Journal of Urban History

http://juh.sagepub.com

Trading Places: The Public and Private Spaces of Merchants in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp
Donald J. Harreld
Journal of Urban History 2003; 29; 657
DOI: 10.1177/0096144203253468

The online version of this article can be found at:

http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/29/6/657

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

The Urban History Association

Additional services and information for Journal of Urban History can be found at:

Email Alerts: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

Subscriptions: http://juh.sagepub.com/subscriptions

Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by Carmen Florea on October 6, 2009

10.1177/0096144203253468
JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / September 2003
Harreld / TRADING PLACES
ARTICLE

TRADING PLACES
The Public and Private Spaces of Merchants
in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp

DONALD J. HARRELD
Brigham Young University

Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century merchants had a variety of commercial places at their disposal, including
private spaces such as houses and warehouses, as well as public spaces like market squares. As Antwerp
grew in prominence as a world entrept, merchants expressed a need for places in the city where they could
congregate to conduct business more peculiar to merchant capitalism. The development of the Bourse, or ex-
change, in the sixteenth century shows how merchants attempted to regulate public places for their own
needs. Antwerp was a city where the activities of merchants were closely associated with prosperity, even
when the demands of the merchants were at odds with the interests of the wider population.

Keywords: Antwerp; Bourse; commerce; place; merchants

Merchants need space. The activity of buying and selling products requires
that products be stored and displayed and ultimately carted away. Throughout
history, one can find examples of common spaces set aside for the purpose of
exchange. It is equally true that merchants required more private spaces for
various aspects of commerce; warehousing, production, deal making, and
eventually bookkeeping are just a few that come immediately to mind. One of
the problems facing the urban historian in studying these trading places is
making sense of the changes in the uses of space for commercial purposes that
came about as new commercial techniques spread during the sixteenth cen-
tury. No longer typically medieval, and not yet fully modern, fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century businessmen employed a variety of places for trade, many of
which were negotiated with uncertainty in urban society.
This article examines the development of commercial places and looks at
where they fit in the public and private commercial life of Antwerp. It focuses
on the ways merchants used particular places. The discussion presented here
moves away from the strictly legal definitions of public and private, the focus
of many of the studies on this theme.1 As far as legal ownership goes, many of
the trading places discussed in this article were public places. As a result of this

AUTHORS NOTE: This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the 2002 annual meeting of the
American Historical Association in San Francisco.
JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY, Vol. 29 No. 6, September 2003 657-669
DOI: 10.1177/0096144203253468
2003 Sage Publications
657

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by Carmen Florea on October 6, 2009

658 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / September 2003

focus, one question that needs to be asked is, Did a particular space, or more
precisely the actions taking place in the space, have a public or a private pur-
pose? In some respects, this way of considering space stems from discussions
of the private and public spheres in society. It is not correct to suggest that
because commerce in the sixteenth century was more or less a private activity,
the places where commerce was transacted were private. Indeed, an examina-
tion into the use of space begins to bring into focus the ways in which public
places could take on a more private character.
A secondary purpose of this article is to examine the attitude of the citys
inhabitants toward the merchants and their willingness to allow the merchants
to set the agenda for the regulation of public places for the private needs of
commerce. The Antwerp elite wanted to portray the feeling of a community
of commerce2and most Antwerpeners bought into this rhetoric. Antwerp
society, however, was not homogeneous. While trade may have been the basis
of Antwerps success, by no means were all Antwerpeners merchants; nor did
its citizenry share in the tremendous wealth generated by trade.3 The city was
becoming more and more polarized between the very rich and the poor.4 Nev-
ertheless, most Antwerpeners accepted the idea that what was good for the
merchants was good for the welfare of everyone in the city. City regulations
regarding building and the free flow of traffic reflect the importance of the mer-
chants needs (in particular the foreign merchants and long-distance trade)
over the needs of artisans, the traditional backbone of the late medieval city.
In Antwerp, marketplaces and market squares were common public spaces,
accessible to all and used by merchants and the citys inhabitants for com-
merce as well as other activities. By the sixteenth century, these places proved
to be unsatisfactory, or at least inefficient, for merchants as they plied their
trade. Merchants continued to operate in a variety of places that had formed
part of their milieu for generations, but new places were also established that
had specific purposes and allowed merchants to congregate together more eas-
ily for the express purpose of exchange. The rapid pace of change gave rise to
tensions over the use of public spaces and perhaps even some confusion over
what constituted a public place and whether these public places were indeed
part of what would eventually come to be known as the public sphere.
Just as it had been for centuries, the line between public and private was still
quite blurred in the sixteenth century. And any definition of public and private
needs to take that into account. As Jrgen Habermas in his examinations into
the public and private has pointed out, We call events and occasions public
when they are open to all, in contrast to closed or exclusive affairs.5 Habermas
goes on to say that simply because a space was public did not mean that that
space had to be open to public traffic. Indeed, quite private activities could be
going on in what we would identify as public places. A memoire written in
the early nineteenth century argued that, dating at least to the early-fifteenth-
century privilege of Duke Jean of Brabant, all space within Antwerps walls
belonged to the city.6 While the memoire was arguing a legal point concerning

