Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [26]
From around the year 1500, the old Dutch shipowners—who had made their profits solely as carriers—began to be supplanted by merchants who took advantage of the favorable geographical position of the Northern Netherlands to buy and sell goods on their own account. The seven provinces that would eventually form the Dutch Republic were ideally placed to profit from the growth of international trade, which at that time was centered in the ports of Italy and Spain. They were midway between Scandinavia and Iberia and at the confluence of seaways and river systems that linked the Atlantic coast with central Europe. Goods landed in Dutch ports could be sent quickly and cheaply to Germany and England, the Southern Netherlands and France.
The towns of Zeeland and the Zuyder Zee thus grew in wealth and population. For many years, however, the greatest fortunes continued to be made by merchants in the Southern Netherlands. The towns of Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent were far bigger than Amsterdam and its great Zeeland rival Middelburg, and they had long been established as commercial centers for the trade in wool and cotton. Being large and wealthy places, they also attracted merchants specializing in luxury goods such as spice and sugar. Commodities of this sort were generally known as the “rich trades” because they were so much more profitable than the bulk trades of the Dutch.
The merchants of the Southern Netherlands retained their dominant position until late in the sixteenth century. It was only in the late 1570s that the people of the northern provinces at last began to overtake those of the south. One reason for this was the Dutch Revolt, which broke out in 1572 and ran on intermittently until 1648. Before the war began, Amsterdam had been a town of 30,000 people—a good size for the time, but no more than a third the size of Antwerp and smaller, too, than Brussels, Ghent, and Bruges. By 1600, though, double that number lived within the city walls, and by 1628 the number of inhabitants had exploded to 110,000. Amsterdam was now larger than any of its southern rivals and, indeed, one of the four largest cities in Europe.
In an age when plague and pestilence visited the largest towns with grim regularity, and could carry off up to a fifth of the population within a year, such rapid growth could only be the result of mass immigration. Amsterdam became home to tens of thousands of new citizens during these years. A few, like Jeronimus Cornelisz himself, were from elsewhere in the Dutch Republic, but the majority were Protestant refugees from the Southern Netherlands, driven north by Spanish persecution and the war. Many of the refugees were merchants from the great cities of Flanders and Wallonia, who possessed both capital and experience. They helped to establish Amsterdam as a trading power in its own right. A new bank, a stock exchange, and all the other paraphernalia of a mercantile economy followed, and by 1620 the town had unquestionably become the greatest entrepôt in northern Europe. During the first third of the seventeenth century, this flood of cash and expertise made it easier to exploit fresh opportunities and open up new markets. The most important of these was the spice trade.
Why spice? Amsterdam, in truth, was built upon the taste of rotting meat. In 1600, when the science of food preservation was still in its infancy, most of the cuts sold by butchers or hung in larders throughout Europe were sour and decaying. The only things that masked the tang of decomposing flesh were spices such as pepper, which thus became the most-sought-after luxury goods of the day.
The great difficulty, so far as the merchants of Europe were concerned, was that spices came from far away. They were grown and harvested in a swath of southeast Asia stretching from India nearly to New Guinea, and though they had been known in Europe since