Europe's Babylon: The Rise and Fall of Antwerp's Golden Age

Michael Pye

Jul 2022 · Tantor Media Inc · Kuchazwe ngu-Nigel Patterson

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Before Amsterdam, there was a dazzling North Sea port at the hub of the known world: the city of Antwerp. 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, easy kisses, a market in secrets and every kind of heresy. For half the sixteenth century, it was the place for breaking rules-religious, sexual, intellectual. And it was a place of change. Thomas More opened Utopia there, Erasmus puzzled over money and exchanges, William Tyndale sheltered there and smuggled out his Bible in English until he was killed. But when Antwerp rebelled with the Dutch against the Spanish and lost, all that glory was buried and its true history rewritten. Mutinous troops burned the city records, trying to erase its true history. In Europe's Babylon, Michael Pye sets out to rediscover the city that was lost and bring its wilder days to life using every kind of clue: novels, paintings, songs, schoolbooks, letters, and the archives of Venice, London, and the Medici.

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Michael Pye is the author of The Drowning Room, The Pieces from Berlin, and The Edge of the World, all three of which were New York Times Notable Books of the Year. He lives in Amsterdam.

British audiobook narrator and AudioFile Earphones Award winner Nigel Patterson has many credits as a stage, screen, and voice-over actor that influence his powerful characterization across a broad range of genres. A graduate of the University of Oxford, he is fluent in French and Spanish.