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by Carmen Florea on October 6, 2009

 Harreld / TRADING PLACES 659

nineteenth-century property rights, it still suggests that legal ownership had lit-
tle to do with whether people viewed a particular place as public or private.
Richard Mackenney has written that, at least in Venice, urban physical
space was being almost continuously redefined. Indeed, he said that while
physically linked, there were clear distinctions between the political or pub-
lic spaces and the commercial or private spaces in early modern Venice.7
Could the rise of a merchant culture have had a deep impact on the ways in
which Europeans viewed the public and private use of space? The geographer
Denis Cosgrove, writing on the idea of landscape as a cultural concept, sees a
clear relationship between capitalism and perceptions of space: the emer-
gence of European capitalism involved radical changes in the social organiza-
tion of space at different scales.8 Cosgrove is most concerned with changes in
the significance of land for the peasant and the landowner and much less con-
cerned with urban land use patterns. It would seem, however, that based on the
evidence of Antwerp, the same kind of change was at work in the urban arena.
Nevertheless, the kinds of places used by merchants in Antwerp showed a
great deal of continuity during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The mer-
chant house was the location for much commercial activity in the city. Proba-
bly the most private of the various places used by merchants, these were often
the places where merchants showed their goods to prospective buyers and the
places where bargains were made. Most merchant houses had several storage
rooms and a cellar. The merchant family or firm conducted business and lived
on an upper floor. Some merchant houses also included separate pack houses
nearby. For example, the merchant Bartholomeus Bertels had a house named
den Beerendans on the Ijzerenbrug, which included four pack houses on the
new street between the Ijzerenbrug and the Maalderijstraat.9 Before inherit-
ing the Huis van Aken from his father-in-law in 1534, the important Antwerp
merchant Erasmus Schetz purchased, along with his partner, a property con-
sisting of two houses and an outbuilding.10 The houses of merchants were at
once public showrooms, warehouses, and pack houses.
The Antwerp magistracy placed few restrictions on the foreign merchants
operating within its jurisdiction. Merchants were free to buy and sell real estate
in the city both for speculative reasons and to use as lodging and for offices.
Beyond this, however, the city magistrates also routinely granted houses to for-
eign merchants. The organization of foreign merchants private places in Ant-
werp tended to follow two distinct models depending on the origin of the
merchants. The enclave model, exemplified by the Hanse community and
including the English merchants, was based on the self-segregation of these
merchant communities in Antwerp. The open model followed more closely
the forms followed by the Italian merchants, who tended to live and do busi-
ness freely in the larger community, eschewing the strict ghettoization of the
northern merchants.
Most merchants newly arrived in the city from northern German Hanse
towns lodged and conducted their business in the official house of their

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by Carmen Florea on October 6, 2009

