This rich history of Antwerp was a Times Book of the Year and Radio 4 Book of the Week Even
before Amsterdam there was a dazzling North Sea port at the hub of the known world: the city of
Antwerp. Antwerp was sensational like nineteenth-century Paris or twentieth-century New York
somewhere anything could happen or at least be believed: killer bankers easy kisses a market
in secrets and every kind of heresy. For half the sixteenth century it was the place for
breaking rules - religious sexual intellectual. In Antwerp things changed. One man cornered
all the money in the city and reinvented ideas of what money meant. Another gave Antwerp a new
shape purely out of his own ambition. Jews fleeing the Portuguese Inquisition needed Antwerp
for their escape thanks to the remarkable woman at the head of the grandest banking family in
Europe. Thomas More opened Utopia there Erasmus puzzled over money and exchanges William
Tyndale sheltered there and smuggled out his Bible in English until he was killed. Pieter
Bruegel painted the town as The Tower of Babel. But when Antwerp rebelled with the Dutch
against the Spanish and lost all that glory was buried and its true history rewritten. The
city that unsettled so many now became conformist. Mutinous troops burned the city records.
Michael Pye sets out to rediscover the city that was lost and bring its wilder days to life
using every kind of clue: novels paintings songs schoolbooks letters and the archives of
Venice London and the Medici. He builds a picture of a city haunted by fire plague and
violence but learning how to be a power in its own right in the world after feudalism. This is
the Antwerp which was the proud 'exception' to all of Europe.
