The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

by Michael Pye

  Merchants turned up at the Bourse every day because absence was taken as proof you were bankrupt. A trader who was still in business would have to have the day’s information, to see what was changing and what might change next. Letters were unreliable; merchants always sent a copy of their last letter with a new letter, and sometimes sent three copies by different routes.32 Information was talk and talk was raucous. In Amsterdam, before there was an Exchange, the traders met on a narrow street of shops called Warmoesstraat, or on the New Bridge, or in churches when the weather was foul. Neighbours complained about the racket coming from the churches.

  The Bourse, the Exchange, was born in Bruges, in a town with merchants from everywhere, who needed a place to meet and do business, to deal information, paper, goods. They often met outside the hostel that belonged to the Van der Buerse family, and when the big trading powers, Venice, Florence and Genoa, built their headquarters around the Buerse square the talk began in earnest and the name Buerse and Bourse stuck to every exchange. The city added a bailiff to stand watch and keep order. The pattern was set: an open space with at least one portico for shelter against the weather, a narrow entrance with security, a semi-public square in the middle of the city.33 There had to be room for goods to be shown. There had to be dry zones for all the paper.

  The first exchange in Antwerp was a fine private house, a courtyard with arcades on three sides all sculptured and trefoiled like some Victorian railway station. More merchants came to town, there were more deals and more paper to be dealt, so the city planned a new and showy Bourse in 1531. They found an unbuilt parcel of land, and put the Bourse in the middle of it all, enclosed by streets and houses: ‘an ornament for God and city’ with a couple of towers to show where it was, but not a palace. It was a beautiful, shut-in courtyard, galleries all around, an upper floor with shops for art and luxuries. It was a public square, which the Florentine merchant Ludovico Guicciardini reckoned the ‘most decorous’ square in Antwerp. It would be the model for the Royal Exchange in London, and for the Beurs in Amsterdam, not to mention the exchanges in towns like Lille: the kind of space that every city wanted.34

  In Antwerp if you wanted to trade goods – we’d say ‘commodities’ – you went to the English Bourse, which was the place on Wolstraat and Hofstraat where the English met customers to organize the sale of their wool. Their market was a futures market; they sold wool that had not yet been delivered for prices they had to predict. Anything even less solid was traded in the palatial new Bourse.

  Climb the stairs there and you could buy a picture; Barbara Alleyns would sell you one of the paintings stacked around while her husband ran his workshop to paint more. There were already art dealers, and there are a good number of women among them, sometimes selling the work of women artists.35 You could lend money, lots of money, to the Hapsburgs if you were so minded. You could insure your life, or someone else’s; if you got paid, the insurer had seven years to try to prove the person wasn’t dead after all. You could insure a ship to voyage as far as the Indies, East or West, almost anywhere, which had more to do with the flexibility of the Bourse than the traffic coming through the Antwerp docks. Antwerp brokers used insurance mostly as a speculation, a way to profit from trade without actually buying, selling or shipping. They liked the profit so well they blocked schemes to send fleets out with official naval protection, which would have spoiled the game.

  To get prices right, traders had to know about the supply of solid, physical money, how much silver was flowing up from Spain, if the land route was open across France for couriers to pass with safe conducts, or if the metal would have to come by the rarer and riskier sea route. Money was a commodity, too, like grain or spices: the amount available changed its price. The good coins, solid silver, inevitably went abroad to do business, bad coins that were clipped or worn out stayed at home. Bad money was always driving out good.36

  Besides what you knew, how you were known was all important. Even when the law allowed bad behaviour, like slow payment, a man lost all his standing if he made a fuss about paying a letter of credit. It ‘looked bad’.37 Everyone had to trust people he didn’t know, from outside his family or even his nation; people of all nationalities were working together because trade required so many languages. Smaller firms were always going bust, so it was alarming if a bankrupt started to hide what he owned; the de la Peña brothers were notorious because Gaspar got his workers to pile the contents of his warehouse on a ship bound for Spain, so the Antwerp courts could not touch them, and his brother Diego sat down South to handle everything that was left to the firm.

  It was harder and harder to know who could be trusted, and it would get worse.

  Nobody went home after Vespers. The crowd stayed around the Cathedral of Our Lady. The city guard came to move them on, but more and more people kept arriving and standing and waiting. Most of them wanted to see something break the tension in the city like rain does in a thunderstorm. Some of them wanted to make something happen. They carried axes, heavy hammers, ropes and ladders, pulleys and levers.

  20 August 1566, in Antwerp. Two days before, the statue of the Virgin Mary was booed in the streets and pelted with rubbish, but the statue got back safely to the cathedral. One day before, a crowd had come to jeer at the statue as it stood in its proper place. On 20 August things got worse, as everyone expected.38

  A few street girls clambered onto the altars and brought down wax tapers, which they lit so everyone could see. The men went to work. They found all the painted images, wood or canvas, and tore them down from the walls and cut them up. They hooked down the statues and images, saints and martyrs slammed on the floor and cracked open. They broke the bright painted glass in the windows. First there was the dry sound of breaking glass, incident by incident, and then a sound like some great factory: axe-blows and hammering. Every image was brought as close to dust as the men could manage.