660 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / September 2003

nation. In 1468, Antwerps magistrates granted a house on the Korenmarkt to

the Hansards, who had been frequenting the citys fairs and markets.11 The
presence of Hansards in Antwerp helped to attract other foreign merchants to
the city, particularly the English. The Hanse clung to the tradition of housing
its merchants in one common establishment throughout the sixteenth century
and built a massive new house in the 1560s. This new Hanse house was large
enough to include substantial warehouse space and to provide lodging for
three hundred merchants at a time.
The English merchants came to Antwerp in force in the late fifteenth cen-
tury. Because of the ban on the import of English cloth by the market towns of
Flanders in the fifteenth century, the English merchants needed to look else-
where for markets. In Antwerp, where the cloth industry never was able to
compete with the other cloth-producing towns of the Low Countries, they
found a ready market for their cloths at the fairs. By 1474, the English had
received permission from the magistrates to establish a house for their mer-
chants near the area where some merchants had organized an informal
exchange. The rationale for an English house, in what was known as the
English Concession of Antwerp, was that the large number of English mer-
chants coming into the town would need a neighborhood of their own in a
strange city where they could maintain offices, warehousing, and lodgings and
sell their goods.12 Some contracts refer to the area in which they lived and con-
ducted their business as the vico anglorum, or English Quarter.13 The English
in particular tended to follow this pattern of enclave communities in the seven-
teenth century as well. Following the troubles in Antwerp, the English Mer-
chant Adventurers moved to Hamburg, where they eventually acquired a
substantial establishment and negotiated sweeping trading privileges.14
Southern Europeans also contributed to Antwerps economic success. Ant-
werp often officially recognized Italian merchants from the same city as privi-
leged groups (i.e., the Genoese, the Luccese, etc.). The largest of the many
Italian merchant groups in Antwerp was the Genoese, and they were also the
earliest group to establish offices in the city. In Antwerp, the Genoese nation
had a house near the old Bourse, but individual merchants lived in scattered
areas near the commercial center of the city.
When the Portuguese brought the first shipment of Asian spice to Antwerp
in the opening years of the sixteenth century,15 they laid what soon became part
of the foundation of Antwerps economic success. In 1511, recognizing the
spice trade as essential to the towns continued economic growth the city
offered the Portuguese community a house on the Kipdorp.16 Newly arrived
Portuguese traders routinely came to this house and found help establishing
themselves in the city.17 This house was listed by Guicciardini almost a century
later as one of the most important places in Antwerp.18 But like the Italians,
Portuguese merchants also lived and conducted business in the wider
community.

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by Carmen Florea on October 6, 2009

 Harreld / TRADING PLACES 661

Another important foreign merchant group in Antwerp was the South Ger-
mans.19 While the South Germans had no official house in common due to
their lack of privileged status in the Antwerp, other merchants and even city
officials treated them as a single entity. Rather than following the northern
model like the Hanse, South German merchants, like the Italian and Iberian
merchants, lived and set up offices in a variety of locations. On the other hand,
those merchants associated with the great merchants firms of Fugger,
Hochstetter, Welser, and so on often occupied offices in the houses belonging
to these firms.20
The Fugger house was one of the points around which many German mer-
chants located. The earliest available records indicate that German merchants
also initially located near the major markets for the products in which they
were dealing. For instance, they located on the old Grain Market (Oude
Korenmarkt) where the Hanse house had been established in the fifteenth cen-
tury, and in the new Grain Market (Brabantse Korenmarkt). The Vrijdagmarkt
(just north of the Fugger house) formed a focal point due to its proximity to the
Ijzerenwaag (the public scale for iron and copper sold in the city), as did the
new Bourse after it was established in 1532 near the Meir.
Merchants not associated with one of the officially recognized trading
nations and who were in Antwerp for only a brief period had to stay at inns.
While private in a legal sense, the inn was really a semipublic place providing
the transient community with meals, lodging, and often other services. Inn-
keepers routinely catered to the merchants of a particular nationality, often
introducing the foreign merchant to the resources of the city.21 Some foreign
innkeepers even purchased citizenship and acquired inns in Antwerp, thereby
solidifying the merchants ties with their city of origin.22 While in Antwerp,
foreign merchants did not use inns and taverns only for board and lodging; they
also negotiated deals and had contracts drawn up there.23
Beyond this aspect of the inn as a place for lodging and for making deals,
innkeepers and taverners were also involved in facilitating the transactions of
their patrons. It is unclear whether innkeepers were brokers in Antwerp, or
whether they had brokers working for them, but we do know that this was the
case in other cities of the Low Countries such as Bruges. The privileges of Ant-
werps Brokers Guild were based on the earlier privileges granted to the Bro-
kers Guild of Bruges in 1303 by the count of Flanders.24 The innkeepers of
Bruges clearly acted as intermediaries for the merchants staying at their inns,
and there is evidence that Bruges innkeepers were members of the Brokers
Guild in that city.25 Whether or not the innkeeper was a broker in Antwerp, as
way stations for trade, the success of an inn depended in large part on its ability
to cater to the needs of a merchant clientele.
Antwerps medieval fairs, however, provided the structure merchants
needed as they conducted their business. Antwerps fairs had regulations, just
as fairs in other parts of Europe had (i.e., the Champagne Fairs), defining peri-
ods when various activities could take place, such as viewing merchandise,

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by Carmen Florea on October 6, 2009

