Brander contra Schiffbrücke: die Sperrung der Schelde und der Fall Antwerpens 1584/85 - auch ein Stück Quellen- und Literaturgeschichte

Abstract

This article is concerned with a means of naval combat which has been in use for thousands of years: Ships no longer fit for operation are filled with inflammable or explosive material and sent among enemy vessels in order to set them on fire and destroy them. The author begins with a look at the original seventeenth-, eighteenth- and twentieth-century definitions of this practice and touches on related strategies. The primary focus of the discussion is a case that became famous against the background of the Dutch revolution: The Italian engineer Frederico Giannibelli used burning ships against the pontoon bridge set up by the Spanish military and civilian commander Alessandro of Farnese to block the Scheldt during the 1584-85 siege of Antwerp, which at that time was a mercantile centre of global significance. The purpose of the impressively constructed bridge was to keep the city's inhabitants from receiving supplies from the downriver side, as well as to prevent sorties from the besieged city by ship and to help intercept possible relief attacks by Zeelandic river fleets. Although the attack by burning ship was at least partially successful and carried out repeatedly, the employment of this military means was finally rejected due to tactical/ logistic inadequacy on the part of the Dutch "rebels." Following further bloody battles, Antwerp was defeated and remained “Spanish,” today Belgian, i.e. not Dutch. In 1795 the great poet Friedrich von Schiller, who held a professorship of history at the University of Jena for a time, wrote a detailed history of the siege of Antwerp and with it Giannibelli's attempt to make tactical use of burning ships. This circumstance provides an occasion not only for the critical assessment of Schiller’s painstakingly evaluated (primarily secondary) sources, but also for the quotation of passages describing the technical details of pontoon bridges and burning ships in the literary form of the historical novel. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the English use of burning ships against the Spanish armada in 1588 off Calais - an incident also connected with the name Giannibelli - as well as a naval battle of 1600 on the Scheldt at Antwerp, in which a row galley (called the "black" row galley) participated. At the time of this naval action, Antwerp was already long "Spanish" and the rebels were the aggressors.