ANTWERP,Flanders,Belgium,European Scenery,1836 Antique Steel Engraving Historical Collectible Art Print

Antwerp (Dutch: Antwerpen, French: Anvers, Spanish: Amberes) is a city and a municipality in the province of Antwerp (and its capital), in Flanders, one of the three regions of Belgium.The Brabantine city of Antwerp succeeded Bruges in Flanders as the major port city and center of the economy of northern Europe, but became, as Fernand Braudel pointed out "the center of the entire international economy—something Bruges had never been even at its height." (Braudel 1985 p. 143.) He dates the opening of the new order with the arrival of the first Portuguese ship laden with pepper and cinnamon in 1501. Antwerp's "Golden Age" is tightly linked to the "Age of Exploration". During this period Antwerp clung to some disadvantages. Without a long-distance merchant fleet, and governed by an oligarchy of banker-aristocrats forbidden to engage in trade, the economy of Antwerp was in the hands of the foreigners who made the city very international. Ships from Venice, Ragusa, Catalonia or Portugal met in the port where Portuguese pepper and silks met German silver. Antwerp wisely embraced a policy of toleration: even today Antwerp is nicknamed "The Jerusalem of the West" because of its large orthodox Jewish (hasidic) community. Antwerp in its greatness was not even a "free" city; it had been reabsorbed into the duchy of Brabant in 1406 and was controlled from Brussels. Antwerp experienced three booms during its century, the first based on the pepper market, a second launched by American silver coming from Seville that came to an abrupt end with the bankruptcy of Spain in 1557. A third boom, after the stabilizing Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, in 1559, was based on industrial production of textiles. The boom-and-bust cycles and inflationary cost-of-living put a squeeze on Antwerp's less-skilled workers, and the profound religious revolution of the Reformation erupted in violent iconoclastic riots in August 1566. The conciliating presence of the regent Margaret, duchess of Parma was swept aside when Philip II sent the Duke of Alva to restore peace and orthodoxy at the head of an army the following summer. The Eighty Years' War broke out in earnest in 1572, and commercial communication between Antwerp and the Spanish port of Bilbao was essentially terminated. On November 4, 1576, Spain captured the city and nearly destroyed it after three days. The "Golden Age" of Antwerp is traditionally considered to have ended when the city was captured by Alessandro Farnese in 1585. Antwerp's banking was assumed for a generation by Genoa and its mercantile supremacy passed to Amsterdam.