662 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / September 2003

settling payments, and so on. During their earliest years, the local market
squares likely provided sufficient space for merchants to buy and sell their
wares. As the fairs began to attract merchants from farther afield, the panden,
or various specialty markets operating within the structure of the cycle of fairs,
became the locations where merchants and artisans traded all sorts of goods on
both a local and an international scale. For example, the Onze-Lieve-
Vrouwpand (Our Ladys Market) situated on Antwerps Groenplein, dating
from at least 1460, was the market where painters, religious sculptors, and
manuscript dealers offered their goods for sale.26 These panden became impor-
tant gathering places for merchants looking to make deals and purchase mer-
chandise. The pand usually included a courtyard with covered galleries
surrounding an open space. Merchants and artisans offering their goods for
sale at the pand occupied stalls in which they displayed their wares.
Probably the most important pand of the period was the Engelse Pand (Eng-
lish Market), but it took some time to be organized. Before the establishment of
the Engelse Pand, English merchants and those who came to Antwerp to pur-
chase English wool and cloth met to conduct business out in the open along the
Wolstraat and on the Hofstraat. The Engelse Pand was first located on the
Zirkstraat around 1502.27 (By the mid-sixteenth century, the English moved to
the much larger Hof van Lier, with a pack house around the corner on the
Venusstraat.) Located as it was in the courtyard of the English merchants
house in Antwerp, this pand was the site where English merchants sold their
woolen cloth.28 The establishment of the Engelse Pand transformed what had
once been a fairly public institution (merchants with stalls) for buying and sell-
ing goods during the fair into a private, highly regulated marketplace under the
direction of a small group of merchants.
The origin of the exchange is the best example of how negotiated public
space became an essential commercial institution. It is important to remember
that while a public place, the exchange, whatever its name, did not always refer
to a building in its earliest form; the functions of exchange occurred in very
public places. The practice of merchants meeting in a particular location
within a city did not begin in Antwerp, and it was certainly not new in the six-
teenth century. In Bruges (dating from about 1409), merchants met in the
Beurze, a public square named after the house of the family van de Beurze.
This square was near the offices of various Italian merchant groups and was
where they met to transact their business.29 The mid-sixteenth-century descrip-
tion of Lisbon by Damio de Gois indicates that merchants from all over
Europe routinely came together along the Rua Nova dos Mercadores.30 In
Seville, merchants met on the cathedral steps.31 Regardless of the name of the
place, or where the place was located, each trading town eventually developed
its own version of an exchange. Like other trading places all over Europe, the
Antwerp exchange was a place carved out of the greater public space of the
community to meet the particular needs of just one group, the merchants, who
eventually came to view it as their own.

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by Carmen Florea on October 6, 2009

 Harreld / TRADING PLACES 663

Already by about 1353 there is mention of a Bourse in Antwerp, but at this

early date it was likely a place where the moneychangers gathered rather than a
place for merchants to come together for trade.32 Later in the fourteenth cen-
tury, an informal exchange had been established in Antwerp following the
model of the Bruges Bourse. This exchange in Antwerp was really just a regu-
lar gathering of merchants at various places, oftentimes centered on the
Bullinckstraat.33 With the large number of merchants coming to trade in Ant-
werp by the middle 1480s, an informal gathering place along the street had
become unsatisfactory, and the citys merchants searched for a solution to the
problem. They received permission to locate the first real exchange building
near the Wolstraat in 1485.34 This Bourse was later remodeled and enlarged in
1515 with the addition of stone pillars and a stone tower. Now the merchants
had a distinct place in which to conduct their affairs. This was still a technically
a public place, part of the public life of the merchants, but it afforded the mer-
chant community a place to withdraw from the hustle and bustle of market
squares and street corners.
Within only a decade or so, this first exchange building was already too
small to accommodate all the merchants dealing in the city, most of them for-
eign wholesalers. About 1526, the merchants of the city appealed to the magis-
trates for a larger place in which to meet.35 There is some evidence that the city
had a property acquired as early as 1396 and that this house and the land on
which it sat formed part of the site for the new Bourse.36 A city magistrate
owned much of the remaining property in the area, which the city purchased.
The city built the new Bourse in 1532 on these properties located just off the
new thoroughfare, the Meir, just outside the old medieval walls and traditional
commercial center of the city.
With the planned construction of the new Bourse the merchants got what
they wanted, but some groups (including several merchant concerns) did not
like the location of the new Bourse. A number of shopkeepers and various
trade guilds from the area of the old Bourse brought suit against the city, claim-
ing that the location of the new Bourse, so far from the commercial heart of the
city, would ruin their business.37 Prominent merchants joined them in the suit.
In his letter to the participants of the suit in 1532, the Emperor Charles V indi-
cated that he understood the reason for the new Bourse as a place for merchants
to conduct business amongst themselves and that this is what the magistrates
were providing.38 The claimants had a point. The old Bourse had been close to
the Grote Markt and the wharves. It was ringed by the various panden of the
city and the houses of the great merchant firms. The plaintiffs found no satis-
faction and the city proceeded with the construction of the new Bourse.
The city built the new Bourse on a similar plan to the old one, only on a
much grander scale. It provided the merchants with an open-air courtyard as a
meeting place complete with covered galleries, above which were located
more private meeting rooms and commercial stalls. While the location of the
new Bourse just off a broad street with access to one of the many city gates

