by Mark Lamster
All around the city there was construction, a building boom born from Antwerp’s role as the leading port north of the Alps and the reigning financial capital in all of Europe, a position it had assumed just a few decades earlier. The city dates to Roman times, if not earlier, and reputedly took its name from the legend of a mythical giant who cut off the hands of those who refused to pay him and then tossed them into the river. (Hand werpen means “hand tossing” in Dutch.) Its location was ideal for trade. Situated on a rise along the eastern bank of the Scheldt, Antwerp could be accessed by ship from the North Sea, but was also on the land routes from France to the south, Germany to the east, and the Dutch provinces to the north. Advanced systems of water management, a necessity in territory so often below sea level, transformed the region into the most fertile and productive in Europe, and bred in the populace a sense of political cooperation and interdependence. By the middle of the sixteenth century, cargo traffic through Antwerp had more than quadrupled that of London, and the population had soared past 100,000, a figure rivaled in Europe by only a handful of cities.
The Rubens and Pypelinckx families built their modest fortunes providing the staples of daily life—food, medicines, dry goods—to Antwerp’s expanding middle class. Even greater sums were being made in Antwerp from a new kind of business, finance, that was conducted in a new kind of building: Unveiled in 1533 with a design by Dominicus de Waghemakere, the Nieuwe Beurs (New Exchange) was an arcaded three-story square with an open court—the trading floor—at its center. Ever after, stock exchanges the world over would follow its essential blueprint. They would also adopt the financial instruments Antwerp’s merchants created on that floor, the forwards, futures, and options of the modern derivative market. Capital flowed readily, both for private enterprise and for public works. Europe’s monarchs looked to Antwerp to finance their wars, their monuments, their extravagances. The city would eventually pay a steep price for its role as the world’s banker, but when times were flush, there was no better place to become rich quickly, despite the occasional accusations of price-fixing and stock manipulation. The temper of the times was neatly summed up by the maxim engraved on the correspondence of a prominent Antwerp businessman: “Every Man for Himself.”
Antwerp’s great wealth was a bounty for the large community of artists who made it their home; in 1560, the city roll boasted nearly twice as many painters as it did bakers. Carel van Mander, who in 1604 authored the first history of painting north of the Alps, Het schilderboeck, called the city “the mother of the arts,” though he was not overly impressed by the “somewhat cold, fishy pallidness” that so often characterized the local color palette. The literary arts also flourished in Antwerp. In 1555, the French émigré Christophe Plantin founded the Golden Compass publishing house, or Plantin Press; in the years following, it produced an unrivaled catalog of exquisitely printed works on subjects ranging from philosophy to mathematics to religion, among them Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum orbus terrarum, the first modern world atlas, and the philological study the Rubens brothers collaborated on during their time in Rome. Plantin’s grandson Balthasar Moretus, a friend of the Rubenses’ from their days at the Verdonck school, built on the family tradition, publishing a wide range of humanist titles, many with elaborate title-page designs and illustrations by his childhood chum Peter Paul, who did them at cut rates in his spare time or in exchange for books.
Visitors to the city marveled at its energy. In 1549 a touring Spanish nobleman dubbed Antwerp “the metropolis of the world,” and in 1567 the Italian merchant and writer Lodovico Guicciardini suggested it had transcended even that terrestrial praise. He called Antwerp the marketplace “of all the universe” and hailed its “beauty, grandeur, power, and magnificence.” In those days, Antwerp’s streets were so clogged with traffic during work hours that they were all but impassable. Even the paintings were crammed with activity and abundance. The Antwerp master Pieter Aertsen created a new genre that advertised the city’s prosperity, a fusion of the still life and the peasant scene in which market stalls overflowed with meat, fish, fruits, and flowers—the quotidian spoils of a booming consumer economy. Consumption, in fact, was something more than an art form. A typical sinjoor drank three pints of beer each day. Antwerp’s feasts were legendary for their decadence, and nearly all of its citizens took part.
