Chapter 04 - The Story of Antwerp

CHAPTER IV

THE STORY OF ANTWERP

THE records of Antwerp are meager in comparison with those of the other cities, but as its burning by the Norman pirates in the year 836 is an historical fact, it must then have existed at the least for a century or more. In the Frank period a castle named And hunerbo is marked on the site, and this brings us to the explanation of its name. The castle was built here to protect the approach by the Scheldt, and to prevent robbery either by foreign plunderers, or by foreign traders introducing goods without paying toll to the sovereign of the land. The general European punishment for theft in those days was to cut off the thief's right hand. It is still the practice in uncivilized Africa and in Afghanistan. On the Scheldt the infliction of the penalty had a sequel. The cut off hands were thrown into the river, hence the origin of the name - Andhunerbo in mediaeval Latin or Antwerpen in Flemish, i. e., the place of handthrowing. On the arms of the city to this day appear the castle and two severed hands.

A suggestion has been made, and naturally Motley, who rather lays himself out for ponderous joking at everything mediaeval and feudal, favors it, that the name Antwerp is nothing more than "an t' werf" (in Flemish, "on the wharf"). It is rather curious that so skilful a compiler of facts should overlook the point that this really fantastic etymology does not explain the origin of the older name of Andhunerbo, which can only have one meaning. Besides, Antwerp was not a place of trade until a much later period. It was a castle guarding an approach to the country by a river, and proof of this is furnished by the fact that the Emperor Otho, on creating the fief, made it a Marquisate - that is to say, a frontier countdom. Among the holders of this title the most famous was Godfrey of Bouillon, but if a herald were to recite the full titles and dignities of the Head of the House of Hapsburg there would appear among them that of Marquis of Antwerp.

The commercial importance of Antwerp dated from the beginning of the decline of Bruges through the silting up of the Zwyn. It must be remembered that the approach of this calamity was visible half a century before it became complete, and the desertion of Bruges by traders was gradual. The patronage of the Burgundian Court also staved off the blow till the last possible moment. But none the less the commercial importance of Antwerp was well established in the earlier half of the fifteenth century. In the year 1450 the Antwerp records show that the Place de Meir was paved with stone for the first time. This was the year also when the famous Cathedral, which was commenced a hundred years before, was brought practically to completion. In 1490 the foreign merchant Guilds or Nations transferred their headquarters from Bruges to Antwerp which at once became the principal center of trade for the whole of the Netherlands. Its position was far superior in every way to that of Bruges. Seated on a tidal river, navigable by the largest ships, it was most advantageously placed for communication by various waterways with the central and eastern provinces of Belgium.

The period of Antwerp's greatest splendor was between the years 1550 and 1560, when it contained the houses of not fewer than a thousand foreign merchants. These houses were divided among six nations, viz., the Spaniards, the Danes and the Hansa together, the Italians, the English, the Portuguese, and the Germans. In 1560 more business was done in one month at Antwerp than in two years at Venice, although that city was still one of the chief places of trade in the world. Every day nearly 500 vessels entered and left the great port on the Scheldt, and two thousand wagons entered the city every week from France or Germany. Between 1550 and 1577 the total of the population fluctuated between one hundred fifty and two hundred fifty thousand persons. During this period of her greatest splendor Antwerp acquired her most famous buildinsrs after her churches. The Hotel de Ville, the Bourse (burnt down in 1858 and rebuilt), the Vieille Boucherie, the Musee Plantin all date from this epoch.

Bruges fell by the work of nature; Antwerp declined by the act of man. Antwerp has no reason to love the names of Spain and Alva. In 1567 Alva placed a Spanish garrison in Antwerp, and his first task was to build a citadel with the money of its citizens. Walls and fortified gates had always been the chief demand of the cities ; the construction of a castle or citadel in the interior of the city had always been the first step in subjecting it to unrestrained autocratic power. Antwerp had escaped the troubles of the feudal period. Her day of trouble had arrived. The bastions of Alva's citadel were so solid that it took the French siege artillery three weeks to destroy part of them in 1832.

