Europe’s Babylon: 16th-Century Antwerp was a City of Wealth, Vice, Heresy, and Freedom

History Unplugged Podcast · Jan 4, 2022 · 52m

Before Amsterdam, there was a dazzling North Sea port at the hub of the known world: the city of Antwerp. For half the sixteenth century, it was the place for breaking rules – religious, sexual, intellectual. Known as Europe’s Babylon, the once-humble Belgian city had an outsized role in making the modern world.

In the Age of Exploration, Antwerp was sensational like nineteenth-century Paris or twentieth-century New York. It was somewhere anything could happen or at least be believed: killer bankers, a market in secrets and every kind of heresy.

And it was a place of change—a single man…