Introduction:
The city of Antwerp in modern day Belgium was one of the great financial centers of the 16th cenutury. it benefited from its position in the Lowlands and its protected harbor up river on the Scheldt River. As a favored city of the Portuguese and later the Spanish, its close proximity to the road routes leading into the Bavarian and silver rich mining centers of Southern Germany allowed it to serve as a city that could survive the rivalries of empire and even the Lutheran Reformation.
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| Peeter Van Bradael (1629-1719), The Old Ox Market in Antwerp |
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| Alexander Van Bradael (1663-1720) The Ommegang at the Meir in Antwerp |
Lecture Notes based on S.T. Bindoff's The Greatness of Antwerp:
The following are a series of lecture notes taken on the classic essay by S.T. Bindoff, “The Greatness of Antwerp,” in G.R. Elton, ed. The New Cambridge
Modern History. Vol. II: The Reformation. Cambridge University Press, 1962, 50-69.
The golden age of Antwerp coincides with
the Northern European Renaissance. It
was regarded by contemporaries as an exceptional city, for it was also a
commercial center of great wealth. Even
the Florentine historian Guicciardini who visited it after it had reached its
zenith, wrote, “never since has there been a market which concentrated to such
a degree the trade of all the important commercial nations of the world.” Antwerp was unique because it was not just a
commercial and banking center, but it was also a city of industry and textile
manufacturing.
The rise to prominence of Antwerp was the
result of the Portuguese choice to make it a port town for the spice trade in
1499. From about 1460 the Portuguese
had chosen nearby Bruges to market their ocean wares and enterprise from their
newly developed commercial empire of spice trade with India. The first consignment of pepper and other
gods from Lisbon reached Antwerp in august 1501. Two years later the first contract for a
thousand tons of spices were brought up the Scheldt River by 1504. The yields of the consignment were spent
partly on grain which the Portuguese needed desperately. But they also wanted metals, and sliver,
metals that Antwerp was in a position to receive because of tis overland trade
roads to Southern Germany and the mines.
From Antwerp the Portuguese could obtain cloth, silver and metals that
could then be traded in the Far East. In
fact, for 50 years the Portuguese factor kept his residence there until 1549
and his withdrawal was a sign of Antwerp’s competitive disadvantage. The South Germans came to trade copper and
quicksilver for spices and in time they became some of the greatest financiers
of the age. All this activity then
attracted the English and the Dutch.
From the 12th the 15th
century the main town of commercial intensity was Bruges in Flanders. In Then in the 15th century,
Bruges was overtaken by Antwerp and for half a century Antwerp held a greater
supremacy than Bruges. Antwerp in time
was caught up in the economic change and political upheaval of the mid-16th
century and the leadership passed to the northern fringe of the delta to the
Dutch where Amsterdam was to take off from the end of the 16th
century and into the 17th century.
The history of Antwerp’s rise from the 14th
century was described by Henri Priene in his Histoire de Belgique. It was able to take off because of the
deepening of the waterway form the sea, and the amenities of its safe harbor. The rise of English cloth trade helped. It also received the High Germans with their
liberal business practices.
Antwerp grew because it had great ease of
access. It did not have a difficult sand
bar that hindered access from the sea.
Even though it is inland along the river Scheldt. There was a great medieval road that went
from Cologne to Bruges and ran through Ghent and Mechlin, but another branch
road ran to the Scheldt estuary. This
was South Germany’s way to Antwerp. It
was a relatively good but inexpensive route.
In the villages along these roads were inn names like “the Cologne
Wagon,” which preserve the sense of this vanished highway.
One of the signs of market transformation
at Antwerp and in other towns of Belgium and the Netherlands is the rise of
fairs. There were famous Brabant fairs
or markets that were famous in the delta region. These fairs seem to have been
regularized under the auspices of duke John II at the opening of the 14th
century (p. 55). Each fair was to last
for two weeks, but these eventually lengthened to six. They eventually overlapped some, and
eventually extended to nearly half a year or about 22 weeks. They began around Easter or the Paaasmarkt,
at Bergen-op-Zoom, - it opened on Maundy Thursday and was followed next by the
Pentecost Fair or Pinxten or Sinxtenmarkt at Antwerp. The Antewerp Bismarkt or St. Bavo’s Fair opened
at end of August and then came the Bergen Koudmarkt or Winter fair the last
week of October. The proximity of the
two towns only 30 miles apart made it easy for merchants to visit both. These
fairs grew in importance over time and were more regulated and lengthened as
the need to make goods available or to swap goods from English ship based cloth
merchants for example. By the 16th
century Bergen-op-Zoom continued as a fair town with hits foreign trade
concentrated within the few weeks of its two fairs, but almost non-existent
outside them. However, Antwerp, on the
contrary, the fairs flourish, but their activity is more or less continuous
during the trading season. This was the
advantage of Antwerp in that it gained the attention and endorsement of the
Merchant Adventurer’s Company in the 16th century after about the
1520s.
Antwerp owed much to political good
fortune. There remained the attitude of
Burgundian rulers of the Netherlands toward the rising metropolis of Antwerp on
the banks of the Scheldt. (56).
The relation of Burgundy and Habsburg
politics to keep influence in the area played a part. Flanders had given the house of Burgundy its
first footing in the Netherlands. When
Antwerp arose, the town’s support of Maximilian during his ten years’ struggle
with the Flemish towns to forged a bond
between Antwerp and the dynasty that was to last unimpaired until the advent of
Philip II in around 1558. For the first
50 years of the 16th century the position of Antwerp was linked ot
the fortune of Charles V of Spain.
Catholic and Protestant alike were tolerated if they were prominent
businessmen, merchants.
The textile trade was most important. English and Flemish cloth. There was also a growing consumption of
metal. The German mines were especially
important. Exports of furniture and
paper goods, maps, musical instruments for which the Netherlands were
renowned.
Italian merchant families, including the
Guicciardini family introduced double entry bookkeeping, a marker of commerce. A credit system was established and a bill
paying system. This enabled the
development of banks and over time German banks appeared because Germans were
also merchants of precious metals, silver.
Speculative activity in real estate
occurred at Antwerp. (65) Marine insurance was just beginning. Merchants were in the habit of insuring their
lives during their absence, a forerunner of modern life insurance.
The downfall of Antwerp, it was never a
complete collapse, came when the catastrophes of the third quarter of the 16th
century befell the city. In 1557 Spain
and France declared themselves bankrupt. Three years later Portugal declared
the same. For the bankers who had lent
the two Iberian governments great sums these were heavy blows. They saw their loans converted into 5 per
cent annuities, which meant not merely a drastic reduction of interest but a
large scale amortization of funds.
The state bankruptcies were the receiver-general
and a number of towns were immobilized by the losses of smaller scale of capital
flows for the money market and investment boom and bust as the effects of
failure spread far and wide.
As the Protestant-Catholic wars in Europe spread, in 1576 the city suffered a major invasion by the Spanish known as the Spanish Furty in which about 7,000 civilians were massacred This marked the formal end of Antwerp’s
commercial position until its revival in modern times.
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| Sack of Antwerp in 1577 (Source Wikipedia) |
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