Siege of Antwerp

Parma took Antwerp not by storming its walls but by strangling its river, throwing a fortified bridge of boats more than seven hundred metres across the Scheldt and mounting it with guns, so no relief ship could reach the starving city. The defenders answered with the 'hell-burners', floating gunpowder ships that blew a gap in the bridge and killed hundreds of Spanish troops in a single blast, but they failed to exploit the breach and it was repaired. When a last attempt to relieve the city across the Kouwenstein dike was beaten back, Antwerp surrendered on generous terms, its soldiers paid in coin rather than plunder. Parma then gave the city's large Protestant population four years to reconvert to Catholicism or leave. Within a few years the population had roughly halved, and the balance of commerce in the Low Countries began to shift north.

The fall of Antwerp is the textbook case of a military defeat redrawing an economic map. Historians treat 1585 as the hinge on which the commercial capital of northwestern Europe passed from Antwerp to Amsterdam, as the rebels closed the Scheldt to seaborne trade and Protestant merchants, financiers and printers fled north to seed the Dutch Golden Age. The debate is over how decisive this one event really was, against longer structural shifts already under way. Either way the phrase that when the merchants moved the power followed has proved durable.