In such an atmosphere, the newlyweds Jan and Maria Rubens were naturally enthusiastic about their prospects. The Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis, signed just two years earlier, had put a stop to the seemingly perpetual warring between Spain, France, and England, bringing considerable relief to Antwerp’s bankers, who were pressed to fund Spanish military endeavors at enormous cost. Jan’s career was ascendant. Barely five months after their marriage, Jan was elected an alderman. In short order, the Rubens family expanded with the additions of Jan Baptist (1562), Blandina (1564), Clara (1565), and Hendrik (1567).
The future appeared bright, but the Low Countries were notorious for rapidly shifting conditions, and there were dark clouds on the horizon. Trouble, inchoate for years, had become quite real in 1556 with the abdication of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. Through a combination of force and diplomacy, Charles had united the territories of the Low Countries into a loose federation of seventeen provinces. But those provinces were naturally resistant to the centralized authority that would be the hallmark of the Baroque period. Their long history of collective cooperation, a practical necessity given the demands of the water table, had bred a sense of political self-reliance. As a price for peace, Charles had allowed the provinces considerable autonomy, formalizing their privileges in the Augsburg Transaction of 1548. But when he relinquished his crown to pursue a monastic life in the Catholic Church, the Habsburg Empire was cleaved in two, thereby sowing the seed of future discontent. Charles’s younger brother, Ferdinand I, assumed sovereignty over the Austrian branch of the family dynasty, and with it the title Holy Roman Emperor. Charles’s son, Philip II, took the Spanish crown, which also gave him dominion over the Low Countries.
Philip’s relationship with his subjects in the Low Countries began on an auspicious note. In his tour of the region as crown prince and heir apparent, in 1549, he was received with considerable pomp. Antwerp alone spent a quarter of a million florins, an enormous sum, on the ceremonies attendant on his arrival. It was a gracious gesture, but it did nothing to remove the essential fact that Philip’s command over the region would never be, to his immense frustration, complete. His vision of imperial power was a good deal less compromising than that of his father, and following Augsburg the unrestrained local population had become, to his mind, entirely and unacceptably too freethinking. Antwerp’s bankers balked at the prospect of financing his wars with France, England, and the Ottoman Empire, and extracted massive interest payments in return for their support. The provinces demanded additional freedoms as compensation for their own acquiescence. His Catholic Majesty was especially displeased to find the ideas of the Reformation in full flower across the Low Countries; Protestantism, in its several denominations, had colonized much of the region, north and south. Its spread was as much a political repudiation as a religious one. The Catholic clergy had a well-earned reputation for corruption and decadence, traits that became especially offensive in lean years, when even the unrivaled agricultural machine of the Low Countries failed to meet the demands of a hungry and impoverished population.
The authority of the Church was perceived as but another infringement on local prerogatives, a feeling exacerbated when Philip insisted on bringing the full force of the Inquisition, with all of its attendant cruelties, to the greater Netherlands. In this context, Protestantism took on the broad mantle of an independent-minded, moderating humanism, and was widely adopted by rich and poor, nobleman and commoner alike. Antwerp, by 1566, had a considerable Calvinist population; nearly thirty thousand sinjoren attended an outdoor service on a cool summer Sunday in that fateful year. Jan and Maria Rubens were almost certainly not in attendance
at that event; it would have been improper for an alderman to be seen at an outlaw function. But like many among their social set, they had shifted their religious affiliation. In 1561, the Rubens family will was denuded of traditional Catholic language.