  After the cathedral they moved on, chapel after chapel, thirty churches in all before dawn. The crowd ran howling alongside through the streets, torches flaring. They broke into sacristies and tried on the heavy silk robes of the priests, downed wine from gold chalices, burned missals and shined their shoes with holy oil. They burned monastery libraries and broached the barrels in the cellars; monks and nuns went scrambling in panic.

  At the end of the night nobody was hurt. Nothing was stolen. A few works of art did survive. But everything else was broken, not just the magnificence of the cathedral but the possibility of any civic peace between factions. No harm was done to town halls, so the issue was not taxes, nor to any official or military building, so the point of the mob’s fury was not the ruling Hapsburgs. A war was starting, and for the next eighty years the frontier ran between Calvinist and Catholic, Dutch and Spanish, in the Netherlands.

  It was a campaign of sieges which made whole cities change sides one year and then change back the next, going hungry in the meantime: a war of attrition broken by moments of horror. Antwerp suffered in a dozen ways, its markets disrupted, its trust spoiled, its stock of silver exhausted by 1575 by taxes raised to pay for the war. The system in the Bourse was ruined. Exchange rates went wild. City creditors went bust. Everyone was paid late, if at all, and everyone borrowed what he could at higher and higher rates of interest. Nobody could assume the good credit or even the good intentions of the other men at the Bourse; everyone had to pay attention all the time to individual merchants and the amounts they wanted to trade. The market was just that bit more abstract, more dependent on a subtle kind of information: more minute by minute, more modern.

  There was worse. The royal finances were frozen shut and the army went unpaid. The starving veterans of that army turned on their paymasters. They came into Antwerp for three long days of killing, stealing, raping, burning down some six hundred houses and the glorious new Town Hall with all its archives. They also demanded ransom from the merchants left in the city, unsettling the few English merchants left there by using ‘naked swords and daggers’
to get money from the head of the English House, the headquarters of the Merchant Adventurers; naturally, being an Antwerp veteran himself, he paid partly in promissory bills rather than cash.39 The Bourse, that elegant palace for playing with money, insurance, shares, was invaded by soldiers dressed in velvet and satin stolen from merchant wardrobes who set out tables to play their own games with dice.

  Merchants hate to be parodied almost more than they hate to be threatened or robbed; many left. They went north to get away from the warzone, and they were right to do so since it would be almost twenty years before Antwerp began to recover,40 and in the meantime even the river worked against them, filling with silt. There were blockades by the Dutch, one more siege by the Spanish, a purge of all Calvinist citizens, who had to get out at once. Those refugees treasured their anger against the Spanish, against a regime that defined them by denomination, and they defined themselves by anti-Catholic feeling: Protestant and right.

  They took with them a new and strong idea of what they needed to know to do business: information as the richest commodity of all. They carried ideas about deals, about taking shares in a ship or an insurance, about arbitrage between markets, about how paper could be almost more valuable than freight, and how the world could be written down, bought and sold. They knew how to deal in the future because the Antwerp wool trade had instant deals on future supplies even before the same kind of futures market opened in Amsterdam (where it balanced the value of fish going north with the likely value of grain being shipped south from the Baltic). They carried to the Protestant north most of the equipment needed for what we would come to know, after a while, as capitalism.

  This great shaking of markets confused matters for centuries, made capitalism seem somehow Protestant by nature. Yet the Antwerp markets spoke Italian, were driven by the need to raise money for a Spanish overlord, did business constantly with the Portuguese and every other Catholic power. Capitalism came out of circumstances long before the divide over theology complicated the picture.

  Catholics cannot try to look all moral and innocent. Protestants need not be unduly proud. As trade expanded and more money had to be found for bigger ships and bigger loads, as ambition crashed through frontiers, capitalism was happening anyway. It depended on, and it brought along, a world expressed in numbers, not images or legends or metaphors, in which mathematics had the power to change reality; and an industry of information long before our kind of newspapers, websites or broadcasts. It was making us modern.

  There were a dozen reasons for going north. The war was very rarely fought as far north as Leiden, let alone Amsterdam: and a bit of order is always welcome when you have a living to make. Artists who could no longer make a living went north with all their ideas alongside Calvinists who could not tolerate being forcibly led astray by Spanish bullies, Catholics who had seen everything holy torn apart in a single night, merchants who might find everything changed day to day in their home port depending on the progress of the war. Those merchants had long memories; in 1621 they formed the West Indies Company with the special purpose of revenge on the Spanish in the Caribbean, a company with two sets of books, one for trade and one for war.