Beyond providing the means of its downfall, Antwerp did not suffer at the hands of Alva. The great blow was dealt by the mutinous Spanish garrison, which, having long arrears of pay to receive, decided to repay itself by sacking the city over which it was supposed to keep guard. The Spanish Fury, as it was called, raged through three days of the month of November, 1576. More than six thousand men, women, and children were butchered, eight hundred houses were destroyed by fire, and damage was done to the extent of ten millions of our present money. That was the direct loss ; the indirect was greater, for a considerable number of the citizens at once took refuge in England. The next blow that fell on Antwerp was the treacherous attempt of Anjou to seize the city in 1583, but the French Fury, as it was called, unlike the Spanish, ended in the triumph of the citizens.

It was Parma, the greatest of the Spanish leaders, who dealt Antwerp its coup de grace. In 1584 he began its siege in a deliberate fashion by cutting off its communications. The city was held by a strong garrison under Marnix de Ste Aldegonde, but so close was the investment that by the summer of 1585" the besieged were on the verge of starvation and Marnix was obliged to capitulate. The victory was stained by no act of cruelty, but in the eighteen months covered by the siege, the population of Antwerp fell from 85,000 to 55,000 persons. This decline was, of course, largely due to the voluntary emigration of those who elected to follow the new religion.

Here again, as is so often the case in human affairs, the indirect consequences were more serious than the direct loss. Antwerp passed finally under the rule of Spain, and its legitimate successors. That signified its complete severance from the revolted northern provinces, which had acquired the command of the sea. To the great joy of its commercial rivals in Amsterdam and Rotterdam, the blockade of the Scheldt was established, and the prosperity of Antwerp vanished like a dream. This blockade lasted during the better part of three centuries. From an act of war it passed into an international condition embodied in a succession of treaties. One of the most prized possessions of the Dutch was the right to close and keep closed the navigation of the Scheldt. The effect of this exclusion from the sea on the prosperity of Antwerp is recorded in statistics that cannot be challenged or refuted. The city which contained after Parma's conquest a population of 55,000, had no more than 45,000 inhabitants in 1780, and of these one-third received charitable relief. The cause is as clearly revealed as the result. The port, which in 1555 had seen 2,500 ships at anchor in its roadstead, and 500 ships sail or arrive in a single day, received in the year 1761 only four vessels.

Antwerp enjoyed a glimpse of its early prosperity during the French occupation from 1794 to 1814. The closure of the Scheldt was declared to be "a survival of feudal tyranny and a violation of the rights of man." When France made a treaty with Holland as the Batavian Republic in 1795, she exacted the freedom of the Scheldt, and for the first and only time the Dutch waived their right. Despite the English command of the seas, as many as 3,000 ships came up to Antwerp in 1813. After the withdrawal of the French, Belgium was joined to Holland as the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and it was, of course, impossible for the Dutch to enforce old treaty right against their fellowsubjects. But after the Belgian revolution, this claim to close a neighbor's river was revived, and once more the European Powers ratified a preposterous pretension. On this occasion, however, it was given a new form. The Dutch were no longer to have the right to close the river by firing upon and sinking any ship that entered it; but they were authorized to exact what was practically speaking a prohibitive toll - prohibitive in the sense that it only admitted of a moderate traffic, and forbade all expectation of its free expansion.

The situation thus created between Belgium and Holland was really intolerable, and no friend of the two States could find a word to say in favor of its continuance. But old privileges and treaty rights are not easily abandoned, and in this particular the Hague Government resembled every other. The toll of 73 cents per ton was rigorously levied, and the Belgian Government, which had voluntarily taken the burden on its own shoulders, found the charge irksome and irritating. Among other consequences it rendered it loth to stimulate the trade of Antwerp.