Jan and Maria were among Antwerp’s burgher elite, an enterprising and urbane community alarmed by the reactionary winds blowing from Spain. But the new Spanish directives were even more of an affront to the historically independent Flemish nobility, especially those of Protestant faith. In 1566, three hundred of these emboldened aristocrats marched on the Brussels palace of Spain’s regional governor, demanding a relaxation of the Inquisition and the open practice of religion. When they were disparaged as “beggars,” they began dressing the part. The unlikely leader of this “Beggar” movement soon became William of Orange, a political moderate whose natural aversion to conflict had earned him the sobriquet William the Silent. William was born to a minor German count of Lutheran orientation, but through a quirk of dynastic succession, as an adolescent he unexpectedly inherited the title Prince of Orange, and with it much of Europe, including the region of southern France that gave name to his title. It also gave him most of the Low Countries. He was, however, obliged to forsake his father’s religion in favor of Catholicism. This he did, but he retained an essential tolerance for Protestantism, a fact that placed him very much at odds with the Spanish king, Philip II, who was his sovereign. That tolerance was balanced by a sense of propriety and steely resolve that Jan and Maria Rubens would come to know firsthand, and at great personal cost.
For the moment, however, William’s association with the Beggars gave their cause an essential credibility, and presented a grave challenge to the Spanish governor of the Low Countries, Margaret of Parma. A temporary acquiescence to Beggar demands followed, but the overall conditions in the Netherlands suggested trouble was far from over. The economy had turned bleak; a bitter winter, a trade squabble with England, and an unrelated war in the Baltics left state coffers empty and kitchen cupboards bare. When even the black bread and salt soup that were the daily nourishment for the less privileged became scarce, they found their frustrations released by agitating Calvinist sermonizers who, in turn, directed their anger at the Catholic Church.
The righteous fulminations of those preachers bred an iconoclasm that swept across the Netherlands in the heated summer of 1566. On August 13, a monastery near the French border was raided by an angry mob. In the ensuing weeks, a core of henchmen sacked the churches and cathedrals of the Low Countries, destroying the graven images Calvin had derided as presumptuous blasphemies. In Antwerp, the beeldenstorm (image storm) came on the Sunday following Assumption, a festival day that predictably exacerbated religious tension. By tradition, it was the day of the Ommegang, in which religious icons were paraded through the city streets to the gates of the Onze Lieve Vrouwekathedraal, or Cathedral of Our Lady. The artist Albrecht Dürer, a witness to the procession in 1521, described the amazing splendor of the event in his travel diary. “Twenty persons bore the image of the Virgin Mary and the Lord Jesus, adorned in the richest manner, to the honor of the Lord God.” All told, it made for a “delightful” spectacle, and one that was “very conductive to devotion.”
Conductive to devotion. One could hardly imagine a vision more likely to incite the would-be iconoclast. Somehow, tempers were held in check for a day. But on the next an angry crowd gathered at the cathedral, and it became ever more rowdy the day after that. The Antwerp town council, on which Jan Rubens sat, sent out the civil guard in an effort to disperse the mob, but it was too late; the guard was forced to retreat to de Vriendt’s town hall. Inside the church, Herman Moded, the most reactionary of Calvinist preachers, took the podium, and as he excoriated the paganism of Catholic idolatry, his makeshift flock attacked those idols with axes and sledgehammers and crowbars. Sculptures were yanked down from upper stories with ropes and pulleys. When they were done, the most extravagantly decorated cathedral in northern Europe was a standing ruin.
Back in Spain, Philip was appalled when he learned of these events, and especially displeased to find that William, in his capacity as margrave (hereditary lord) of Antwerp, had granted Protestants the right of free practice in that city. Philip was absolutely unwilling to brook the open worship of a religion he considered heretic within his kingdom, and he was assuredly not prepared to stand by as an emboldened opposition flouted his authority and spread insurrection across the Low Countries. The king took action. Goaded by his most bellicose advisers, Philip ordered that an army of nearly ten thousand men, an overwhelming force, be drawn from his dominions and assembled at Milan, in Spanish-controlled Lombardy. Military engineers were dispatched to ready a route through the Alps to the Low Countries that would circumvent hostile France. This was no simple task. Moving troops from Spanish territory to the Netherlands was so notoriously difficult that the phrase “send a soldier to Flanders” (poner una pica en Flandes) became a sardonic euphemism for asking the impossible. Some three hundred engineers were sent to expand the military corridor known as the Spanish Road, and their preparations continued through the winter and into early spring. In June 1567, the army finally departed under the command of Philip’s most militaristic counselor, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, the Duke of Alva.