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by Carmen Florea on October 6, 2009

664 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / September 2003

facilitated the movement of the large volume of commercial traffic coming and
going in the city,39 its location marked a new phase in the growth of the city and
aligned the development of the town much more closely with the commercial
interests of the city. People of means mostly inhabited the traditional core of
the city; most merchants lived in this section of the city as well. Poorer people
were forced to live outside the old medieval walls of the city. The location of
the new Bourse established a symbolic barrier separating the commercial cen-
ter of the city, where merchants and the well to do took care of their affairs,
from the rest of the city, where the less well-off mass of the population lived
and worked.
From the first, merchants sought to restrict access to the new Bourse and to
regulate the activities within its walls. By 1533, less than a year after its estab-
lishment, the merchants already had succeeded in prohibiting old clothing
venders and some other types of peddlers from setting up displays as well as
prohibiting the kinds of amusements people might engage in while visiting the
Bourse.40 The merchants claimed that they could not conduct their affairs with
such distractions and that the new Bourse was becoming much too crowded
when so many people had access to the place. The new regulations did not stop
peddlers from setting up stalls near the entrances to the Bourse, however, and
by 1557 a new ordinance forced these peddlers (mostly produce and meat sell-
ers) to move to areas farther from the entrance of the Bourse.
While the citys concessions, including both the places granted to mer-
chants and the regulations restricting access to the Bourse, made fairly clear
the favorable attitude toward merchants, magistrates were quick to cater to a
variety of other merchant concerns. A regulation of 1532 restricted how far
shop canopies might project out into the street because merchants and trans-
porters with wagons and horses were having difficulty negotiating the streets
of the city.41 Such regulations might have benefited the long-distance mer-
chant, but they hindered the artisans, peddlers, and shopkeepers, who saw their
use of the public space being restricted.
Another indication of the desire of the city to meet the needs of its foreign
merchant community concerns the establishment of the Hessenhius. As the
city streets became more and more crowded, those merchants who shipped
their goods by land found it increasingly difficult to load their wagons bound
for distant lands and to unload the wagons coming into the city from abroad. A
cross-section of Antwerps merchant community, including a number of Ger-
mans and Italians, petitioned the city in 1562 for what was essentially a freight
terminal.42 One of the petitionerspoints was that a commercial city as prosper-
ous as Antwerp should have such a terminal, particularly since other cities like
Cologne, Augsburg, and Basel had one.
The importance of the commercial places in defining the very character of
Antwerp as a commercial capital is perhaps best presented in Jost Ammans
illustration Allegory of Trade, first printed in 1585.43 Allegory of Trade portrays
Antwerp as the focus of European commerce. At the top of the print is

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by Carmen Florea on October 6, 2009

 Harreld / TRADING PLACES 665

Figure 1: Jost Amman, Allegory of Trade, ca. 1585

SOURCE: From the collection of the James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota.

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by Carmen Florea on October 6, 2009

