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Diamond-Studded Paths: Lines of Communication and the Trading Network of the Hellemans Family, Jewellers from Antwerp

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Book cover Gems in the Early Modern World

Part of the book series: Europe's Asian Centuries ((EAC))

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Abstract

In the late sixteenth century, the Hellemans family of Antwerp benefitted from an extensive trading network stretching from South America across Europe to the Near East and India. At the heart of this was the trade in diamonds and other gems. This chapter examines the strategies that the family employed first in building their network, including marriage alliances and the establishment of business relationships with other trading diasporas such as the Germans. It then analyses the ways in which family members both acquired and displayed expertise in their core diamond trade. Finally, it evaluates the reasons for the breakdown of the network after the death of the last of the Hellemans brothers and looks at its legacy through to the mid-seventeenth century.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Hermann Kellenbenz, “Le front hispano-portugais contre l’Inde et le role d’une agence de renseignement au service de marchands allemands et flamands,” Studia 11 (1963): 263–90; Wilfrid Brulez, “Venetiaanse Handelsbetrekkingen met Perzië en Indië Omstreeks 1600,” Orientalia Gandensia I (1964): 1–27; John Everaert, “The Antwerp Diamond Trade with Portuguese India (1590–1635),” Mededelingen der Zittingen. Koninklijke Academie voor Overzeese Wetenschappen 50, no. 4 (2004): 467–94.

  2. 2.

    Jan Denucé, “Familie De Pape met stamtafel,” Antwerpsch Archievenblad 33 (1928): 98-104; Felixarchief Antwerp (Antwerp city archives, FAA), Insolvente Boedelkamer, IB 770–787.

  3. 3.

    His name also appears in records as Berlaymont, Barlaymont and Barlamonte.

  4. 4.

    Although in his native Antwerp he appears to have been known as ‘Carlo Hellemans’, the version of his name that is used in this chapter, in Italy and elsewhere, the family name was often altered to Helman, Elman or Elmano, among other variations.

  5. 5.

    Archivio di Stato di Mantova (ASM), Archivio Gonzaga (AG), busta (hereafter b.) 1540, II, ff. 307r–308r, 27 June 1608. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are the author’s own.

  6. 6.

    Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASV), Cinque Savi alla Mercantia, Prima serie, Risposte 135, f. 35r&v, 21 January 1549.

  7. 7.

    A statement made by Guillaume Hellemans, the nephew of the van Santvoorts who took over the running of their business, reveals that Willem van Santvoort had, in fact, only been living in Venice since 1545. ASV, Notarile, Atti, b. 8316, ff. 151v–152v, 5 March 1579. Thus, van Santvoort had likely not been in Venice for 26 years. Nonetheless, van Santvoort, compared to many of his later compatriots, was in Venice from a very early date, making him one of the earliest Flemish merchants to settle in Venice during this period.

  8. 8.

    Wilfrid Brulez, Marchands Flamands à Venise I (1568–1605) (Brussels and Rome: L’Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 1965; hereafter Brulez I), no. 156, 3 October 1586 and 661.

  9. 9.

    Alvise Casanova, Specchio lucidissimo nel quale si vedeno essere diffinito tutti i modi & ordini de scrittura che si deve menare nelli negotiamenti della mercantia, cambia, recambii con li loro corrispondentie, disgarbugliando & illuminando l’intelletto a negotianti (Venice, 1558).

  10. 10.

    Casanova, Specchio, entries for 14 June and 16 July 1555.

  11. 11.

    Casanova, Specchio, entries for 5 March and 20 April 1555.

  12. 12.

    Casanova, Specchio, entry for 18 November 1555, 100.

  13. 13.

    Brulez I, 595, 4 May 1591. The boxes were sent by ship. Two different terms for box are used in the document: scatola and cassetta.

  14. 14.

    Casanova, Specchio, entry for 3 December 1555, 102.

  15. 15.

