Major art city meets major merchant city – think elevated aesthetics of a great Italian art city and rich history of an Italian maritime republic combined, or a product of a merger of Munich, Nuremberg, and Augsburg, if cities were allowed to combine and amalgamate, corporate style. But minus a royal seat – Antwerp has been a self governing trading metropolis, for centuries powered from the bottom up, city council above Imperial rule, mostly. A city where indigenous master masons and local military engineers, armed with the latest Italian Renaissance principles – not some imported and transplanted foreign royal architects – took the lead in urban development, carefully layering quality physical infrastructure on top of the thriving commercial one: ecclesiastical masterpieces inaugurated, streets added, canals and fortifications expanded, new blocks filled with merchant houses, exchanges, and guild quarters. A city where entrepreneurial spirit of Renaissance men found innovative ways to fund the ambitious expansion – by pledging revenues, mortgaging properties, borrowing from the public and the Imperial lenders – of what already was one of Europe’s largest and densest built environments.
Antwerp is a place of singular historical diversity and multiplicity of rule – initially the capital of the duchy of Brabant but ruled by the Spaniards in the 16th and 17th centuries, which contributed to the city’s Southern character, the Austrians of the same royal family in the 18th, then the French and, after the French Revolution, the Dutch, until it became a part of old Europe’s newest sovereign state, Belgium, in 1830. This succession of European rulers – all of them Catholic and most of them among the biggest patrons of the arts – makes it more diverse and more removed from the gestalt of the unitary nation state, than just about any place in Europe’s ethnocentric West; you really need to be in the East Central part of the continent to see this much border shifting. No question inhaling so much influence from different cultures has been good for Antwerp’s creativity.
Golden Age Antwerp is the high watermark mark of achievement of an individual was able before the advent of the nation state. Cities of Renaissance Europe, just as much as today, and possibly more than today, were islands – liberal, pluralistic, and by definition multicultural – of relative meritocracy based on purposeful human action in pursuit of individualistic and shared goals. Social contrasts and physical vulnerability notwithstanding, cities were centers of learning and dissemination of ideas, and common ground for everything diverse, worldly, urbane, tolerant, and forward thinking. At least relative to surrounding landed estates of the nobility. From Flanders to Poland, city vs castle – or said differently, urban patrician, learned, connected, engaged in commerce or city governance, vs hereditary feudal landowner – was one of the lasting juxtapositions of pre-modern Europe. In contrast, the sovereign state after mid 1600’s, and especially after the French and American revolutions, allowed those seeking absolute and maximalist power to consolidate then industrialize it. Coercive and repressive by design, the state, and especially the nation state – built on placing the interests of the many above those of the individual, without questioning, as long as the many marched to the beat of the same drummer – reached the tipping point of totalitarianism once the nationalism collided with the popular vote. The worst atrocities against the individual, spiraling further out of control with every generation, were committed in the interests of the many – the majority, united by the nation and the flag, by blood and soil. Committed by the state – and not by the city – as the sovereign state defeated the free individualistic city.
Antwerp’s free merchant spirit lives on in nostalgic replicas monumentalized throughout urban Europe. It is symbolic that the start of Antwerp’s decline was triggered by the closing of the navigation on the Scheldt, the city’s main artery of prosperity, ordered by the Treaty of Westphalia. A treaty, which in 1648 officially launched the age of sovereignty of the nation state at the expense of the Holy Roman Empire and the city, pushing back the House of Habsburg and marginalizing the free merchant cities of the Italian peninsula and of Northern Europe. Before then, no one had been able to match the achievements of the Italian city republics as world renowned centers of learning or the heights achieved in early experiments with mercantile democracy by self-governing cities of Belgium’s predecessor, the Spanish Netherlands. Whatever you may think about the exact and subjective hierarchy of those free cities, you will Antwerp comfortably at the top of the pyramid.