666 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / September 2003

Mercury, god of trade, the port of Antwerp forming the background. The lower
half of the illustration depicts merchants conducting their business in the vari-
ous places of commerce: the merchant poring over his account books, goods
being moved about the public places such as wharves and warehouses, deals
being made in private upper rooms, and the like. This illustration can be read
on a number of levels, from the purely descriptive reading of the infrastructure
of trade, and the need for trading places for the smooth conduct of commerce,
to the literary interpretation of the snippets of text describing the various
aspects of the illustration. The Allegory seems to set up a sense of competition
between competing forcescompetition between the public nature of com-
merce and the private nature of the deal.
Scholars have often characterized sixteenth-century Antwerp as a trans-
shipment center because it lacked any significant industry of its own. In many
respects, much like an inn, the success of the city depended on its ability to
cater to the needs of the merchants coming into the city. But to do this, the
entire city needed to be convinced that the fortune of the merchants was in its
best interest. From fairly early on, a sort of propaganda machine was at work,
proclaiming to the city population its dependence on merchants. In 1491, Japar
Laet wrote an astrological treatise predicting great success for Antwerp thanks
to the merchants coming to the city.44 As the economic success of the city
proved to be clearly the result of the merchants success, the city elites had to
counter quickly any doubt about the uprightness of the merchants in the city.
Chambers of Rhetoric, poets, and others joined the elite of the city in painting a
favorable picture of the merchants to the inhabitants of the city.45
Even on an international level, the identification of the city with its mer-
chants (and again, these were mostly foreigners) was part of the political rheto-
ric and foreign affairs of the land. Because of the Schmalkaldic War (1546-
1547), Charles V tried to have merchants from towns such as Frankfurt, Augsburg,
Ulm, and Memmingen kept out of the Antwerp trade, but the city complained to
his sister, Mary of Hungary, who was Regent of the Netherlands, that it would
be the citys undoing. Mary wrote to her brother that the war he was prosecut-
ing would do more harm to Antwerp (and by extension the taxes that could be
gained there) than all other wars combined.46 Merchants and magnates from all
over Europe understood the importance of commerce for Antwerp. In the
sixteenth-century work Antwerps Unity, the author extolled the citys hitherto
flourishing estate in traffic, merchandise, handicrafts, navigation, martial
feats, and all other good or virtuous policy and practice.47
As Antwerp grew in size and in economic might, the city became more and
more segregated. While all may have agreed, or at least have been convinced,
that merchants brought prosperity to the city, very few Antwerpeners shared in
the wealth. Antwerp was a city of extremes of wealth. The richest people in the
city (the urban elite, the native merchants, and the foreign merchants) bene-
fited most from the commercial success of the city. These people lived near
the commercial center of the city: the Grote Markt, the Cathedral, the

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by Carmen Florea on October 6, 2009

 Harreld / TRADING PLACES 667

Bourse, and so on. So the medieval core of the city was largely given over to
the merchants.48 The mass of the populationthe artisans, the poor, and for-
eigners of little meanswere left to live in the peripheral areas of the city. Ant-
werps merchants may not have deliberately forced the common folk out of the
city center, but the preponderance of merchants and the scarcity of space, with
a concomitant rise in rents, certainly did.49
Merchant manuals of the early modern period, while usually concentrating
on the minutia of commerce such as exchange rates and merchandise, often
gave some indication of the places foreign merchants might find in a commer-
cial center like Antwerp. The Englishman Lewis Roberts, in his seventeenth-
century manual The Merchants Map of Commerce, identified many of the
places in a market town that all merchants would recognize and consider nec-
essary for the smooth conduct of business;50 one might even add that these were
places where the merchants would feel at home in a strange city. What are
absent from Robertss list, however, are the merchant enclaves of the type
favored by Antwerps English and Hanseatic merchants. These kinds of places
were much less important in the seventeenth century. With the exception of the
Jews and English, few merchants still gathered in enclaves. But by the time
Roberts made his list, the model of the Antwerp exchange had by and large
spread to most the commercial cities of northern Europe. Indeed, foremost
among the locations for trade identified by Roberts was the place where mer-
chants assembled and met at certain hours to confer and treat together con-
cerning merchandizing, shipping, buying, or selling. It is little wonder that
Thomas Greshem chose the Antwerp Bourse as the model for Londons own
Exchange.51 And the Amsterdam Exchange was closely modeled on the
exchanges of both London and Antwerp.52 Public places like these operating
within the private sphere of commerce slowly replaced the open marketplaces
among the preferred commercial places for large-scale merchants in the seven-
teenth century.
The transformation and institutionalization of public spaces for more pri-
vate business pursuits may have been an indicator of a larger shift in society.
These developments may signal the beginnings of a distinction between public
and private in the life of the city in a general sense. Often overlapping, public
and private spaces formed the focus of Antwerps success as an international
marketplace. Because the understanding of a distinction between public and
private space in a community, like that between the public and private spheres,
was a long process spanning several centuries between the late Middle Ages
and the modern period, it is difficult to suggest any one cause for this shift. It
seems to me, however, that the developments in sixteenth-century Antwerp
further our understanding of this process.
Antwerp was a city that not only accepted but encouraged the creation of
distinct trading places, even if the creation of these places was at odds with the
needs of the common people. Public institutions such as the Antwerp Bourse
took on a private character when public traffic was restricted. The city was a

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by Carmen Florea on October 6, 2009

668 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / September 2003

community that held up the merchant as the backbone of its success. This sense
that Antwerp was, by its very nature, a community rooted in commerce facili-
tated shifts in urban land use and the development of public institutions to meet
the needs of commerce without the turmoil that might have occurred in other
communities. Antwerp was so accommodating to merchants that the city
moved more and more toward the formation of clearly defined trading places
despite the fact that few of the merchants were natives of the city.

