ABSTRACT
Introduction On the 29th of November 1565, the secretary of the English Merchant Adventurers at Antwerp wrote to the English Privy Council on the Adventurers’ grievances regarding trading in the Low Countries and on the recent disruptions of trade. He singled out the erce competition of merchants of the Low Countries and more speci cally those of Antwerp. He writes: ‘the inhabitants [of Antwerp] … have crept into such credit that almost they rule all trades and moneys’.1 Clearly these grievances were meant to push the English government to strife for more privileges for its subjects in the Low Countries. e secretary’s statement is clearly at odds with current historiography: merchants from the Low Countries are never listed as important players in the money trade in the eenth and sixteenth century. e standard narrative of sixteenth-century nancial history stresses the succession of Florentine and Luccese nanciers by south German bankers (from Augsburg and Nuremberg ). In turn, the ‘Zeitalter der Fugger’ (Ehrenberg) made way for the ‘siècle des Génois’, the century of the Genoese (1557-1627) (Braudel).2 Successful merchant groups always engaged in the money trade, o en a er a relative shi away from commodity trade.3 South German merchant dynasties such as the Fugger and the Welser stand out as an obvious example: at rst, they were active in the textile and metals trade; they engaged in mining and, as a result of their mining activities, they got into contact with the high nobility and princes, prompting them to become the chief creditors of European crowns.4
