Antwerp
The first global commodity exchange.
Kernel
For most of the 16th century, Antwerp was the central exchange of the Atlantic world. Portuguese spices arriving from the Cape, Spanish silver from Potosí, German banking capital (the Fugger), English wool, and Italian art all converged here. The 1531 Bourse was the world's first purpose-built commodity exchange. Antwerp's sack by Spanish troops in 1576 transferred its institutions wholesale to Amsterdam — a single political event that shifted Europe's financial center 200 km north for a hundred years.
Why it rose
Geography — the Scheldt estuary connects the North Sea to inland Europe. Habsburg patronage. The Portuguese decision to make Antwerp the entrepôt for Cape-route spices in the 1490s. The diffusion of printing through the Low Countries. Antwerp combined the commercial sophistication of the Italian city-states with Atlantic-scale trade volumes.
Why it declined
The 1576 "Spanish Fury" — three days of unpaid Spanish soldiers sacking the city, killing perhaps 8,000 — broke commercial confidence. The 1585 fall to Parma sent the Protestant merchant class permanently north to Amsterdam. The Scheldt was eventually closed by Dutch power; Antwerp would not recover full commercial standing until the 19th century.