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Hello and welcome to the Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and this week we're talking about Antwerp, now a relatively unremarkable Belgian town, but in the 16th century, the first city of the world.

Michael Pye is the author of Antwerp the Glory Years, and he joins me now to talk about that remarkable period.

Can you tell me first how Antwerp came to be so important in the 60th century?

Because it seems, you know, it kind of flowered really quite abruptly, didn't it?

Well, it did. The thing to understand is this isn't a town that flowers because it's got a court

or a bishop or some sort of famous centre. It's a town where everything went through. It's a town for trade

in ideas or secrets or goods, whatever. And that was what had to come right for Antwerp to be

as dominant as it was. And what happened was really quite simple. You must remember that what's

now Belgium divided at the time into Flanders and Brabant,

which both were answering to Madrid and to the Habs, fine. Brubant behaved carefully. Flanders

didn't. And that resulted in Flanders and towns like Bruges getting less and less advantages from the Habsburgs.

And Antwerp promptly exploited that.

For example, at the point where the would-be Emperor Maximilin had turned up on the steps of Bruges,

wanting to sort things out, the people of Bruges took him in, put him in a very nice

house on the main square, and proceeded to give him windows with a view out onto where his

associates were being executed. This was tactless, and it resulted in the, it resulted in

a certain amount of distaste for Bruges. Bruges at the same time has got its basic

problem, which was mud. Its main access to the North Sea was beginning to silt up. So the combination

of those two things, a bit of imperial disfavor and mud, was quite enough to give Antwerp a really

good chance, and they used it. They started trade fairs twice a year,

...