BIG BANGS

Fall of Antwerp

During the fall of Antwerp, which started in the summer of 1584 and lasted until August the following year, Spanish army troops invading what was then the largest and richest city in the Netherlands built a bridge across the Scheldt River in hopes of creating a blockade that would both cut off the city’s access to the sea and deny Dutch rebels convenient means of reaching their strongholds to the north. The bridge was designed by military engineers working under Alejandro Farnesio, the Roman-born governor of the Spanish Netherlands and a celebrated military strategist. Farnesio’s bridge—el Puente Farnesio—linked the provinces of Brabant and Flanders across nearly a half mile of deep and turbulent water and boasted armed forts on each shoreline. Beyond its piers in the river’s middle were 32 interconnected, four-yard-wide wooden pontoons, all secured to the river bottom and topped with long metal-tipped spears to ward off attackers. To further bolster their defenses, the Spaniards flanked the piers near both riverbanks with 20 boats, each with soldiers and artillery to protect the novel bridge from saboteurs.

The explosion created a veritable tidal wave in the river, killing 800 Spaniards.

The Dutch rebels, determined to break the Scheldt River blockade, adopted a plan proposed by Federigo Giambelli, a well-regarded Italian military engineer living in Antwerp, to float ships packed with explosives and projectiles down the river and detonate them with delayed-action fuzes. On the night and the , whose pilots steered their booby-trapped vessels toward the bridge before escaping through the darkness in smaller craft. The came aground on the west side of the river, and a paltry explosion followed. But the came to rest beside the bridge as intended, and not long after inquisitive Spanish soldiers climbed aboard to inspect it, a timer crafted by a local watchmaker detonated the ’s well-concealed payload. The explosion that followed, which created a veritable tidal wave in the Scheldt and reverberated 20 miles away, killed 800 Spaniards and heavily damaged a section of the bridge. But the Spaniards repaired the engineering marvel within days and took steps to preclude another such attack. Four months later, Antwerp surrendered to its Spanish occupiers.