Antwerp

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Before Amsterdam, Antwerp was a dazzling North Sea port at the center of the known world, akin to nineteenth-century Paris or twentieth-century New York. It was a place where anything could happen: killer bankers, easy kisses, and a market in secrets and heresy. For half of the sixteenth century, Antwerp was synonymous with breaking rules—religious, sexual, and intellectual. One man monopolized the city's wealth, redefining the concept of money, while another reshaped Antwerp through sheer ambition. Jews fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition found refuge there, aided by a remarkable woman leading Europe's grandest banking family. Thomas More introduced Utopia, Erasmus pondered money and exchanges, and William Tyndale sheltered and smuggled his English Bible until his execution. Pieter Bruegel depicted the city as The Tower of Babel. However, after Antwerp's rebellion against the Spanish, its glory faded, and its history was rewritten. The city that once unsettled many became conformist, with mutinous troops destroying city records. Michael Pye seeks to rediscover this lost Antwerp, using clues from novels, paintings, songs, letters, and archives from Venice, London, and the Medici. He paints a picture of a city marked by fire, plague, and violence, yet learning to assert its power in a post-feudal world, revealing Antwerp as the proud 'exception' in Europe.