    Greta Devos and Brulez, Wilfrid, Marchands flamands à Venise II (1606–1621) (Brussels: L’Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 1986; hereafter Brulez II), 809–11.

  16. 16.

    This for the sum of 2000 Venetian scudi. His years are listed as 1526/1556. Piero Pozzi, Dizionario Aureo: Orefici, Argentieri, Gioiellieri, Diamantai, Peltrai, Orologiai, Tornitori d’Avorio nei Territori della Repubblica Veneta (Venice: Grafiche Crivellari, 1998), 570.

  17. 17.

    Brulez I, no. 68, 18 August 1583.

  18. 18.

    Brulez I, no. 365, 4 December 1592.

  19. 19.

    FAA, Schepenregister 397, 14 August 1589; Brulez I, no. 68, 18 August 1583 and no. 318, 22 November 1591. In the latter, Guillaume Hellemans is listed as the heir of Jan van Santvoort along with his brother Pieter in Antwerp.

  20. 20.

    ASV, Notarile, Atti 8321, 363v–365v, 10 July 1584.

  21. 21.

    Brulez I, no 435, 24 September 1593 for his earliest known mention, in which he is clearly connected to both Carlo Hellemans and a fellow Flemish merchant and friend of the family, Francesco Vrins. Adrian van Santvoort is described as Francesco’s father in Brulez I, no. 541, 3 September 1594. That same day he makes Francesco Vrins his procurator, in an act which suggests he is leaving Venice: Brulez I, no. 542.

  22. 22.

    ASV, Notarile, Atti 8318, 167v–168r, 17 April 1581.

  23. 23.

    Pera or Galata, then a community opposite Constantinople on the northern shore of the Golden Horn where foreign merchants lived, is known today as Karaköy.

  24. 24.

    ASV, Notarile, Atti 8318, 167r&v, 17 April 1581.

  25. 25.

    ASV, Notarile, Atti 8315, 219v–220v, 17 May 1578; and 523r&v, 16 December 1578.

  26. 26.

    Brulez I, no. 30, 19 April 1581, and no. 646, 24 May 1596.

  27. 27.

    Brulez 1, 586.

  28. 28.

    Arnout’s descendants tended to settle in the Dutch Republic. His daughter Leonora, for example, married the Dutch poet P.C. Hooft.

  29. 29.

    ASV, Notarile, Atti 8325, ff. 41v–42v, 22 January 1588.

  30. 30.

    ASM, AG, b. 1536 f. 259, 8 January 1604. This letter referring to the earlier rose-shaped gem has been translated in Christina M. Anderson, “Merchants as Collectors and Art Dealers: The Cases of Daniel Nijs and Carlo Hellemans, Flemish Merchants in Venice,” in Early Modern Merchants as Collectors, ed. Christina M. Anderson (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), 161.

  31. 31.

    ASM, AG, b. 1536 III, f. 395r, 27 March 1604.

  32. 32.

    For a discussion of Nijs’s collector’s cabinet see Christina M. Anderson, “Daniel Nijs’s Cabinet and Its Sale to Lord Arundel in 1636,” The Burlington Magazine 154 (March 2012): 172–6. In addition to cameos, agate intaglios, antique corniola (cornelian), crystal intaglios and other jewels, Nijs’s cabinet contained drawings, pictures, medals and ‘many other rare curiosities’ (ASV, Notarile, Atti, b. 10906, ff.448–50, 27 January 1643). From this description, it is possible to see a similarity between Nijs’s cabinet and Frans Francken the Younger’s A Collector’s Cabinet of circa 1617, now in the collection of the Duke of Northumberland. The architect Vincenzo Scamozzi gives, perhaps, the fullest description of the cabinet’s contents in his L’idea della architettura universale (Venice, 1615), III: XVIII, 306.

  33. 33.

    The National Archives (Kew, London), State Papers 14/77, f. 33, 12 May 1614.

  34. 34.

