The Silicon Valley of the 16th Century
It’s a joke that every Fleming knows: ‘Antwerp is the city and everything else is… parking.’ By this they mean that Antwerp residents like to think that their city is the center of the world. A trait that most residents of capital cities have. Only: Antwerp is not a capital.
But still. Antwerp was the center of the world for a while, argues British historian Michael Pye in his new book Antwerp. The glory years.
Michael Pye doesn’t say it like that, but you do think it when you read his book: Antwerp was the Silicon Valley of the sixteenth century. Anyone young and ambitious wanted to go there. You could make a fortune there. There is freedom of religion. And, wrote Giovanni Zoncha, a cloth seller from Venice who moved to Antwerp at the age of twenty, the girls were ‘wonderfully bold’. “During the meal you sat between two girls who gave you an occasional kiss, and after dinner you sat on the floor, in your girl’s arms,” Pye writes. “You talked about everything, even if you didn’t have a common language, and went for a walk without anyone having to accompany you.”
Who the novel last year wild woman by Jeroen Olyslaegers read, which also takes place in sixteenth-century Antwerp, is immediately back in the city on the Scheldt. Pye knows how to sketch an atmosphere almost as visually: you smell the smell of beer, hear the hum of the harbor and see the fine tapestries glitter with golden thread.
The fall of Antwerp
Michael Pye is not a novelist, he is a writer. Take, for example, the sentences with which he opens a chapter about the iconoclasm in Antwerp:
“There were some guys kicking shit in the cathedral (…). They taunted the woman who always asked for alms at the Lady Chapel. She became enraged, she aggressively watered them, the boys harassed her and the boys were rudely disturbed.’
The difference between Jeroen Olyslaegers and Michael Pye: the characters of the Brit are real.
The further you go back in time, the more political the historiography often becomes. Sources about everyday life are now customary. But Pye doesn’t want to talk too much about ‘economic aspects’ and ‘institutional variables’, because: ‘it’s really about the people behind it: what they know, they talked and what they remember’.
But let’s briefly summarize the main points. The heyday of Antwerp begins around 1500 with the arrival of the first Portuguese ships. The city fell under the rule of Charles V. The end of the heyday is arbitrary. You can take 1566 (the Iconoclasm), 1577 (when Antwerp joined the Revolt), from 1585 (when the Spaniards recaptured the city). Pye complicated story in the last year.
At that time, there were quite a few celebrities walking around the city and Pye is giving them a face one by one. Thomas Meer for example those are Utopia not without reason started on the Grote Markt, where a sailor told about a remote island kingdom with that name. After all, Antwerp was the place where you could hear stories ‘about the world that had been opened up further’. Antwerp was also a place where you could learn new languages. And so it’s not surprising that you can recognize elements of the city on The Tower of Babel, the famous painting that Pieter Bruegel made.
International bestseller
Christoffel Plantin, the printer, Abraham Ortelius, the mapmaker, Albrecht Dürer, the painter – the emergence of Antwerp for a shorter time as a base of operations. The poet Anna Bijns, who, especially for a woman at the time, practiced under her own name: also an Antwerper.
Just outside the city in Borgerhout, Peeter van Coudenberghe borders a special garden with exotic and medicinal plants and herbs. to be dispensatory, a compendium of medicinal plants, became an international bestseller.
Antwerp was so important in the sixteenth century, thanks to its location on the Scheldt and to the fact that at the same time Bruges was slowly silting up. Antwerp was also able to outflank Bruges because there is more freedom: the guilds had less power and there were fewer regulations that hindered trade. For example, English cloth merchants did not pay tax on goods they imported and they could settle conflicts under English law. Although Antwerp fell under the authority of the (Catholic) Spanish Empire, the city housed wealthy Portuguese Jews fleeing the Inquisition.
Also read: The savage Antwerp of the 16th century
Antwerp act what it wanted. That last sentence does belong to the style of Pye, who also regularly presents the city as a character. He writes about the rise of the city: ‘Antwerp is trying to invent the clear and future.’ And about the destruction during the Iconoclasm: ‘It was as if the city itself was not defending itself.’
Mighty banker
Sometimes you want Pye to explain a little more in his stories about people. For example, in the case of Gaspar Ducci, an Italian banker in Antwerp who was one of the first in history to realize that you could make money with money by keeping a close eye on exchange rates and taking them at the right time. In 1540, Ducci bought money ‘as others in a market bought a certain product’. At one point he controlled all cash in Antwerp, writes Pye. ‘He thought Antwerp that all trade, all life in the city could be brought to a halt by one man.’ Fascinating, you think as a reader, and you actually want to know a lot more about it.
Antwerp was therefore even the center of the world. But what is the importance of Antwerp for world history in retrospect? Antwerp may not have been the site of London, a role often attributed to Amsterdam or to a later period in history. But it was the city where money became more than coins, argues Pye, due to the lively trade in bills of exchange. Printed price lists of goods appeared for the first time, a precursor to the financial pages of newspapers. Michael Pye quotes from a wonderful letter from the banker Erasmus Schetz who tries to explain the new concept of money to a ‘very dear friend’, the philosopher of Desiderius Erasmus from Rotterdam. “Schetz had to be able to ‘use the difference between the money markets to their own advantage and your disadvantage’.” The great philosopher had a hard time grasping it all. Schetz sighed, “I’d rather you understood this material better than you apparently do.”
After Antwerp fell back into Spanish hands, the city had to be rebuilt. And worse than that: a large part of the population moved north. Pye decision: ‘What happened in Antwerp, supported by the change of the world and how we think about it. But it was only a city, a place with walls, that could rise with time and become clear again. The city could be eroded and it was.’
A version of this article also in NRC Handelsblad of 3 September 2021
A version of this article also in NRC in the morning of September 3, 2021