1. See, for example, Kathryn Reyerson, Public and Private Space in Medieval Montpellier: The Bon
Amic Square, Journal of Urban History 24 (1997): 3-27.
2. The idea of Antwerp as a community of commerce is explored in An Kint, The Community of Com-
merce: Social Relations in Sixteenth-Century Antwerp, (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, New York, 1995).
3. Wages for the majority of Antwerps residence could not keep up with prices, so many Antwerpeners
lived in poverty during the sixteenth century. See E. Scholliers, Loonarbeid en Honger: De Levenstandaard
in de XVe en XVIe eeuw te Antwerpen (Antwerp, 1960), 177-81.
4. Guido Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation: Underground Protestantism in a Commercial
Metropolis, 1550-1577 (Baltimore, 1996), 8-12.
5. Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 1-2.
6. Stadsarchief Antwerpen (hereafter, SAA), Privilegiekamer 2208. Hessenhuis. Memoire (n.d.,
about 1810).
7. Richard Mackenney, Public and Private in Renaissance Venice, Renaissance Studies 12 (1998):
111-2.
8. Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison, 1998), 4, 64.
o
9. SAA, VersamelingStatsprotocollen, September 22, 1554, f . 105.
o
10. SAA, Schepenregister 184, f 453v.
11. Robert van der Weghe, Geschiedenis van de Antwerpse Straatnamen, (Antwerp, 1977), 208-9.
12. Oskar de Smedt, De Engelse Natie te Antwerpen in de 16e Eeuw (1496-1582) (Antwerp, 1954), 128-9.
13. Jacob Strieder, Aus Antwerpener Notariatsarchiven: Quellen zur Deutschen Wirtschaftsgeschichte
des 16. Jahrhunderts (Stutgartt, 1930), 162.
14. William E. Lingelbach, The Merchant Adventurers at Hamburg, American Historical Review 9
(1904): 269.
15. Herman van der Wee, The Low Countries in the Early Modern World, trans. Lizabeth Fackelman
(Aldershot, 1993), 94.
16. V. Vasquez de Prada, Lettres Marchandes dAnvers (Paris, 1961), 158. See also Jan Albert Goris,
tudes sur les colonies marchandes mridionales Anvers de 1488 1567 (Louvain, 1925), 38.
17. Goris, tudes sur les colonies marchandes mridionales, 48.
18. Ludovico Guicciardini, The Description of the Low Countries (London, 1593), reprinted by
Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Amsterdam, 1976), 32.
19. Some scholars have mistakenly identified South German merchants with Antwerps Hessennatie,
really the local guild associated with packing, loading, and unloading the great wagons of Hessen that plied
the overland routes between south German towns and Antwerp. The reason for the confusion is probably
because the word natie can mean both nation and guild in the Antwerp dialect. For an example of misidenti-
fication, see Vazquez de Prada, Lettres Marchandes dAnvers, 153.
20. Jacob Strieder, Aus Antwerpener Notariatsarchiven, no. 3, 12.
21. James Murray, Of Nodes and Networks: Bruges and the Infrastructure of Trade in Fourteenth-
Century Europe, in Peter Stabel, Bruno Blond, and Anke Greve, eds., International Trade in the Low
Countries (14th-16th Centuries) (Leuven, 2000), 13.
22. Donald J. Harreld, High Germans in the Low Countries: German Merchants and their Trade in
Sixteenth-Century Antwerp (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 2000), 122-3.