It is no coincidence that Antwerp and its region became one of the historicist symbols of choice for the 19th century urban Europe’s expressions of independence and assertiveness. The most sweeping reforms by the Continent’s most ambitious planners – Ludwig I’s transformation of Munich into a royal capital, followed by the transformation of Vienna by Franz Joseph and by that of Paris by Napoleon III into global capitals – defaulted time and again to the tried and true cookbook recipes for official civic design. To the Italian Renaissance palazzo whenever a signature educational building project was to express the timeless virtues of learning, and to the imposing secular monuments of Flemish Gothic or Renaissance for nearly every new colossal city hall complex seeking to relay the grassroots story of self governance and self reliance of the enterprising townsfolk of more liberal times that predated the era of the illiberal nation state. Thus, the Hotel de Ville in Paris at the gate of medieval Marais decided to outdo Antwerp’s Standhuis and the Neues Rathaus on Munich’s central Marienplatz tried to replicate Brussels City Hall. Vienna’s Rathaus anchoring the most monumental segment of Europe’s most monumental boulevard was erected as perhaps the boldest advertisement of a town hall of a Flemish city of the period, only bigger. Needless to say, all three are better known than Antwerp, even if clearly derivative.
At the peak of its Golden Age, Antwerp possessed roughly the relative significance and wealth of today’s Manhattan. A Venetian envoy mesmerized by Antwerp’s vibe in mid-1500’s, claimed the city did more commerce in two weeks than Venice, then a global commercial powerhouse, did in a year. Exaggeration or not, Antwerp, with Europe’s busiest daily market and a succession of trade fairs, had by then surpassed the richest of the Italian city republics. It was truly the wealthiest and one of the most populous of European cities in the 16th century with 100,000-200,000 inhabitants – on this measure it closely approached Paris and far exceeded London – its port capable of taking in 500 large merchant ships daily was expanded to hold as many of them at a time, its walls containing no fewer than 15,000 houses of burghers and patricians. Amsterdam, the region’s distant second, was a far cry at the time. But Antwerp wasn’t only about trade – or spending its proceeds on local real estate – it had significant exportable industrial production of its own; of cloth, Europe’s finest; of tapestries, Europe’s most famous; but also of glass, gold and silver craft, and musical instruments; the city produced some of the finest furniture, woodcarving, and other luxury goods prized in the royal courts and across major European capitals. But above all, it was known for its printed books.
To people who prefer Disney-like Bruges – I say, buy a postcard instead. Not much in the way of 3rd dimension left in this continental port of entry favored by British retirees. No, there is absolutely nothing specifically wrong with the so-called Venice of the North, it had in fact rivaled Antwerp and was among the larger and wealthier cities. Today, however, just about everything about Brugge feels staged – a caricature of a medieval town flooded with mass consumers of mainstream tourism – a postcard may indeed be more authentic. Even if you are in a scavenger hunt and Northern Renaissance is your mission, you can do much better. Ghent, Antwerp, even Brussels feel different – detailed, lived-in, vibrant, inviting, they must be experienced in real time, at street level, on foot, with a head up high, and with a historical lens – their historic and historicist skyline features, architecture, food, street life, and people all infinitely more exciting. And for enchanting and picture perfect, I honestly prefer the intricate detail and college town energy of Leuven, stunning and impeccably restored after almost total ruin by the Germans in WWI and a miniature of Antwerp, if not more elegant in its late Gothic and high Baroque splendor – yes, but that is another beer-bar-architecture themed blog entry.
My preference of Antwerp over Bruges is not that original. Maximilian of Austria himself clearly expressed a similar sentiment in 1484 when, exiled from Vienna by Matthias Corvinus of Hungary and after a house arrest by not so welcoming burghers of Bruges, he chose to reward Antwerp’s hospitality with a charter ordering the movement of all commerce from Bruges to Antwerp, granting merchants new privileges that would match and exceed those of Bruges, spanning from a limited tax exemption on beer to a guarantee of security over export and import of property. English and Hanseatic merchants had already been enjoying privileged presence in Antwerp since the 1300’s and early 1400’s, the Scandinavians and the South Germans also a fixture in the city albeit with no special privileges. But it was nevertheless thanks to Antwerp that the South Germans achieved new heights of their commercial success of the early 1500’s: the Flemish city helped the Imhofs, the Welsers, the Fuggers, the world’s leading families, mainly from Augsburg and Nuremberg, expand their already impressive metals trading fortunes as they rose to the top ranks of the world’s government and private bankers of the day. But extensive operations in the metropolis by the most active, influential, and connected of Antwerp’s foreigners – the Portuguese, the Spaniards, and the Genoese – only started after the the Emperor articulated his his Antwerp vs Bruges view. An Imperial ‘parent guaranty’ of prosperity of sorts, an indemnity that gave legitimacy to Antwerp’s commercial assertiveness and global standing, a shot in the arm that secured its rise to the Golden Age of the next century. During its most spectacular decades of the 16th century over 1,000 foreign merchants operated in Antwerp at the same time, most proceeded to gain citizenship and form their trading nation associations in the city. The Genoese, central to the funding of Spain’s overseas conquests and the finances of the Holy Roman Empire, formed the largest and most coherent trading colony in Antwerp, the city’s most visible of all Italian merchant and banker communities. Genoa, as the financier of the Spanish Habsburgs, was the main beneficiary of changes in the world’s money flows, Antwerp – of parallel changes in the flows of goods brought by the expansion of the House of Habsburg, the fall of Constantinople, Spanish conquests in the Americas, and the rebalancing of maritime and overland trade routes.