  Simon Stevin went north and enrolled in Leiden University: a taxman from Bruges, one-time cashier in a merchant house, the kind of man who might usually have gone south to university at Louvain, where Erasmus once studied. Louvain was distinguished enough for him and practical enough; its mathematics had to do with surveying, and Jesuits took an interest in architecture and military science. And Stevin always thought of himself as a southerner; book after book, the title page calls him ‘Simon Stevin of Bruges’ even when he was in the service of the stadhouder of the north. Still, he did go north and he left behind his connections.41

  He was the natural child of Cathelyne van der Poort, whose own connections were mostly in bed, and Anthonis Stevin, who was a bolter and leaves few traces on any records except when his sister pays up to protect his inheritance, ‘her brother having been a long time out of the country without having any news from him’. Simon was raised with Cathelyne’s other children, whose father was the grand burgomaster, alderman and magistrate Noel de Caron, a strict Calvinist in most other ways. He also had the protection of the one man Cathelyne did remember to marry, the merchant Joost Sayon, who made silk at the sign of ‘the French Arms’.

  Stevin was perhaps a teacher and then, as he wrote himself, ‘well-versed in mercantile book-keeping and being a cashier; and later on in the matter of finance’. His business years were in Antwerp: if he didn’t work for some partnership with offices in Venice, Augsburg, London, Cologne and Antwerp, he was certainly familiar with how such an office worked. He saw how one of the partners never did keep proper records, which meant he had to accept what the other partners decided.

  At twenty-eight, which is not so very late for the time, he was officially declared an adult and not a dependent orphan any more; was staked some money by relatives; and went to work for the financial administration in Bruges, a settled job in an insecure world. That was 1577; the Calvinists were still in power four years later when he left for the new and deeply Protestant university at Leiden. He moved far too early to be a religious refugee. Most likely, he moved for ambition, away from the disorder and uncertainty of the south.

  Even before he registered as a student at Leiden in 1583, he was putting out books: the southerner teaching business to the north. He produced a book on double-entry book-keeping, the system that balances out what you spend and what you have and get, which was not familiar but not unknown in the north. He also produced a little book on working out how much interest is to be paid on borrowed money. He knew how subversive he was being by publishing that information; ‘such tables are to be found in writing with some people,’ he wrote in the preface, ‘but they remain hidden as great secrets with those who have got them and they cannot be obtained without great expense.’

  He had started his revolution: making mathematics work in the everyday world.

  Refugees went both ways: running out of Flanders for safety and advancement, but also running there for refuge and work. Richard Verstegan left England because he was in danger of being hanged, and in Antwerp he set up as a kind of dealer in a new kind of commodity: information. He wrote books, made brilliantly gruesome propaganda for his Catholic cause, wrote for the news sheets; he was one of the first newspaper humorists. He also worked on the hidden side of his business. In his coded letters and reports Richard Verstegan became ‘181’: a spy.42

  Information was already something to buy, sell and trade across the sea, like cloth or salt or wheat or silver; a necessity with a cash value. It could be hoarded like a treasure, or put about ostentatiously; it could be secret knowledge of amazing alchemical transformations, smuggled very discreetly by couriers from court to court, or the boastful stories of battle and triumph in the new public news sheets. It could get you a living or get you hanged.

  Printing put information in books, and sent it everywhere, but information also travelled in secret letters and open letters, in maps of newly explored countries, specimens of fruits and cuttings from unfamiliar plants, even the bones of strange animals. Letters were work in progress, long-distance discussions across the sea: the conversation of the times.

  The idea of a ‘fact’ was beginning to move out from courts of law into the world. Judges were used to hearing witnesses who said what they did or what they saw or what they knew, and coming on that basis to an official kind of truth about what happened, and why. A ‘fact’ is a ‘factum’ – an event, something that has been done.43 Outside the law, truth rested on authority: the great book, the great power, the Church’s teaching. Now the idea of the ‘fact’ began to corrode that notion of truth. It would soon affect the natural sciences: Francis Bacon famously told his readers to put away ancient books, and then to make their words as simple as stones piled up for building, a clear, functional account of solid things. For a world used to studying the great theorie
s of Aristotle, the nature of the spheres of heaven, Bacon prescribed something different: all things ‘numbered, weighed, measured and determined’. Everything had to be tested. The instincts of Robert Grosseteste were becoming seventeenth-century practice.

  Facts began to appear in news sheets, the pictures of battles so carefully drawn they turned the reader into a witness. When Verstegan wrote about his Catholic martyrs, he also showed pictures of them so the reader would be convinced. Facts had a money value which allowed Verstegan to work in various markets, including the black.

  He had the right unsettled background for a spy: his family improvised their lives, running from wars in the Rhineland, remaking their lives across the sea in England, slipping social class and clambering back again. They knew how to play at belonging. Young Richard even seemed likely for a while to slip away from the Catholic Church. He worked his way through Oxford as servant to Thomas Bernard, a hardline Protestant; he was around men who talked about things like ‘predestination’. He must have known how convenient it would be to turn Protestant and be eligible to be a soldier, a lawyer, to hold a government job or even be a priest; but being Catholic had its own glamour for rebellious undergraduates. It was the risky, radical position. It showed deep doubts about the Church of England, and the whole reordering of the state under Queen Elizabeth; it was a chance to claim a certain purity of mind. So instead of bending, Verstegan left the university ‘to avoid oaths’ of loyalty.