I visited Antwerp in 2013 and thought that Antwerp: The Glory Years by Michael Pye would be an interesting read. Pye covered the city during the sixteenth century, its period of dominance in trade and freedom. Why freedom? Antwerp was not only a leading port of trade, rivalling Amsterdam, but also a safe haven for religion, regardless what one believed. While laws were on the books against Protestants, Calvinists, humanists and other “heretics”, authorities turned a blind eye because it was these people who were bringing in the big bucks. The city was thriving with trade and Pye wrote of reports where ships were waiting on the Scheldt for weeks to offload. I questioned this length of time, for wouldn’t certain cargo, like fruits and vegetables, perish if it had to wait that long? Maybe sensitive cargoes had a right to offload before other ships.
Antwerp was the city that people flocked to if they were in danger of persecution, as:
“the clandestine flow of information, the reluctance to impose uncomfortable imperial laws, the weakness of local guilds, the availability of money and the influence of foreign merchants in an empire which otherwise put a high value on every kind of orthodoxy”
helped people prosper. Money talked, even if you were in violation of orthodoxy. Pye wrote about publishers who were prohibited from printing the Bible in English and other local languages, yet the authorities ignored this. With the regents and governors far away and frequently absent, one was left to do as one wished. That is not to say that Antwerp was besieged by anarchy, as some semblance of justice was meted out, but Pye made it seem as if the rich got off not most but all of the time.
Although a mere 251 pages, Antwerp took me nine days to finish. It was often a dry read, with names and events thrown onto the pages which I felt did not add to the story. I tried to grasp the importance of all the people and events Pye inserted into the text, in order to make connections between them and prior events, but it just seemed meaningless when I never encountered these parachuted names again. I did not fully understand the fall of Antwerp, although the inclusion of the painting entitled The Spanish Fury by an anonymous artist showed the gruesome massacre that befell the city on November 4, 1576. Antwerp couldn’t regain its status as a dominant cosmopolitan city after this.