Silvius Brabo

Also Known As: also Salvius Brabo, Silvius Braboen, Brabo; Breboen in the earliest paired telling; from the Middle Dutch chronicles of Brabant, where his name was made to account for the name of the duchy
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: Belgium Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: A Roman soldier, kinsman or follower of Julius Caesar, who beats a giant in single combat and takes the giant’s hand off at the wrist.
Role in Mythos: He is the founding hero the dukes of Brabant and the city of Antwerp were given by their own chroniclers, invented to explain two place names and kept because he was useful.
Relation to Humans: He kills the thing that was maiming boatmen and takes a toll off the river, which makes him the patron of free passage and of civic liberty rather than of any devotion. Nobody has ever prayed to him, and Antwerp put him back on the Grote Markt anyway.

A bronze hand leaves a bronze fist above the Grote Markt and never lands. Jef Lambeaux caught Silvius Brabo at the top of his fountain in the instant before the throw, right foot planted on a model of the castle, left foot still in the air, the severed fingers of a giant pinched between his own. Water drops past him over sirens and a sea lion and a monstrous lizard, and lands on the headless body of the thing he killed. Antwerp has been telling itself this story for six hundred years. For most of that time it has known the story was not true and has gone on telling it, which is the more interesting fact.

The tale runs short and hard. In the castle on the Scheldt lived the giant Druon Antigoon, and from every skipper who came up the river he demanded toll. A man who would not pay, or could not, was taken, and the giant cut off his right hand and threw it into the water. Then a Roman soldier called Brabo came, met him in the open and beat him. Brabo took the giant’s own hand off at the wrist and slung it into the current. From that throwing of a hand, hand werpen, the place is supposed to have got its name.

He has no body. That is the first odd thing about him. The chroniclers who built him cared about whose kinsman he was and what he was owed, never what he looked like, so there is no scar, no height, no colour of hair, nothing to hold. Everything a reader can picture comes from a Freemason sculptor in the 1880s who gave him a swimmer’s shoulders and no clothes at all. The one physical detail the medieval tellings insist on belongs to the giant, and it is the hand.

Trace him back and he thins out as he goes. A genealogy of Godfrey with the Beard, drawn up in 1356, already has a Silvius Braboen riding on campaign with Julius Caesar. Behind that stands a thirteenth-century romance of Caesar in which Brabo is a king of Tongeren and a relative of the Roman general. The giant arrives later. Breboen and Druoen first appear together in the chronicle of Hennen van Merchtem, dated 1414, and the shape of that version is strange enough to be worth having: Breboen is a knight in the retinue of Octavian, son of the emperor of Greece, sent into the Low Countries to look for Octavian’s abducted sister. Along the Scheldt he finds a valley full of swans. Riding home he loses his way and comes on the giant, who takes horse, weapons and one hand from everyone who passes. Breboen kills him and cuts off his head. Later he marries into the family and gives his name to the land of Brabant.

Around 1470 a canon of Nijmegen, Willem van Berchem, put the last piece in. In his chronicle the hero is Silvius, the giant is Antigoon, and the hand goes into the river to produce the toponym Hand-Werpen. The classical-sounding name suggests a chronicler with the new humanist learning in his ear. In 1512 Jean Lemaire de Belges, a court historian then attached to Margaret of Austria at Mechelen, lifted van Berchem’s account into his Illustrations de Gaule et singularitez de Troye, which is how the story went international. Marcus van Vaernewijck copied Lemaire into his Spieghel der Nederlandscher Oudtheyt in 1568 and could not resist improving it: Brabo now throws the hand to the middle of the Scheldt, and Caesar rewards him with the title of margrave, names the spot Antwerpen and builds a castle there. Van Vaernewijck also records the sceptics of his own day, who thought Antigoon had been no giant at all but a powerful man who controlled the river before the Romans came.

The reason all this was written is not mysterious. The late-medieval dukes of Brabant wanted ancestry to match their ambitions, and the writers at their court obliged by running the ducal line back through the legendary founder of the Merovingians to King Priam of Troy and to Caesar. One of those inventions was the swan knight Helias, who arrives at Antwerp in a boat pulled by a swan to defend Elsa of Brabant, marries her on condition she never ask his name, and leaves the moment she does. That story was already being laughed at by the fourteenth century. Jacob van Maerlant doubted it, and Jan van Boendale, the town clerk of Antwerp himself, wrote that whatever people say about the swan is a feigned lie. A house that had lost its swan knight needed a more plausible hero, and Brabo was the replacement.

