by Michael Pye
32 De Prada, Lettres marchandes, vol. I, p. 19.
33 Sheilagh Ogilvie, Institutions and European Trade: Merchant Guilds 1000–1800 (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 368–9.
34 On the influence of the Bourse, see Krista de Jonge, ‘Bâtiments publics à fonction économique à Anvers au XVIème siècle: l’invention d’un type’, in Konrad Ottenheym, Monique Chatenet and Krista de Jonge (eds.), Public Buildings in Early Modern Europe (Turnhout, 2010), pp. 183ff.; on the siting of the Bourse, see Jochen de Vylder, ‘The Grid and the Existing City’, in Piet Lombaerde and Charles van den Heuvel (eds.), Early Modern Urbanism and the Grid (Turnhout, 2011); on the Bourse and the city, see Konrad Ottenheym and Krista de Jonge, ‘Civic Prestige: Building the City 1580–1700’, in Konrad Ottenheym and Krista de Jonge (eds.), Unity and Discontinuity: Architectural Relationships between the Southern and Northern Low Countries (1530–1700) (Turnhout, 2007), pp. 232–4.
35 For the Alleynses and the structure of art dealing, see Filip Vermeylen, Painting for the Market (Turnhout, 2003), esp. pp. 70–77.
36 De Prada, Lettres Marchandes, vol. I, pp. 122–3.
37 Hernando de Frias Cevallos to Simon Ruiz, 16 March 1564, in de Prada, Lettres marchandes, vol. II, pp. 11–12.
38 Frederic Schiller (tr. A. J. W. Morrison), History of the Revolt of the Netherlands (New York, 1860), pp. 189–94.
39 G. D. Ramsay, The Queen’s Merchants and the Revolt of the Netherlands (Manchester, 1986), pp. 183–90.
40 See Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995), for excellent summaries of Antwerp’s fate, esp. pp. 185, 413–14.
41 The best source on Stevin is J. T. Devresse and G. Vanden Berghe, ‘Magic is no magic’: The Wonderful World of Simon Stevin (Southampton, 2008).
42 Paul Arblaster, Antwerp and the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of the Catholic Reformation (Leuven 2004).
43 For a discussion of the development of the ‘fact’, see Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England 1550–1720 (Ithaca, 2000).
44 Frank Lestringant (ed.), Le Théâtre des Cruautés de Richard Verstegan (Paris, 1995).
45 On Stevin’s international influence, see Ron van Oers, Dutch Town Planning Overseas during VOC and WIC Rule 1600–1800 (Zutphen, 2000); for the notes on buildings, see Charles van den Heuvel, De huysbou, a reconstruction of an unfinished treatise on architecture, town planning and civil engineering by Simon Stevin (Amsterdam, 2005).
46 Xinru Liu, Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious Exchanges AD 1–600 (New Delhi, 1988), pp. 8–11.
47 Jon Solomon, ‘The Apician Sauce’, in John Wilkins, David Harvey and Mike Dobson (eds.), Food in Antiquity (Exeter, 1995), p. 128n.9.
48 Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (eds.), Francis Bacon: The New Organon (Cambridge, 2000), p. 44, XLVIII, for ‘unthinkable …’; p. 69, LXXXIV, for ‘disgrace to mankind’.
Acknowledgements
A thousand years and a hundred kingdoms is far beyond the competence of just one writer; which is why this book owes everything to the help of others – to texts which set me thinking, to the people who suggested, corrected, interpreted and encouraged, and to the institutions that made the work possible. The problem now is: how to share any credit due without sharing the blame, because the latter belongs to me alone.
I would never ask them to admit paternity, but my ideas owe much to Stéphane Lebecq’s work on Frisia; to Rosamond McKitterick’s studies of history, memory, writing and reading; to James A. Brundage’s magisterial account of the start of the legal profession; to Joel Kaye’s Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century; to Judith M. Bennett’s work on plague and labour laws; to Tine de Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden on ‘girl power’; and Marina Belozerskaya’s brilliantly revisionist view of Flanders in the Renaissance. They started me thinking, but that is where their responsibility ends. From there on, I owe this book also to the hundreds of specialists who make it possible to generalize, from the editors of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in the nineteenth century to twenty-first-century archaeologists whose papers, monographs and reports gave me raw material. Endnotes are nothing like enough to settle debts like these.
