Abraham Ortelius: The Man Who Bound the World

How an Antwerp map-colourist invented the atlas, and quietly guessed at continental drift

Abraham Ortelius was born in Antwerp in 1527, into a city that was then the beating commercial heart of northern Europe, a port where spices, silver and information from the whole expanding world changed hands. He began not as a scholar but as a tradesman: an afsetter van kaarten, a colourist and dealer in maps, who travelled the great book fairs of Frankfurt buying, selling and illuminating printed sheets by hand.

It was at Frankfurt, around 1554, that he met Gerard Mercator, the greatest mathematical cartographer of the age. The friendship would shape the rest of his life. Where Mercator was a maker of maps, Ortelius became something new: an editor of the world.

In 1570 he published the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Theatre of the World. Its genius lay not in any single map but in the idea: to gather the best available maps from across Europe, re-engrave them all to a uniform size and style, and bind them as one coherent, systematic book. This was the first modern atlas, and it made the world, for the first time, something a person could hold between two covers and turn page by page.

Ortelius did something else remarkable. At the front of the Theatrum he printed the Catalogus Auctorum, a list crediting by name the cartographers whose work he had drawn upon. It is the first modern bibliography of map-makers, an act of scholarly honesty rare in any age and almost unheard-of in his own.

The intriguing part: Ortelius was a quiet radical. In 1596, in his Thesaurus Geographicus, he noted that the coastlines of the Americas, Europe and Africa fit together as if they had once been joined, and suggested they had been torn apart by floods and earthquakes. It is one of the earliest known intimations of continental drift, three centuries before science caught up. He also moved in the secretive circle of the Family of Love, a clandestine spiritualist sect that prized inner faith above religious war, dangerous company in the Antwerp of the Inquisition.

The Theatrum was a sensation. It ran through dozens of editions and was translated into Latin, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian and English. When Ortelius died in 1598 he was mourned across learned Europe and buried in the Abbey of St Michael in Antwerp. The atlas he invented never went out of fashion, it simply became the way the world is seen.

To own a 1570 Theatrum, or one of its individual sheets, is to hold the very moment when the world became a book.