Antwerp

The Scheldt port overtook its rival in the decades around 1500. As the Zwin silted up and Bruges faded, the foreign trading houses moved to Antwerp, and by 1504 the Portuguese had made it one of their main bases for Asian spices, which they exchanged for textiles and metal goods. English cloth, German wine, French salt and Baltic wheat followed, and the exchange that opened in 1531 was dedicated "to the merchants of all nations". The population doubled between 1500 and 1569, and with some 360 painters in 1560 the city was the leading artistic centre north of the Alps.

Religion and war undid this. Iconoclast riots broke out in August 1566, and on 4 November 1576 mutinous Spanish soldiers sacked the city in the Spanish Fury, killing some 8,000 citizens. Antwerp then became a centre of the Dutch Revolt until 1585, when Alessandro Farnese, Duke of Parma, took it after a siege of more than a year. Protestants were given two years to settle their affairs and leave, and about half the population departed. The northern provinces closed the Scheldt to shipping, a closure confirmed by the Treaty of Münster in 1648, and Antwerp became a Catholic stronghold of the Counter-Reformation, where Rubens and Jordaens painted but where the great days of trade did not return.