"Antwerp" Antwerp by MATIM

Excavations have proved that there was habitation on the bend in the River Scheldt, opposite the Steen, as long ago as the Gallo-Roman period (second and third centuries AD).

Christianization of a settlement just to the south of that started around the year 650. The Vikings destroyed it in 836. After that the site near the Steen became the most important centre of habitation.

At the end of the tenth century Antwerp became a border province of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The River Scheldt was the border and the County of Flanders lay on the other side. The original wooden part of the fortification was replaced by a surrounding stone wall, the remains of which can still be seen today.

The first period of economic prosperity followed in the first half of the fourteenth century. Antwerp became the most important trading and financial centre in Western Europe, especially as a seaport and wool market.

In 1356 the city was annexed to the County of Flanders and lost very many privileges, partly to the advantage of Bruges. Fifty years later the political and economic tide turned again and the run-up to the Golden Age began, when Antwerp became a metropolis of world class, a kind of sixteenth-century Manhattan.

This was the centre of trade and culture Florentijn Lodovico Guicciardini described as "the most beautiful city in the world". The most famous names from that period are the painters Quinten Metsys and Breughel, the printer Plantijn and humanists and scientists like Lipsius, Mercator, Dodoens and Ortelius.

In the second half of that century the city was the focus of the politico-religious struggle between the Protestant North and Catholic Spain and as such it was stricken by a serious of calamitous events: the iconoclasm (1566), the Spanish Fury (1576) and finally the Fall of Antwerp (1585). After the Fall, the city came under the rule of Philip II again and the Northern Netherlands closed off the Scheldt. From an economic point of view this was a disaster.

To make matt-ers worse, not only Protestants fled the city but so did the commerc-ial and intellectual elite. Of the city's 100,000 inhabitants in 1570, by 1590 only about 40,000 remained. Yet the city continued to flourish culturally until the mid-seventeenth century with painters like Rubens, Van Dyck, Jordaens and Teniers, the sculptor families Quellin and Verbrugghen, printers like Moretus, the famous Antwerp harpsichord builders, etc.

There is little of cheer to recount in the history of Antwerp between 1650 and the nineteenth century. The River Scheldt remained closed to traffic and the metropolis became a provincial town. Under Austrian rule (1715-1792), Joseph II tried to free the river by military force, but the plan misfired. In 1795, under French occupation, it succeeded but this time the ships encountered an English blockade. This was hardly surprising since Napoleon regarded the port of Antwerp as "a pistol pointed at the heart of England". Whilst it is true that Antwerp owed the beginnings of a modern port to that French period (1792-1815), at the same time the city's cultural heritage fell prey to art plundering and destruction on a scale rarely seen before. Plans were even drawn up to demolish the Cathedral.

After the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo (1815), there followed a short-lived reunification with the Northern Netherlands and an equally short period of prosperity which ended with the Belgian Revolution (1830) and once again the closure of the Scheldt. It was reopened, this time for good, in 1863. Then Antwerp's third great heyday could begin.

Apart from interruptions during the two world wars, Antwerp experienced steady economic growth in the twen-tieth century and consequently a cultural revival, which culminated in Antwerp's nomination as Cultural Capital of Europe in 1993, in recognition of its historical and contemporary riches.