The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (48 page)

There were kings as well as merchants.
Edward IV was there in exile from England for a year. So was Mulay Hassan, the deposed
Bey of Tunis, who came to ask the
Emperor’s protection. He was painted by the local painter Vermeyen, he went
hunting the forest with the Duke of Taxis, both of them in splendid Arab robes; he
disconcerted his hosts by eating very expensive peacock and pheasant, taking aubergines
as a sauce for his meat and insisting on being blindfolded to listen to music. He was
the start of an Antwerp tradition of painting exotic people in exotic clothes, making
exiles useful; a hundred years later, the ex-bey was still the model for one of
Rubens’s Magi visiting Christ.
¹¹

The kings came for safety, for the relative
ease of being on territory that was French but not in Paris, and later Hapsburg and
imperial but not in Spain. Being in exile, however brief, they understood how a
ruler’s position could be weak, and they learned what show it took to stay in
power. They watched the rulers of Burgundy bluff, as states were learning to bluff; the
dukes played to an audience of citizens, subjects and the world. Tafur said:
‘nothing could surpass in majesty the persons of the Duke and Duchess and the
state in which they live, which is the most splendid I have ever seen’. The
Duchess had two hundred maids of honour, all of them all the time, so he heard.

He arrived just as the duke put down a
serious rebellion. He wrote: ‘I myself saw many high gallows around
Bruges.’
¹²

The court lived with all kinds of glory, as
the diplomat Prospero da Camogli told the Duke of Milan: he complained about the
‘mad rush of dishes’ at dinner every day, not to mention the habit of
leaving the silver on the table at the end of each course just to show the duke owned
more and had ‘spare’. He was hugely impressed by the ceremonies of the Order
of the Golden Fleece, the scarlet hoods when scarlet was costly, a piece of the True
Cross, and a fleur-de-lys crusted in jewels, and ‘of singers, heralds and such
like there was an infinite number’. The banqueting hall was hung with cloth of
gold and there were four unicorn horns ‘like organ pipes’ among the silver.
Anyone would want to join, and the Burgundians knew it; the Order was a diplomatic
instrument to seal their reputation as a knightly finishing school, the place to learn
war, chivalry and how to behave at court. It was imitated in France and Denmark,
Scotland and Germany, even among the Renaissance aristocrats of Italy.

Yet Prospero had to apologize a month later that ‘I
have not sent you the names of the lords and knights of the Order because the Duke of
Burgundy’s household is so lacking in organization that not a secretary in it has
been able to give me the names.’ Weeks later, he was judgemental: he wrote of the
‘inept administration of the Duke of Burgundy, who is ruled by other
men’.
¹³

The show was brilliant and also
insubstantial. There was a solid-looking throne of gold, hugely impressive unless you
realized it was just gilt on a wooden frame. Diplomats, visitors, were constantly
reminded of what was in the treasury; Gabriel Tetzel from Bohemia was told there was a
‘hundred thousand pound weight of beaten gold and silver’ but he never got
to see or count it. Having gold meant you could afford to go to war; it was a kind of
deterrent. It also meant you could act like a king. At dinner the duke was served by men
riding a two-headed horse, drank aromatic wine from the breasts of a naked girl who was
guarded by a live lion, was entertained by an elephant who begged: all illusions.

The Burgundian duke, Charles the Bold, rode
into Dijon in January 1474 wearing armour covered with rubies, diamonds, huge pearls.
Three years later he died in just such gaudy armour trying to take back the French town
of Nancy in the Lorraine. His body was found in the snow, but all the armour was gone,
he had been stripped naked and he was so badly mauled that his own doctor took days to
identify him by the one remaining sign: a fistula in the groin. The show failed him.

Inside three years the Hapsburgs inherited
Flanders by marriage and the Flemish were in full revolt against their new rulers: a
rehearsal, in a way, for the final break a century later. The first revolt went on for
fifteen years, the second started a relentless eighty-year war because it was scaffolded
with the religious divide between Calvinist and Catholic and not just grievances over
tax and local privileges; both revolts were against a state so weak that the show had to
go on even in times of civil war. Giovanni Botero in the 1580s understood very well:
‘There was not a country throughout all Europe neither more rich nor more
indebted.’
¹⁴

This was a mirror world, one we know: politics as theatre,
power as a show. If the machinery became visible at times, that only made it clear that
some people still wanted to believe.