What is known as the Spanish Netherlands in fact joined the Hapsburg domains a generation earlier than Spain did. Having bounced back and forth between the Empire and France for a couple of centuries, Antwerp found itself under the French House of Valois-Burgundy by the 1360’s. In the late 1400’s, the marriage of Mary of Burgundy to Maximilian transferred Flanders (Bruges, Ghent) and Brabant (Brussels, Leuven, Antwerp) to the Empire, kicking off House of Austria’s centuries long tradition of peaceful territorial expansion by marriage rather than war. It was the marriage of Maximilian’s son’s to the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella that established the European – and global – dominance by this family’s Spanish line. This dominance that would last nearly three centuries was later cemented by Maximilian’s more famous grandson, Charles V, and his even better known successor, Philip II, who established Florida and Buenos Aires, ruled over the Aztecs and the Incas, and reigned from Peru to the Philippines by way of Spain, Portugal, Milan, Naples and Sicily. Only Antwerp and its province had joined the family a quarter century earlier – and a half century earlier than some of the core hereditary Habsburg lands like Bohemia and Hungary.
Free, uber democratic spirit of Maximilian of Austria’s reclaimed possessions ultimately proved too volatile for comfort, forcing the Holy Roman Emperor to establish his court in Innsbruck, the long distance rule affording Antwerp significant self governance. Burgundian Netherlands were drawn into centuries of conflict for local and European supremacy between the Holy Roman Empire and France, between the Habsburgs and the Valois then the Bourbons, and later between post Revolutionary France and Germany, a fragmented battlefield with fluid balance of power more characteristic of European regions much further East.
Even Antwerp’s eventual decline that followed in the early 1600’s was felt across Europe with extraordinary force. The shift of Europe’s commercial epicenter from Antwerp then in decline to Amsterdam after the religious wars unleashed forces powerful enough to secure the fortunes of a number of N German and Polish cities. A long list of beneficiaries of Antwerp’s creative exodus included Augsburg and Nuremberg, perhaps the greatest centers of artisanal production of later centuries; it revived the court in Munich and the old Hanseatic centers of Bremen, Lubeck, and Gdansk, the largest city of the formerly great trading league badly lagging its Italian and Flemish rivals and now under pressure from the Swedish Empire, the superpower of the day. Antwerp’s decline was powerful enough to induce an influx of Netherlandish artists into major trading cities and art centers of the Holy Roman Empire and Poland, where them to merge with South German artisans and join numerous Italian masters already working in central European courts, thanks to the Jagellonian and Habsburg patronage – and towns, thanks to the sponsorship of urban patrician elites – creating a distinctly middle-European German/Flemish/Italian stylistic mix still visible in historic cities of that region today.
Antwerp of today asserts itself as a bourgeois and bohemian paradise, its luxurious comfort soaked in traditions of aesthetics has always been thoroughly bourgeois, its informal creative edge always added a bohemian twist, these two remain in balance with each other and never too far. More than an elegant marketplace for luxury objects, this cosmopolitan city confidently punches far above its weight once again, reinvigorated with artistic and mercantile energy and a new sense of modernity. The impressive stats and global reach of Antwerp – take its precision diamond cutting and trading, its shipping and industrial base, the Six and the city’s fashion design scene, the 8,000 creative enterprises registered in the city, its artisan specialties and culinary scene, or its alphabet soup of catchy new generation museum acronyms including MOMU, FOMU, M HKA, DIVA – are for the record books and league tables or, at the very least, a stimulating conversation over a drink following an inspired visit.
