The Ortels or Wortels (latinized as Orthellius and Ortelius) family was originally from Augsburg, a Free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire.

They had five children: Imbert who inherited his father's pharmacy, Anna, Odille (or Ottilia of Odilia), who married Nicolaes van der Voorden, a merchant in Brussels, and, in her second marriage, Jacobus van Meteren from Breda, who was a Protestant and supervised the printing of English versions of the bible in England, Leonard (born in 1500 and father of Abraham Ortelius) and Josef.

Following the death of his father, Abraham Ortelius' uncle Jacobus van Meteren returned from exile in England to take care of him.

[4] The inscription on his tombstone reads: Quietis cultor sine lite, uxore, prole ("served quietly, without accusation, wife, and offspring").

Most of the maps were admittedly reproductions (a list of 87 authors is given in the first Theatrum by Ortelius himself, growing to 183 names in the 1601 Latin edition), and many discrepancies of delineation or nomenclature occur.

Errors, of course, abound, both in general conceptions and in detail; thus South America is initially very faulty in outline, but corrected in the 1587 French edition, and in Scotland, the Grampians lie between the Forth and the Clyde; but, taken as a whole, this atlas with its accompanying text was a monument of rare erudition and industry.

Its immediate precursor and prototype was a collection of thirty-eight maps of European lands, and of Asia, Africa, Tartary, and Egypt, gathered together by the wealth and enterprise, and through the agents, of Ortelius's friend and patron, Gillis Hooftman (1521–1581),[11] lord of Cleydael and Aertselaar: most of these were printed in Rome, eight or nine only in the Southern Netherlands.

He also had a keen interest in and formed a fine collection of coins, medals and antiques, and this resulted in the book (also in 1573, published by Philippe Galle of Antwerp) Deorum dearumque capita ... ex Museo Ortelii ("Heads of the gods and goddesses... from the Ortelius Museum"); reprinted in 1582, 1602, 1612, 1680, 1683 and finally in 1699 by Gronovius, Thesaurus Graecarum Antiquitatum ("Treasury of Greek Antiquities", vol.

[12] The Theatrum Orbis Terrarum inspired a six-volume work titled Civitates orbis terrarum, edited by Georg Braun and illustrated by Frans Hogenberg with the assistance of Ortelius himself, who visited England to see his friend John Dee in Mortlake in 1577,[13] and Braun tells of Ortelius putting pebbles in cracks in Temple Church, Bristol, being crushed by the vibration of the bells.

[14] In 1579, Ortelius brought out his Nomenclator Ptolemaicus and started his Parergon (a series of maps illustrating ancient history, sacred and secular).

[15] 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.

[19] Because his publications were widely available in German and English and because he adduced geological support for the idea, Wegener is credited by most geologists as the first to recognize the possibility of continental drift.

During the 1960s geophysical and geological evidence for seafloor spreading at mid-oceanic ridges became increasingly compelling to geologists (e.g. Harry H. Hess, 1960) and finally established continental drift as an ongoing global mechanism (e.g. by the work of W. Jason Morgan by 1967 and Dan McKenzie in 1968).