What followed was an object lesson in the dangers of an arrogant, insular, and incompetent occupation. The “Iron Duke” arrived with his troops in late August, and wasted no time in alienating the local population. His soldiers, hardened veterans in shiny battle gear, were a daunting vision as they marched in file through the Low Countries, trailing behind them an unruly horde of profiteers. Despite the objections of Margaret of Parma, the Spanish governor, the duke garrisoned his men in the loyal towns surrounding Brussels, where they were needed least and where their rough behavior was an affront that turned friends into foes. He then proceeded to decommission Margaret’s army, a public rebuke that prompted her resignation and left him with responsibility for both military and administrative governance. Undeterred, he dismantled her entire bureaucracy. “Putting in new men one by one is like throwing a bottle of good wine into a vat of vinegar,” he said. To see to his directives, he relied almost exclusively on his own staff of Italian and Spanish officers and functionaries. He even ordered that William’s son, a university student in Louvain, be abducted and packed off to Spain. When the boy’s professors complained about this outrage against their very conception of order and fairness, the duke’s councillor replied, “We care nothing for your privileges.”
In Antwerp, a hotbed of Calvinist insurgency, the duke saw to the design and construction of a fortified military compound. Just south of the city, and separated from it by a large open field that would leave would-be attackers fatally exposed, an enormous moated citadel—a “green zone” avant la lettre—was erected by the duke’s Italian military architects, who then rerouted the city ramparts to enclose it. Pentagonal in form, but with wedged bastions and ravelins projecting from its corners and flanks, the fortress offered a menacing profile to the city it was ostensibly intended to protect, an unholy inversion of the typical fort-defends-town program. Inside was a veritable city within a city: barracks, armory, stores, tavern, chapel, all the necessities a battalion might require to withstand a prolonged siege, including—presumably for inspiration—a bronze statue of the unrepentant duke himself. Its inscription was dedicated to the man “who extirpated sedition, reduced rebellion, restored religion, secured justice, and established peace.”
With his army in place, the duke set about the subjugation of the local population, and did so using tactics honed during the Inquisition. “Everyone must be made in constant fear of the roof breaking over his head,” the duke wrote in a letter back to Philip. He seemed entirely immune to the commonsensical idea that his harsh rule might come back to haunt him, though Machiavelli, in The Prince, had warned specifically of the danger of such measures. “He who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it,
may expect to be destroyed by it,” the Italian wrote in 1513, “for in rebellion it has always the watch-word of liberty and its ancient privileges as a rallying point, which neither time nor benefits will ever cause it to forget.”
The primary instrument of Alva’s terror was a secret court, the Council of Troubles. Flemings called it the Council of Blood. The tribunal prosecuted some twelve thousand citizens for heresy and treason, often on trumped-up charges and with evidence obtained via torture. Alva orchestrated mass arrests, midnight seizures, book burnings, a full catalog of horrors. More than one thousand were executed in gruesome public displays—live quarterings, burnings at the stake—designed to instill fear in the populace.
The duke’s terror was directed at body, mind, and wallet. “A goodly sum must be squeezed out of private persons,” he wrote. Maintenance of his new order, in particular his immense standing army, was an expensive proposition. Massive urban citadels didn’t just pay for themselves, and Philip had more pressing needs at home. Funds would have to be raised from the native population, and that meant a series of new taxes on those least willing and able to bear them. Public disdain for the duke, under these harsh conditions, was enormous, as reflected by a contemporary parody of the Lord’s Prayer: