The cathedral's story begins with a parish dispute. In the 10th century a community of twelve secular canons attached to a church dedicated to Saint Michael in what is now the Sint Michielsstraat had drifted toward beliefs the Roman Catholic hierarchy disliked. The Bishop of Cambrai sent Norbert of Xanten to bring them back in line. In 1124 Norbert succeeded in convincing four of them to found a Premonstratensian abbey on the spot - the future St. Michael's Abbey. The other eight preferred their freedom and moved out, taking up a small chapel dedicated to Our Lady, the Virgin Mary, sited between the Saint Michael residential area and the older settlement clustered around Het Steen. That chapel, expanded into a Romanesque church with a cloverleaf eastern apse forty-two meters across, eventually outgrew itself. By 1294 a novum opus extension was already drifting toward the new Gothic style. In 1352 the builders started over.

On the night of 5-6 October 1533, the new church caught fire. Mayor Lancelot II of Ursel coordinated the rescue and is credited with saving the building, though fifty-seven altars went up in flames and Lancelot himself was badly injured. The Italian chronicler Francesco Guicciardini recorded that he survived. The fire delayed and finally killed the project to complete the south tower. Worse came in 1566. On 20 August, during the Iconoclasm that opened the Eighty Years War - the Beeldenstorm, the breaking of images - Protestants stripped the cathedral's interior. The Welsh Protestant merchant Richard Clough was inside that day and described it: the place looked like a hell, with above ten thousand torches burning, and such a noise as if heaven and earth had got together, with falling of images and beating down of costly works. He claimed he could not have written what he saw in ten sheets of paper. Organs and all destroyed, he ended. When Antwerp came under Protestant administration in 1581, more treasures were sold or removed; with the Spanish recapture of the city in 1585 Catholic authority was restored. Then in 1794 the French revolutionaries arrived and plundered the cathedral again. Six years later Napoleon's Concordat of 1801 stripped it of its cathedral status entirely. It would not regain the title until 1961.

What survived all of that, or returned to the building afterward, is extraordinary. Four major Peter Paul Rubens canvases hang here: The Raising of the Cross, The Descent from the Cross, The Resurrection of Christ, and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Two of them - the Raising and the Descent - were confiscated by Napoleon and shipped to France in the 1790s. Both came home in the 19th century. The Raising had not even been painted for the cathedral originally; it had been the altarpiece of nearby Saint Walburga's church. The cathedral also holds the bronze effigy from the Tomb of Isabella of Bourbon, the wife of Charles the Bold. The list of musicians who worked under the cathedral's roof reads like a survey of European keyboard music: Henry Bredemers, who left in 1501 to teach Philip the Handsome's children; the English composer John Bull, who held the organist post from 1615 to 1628 after fleeing his home country to escape prosecution; Willem de Fesch in the 1720s; Joseph-Hector Fiocco in the 1730s.

The single finished tower remains the tallest church spire in the Benelux at 123 meters. The largest bell takes sixteen ringers to swing. The west portal carries statues that include the missionary Saint Willibrord, who is believed to have spent time in Antwerp in the 7th century. The belfry was included in the Belfries of Belgium and France inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, recognition of the civic role that Flemish bell towers played in medieval life. Charles V was right, in his way - even now, walking through the narrow streets of the old town, the spire keeps appearing between buildings, sliding into view and back out, a piece of carved openwork that almost does look like it should be kept under glass.