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Abraham Ortelius (also Ortels, Orthellius, Wortels; 4 or 14 April 1527-28 June 1598) was a cartographer, geographer, and cosmographer from Antwerp in the Spanish Netherlands.
He is recognized as the creator of the first modern atlas, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of the World). Along with Gemma Frisius and Gerardus Mercator, Ortelius is generally considered one of the founders of the Netherlandish school of cartography and geography.
He was a notable figure of this school in its golden age (approximately 1570s-1670s) and an important geographer during the age of discovery. The publication of his atlas in 1570 is often considered as the official beginning of the Golden Age of Netherlandish cartography. He was the first person proposing that the continents were joined before drifting to their present positions.
Abraham Ortelius was born on either 4 April or 14 April 1527 in the city of Antwerp, which was then in the Spanish Netherlands. The Ortels or Wortels (latinized as Orthellius and Ortelius) family was originally from Augsburg, a Free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire.
Leonard Ortelius was well educated. He spoke Greek and Latin, and worked with his brother-in-law Jacob van Meteren on the translation of Miles Coverdale's English Bible.
In 1535, they were both prosecuted for possessing suspicious books. Searches turned up nothing and the case was subsequently dismissed.
He traveled extensively in Europe and is specifically known to have traveled throughout the Habsburg Netherlands; in southern, western, northern, and eastern Germany (e.g., 1560, 1575-1576); France (1559-1560); England and Ireland (1576); and Italy (1578, and perhaps two or three times between 1550 and 1558).
Beginning as a map-engraver, in 1547 he entered the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke as an illuminator of maps. He supplemented his income trading in books, prints, and maps, and his journeys included annual visits to the Frankfurt book and print fair, where he met Gerardus Mercator in 1554.
In 1560, however, when travelling with Mercator to Trier, Lorraine, and Poitiers, he seems to have been attracted, largely by Mercator's influence, towards the career of a scientific geographer. He died in Antwerp.
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In 1564, he published his first map, Typus Orbis Terrarum, an eight-leaved wall map of the world, on which he identified the Regio Patalis with Locach as a northward extension of the Terra Australis, reaching as far as New Guinea. This map subsequently appeared in reduced form in the Terrarum (the only extant copy is now at Basel University Library). He also published a two-sheet map of Egypt in 1565, a plan of the Brittenburg castle on the coast of the Netherlands in 1568, an eight-sheet map of Asia in 1567, and a six-sheet map of Spain before the appearance of his atlas.
In England Ortelius's contacts included William Camden, Richard Hakluyt, Thomas Penny, Puritan controversialist William Charke, and Humphrey Llwyd, who would contribute the map of England and Wales to Ortelius's 1573 edition of the Theatrum.
In 1578, he laid the basis of a critical treatment of ancient geography by his Synonymia geographica (issued by the Plantin Press at Antwerp and republished in expanded form as Thesaurus geographicus in 1587 and again expanded in 1596; in the last edition, Ortelius considers the possibility of continental drift, a hypothesis that would be proved correct only centuries later).
In 1596, he received a presentation from Antwerp, similar to that afterwards bestowed on Peter Paul Rubens. His death on 28 June 1598 and his burial in the church of St. Michael's Abbey, Antwerp, were marked by public mourning. The inscription on his tombstone reads: Quietis cultor sine lite, uxore, prole (served quietly, without accusation, wife, and offspring).
In 1579, Ortelius brought out his Nomenclator Ptolemaicus and started his Parergon (a series of maps illustrating ancient history, sacred and secular). He also published Itinerarium per nonnullas Galliae Belgicae partes (at the Plantin press in 1584, and reprinted in 1630, 1661 in Hegenitius, Itin. Frisio-Hoil., in 1667 by Verbiest, and finally in 1757 in Leuven), a record of a journey in Belgium and the Rhineland made in 1575.
In 1589 he published Maris Pacifici, the first dedicated map of the Pacific to be printed. Among his last works were an edition of Caesar (C. I. Caesaris omnia quae extant, Leiden, Raphelingen, 1593), and the Aurei saeculi imago, sive Germanorum veterum vita, mores, ritus et religio. (Philippe Galle, Antwerp, 1596). He also aided Welser in his edition of the Peutinger Table in 1598.
Contrary to popular belief, Abraham Ortelius, who had no children, never lived at the Mercator-Orteliushuis, but lived at his sister's house.
More information: 'Theatrum orbis terrarum', the first modern atlas
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