Antwerp

an important commercial city of Belgium. It is situated on the "lazy Scheldt," sixty miles from the North Sea. It is at least a thousand years old. At the time of the discovery of America, Antwerp was the leading commercial city of western Europe, far surpassing London. It has not had fair treatment at the hands of jealous rivals. Just to realize how unfair nations can be, it is well to know that by the Treaty of Westphalia, 1648, it was agreed to forbid merchant ships from entering the Scheldt, nor was Antwerp permitted to engage again in commerce until the French opened the Scheldt in 1794. Napoleon spent $10,000,000 in the construction of docks. He declared Antwerp to be a "loaded pistol which I hold at the throat of England." Antwerp had its full share of the miseries of the warfare which from time to time rolled over the Netherlands. It suffered from the "Spanish Fury" of 1576 and the "French Fury" of 1583. In the days of its commercial supremacy Antwerp possessed wealth and was noted as an artistic city. The Cathedral of Antwerp is the most celebrated church edifice in the Low Countries. It is 471 feet long and 384 feet wide. The exterior is noted for a graceful north tower, and for a spire rising 402 feet above the west front. The roof is one of the most peculiar known. The windows are very large, and are richly colored. The interior has seven aisles. The vaulting rises to a height of 130 feet. The cathedral contains Rubens' masterpieces, The Descent from the Cross, The Elevation of the Cross, and The Assumption.

The modern city of Antwerp is prosperous and does a large business in coal, linen, woolen, and cotton goods, grain, sugar, chemicals, dyes, diamonds, rubber, glassware, and iron products. The steamers of the Red Star line ply between Antwerp and New York. In 1905 Belgium began the expenditure of $50,000,000 to deepen and enlarge the port of Antwerp. Population, 1907, 310,903.

See Hanseatic League; Belgium; Amsterdam; Scheldt; Vandyck; Rubens

The city was so ancient that its genealogists, with ridiculous gravity, ascended to a period two centuries before the Trojan war, and discovered a giant, rejoicing in the classic name of Antigonus, established on the Scheld. This patriarch exacted one-half the merchandise of all navigators who passed his castle, and was accustomed to amputate and cast into the river the right hands of those who infringed this simple tariff. Thus "Hand-werpen," hand-throwing, became Antwerp, and hence, two hands, in the escutcheon of the city, were ever held up in heraldic attestation of the truth. The giant was, in his turn, thrown into the Scheld by a hero, named Brabo, from whose exploits Brabant derived its name. . . . But for these antiquarian researches, a simpler derivation of the name would seem "an t' werf," "on the wharf." It had now (in the first half of the 16th century) become the principal entrepot and exchange of Europe . . . the commercial capital of the world. . . . Venice, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Bruges, were sinking; but Antwerp, with its deep and convenient river, stretched its arm to the ocean and caught the golden prize as it fell from its sister cities' grasp. . . . No city, except Paris, surpassed it in population, none approached it in commercial splendor.--Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic.