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Thomas More's "Utopia" opens in Antwerp's Grote Markt, "where a man might hope to hear stories of the world newly opening up to Europe".
A review of "Europe's Babylon: The Rise and Fall of Antwerp's Golden Age" by Michael Pye in the New York Review of Books (Volume LXIX, No. 3).
Antwerp's golden age was from 1500 to 1580. Before and during this period, it was a center of the wool trade with England, among others. It housed the major European foreign currency exchange (the Beurs).
Heresy was not as aggressively persecuted here as it was in much of Catholic Europe, and Judaism could for the most part be practiced openly (though the article notes a significant persecution of Jewish merchant caught up in international politics).
Tyndale translated the New Testament into English in Antwerp in 1526. He resided in the city's English merchant's headquarters to complete his translation of the Hebrew Bible.
A Calvinist uprising in 1566 prompted Spanish reaction, just one of many troubles that undermined Antwerp's unique position and a mercantile and cultural capital (its "secular advantage"). In 1585, after years of conflict, the Spanish decisively gained control of the city and the protestants fled to Amsterdam, inaugurating its golden era ("feeding off the corpse of Antwerp").