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by Carmen Florea on October 6, 2009

 Harreld / TRADING PLACES 669

23. Jakob Strieder, Aus Antwerpener Notariatsarchiven, 97-9.

24. SAA, Privilegieboek van de Makelaars, GA 4508 bis.
25. Anke Greve, Brokerage and Trade in Medieval Bruges: Regulation and Reality, in Peter Stabel,
Bruno Blond, and Anke Greve, eds., International Trade in the Low Countries (14th-16th Centuries): Mer-
chants, Organisation, Infrastructure (Leuven, 2001), 39.
26. Dan Ewing, Marketing Art in Antwerp, 1460-1560: Our Ladys Pand, Art Bulletin 72, no. 4
(1990): 558.
e
27. Oscar de Smedt, De Engelse Natie te Antwerpen in de 16 Eeuw (1496-1582) (Antwerp, 1954), 155-7.
28. Ibid.
29. J. A. van Houtte, An Economic History of the Low Countries, 800-1800 (New York, 1977), 114.
30. Damiao de Gois, Lisbon in the Renaissance: A New Translation of the Urbis Olisiponis Descriptio,
trans. Jeffrey S. Ruth (New York, 1996), 27.
31. Ruth Pike, Enterprise and Adventure: The Genoese in Seville and the Opening of the New World
(Cornell, 1966), 29.
32. Geschiedenis van de Fondsen- en Wisselbeurs van Antwerpen: de Antwerpen Wisselagenten en hun
Handel (Antwerp, 1955), 10-1.
33. Jan Matern, Schoon ende bequaem tot versamelinghe de cooplieden: Antwerpens beurswereld
tijdens de gouden zestiende eeuw, in Geert de Clercq, ed., Ter Beurze: Geschiedenis van de aandelenhandel
in Belgi, 1300-1990 (Antwerp, 1992), 51.
34. J. Denuc, De Beurs van Antwerpen. Oopsprong en eerste onstwikkeling 15e en 16e eeuwen,
Antwerpsch Archievenblad, 2d series, 6 (1931): 87.
35. Lodewijk de Barsee, De Bouwkunst te Antwerpen in de XVIe Eeuw, in W. Couvreur, ed.,
Antwerpen in de XVIde Eeuw (Antwerp, 1976), 371.
36. SAA, Privilegiekamer 2224, Handelsbeurs. Unnumbered pages.
37. SAA, Privilegiekamer 2224, Handelsbeurs. Protest tegen het verplaatsen der Beurs. June 31, 1531.
38. SAA, Privilegiekamer 2224, Handelsbeurs. February 1, 1532.
39. Piet Lombaerde, Antwerp in Its Golden Age: One of the Largest Cities in the Low Countries and
One of the Best Fortified in Europe, in Patrick OBrien, ed., Urban Achievement in Early Modern
Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London (Cambridge, 2001), 108.
40. SAA, Privilegiekamer 914. Gebodboek, A (1489-1539), fol. 179.
41. Rutger Tijs, Crowning the City: Vernacular Architecture in Antwerp from the Middle Ages to the
Present Day (Antwerp, 1993), 63.
42. SAA, Privilegiekamer 2208. Hessenhuis, fol. 1. Among those proposing the petition were the firm of
Christoffel Welser and Cie., and Giovanni Battista delle Affaitadi.
43. Koninklijke Bibliotheek Albert I, Prentenkabinet S.II. 4990. also available at the University of Min-
nesota, James Ford Bell Library, 1585 mAm.
44. Jaspar Laet, A Prognostication, English ed. (Antwerp, 1517).
45. Herman Pleij, Antwerp Described, in Jan van der Stock, ed., Antwerp: Story of a Metropolis
(Antwerp, 1993), 82-3.
46. Floris Prims, Antwerpensia 13 (Antwerp, 1928-1954): 100-1.
47. [Richard Day], Antwerps Unity (London, 1579), 1.
48. Guido Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation, 9-13.
49. For a discussion of rents, see E. Scholliers, De Lagere Klassen: Een kwantitatieve benadering van
levensstandaard en levenswijze, in W. Couvreur, ed., Antwerpen in de XVIe Eeuw (Antwerp, 1974), 170-3.
50. Lewis Roberts, The Merchants Map of Commerce (London, 1677).
51. John J. Murray, The Cultural Impact of the Flemish Low Countries on Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-
Century England, American Historical Review 62 (1957): 837-54.
52. Marjolein t Hart, The Glorious City: Monumentalism and Public Space in Seventeenth-Century
Amsterdam, in Patrick OBrien, ed., Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Ant-
werp, Amsterdam, and London (Cambridge, 2001), 131.

Donald J. Harreld (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is an assistant professor of history

at Brigham Young University. His area of specialization is the social and economic
history of sixteenth-century Antwerp.

Downloaded from http://juh.sagepub.com by Carmen Florea on October 6, 2009