Self-made men, senior bureaucrats,
understood this very well. Peter Bladelin was the duke’s moneyman and treasurer of
the Order of the Golden Fleece and once he had become ‘rich beyond measure’
he was also master of the court, producer of its constant pageantry. He was allowed to
use the money he guarded for his own personal investments, and he bought land,
assembling a site parcel by parcel like any modern property developer. Nobody built
whole towns any more because nobody was a feudal lord or an abbot who must be obeyed,
and besides there were towns growing everywhere by themselves. But Bladelin did build a
town, called Middelburg, to show that he was as good as any lord or abbot before
him.

The town was as neatly organized as a model:
a mill, a hospital, a church with a priest, two chaplains and six canons, areas for
living, areas for working and naturally a town hall to administer everything because
Bladelin was true to his trade. He brought in coppersmiths to work there, and tapestry
weavers, the kind of artisans who suggested taste and sophistication; he built a canal
to take their products out by water to Ghent and Bruges; he used his political position
to make sure the copper could be sold in England and that the duke ordered tapestries
when he happened to be staying.

He also built a castle: a stone fanfare, the
loudest possible statement that Peter Bladelin was ‘lord of Middelburg in
Flanders’, as his will said, not just a successful bureaucrat and certainly not
some ambitious climber from Bruges. The spine of his town was the road from Bruges to
Aardenburg, which went through the town and led directly to the castle walls; to go on
to Bruges you had to turn sharp left. Everything inside the town led to the castle, and
to the longest wall of the whole building, built out to impress. Anyone passing would
see the moat which surrounded the wall of Middelburg and inside it the moat around the
castle: the town separate from the ordinary countryside, the castle apart from the town
in its own landscape of water. Ride in through the castle gates, if you were invited, if
you were the right sort of person, and you went through a long high
corridor to a bridge across the moat to Bladelin’s own
quarters, which had a drawbridge, a gatehouse, three massive round towers and two
smaller ones for the stairs. They made a statement about Bladelin’s knightly
skills and warrior tendencies, but they faced the wrong way; an enemy would not see
them, only friends.

The castle’s next owner was another
high civil servant, executed by the townspeople in 1477; he had looked after the
interests of Duke Charles the Bold quite dangerously well. When the northern provinces
rebelled and war moved back and forth, town by town, the castle stood in the way. It was
knocked into ruins thirty years after it was built, because the towers were no kind of
serious defence. By 1607 it was said to be ‘a ruin … desolated and
destroyed … ready to be totally dismantled’. It was no more durable than
a trick on the stage.
¹⁵

Leo left Burgundy and set sail from Calais
for England, on a ship he shared with thirty-six horses. ‘When we left harbour and
reached the open sea the ship sprang a great leak and the water poured in so that the
horses stood in water up to their bellies. Then our Lord God sent us good luck. The wind
veered so that we had a good breeze. But if the wind had not changed, we should all have
been drowned.’ They found another ship, but this time it lay offshore and they had
to take a small rowing boat to reach it; and again they almost drowned. ‘My lord
and his other attendants,’ Leo said, ‘were so distressed by the waves that
they lay on the ship as if they had been dead.’

He found London ‘a powerful and busy
city, carrying on a great trade with all countries’, and he was properly impressed
by the English court. The king was announced with a choir, with trumpeters, pipers,
players of string instruments. The queen sat alone at table ‘on a costly golden
chair’ and her sister stayed on her knees until her majesty had drunk water; other
noblewomen knelt silently all the time the queen was eating, which could be as much as
three hours. Leo noticed the women’s dress because they had ‘long trains. In
no other country have I seen such long ones.’
¹⁶

It should have been familiar; it was one
more imitation of Burgundy. Olivier de la Marche, who was master of ceremonies at
the Burgundian court, was a kind of
consultant to the English king Edward IV. He wrote him a detailed description of how
things were done in Brussels, which served as the manual for the English court: how to
eat, when to bow. The show of how to be king became even more important when the Tudor
Henry VII took the throne of England in 1485. He had a weak hold on power and he had to
act out being exceptionally powerful. He chose to build his palace at Richmond as much
as possible like the Prinsenhof at Bruges with its covered walkways and its gardens with
tennis courts, and he asked ‘merchants of Flanders’ to find the tapestries,
jewels and stained glass that would make it officially regal.
¹⁷

Show and debt and bluff: that, not Hobbes or
Machiavelli, may be the true start of a modern politics.

