyone with imagination and curiosity about distant lands. The waters of the Scheldt flowed for hundreds of miles through a continent hungry for the goods that the ships had unloaded. Along the docks of Antwerp, the age of discoveries was a daily reality.
When he arrived there late in February 1512, Hubert had four sons, a daughter, a pregnant wife, and no real prospects of employment. His one advantage was an uncle in the Catholic Church. Several years before, in Gangelt, Hubert had named his firstborn child after his father’s brother, and he turned to that same Uncle Gisbert, the chaplain of Rupelmonde’s Hospice of St. Jean. Gisbert was not wealthy but comfortably off, and he used his influence to find Hubert and his family a place in the monastery guesthouse. It would have been a simple, even spartan home, but still a welcome shelter for a family on the brink of penury. There, at six o’clock in the morning on March 5, 1512, only a few days after she had arrived in Flanders, Hubert’s wife, Emerance, gave birth to their sixth child, Gerard. The anxious cobbler made a precise note of the date and time, as he had done for the birth of his other children.
The town’s tax records show Hubert, Emerance, and their six children lived on top of each other in a lodging half the size of the house his single uncle Gisbert kept for himself.* Gisbert, a busy, energetic priest, filled with ambition for himself and his family, was the key to whatever future they would have. For him as for many others, the Church had been a route to worldly security as well as to salvation, and his post as chaplain at the hospice gave him financial independence, respectability, and a degree of influence. Well educated himself, he determined to do what he could for the rest of his family. Within a few months, his nephew Hubert was using his skills to produce shoes for the hospice and steadily building up his business in the town, while the older boys, with Gisbert’s encouragement and influence, had started on careers of their own in the Church. Rupelmonde’s church records show that Hubert’s second son, Dominic, eventually followed his great-uncle into the post of chaplain at the hospice, while the eldest boy, Gisbert, named in his great-uncle’s honor, became a priest in the nearby village of St. Nicholas. There was no doubt that they and the other two boys would do well, while their sister, Barbe, was being carefully prepared for the marriage that would secure her future.
Gerard, like his brothers, received his education on the hard wooden benches of the local village school. The few hundred houses in Rupelmonde were huddled around the church, a short way from the river and the imposing black fort that glowered down upon it. Nearby was the ancient water mill where grain was brought from the surrounding fields, its great rough limestone grinders making the wooden structure groan and vibrate as they turned under the power of the rising and falling tides. Farmers brought their produce to a regular market on the riverbank, while barges would tie up to sell cheeses from Brussels, or herring, imported cloth, and ironware from the wharves of Antwerp. Bigger, seagoing ships often moored at the wharves, pausing on their journeys upriver to Brussels. Outside the village, the landscape stretched away for miles, flat and open.
Rupelmonde
British Library, London, Rare Books and Maps Collections
With its fields, mill, market, school, and church, the little town provided for every aspect of life, but the fort, with its high stone walls and seventeen towers, overshadowed everything. Built by Norman invaders in the eleventh century to overawe and terrify the local people, it was no mere monument to past brutality. Behind its bleak walls there still languished criminals, dissidents, traitors, and forgotten men.
The young Gerard was apparently drawn to the sheer variety the landscape offered, for he developed a love of nature that would stay with him throughout his life. From his earliest days, at least according to the stories that grew up around him later, the schoolmaster had little need to encourage his pupil to greater effort in the classroom. Much of the work in the single schoolroom was learning by rote, the children chanting the Latin of the Lord’s Prayer or the Creed, or the questions and answers of the catechism. Every lesson, every moral precept, was based upon the Bible. At home, there was neither leisure nor privacy in the crowded and hardworking household, but the young boy usually managed to find a place to hide away with his books. Often, he would be huddled with them long into the night, forgetting to eat or sleep, and his potential was clearly recognized by his uncle.
In 1526, Hubert de Cremer died suddenly, and the family was threatened with disaster once again. (There is no record of what killed him.) Emerance was able to survive on the little money he had saved, and five of their children were almost old enough to look after themselves. However, Gerard was just fourteen, and if he had had to work in order to earn his keep, his family’s hopes for his future would have been dashed.