    ASV, Notarile, Atti, b. 782 f. 54, 29 January 1622. See Christina M. Anderson, The Flemish Merchant of Venice: Daniel Nijs and the Sale of the Gonzaga Art Collection (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015), 120–21, for the reasons for associating this transaction with the Duke of Mantua.

  35. 35.

    ASV, Notarile, Atti, b. 11130, unnumbered, 11 Aug 1631.

  36. 36.

    ASV, Senato, Terra, filza 325, unnumbered, 19 May 1631.

  37. 37.

    See further Anderson, Flemish Merchant of Venice.

  38. 38.

    There are many letters about grain from Carlo Hellemans to the court in Mantua. Most relevant for this argument, perhaps, are two letters from 1604 in which gems are discussed in the first half of the letter and grain in the second half, showing how closely the trade in both was for the Hellemans brothers when dealing with Mantua. ASM, AG, b. 1536, III, f. 726r, 20 Nov 1604 and f. 738r, 27 November 1604.

  39. 39.

    ASM, AG, b. 1554, f. 399r, 21 May 1622.

  40. 40.

    For example, in his inventory of paintings being sold to Isaac Wake, then English Ambassador to Venice, for the purpose of Wake’s forwarding them to London for presentation probably to Lord Buckingham, Nijs uses such descriptors as ‘most beautiful’, ‘very rare’ and ‘of great consideration’. There is no insight, as with Carlo Hellemans’s letter to Mantua in which he can point out the technical skill of the artisan, of the reasons for the beauty, rarity or consideration of the paintings. TNA, SP92/11, f. 78, 7 February 1626.

  41. 41.

    Daniela Sogliani, Le collezioni Gonzaga. Il carteggio tra Venezia e Mantova (1563–1587) (Milan: Silvana, 2002), no. 509, 15 April 1581.

  42. 42.

    Ugo Tucci, “Bontempelli dal Calice, Bartolomeo”, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 12 (1971), 426–7.

  43. 43.

    Ugo Tucci, “The Psychology of the Venetian Merchant in the Sixteenth Century,” in J. R. Hale, ed., Renaissance Venice (Faber, 1973), 346–78.

  44. 44.

    Sogliani, Il carteggio, no. 913, 10 October 1587.

  45. 45.

    Michaela Sermidi, Le collezioni Gonzaga. Il carteggio tra Venezia e Mantova (1588–1612) (Milan: Silvana, 2002), no. 419, 8 May 1599.

  46. 46.

    Kris Lane, Colour of Paradise: The Emerald in the Age of Gunpowder Empires (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 27, 31.

  47. 47.

    Archivo Histórico Provincial de Sevilla (AHPS), Notariales, signatura (hereafter sig.) 9233, ff. 592v–593r, 10 March 1583.

  48. 48.

    AHPS, Notariales, sig. 9247, f. 302r&v, 20 May 1586.

  49. 49.

    AHPS, Notariales, sig. 9294, f. 196r, 19 November 1596.

  50. 50.

    Brulez I, no. 282, 18 February 1591.

  51. 51.

    Brulez I, nos. 1210 and 1211, 25 October 1601.

  52. 52.

    Johan van der Veken (1549–1616) was a Flemish merchant from Mechelen who transferred to Rotterdam, becoming a poorter (burgher or citizen) there in 1586. He is perhaps most famous as one of the two financiers of the first “Dutch” fleet to sail to Japan in 1598 and as a friend of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt. Anna Hellemans, sister of Carlo Hellemans and Ferdinand Helman’s first wife, had died in 1593 leaving Ferdinand free to marry Catharina van der Veken in 1603.

  53. 53.

    Brulez I, no. 1256, 14 March 1602.

  54. 54.

    Brulez II, no. 2272, 26 July 1608 and no. 2273, 1 August 1608.

  55. 55.

    The Fontego or Fondaco dei Tedeschi, recently restored as a luxury shopping centre near the Rialto bridge in the centre of Venice, served as warehouse, offices and home to the powerful community of German merchants active there. The original edifice was completed in the early thirteenth century, the current building having been constructed at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

  56. 56.