Then the ground produced evidence. In 1510, digging near the Steen turned up enormous bones, later identified as a whale’s. Antwerp took them for the shoulder blade and ribs of Antigoon and hung them in the aldermen’s chamber, cold and grey and far too big, where Albrecht Dürer was shown them in 1521 and noted the visit in his travel diary. The famous 1518 woodcut of the Antwerp roadstead labels a building on the old castle site as the house where the giant used to live. The hero needed no bones of his own. The giant’s were enough for both of them.

None of the etymology holds. The name of the city is attested as Andoverpis in an eighth-century source, and the toponymists derive it either from a natural alluvial deposit thrown up in the bend of the river or from a man-made werp, a raised bank, with the dispute still open. Brabant comes from Bracbant, broken or fallow ground plus a word for a district. The two hands on the city arms are no better: the oldest seal, from the end of the twelfth century, shows a tower and an arm with a banner, the 1239 seal shows a castle with pennants carrying a glove rather than a hand, and two hands only climb onto the seal in the seventeenth century, where they stand for the power of the emperor or the duke. He was invented backwards, out of a word.

What he could actually do was political. Close to the Franciscan convent on 13 January 1478, for the entry of Archduke Maximilian into the city, the tailors and the carpenters put up a stage devoted to the moment Brabo struck the hand off, because a hero who abolished an unjust river toll was exactly the thing a trading city wanted its new prince to watch. Brabo became shorthand for Antwerp’s privileges and for the bargain the Brabanters had struck with their dukes, and under Philip II that shorthand got sharp. A Brabo stood on the front of the new town hall finished in 1564. After the city fell in 1585 the Jesuits had him taken down as too heathen and a madonna put up instead, and he was carried off to the giant’s house in the castle quarter.

His limits are the limits of a figure with no cult. There is no birth, no death, no tomb and no feast day, only a fight and a name. He can be removed from a wall by a religious order and he stays removed for nearly three hundred years. What brought him back was money: in 1863 the Belgian state bought out the Scheldt toll from the Netherlands, the port came off its leash, and a liberal city council remembered a Roman who had once done the same thing with a sword. Lambeaux got the commission, the Catholic press complained about the nudity and lost, and the fountain was unveiled on 21 August 1887. The water has been running over the giant ever since.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Silvius Brabo?

Silvius Brabo is the legendary Roman soldier who, in Antwerp’s founding story, killed the giant Druon Antigoon and threw the giant’s severed hand into the river Scheldt. He is also the figure the medieval chroniclers of Brabant used to explain the name of the duchy. He appears in Brabantine chronicles from the fourteenth century onward and has never been an object of worship.

Did Silvius Brabo really exist?

No. Brabo is a late-medieval invention, assembled by chroniclers working for the dukes of Brabant who wanted a pedigree running back to Troy and Julius Caesar. A Silvius Braboen campaigning with Caesar appears in a genealogy of 1356, the giant is joined to him in Hennen van Merchtem’s chronicle of 1414, and Willem van Berchem gives the story its final form around 1470.

Does Antwerp really get its name from throwing a hand?

No. The city is attested as Andoverpis in an eighth-century source, and place-name scholars derive the name either from an alluvial deposit thrown up in a bend of the Scheldt or from a man-made raised bank, with the question still debated. The hand-throwing explanation is a folk etymology invented to fit the legend. The two hands on Antwerp’s coat of arms come from earlier seals showing a glove, a symbol of the ruler’s authority, not from the giant.

Where is the Brabo statue in Antwerp?

The Brabo Fountain stands in the middle of the Grote Markt in front of Antwerp City Hall. It was made by the Antwerp sculptor Jef Lambeaux and unveiled on 21 August 1887, and it shows Brabo about to hurl the giant’s hand while the headless body of Druon Antigoon lies at the base.

What happened to the giant’s bones?

Large bones dug up near the Steen in 1510 were taken for the remains of Druon Antigoon and hung in the aldermen’s chamber of the old town hall, where Albrecht Dürer was shown them in 1521 and recorded the visit in his travel diary. They were later identified as a whale’s.