Rotterdam

A Dutch port at the mouth of the Rhine and a haven of the tolerant Dutch Republic, filling with Huguenot refugees after France revoked their protection. Pierre Bayle taught here from 1681 and wrote his Historical and Critical Dictionary: a vast engine of erudite doubt, and the book the Enlightenment kept on its desk. Erasmus, the city's other great name, watches from its statue.

Rotterdam was a working port on the Maas that filled with Huguenots after Louis XIV revoked their protection in 1685. Bayle was one of them. He taught there and produced the Historical and Critical Dictionary, a set of biographical articles whose enormous footnotes quietly dismantle the claims made above them. It became the most widely owned reference work of the eighteenth century, and Voltaire, Hume, and Diderot all mined it thoroughly.