A way out of the difficulty was discovered through the patient and persistent efforts of the late Baron Lambermont, of the Belgian Foreign Department. The question of river navigation in Europe had been thoroughly discussed at the Congress of Vienna, where the clearest and soundest principles for its complete freedom from all hindrances had been laid down. The arrangements under the Twenty-four Articles for the Scheldt were really an infringement of those principies, and it is to the credit of Lord Palmerston that he strove hard to mould them in a more liberal spirit. His example was an encouragement to the Belgian statesman, who set himself to the task of emancipating his countrymen from an unjust and offensive limitation of their own freedom and independence.

The case of the Scheldt, although the most arbitrary, did not fortunately stand alone. There were others less involved with national prejudice which called for settlement, and the solution of which could not but hasten that of the major and more difficult problem. The case of the Sound and the Two Belts was the first to present itself. Denmark had there the same right of tolls as Holland possessed on the Scheldt. A conference met at Copenhagen in 1856 to put an end to the exaction. At Baron Lambermont's instigation, Belgium negotiated a special convention with Denmark, by which Denmark acquitted Belgium from paying any quota to the sum raised to free the Danish straits in return for Belgium's engagement, that in the event of the capitalization of the tolls on the Scheldt she would pay whatever there might fall on Denmark. Thus two principles were very adroitly introduced. First, that the tolls of the Scheldt were just as susceptible of being bought up as those of the Sound, and secondly, that each navigating State was liable for its quota.

A second case of a similar kind arose in 1860, when the State tolls levied by the Hanoverian Government of the Elbe were capitalized at the suggestion of the British Government. Baron Lambermont availed himself of this fresh opportunity by opening negotiations with the Hanoverian Government, and in 1861 a Belgic-Hanoverian convention was signed on the same lines as that with Denmark.

Armed with these two precedents, the Belgian Government then asked the Dutch Government the plain question whether it would admit or not the possibility of capitalizing the Scheldt tolls. For the first time since the privilege had been asserted to the detriment of the people of Belgium, the Dutch made a considerate reply by giving a cordial assent to the new principle. There remained only the practical point of deciding the quotas to be contributed by the respective navigating Powers. In this part of the matter, England, whose tonnage on the Scheldt was the largest, became the most important factor in the problem.

The quota could not be fixed by the simple rule of a comparison of the tonnage under each flag, for by such an arrangement Belgium, the chief beneficiary, would have got off for a trifling contribution. The Belgian diplomatist avoided this pitfall. He recommended his Government to take upon itself the responsibility of providing one-third of the total capital, or six times the amount that it would have had to pay by a mere comparison of tonnage. These points settled, the British Government was approached, for its co-operation as the largest contributor of all was essential to success. Our policy had always been favorable to the removal of trade impediments, and no difficulty was experienced in London. There remained only to conclude a formal treaty with Holland prior to the summoning of a general conference for the ratification of these separate arrangements and their embodiment in a single act. Twenty-one Powers took part in the conference at Brussels in July, 1863, which finally freed the Scheldt. Belgium contributed altogether $2,665,600, but if the toll had continued to be levied, it has been computed that she would have $114,904,663.40. In modestly describing the significance of his own work, Baron Lambermont wrote : "In leanding its concurrence to the purchase of the Scheldt tolls the conference will undoubtedly render a service to trade generally. It will complete to the benefit of all nations the work commenced in the Sound and continued in the Elbe. Nor is this all. The foreign States will, by aiding Belgium in an enterprise which is known to be its legitimate desire and ambition, by giving this country and its venerated head a striking mark of sympathy, and by coming forward to sanction by their co-operation the henceforth perfect freedom of the Scheldt, bring a new consecration to the establishment of our nationality, and they will attach to it in some manner the imprint of universal solidarity.

The freeing of the Scheldt removed the fetters that had hindered the development of Antwerp since the days of its prime in the middle of the sixteenth century. Since that event, the city has burst its barriers, stretching out in every direction, and trebling its population. It has become not merely the chief outlet of Belgium, but one of the principal seaports of Europe.

Source: Boulger, Demetrius C. Belgium. Detroit: Published for the Bay View Reading Club, 1913. Print.

• Prev
• Next