Medieval lockdown saga that reads like prime Hilary Mantel
★★★★★
In the 1500s, the only place for a bright young Englishman was Antwerp. Situated a hop, skip and a jump over the North Sea, Antwerp was almost as big as Paris, more important than London, and had long been giving Venice a run for its money. By law, all wool produced in Britain had to be exported first to this medieval city at the mouth of the River Scheldt, before being sent on to North Africa and the Middle East. In return, Antwerp supplied England with wine from the Rhine, oats, furs, turbot, grapes and live falcons. ‘The town,’ explains Michael Pye in this wondrous book, ‘functioned like a department store.’
In effect, Antwerp was an outpost of London but with the added benefit, as far as young Englishmen were concerned, of being socially free and easy. Here was a city where middle-class girls could go out unchaperoned, and even end the evening with a goodnight kiss. You could eat what you wanted during Lent and there was plenty of money to be made on various side-hustles, from dealing in diamonds to printing textbooks or rummaging for curiosities such as elk’s hooves and musk balls.
No one worried much about which place of worship you attended, or didn’t – Lutheran, Calvinist, Catholic or the synagogue were all fine. If you were young, ambitious and wore your conscience lightly, Antwerp was a remarkably congenial base.
Of course, there were downsides to all this coming and going. With so many bodies crammed into wooden medieval buildings, it didn’t take long before the plague arrived. What’s fascinating here is the way that the authorities attempted to protect the citizens. Laws were brought in that forbade more than ten people meeting together. If you had been in contact with someone who had died, you were obliged to stay home alone, although you could ask a neighbour to leave groceries outside your door.
The schools were closed and the hospitals overflowing. Later, when things started to ease, you were encouraged to carry a certificate to show that you did not pose a threat to anyone.
The only reason that the decimated population of Antwerp recovered was thanks to immigration. The city was a place of refuge for Jews and Protestants who were both on the run from the Spanish Inquisition. From Antwerp, the Jews could move on to cities in the East such as Constantinople and Salonika, where a warm welcome was assured. Protestants, meanwhile, could bask in the knowledge that Antwerp was the home of the first English-language
Bible, recently translated in the city by William Tyndale and now due to be smuggled into Britain.
It couldn’t last. By the last quarter of the
16th Century, Antwerp found itself caught up in exactly those kinds of historical realignments that it had always been so careful to avoid.
The Spanish invaded and, at a stroke, the city of tolerance and free thinking became a hotspot of religious fundamentalism. The Jewish population hastened their departures to the East, while the Protestants moved north. Antwerp was no longer the uniquely unregulated hub it had once been – Amsterdam, a little further up the coast, was busy rebranding itself as the capital of the world.
Pye can’t help sounding sad and, indeed, he communicates this sense of paradise lost profoundly. The result is a book of imaginative historical reconstruction that reads as brilliantly as a novel by Hilary Mantel.