Siege of Ostend

The Spanish struggle to wrest the port of Ostend, the last Protestant settlement in Flanders, from the hands of the Dutch lasted more than three years, from July 1601 to September 1604. It was the bloodiest battle of the Eighty Years’ War. Such was its length and violence that the Siege of Ostend became known as the “New Troy.”

After the Battle of Nieuwpoort, the rulers of the Spanish Netherlands turned their attention to capturing the last Dutch enclave in Flanders. On 15 July 1601, a Spanish army of 20,000, nominally commanded by Archduke Albert VII of Austria, the son-in-law of the late Spanish king Philip II, laid siege to Ostend. The city’s garrison numbered 3,500, commanded by the English general Francis Vere.

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By winter 1601, sickness and death had considerably weakened the defenders. To stall an imminent Spanish attack and give time for reinforcements to arrive by sea, Vere called for a parley with Albert. The ruse worked and allowed time for 1,200 men to land. When the Spanish launched an all-out assault on 7 January 1602, they were driven back and suffered 1,000 casualties after miscalculating the tides.

The defenders came to call Ostend “Krijgsuniversiteit,” the university of war, a theater for learning and applying every sort of survival skill—and where two doctors alone, it is said, amputated at least 1,700 limbs. Even so, by March 1602, the Anglo-Dutch garrison had risen to 7,000, regular supplies were getting through, and Ostend’s resolve seemed unshakable. Hope came for the Spanish in the form of the Italian general Ambrogio Spinola, who arrived in the Low Countries with an army of 9,000. The wealthy son of Genoese bankers, Spinola offered to finance the siege in return for command of the armies, and did so in September 1602.

Spinola’s Italian engineers used mines to destroy Ostend’s defenses, and the defenders were driven back slowly but surely in bloody skirmishes in trenches around the city. Since the rebel forces of the United Provinces had made significant strategic gains elsewhere in the Spanish Netherlands, Maurice of Nassau, their commander, declared that Ostend should make no further sacrifices. The city, much of it in ruins, finally surrendered on September 22, 1604. Spinola entered Ostend in triumph, allowing its defenders to leave unharmed and with full military honors.

Losses: Spanish, 60,000 dead; Anglo-Dutch, 30,000 dead.

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