Albrecht Dürer came to the Low Countries in
1520, and he kept a journal, which reads like an account book; so we know he spent two
sous on ‘the red colour you find at Antwerp in blocks newly cooked’, that he
bought varnish and colour in Bruges, where a single red crayon cost him a sou, that he
spent three pounds on the grey-blue ‘colour of lead’ in Antwerp. He traded a
batch of engravings that he said were worth ten ducats for a single ounce of
ultramarine, the mineral compound out of Afghanistan that contains the blue of lapis
lazuli,
¹⁸
and which probably came by way of Venice to the great Northern shop of
Antwerp.

The town had artists because it had
everything the painter needed: the docks bringing green verdigris from Montpellier, but
also the dyes for cloth that made colours for paint as well, blue woad, red brazilwood
or madder. Cochineal came from the New World on Spanish boats, landed at Antwerp and was
sold on to Italy. There were local dealers prepared for the stink of making vermilion,
the colour that ‘makes all the flesh parts glow’, as Karel van Mander wrote
in his guidebook to the painters of the time; it was made from the sulphur and mercury
mined in Germany, treated in Antwerp and then sold back by way of Cologne, on one
occasion in 1543 in a load of four hundred pounds of colour on a single waggon. Like
Venice, but nowhere else, Antwerp had at least four dealers in the 1560s who
sold only colours; and the leaseholder of
the galleries on top of the New Bourse, Bartholomeus de Momper, registered as an art
dealer with the guild of St Luke but also found it worth while to enrol as a dealer in
colours with the mercers’ guild.
¹⁹

Works from Flanders had a reputation for
life, light, vividness, for a mastery of the new-fangled painting in oils, for clever
attention to the real world. Florentines were rude about foreign artists – ‘their
brains are in their hands,’ Anton Francesco Doni wrote – but they went on buying
Netherlandish paintings from the North with enthusiasm.
²⁰
They bought work
on panels, the masterpieces we still know, but they also bought paintings on cloth, the
kind that can be ‘wrapped around a rod’ for easy transport. Antwerp sent
these out everywhere, dozens of them to England and once a ‘barrelful’. They
sold perhaps 2,500 in the course of fifty years.
²¹

There were holy subjects, peacocks, carnival
scenes, warnings against slander and just possibly some proto-porn: ‘four women
and three men who are giving each other pleasure’. These cloths could be very
large, which suited Florentine tastes: Lorenzo Strossi sent down from Bruges three
cloths for his dealer mother to sell in Florence, but she reckoned she could only get
three florins each for the peacock and the three Magi because the pictures were small.
She liked them, she even kept one, but the market wanted scale: something that looked
rather like a fresco but was portable.

The rooms of the Medici were wrapped in
Flemish taste. The family collected at least forty-two cloth paintings from the North, a
third of their whole collection; some were in their city palace, and even more were
spread around their country houses. Medici cousins hung a cloth Moses on the same
chimney as Botticelli’s
Primavera.
²²
The Florentine Raffaello Borghini
sang the praises of Jan van der Straet from Bruges, who went to Italy ‘hearing
talk of the excellence of Italian painters’, met in Venice one of the Flemish
craftsmen making tapestry for the Grand Duke Cosimo and began a career making the
cartoons for huge woven pictures: vivid hunts for a seethe of wild cats or a family of
boar snouting out of a cornfield or a pack of sinisterly attentive wolves; some
classical subjects, Jason and Medea waiting to sail away in a high-prowed ship that
bucks in the water
like a powerful horse,
Time with a wicked sickle holding captive the goddess of wisdom and virtue because death
will cut the brightest life short; a biblical theme, Samuel anointing King David as his
heir but of course meaning to endorse Grand Duke Cosimo. The pictures are as ornate as
some baroque carving, but they are criss-crossed with energy, human and lively, just as
Borghini promised: ‘with his many works he has much enriched the art of drawing
men, animals, landscapes and views, with fresh and lovely invention’.
²³