    Casanova, Specchio, entry for 17 June.

  57. 57.

    Casanova, Specchio, entry for 9 September.

  58. 58.

    For example, letter of 9 June to Antonio Fucher (Anton Fugger) in Casanova, Specchio. Bertholamio Velzer (Bartholomeus Welser) is mentioned in an entry for 14 July.

  59. 59.

    ASV, Senato, Deliberazioni, Terra, filza 140, 22 April 1596.

  60. 60.

    Pius Malekandathil, Trade, Religion and Polity in the Indian Ocean (Delhi: Primus Books, 2010), 161.

  61. 61.

    For Balbi’s travels in India see Viaggi di C. Federici e G. Balbi alle Indie orientali, ed. Olga Pinto (Rome, 1962).

  62. 62.

    Brulez, “Venetiaanse Handelsbetrekkingen”, 10–13; Brulez I, no. 696, 7 December 1596 and no. 817, 7 April 1598.

  63. 63.

    Brulez I, no. 472, 25 February 1594.

  64. 64.

    Brulez, “Venetiaanse Handelsbetrekkingen”, 16–20.

  65. 65.

    Resolutiën der Staten-Generaal, ed. Nicolaas Japikse (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1941), vol. 11, no. 335, 6 October 1600.

  66. 66.

    Brulez, “Venetiaanse Handelsbetrekkingen”, 16.

  67. 67.

    Sibylle Backmann, “Kunstagenten oder Kaufleute? Die Firma Ott im Kunsthandel zwischen Oberdeutschland und Venedig (1550–1650),” in Klaus Berhdolt and Jochen Brüning, eds, Kunst und Ihre Auftraggeber im 16. Jahrhundert. Venedig und Augsburg im Vergleich (Berlin: Akademie, 1997), 155–78.

  68. 68.

    Rodolfo Baroncini, “Giovanni Gabrieli e la committenza privata veneziana: i ridotti Helman e Oth,” in Sabine Meine, ed., Spazi veneziani: Topografie culturali di una città (Venice: Viella, 2014), 23–58.

  69. 69.

    Zsuzsa Barbarics-Hermanik, “Handwritten Newsletters as Interregional Information Sources in Central and Southeastern Europe,” in Brendan Dooley, ed., The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 173.

  70. 70.

    Mark Häberlein, The Fuggers of Augsburg: Pursuing Wealth and Honor in Renaissance Germany (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 107.

  71. 71.

    Malekandathil, Trade, 158, 160–1.

  72. 72.

    This relates to social exchange theory. For more on this see Richard M. Emerson, “Social Exchange Theory,” Annual Review of Sociology 2 (1976), 335–62; and Engaging Theories in Interpersonal Communication: Multiple Perspectives, ed. Dawn O. Braithwaite and Paul Schrodt, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2014). The establishment of trust through the exchange of written information is also a theme of these books on the later gem trade: Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009); and Tijl Vanneste, Global Trade and Commercial Networks: Eighteenth-Century Diamond Merchants (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011).

  73. 73.

    Remondo del Monte is mentioned as Carlo Hellemans’s agent in a letter to the Mantuan court: ASM, AG, b. 1536, part III, f. 670r, 9 October 1604.

  74. 74.

    Everaert, “Antwerp Diamond Trade,” 478–80.

  75. 75.

    Kellenbenz, ”Le front”, 287–8.

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  1. University College London, London, UK

    Christina M. Anderson

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  1. History Department, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Michael Bycroft

  2. History of Art, Science and Technology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Sven Dupré

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Anderson, C.M. (2019). Diamond-Studded Paths: Lines of Communication and the Trading Network of the Hellemans Family, Jewellers from Antwerp. In: Bycroft, M., Dupré, S. (eds) Gems in the Early Modern World. Europe's Asian Centuries. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96379-2_3

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