R. Nisbet Bain - The Cambridge Modern History

At the beginning of the sixteenth century Antwerp afforded unexampled opportunities to enterprising men of any nationality who had wealth at their command and were anxious to engage in commerce. The Portuguese had opened direct trading intercourse with the East; but they were too busily engaged in securing their footing in the Indies, and in prosecuting the distant trades, to have energy to spare for increasing their shipping in northern waters. They left to other merchants the business of distributing to European consumers the spices and other valuable products which were imported to Lisbon; and Antwerp, from her position and still more from her policy, became the chief centre of the capitalists who were ready to take a part in this profitable commerce.

The organisations for intermunicipal commerce in the Middle Ages hampered the enterprising capitalist, as they tended to confine him to dealings in one particular class of goods and to limit the amount of his transactions. The modern capitalist desires to be free to engage in any promising venture, and to push his business as fast as he can; but to this the medieval merchants hardly aspired. To secure a footing at some particular port was a difficult and costly business; and’when they succeeded in this they organised the trade with care, so as to avoid flooding the market with their imports, and to ensure that all who joined in maintaining the factory and in contributing to the expenses of the establishment should have a share of the available trade. The old merchant organisations, with their particular privileges, their private factories, and “well-ordered trade,” were a mere encumbrance at a time when the main routes of the world’s commerce were being shifted; the real chance of rising to fortune lay with the men who were free to adapt themselves to these changing conditions; and Antwerp was a town which imposed little restriction on the employment of capital in any direction. The Merchant Adventurers had transferred their factory from Bruges to Antwerp in 1446; but they were almost the only traders who enjoyed special privileges in the city on the Scheldt. English commerce had given a great impetus to the growth of the town, which also became a staple for the products of Holland, and eventually secured much of the trade in fish, barley, and salt that had been previously carried on at Malines. The men of Antwerp were thus brought into direct antagonism with other Flemish cities, and were forced, almost unconsciously perhaps, to adopt an economic policy in consonance with the requirements of the coming age. The towns which followed the traditional scheme tried to make outside commerce directly subservient to their particular interests as producers or consumers; the men of Antwerp were merely concerned to increase the volume of trade and to take advantage of any benefit that happened to accrue; they bought out the rights of the landowners who took tolls on the Scheldt and made their city a centre of free intercourse, where men of all nations were welcome to engage in trade on equal terms. During the Middle Ages the only opportunities for such unrestricted intercourse had occurred at fairs; Antwerp owed its first importance to one of these gatherings, and so far as its economic institutions were concerned it was not so much a city as a permanent fair. Hence it was most natural that the German capitalists, who saw that traffic was being diverted to new centres, should emigrate to a town which offered the fewest restrictions to their operations as merchants or financiers. Bruges was completely distanced at the close of the fifteenth century; it continued for a time to be the privileged resort of Spanish merchants; but it lay off the line of Portuguese trading connexions. The German merchants, who had been the distributors of the spices imported by the Venetians, now became the principal intermediaries in connexion with the cargoes brought from the East to Lisbon, which was frequented by the factors of the principal German houses, though Antwerp was the chief centre of their commercial operations.

It followed, almost as a necessary consequence of the commercial activity of Antwerp, that this city soon became a great monetary centre; in this respect again it had the character of a permanent fair. The fairs of the Middle Ages had been the great occasions for financial transactions of every kind; rates for making remittances could be easily quoted, and loans could be negotiated to run to the date of the next fair; there was a sort of clearing-house at each fair for settling the transactions that took place during its continuance. One district after another had been the principal scene of these operations; the fairs of Champagne had given place to those of Geneva; Geneva had been superseded by Lyons, which Charles VIII found a convenient place for making payments to his Swiss mercenaries. In the sixteenth century Antwerp took the lead; it was a money-market where there was less organisation and more freedom for negotiating loans than at Lyons; business was carried on with little variation all the year round and was not restricted by the definite dates fixed by the occurrence of the fair; nor was there any attempt to fix a normal rate of exchange, as had been the practice at Lyons. The merchant had far better opportunities here than elsewhere of borrowing capital at the moment when he required it, and for the precise term desired by him; so that mercantile life at Antwerp had many features in common with the commercial centres of the modern era. The discovery of the New World, with its enormous treasure of precious metals, introduced an extraordinary confusion into economic relations in Europe. There are many unsolved problems as to the course of the distribution of the American silver and the effects produced by it in different countries; but at all events we can see that the money-market at Antwerp was so arranged as to be capable of taking a very effective part in the transference of the precious metals from country to country, and in facilitating the application of capital to new enterprises.

These monetary and commercial conditions were favourable to rapid growth; and Antwerp rose quickly from comparative unimportance to be the leading city of Europe. She was enriched by her connexions with Lisbon and the spice-trade of the Portuguese; she did not, however, remain a mere trading city but became a manufacturing town as well. There was a considerable migration of German industry in the wake of German capital: both the linen and the fustian manufacture were attracted to a region from which there was such easy access to distant markets. The prosperity of the town increased by leaps and bounds, until in 1576 the Spanish Fury dealt it a blow from which it never recovered.

Though her greatness was short-lived, Antwerp occupies a very important place in the transition from medieval to modern commerce; for her merchants are said to have developed the modern system of commission-business. In the Middle Ages every possible obstacle had been put in the way of such transactions. Each merchant travelled personally with his own goods, or consigned them to a factor who acted exclusively as the representative of a single employer. Each -city was cautious about admitting outsiders to any trading privileges within its walls; and no merchant, who was free to carry on business himself, was allowed to “colour” the goods of an unfree trader, or to act as his broker. At Antwerp no such jealousy of outsiders existed: any one might settle and commence trade, and there was no objection to his doing business for the men of any city, or on any terms that suited him. This implied an immense reduction in the cost of maintaining agencies and in the incidental expenses of trade; and when once the new system got a fair trial, there could be no doubt that it had come to stay.