Christophe Plantin's press produced between 1568 and 1573 an eight volume Bible setting the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Aramaic and Syriac texts in parallel, with grammars and dictionaries for each language in the closing volumes. Philip II of Spain paid for it and sent his chaplain Arias Montano to supervise, and the result is one of the great works of scholarship of the century. It was also nearly condemned in Rome, on the grounds that it had leaned too heavily on Jewish scholarship in establishing the Hebrew text, and it took years of argument to secure approval. Plantin himself had been associated with the Family of Love, a quiet spiritualist movement that held outward confession to be secondary, which is a fair description of the position a printer in that city needed to occupy in order to work at all.
The presses stood in a city that was tearing itself apart. In August 1566 the wave of image breaking that began in the Flemish countryside reached Antwerp, and over several days crowds went through the cathedral and the parish churches destroying altarpieces, statues and glass. Contemporary drawings of the cathedral's interior before and after record what was lost.
Spanish troops sacked the city in 1576, and Antwerp fell to Spain again in 1585, after which Protestants were given four years to convert or leave. Tens of thousands left for the northern provinces, taking their trade and their printing with them, and Amsterdam is in large part what Antwerp stopped being.