Sometimes you come across a fact which is so strange and so weird, that curiosity simply beckons you to follow every single possible lead.
When slowly falling down a Wikipedia rabbit hole while looking for some background information about the various players in the 1844 US Presidential Election (featuring James K Polk the "Napoleon Of The Stump", Lewis Cass who was a general, and Martin Van Buren who had already been a president), I followed the trails of Martin Van Buren back to The Netherlands which is not actually The Netherlands any more, and the curious tale of the Pennsylvania Dutch which in this case might not even be Dutch but Vlamingen (Flemish). Martin Van Buren's family may have been involved in a turbulent period in what is now Belgian history, with some of the Van Buren family being involved in local politics.
This is where the story got really weird. There were Van Burens who had been Mayor of the City of Antwerp, but if you read further down the list you find one really curious and insane entry:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_Antwerp
Jar Of Mayonnaise - 1752
Jar Of Mayonnaise?!
Come on! Clearly writing the Wikipedia article was someone's local history project, but how can you write "Jar Of Mayonnaise" and leave this in red, without filling in that particular article?! Don't leave us hanging!
Cue a series of frantic searches in the 900s section in my local library and delving into books which only half glance at Belgium and merely hint at what could have been. The story which I have been able to piece together is only surface level at best and probably wrong in parts¹. This then, might be the story of how a Jar Of Mayonnaise came to be Mayor of Antwerp.
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Europe in the 1750s was a chaotic mish-mash of sometimes kingdoms, sometimes city-states, sometimes duchies, sometimes principalities, and sometimes entities that were so vague that even they weren't really sure of what they were. Belgium in the 1750s was not really a thing and the Kingdom of the Netherlands generally was in a period where it wasn't really sure what it owned. The City of Antwerp in the 1750s was one of these places which was in a kind of bonkers flux.
With tensions brewing between France and the United Kingdom over what was going to happen to North America, and which did spill over in the Seven Years' War, the various crowned heads of Europe were cautiously eyeing each other's patches of dirt on their own continent. The Netherlands wanted to consolidate its power in the north, Prussia was more than willing to use military strength to annexe districts from its neighbours, France was otherwise preoccupied and then there was Venice.
Yes, Venice. Italy as we know it had been coagulating and splitting every since about 473, into variously named entities including the Holy Roman Empire which was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire, not in Italy for that matter. In the vacuum the various Italian city states were eyeing off what they could take for themselves and this is where Antwerp comes in.
Antwerp in 1752 was actually owned by nobody but itself. The story of why this is the case is beyond the scope of this blog post but the important thing to note about his here, is that Antwerp was its own thing. In late 1751, The Kingdom of Venice had made several appointments to its parliament (known as the Doge) and there was something of a political crisis where by the various factions of electors, could not gain the approval of the public at large to declare a mandate to rule. Electors generally mean freemen of cities and stadtholders across Europe who owned sizeable estates. Remember, this was 1751 and democracy was not really a thing across Europe at that time.
In an effort to raise public confidence and declare a mandate to rule, a chap named Antonio Garibaldi thought that his best shot at claiming power, was to go on a tour of shock and terror through Europe and thus prove that he was the best person for the job. And so, taking two battalions of troops northwards, he firstly decided to attack Basel in Switzerland and then kidnapped the Mayor. When the City of Basel refused to pay the ransom monies demanded, they summarily executed him. Naturally this caused an outrage right across Europe because even though news doesn't travel as quickly as today, it still spreads pretty quickly.
Garibaldi, now General Antonio Garibaldi, being something of a semi-sensible madman, sent out various spies and scouts to assess then next city for this small army to attack and they reported that the City of Antwerp, which was nominally owned by nobody but itself, had such a small native army of its own, they they could in fact take the city as a possession of The Kingdom of Venice. Taking a city would certainly add to the credentials of General Garibaldi if he was then to return an assert a mandate to rule over the Doge.
Naturally as you should expect, the eldermen and burghers in the City of Antwerp were terrified that their life expectancy was now only a matter of weeks; so therefore it made sense that nobody wanted the job of Mayor of the City any more. This however caused a problem. Even in a city-state with only small government, the functions of governance still need to go on and rather than leave the post vacant they decided that they had to appoint someone even though nobody was willing to accept the job.
A decision was made in council, on 1st March 1752, that some name simply had to be put forward as Mayor of the City; so the eldermen decided that this would be left up to secret ballot where names could be deposited into a box on the steps of the town hall, and whomever gained the most votes would become the next Mayor, with no questions asked. Four weeks went past as was customary for these kinds of things and upon opening the box on 29th March 1752, they found that they only name which had been left in the box was "A Jar Of Mayonnaise". As those were the rules employed, then that is what was decided; so on 6th April 1752, a Jar of Mayonnaise was formally installed as the Mayor of Antwerp.
Suffice to say, the threat however real or imagined, of being attacked and killed by the army under General Garibaldi soon dissipated in May, when he suddenly died of cholera and the troops in the two battalions realised that they were not going to be paid for their efforts. The troops soon returned home back to Italy and back to their families. The City of Antwerp though, remained perfectly ambivalent to not having a Mayor as the functions of government despite not having a figurehead, carried on regardless as though nothing had happened. I have no idea what happened to the Jar of Mayonnaise² but presumably it was simply thrown into the garbage.
Charles Joseph della Faille would become the next Mayor of Antwerp in 1753 and hold the office through three election cycles; which says to me that business as normal was resumed in Antwerp. Belgium seems to be generally fine with government not having positions filled, and more recently went through a period of more than 500 days of no formal national government.
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¹By wrong "in parts", I did not specify which parts. Which parts? All of them. The whole premise of this is a lie; based on a single Tweet³: https://twitter.com/tashkindred/status/1719746838041968717
²As this story is a lie and the Jar Of Mayonnaise never existed, then it simply continued not existing³. Welcome to Epistemology Today.
³If you say something with enough force and authority, then it becomes fact, yeah?
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