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 shel