I am especially grateful to the people without whose help I would have known less, made more mistakes and gone down many more dead ends. I thank: Simon Bailey; Esther Banki; Rachel Boertjens; Gerhard Cadee; John Carey; Alan Coates; Bernadette Cunningham; Pieterjan Deckers; Geir Atle Ersland; Linn Kjos Falkenberg; Piet Gilissen; Rob van Ginkel; Matthew Goldish; Irene Groeneweg; Gitte Hansen; Harald Hansen; Peter Henderikx; Joe Hillaby; Brian Hillyard; Susan Hitch; Neil Jones; Ephraim Kanarfogel; Espen Karlsen; Willem Kuiper; Rune Kyrkjebø; Carolyne Larrington; Moira Mackenzie; Martin Maw; Roy Meijer; Thomas McErlean; Bernard Meijlink; Liesebeth Missel; Tore Nyberg; Aslaug Ommundsen; Hilde van Parys; Anna Petre; Marnix Pieters; Michael Prestwich; Julian Reid; Anna Sander; Caroline van Santen; Dagfinn Skre; Målfrid Krohn Sletten; Peter Doimi de Frankopan Subic; Filip Vermeylen; Ed van der Vlist; Yvonne de Vroede; and Anne Winston-Allen.
The librarians of the University of Amsterdam have treated me with such unfussy generosity for years that I cannot imagine working without their help any more. I thank the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the library of St John’s College, Oxford, the Warburg Institute of the University of London and the Wellcome Library in London, the Openbare Bibliotheek in Bruges, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris (not least for the inconvenient charm of working at the Richelieu site). I owe much to the library of the University of Bergen, to the Special Collections of St Andrew’s University, to the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, and to the Staatsbibliothek in Munich for the online version of the Monumenta Germaniae Historical, which has made wonderfully accessible what used to be dusty and time-consuming. David Rymill at the Hampshire Record Office and Malcolm Boyns at the Warwickshire Record Office were very helpful. I thank the Alumni Office of the University of Oxford for access to JSTOR. And the best of bookshops helped enormously; I’m grateful to the wonderful Athenaeum and the knowledgeable men at Architectura et Natura in Amsterdam, and the indispensable Oxbow Books in Oxford.
I also needed more immediate help and I could depend on the prodigious skill of Mary Boyle, who mined brilliantly for the more obscure materials. Verity Allen helped greatly at the start.
The pictures in this book, in the order they appear, are: Vikings from a 1130 ms. of the Life of St Edmund, The Pierrepoint Morgan Library, copyright © Photo SCALA, Florence, 2014; scribe from the 1121 Liber Floridus in Ghent University Library; finger counting from a French collection on computus around 1100, copyright © The British Library Board; court scene from the 1480 Histoire de la Toison d’Or in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; images of fishing from Olaus Magnus: Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555), the Bridgeman Art Library; Hansa harbour from the Hamburg Staatsarchiv, the 1497 Van Schiprechte; road building from Jean de Guise, Chroniques de Hainault, in the Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique; art-dealing from a painting around 1590 by François Bunel II, in the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, The Hague; bathhouse from a 1470 edition of Valère Maxime, Faits et dits mémorables in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France; the sea monster from a thirteenth-century manuscript, MS Ashmole 1511, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the toy sea monster was made for an Antwerp parade and drawn for Joannes Bochius, Descriptio Publicae Gratulationis (1594, also in the Bodleian). I am very grateful to everyone – librarians and photographers alike – for their help in making these images available; and to Huw Armstrong for his help in the research.
Along the way my old Oxford college, St John’s, gave me a room while I was digging in the Bodleian, and David and Joyce Robinson were the kindest of hosts in Edinburgh. In Amsterdam, the people at Résidence Le Coin must sometimes have wondered if I was ever going to leave, and still they smiled; I thank Corina, Rik, Dimitri, Jesse and the others for their kindness, and the
ir coffee. My good friends Emma, Peter and Alfred Letley, Lynda Myles, Sharon Churcher, Wesley van den Bos, Mickle O’Reilly and Penny Morley, and Lidewijde Paris cheered me on, especially in the last stages when the circumstances turned dark.
You might never have read this book without the zest and attention of Venetia Butterfield at Viking in London, alongside Jillian Taylor, who steered and nursed the book to publication, and Ellie Smith, Mark Handsley and Emma Brown, whose care improved everything. The maps are the work of the brilliant Phillip Green. I owe the cover to John Hamilton’s eye. The index was made by Douglas Matthews. And the book might not have been begun, let alone finished, without three men. David Godwin, my most humane and ruthless agent, staged a resurrection for me; I am very grateful, but then David is becoming famous for miracles. Will Hammond, who commissioned the book at Viking and guided it along was clever, exact, supportive and properly sceptical about any date I typed; I owe the book to all his enthusiasm and his care. And my partner, John Holm, made the book possible because he makes my life possible. I would mention the dogs, but I’m told it is now considered bad form to thank dogs and professors on the same page …
London, 17 March 2014
THE BEGINNING
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First published 2014
Copyright © Michael Pye, 2014
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ISBN: 978-0-241-96384-5
