Atlas Minor of Gerhard Mercator

We have the Duisburg cartographer to thank for the so-called true-angle map projection, which he recorded, among other things, in his “Atlas Minor”. This projection made precise navigation on the world’s oceans possible. Mercator had come to Duisburg from his Belgian hometown of Leuven in 1552 as a religious refugee of the Counter-Reformation in anticipation of the first Protestant university in the later Ruhr Area, but it was only opened after his death in 1655. Mercator's “Atlas Minor” symbolises the reflection on the global world from the provinces of the Rhineland in the age of the Renaissance.