Fort Rammekens
Ritthem, Netherlands

King Charles V (1500-1558), Holy Roman Emperor and an admitted Spaniard, wasn't big on religious tolerance. Many folks in his Netherlands wished to be Protestants, the punishment for which was to be burned at the stake. Why would the Spanish even want the Netherlands, which was (and still is) all the way on the other side of Europe? As a colonial power, Spain was more than happy to claim faraway places as its own, extracting what riches it could for the greater glory of God and/or whichever regal person was presently sitting on the throne, whom was usually named either Charles or Philip. And major Dutch ports such as Antwerp and Middelburg were lucrative enterprises indeed for those who were in charge.

In 1530, Mary (1505-1558), Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, was semi-forced by her brother, Charles V, into governorship of the Spanish Netherlands. Mary seems to have been an effective, if unwilling, governor...but most significantly for the purposes of this page, she ordered that a fort be built to control the Scheldt, the waterway that connects the North Sea to Middelburg and Antwerp, in 1547.

Fort Rammekens claims to be the oldest standing "seafort" in Western Europe. A quick squint at this site's Gallery page shows us that Pendennis Castle was built at the mouth of the River Fal on England's southernmost tip in 1539...and is still standing. I know, I know, Europe and the UK insist that the UK "isn't in Europe," but there are older seacoast forts in Europe (France's Chateau d'If, built in 1531, also springs to mind). Roll out the qualifiers, Rammekens!

Many Dutch persons reached a boiling point concerning Spain's rule over them by 1568: Open rebellion broke out that year, which initiated a conflict that would drag on for eighty years, which length of time lent itself to the war's name (which was the Eighty Years' War).

Our fort and Middelburg were garrisoned by the Spanish at the outset of the war. Surely the Spanish commander, Cristóbal de Mondragón, felt his defenses to be impregnable...but they turned out to be no match for the Water Beggars. Dutch Cavlinist nobles who had fled the Netherlands in a fleet of 25 ships, the Watergeuzen contributed to the war effort by operating as anti-Spanish pirates, undertaking a series of increasingly damaging raids on the shores of the Spanish Netherlands.

England leapt into the fray in 1585. Signing the Treaty of Nonsuch* with the Dutch rebels in August of that year, Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) committed 6400 foot soldiers and 1000 cavalry to the Dutch cause, with the immediate intention of lifting a Spanish siege of Antwerp. In return for the Queen's selfless generosity, She was given "collateral" in the form of the Dutch towns/ports of Brielle and Vlissingen, plus the smallish fortified burg of Ostend...and also Fort Rammekens!

England's meddling in the Spanish Netherlands proved to be the last straw for Spain, which sent its mighty Armada into the English Channel in the summer of 1588 by way of retribution. The Duke of Parma (1545-1592), Spain's unstoppable juggernaut in the Netherlands, was to lead an expedition intended to invade England and violently disenthrone Queen Elizabeth. Any British schoolkid could tell you the story of what happened next much better than I could, but suffice it to say that this dastardly Spanish plot was wildly unsuccessful.

The Eighty Years' War did eventually subside, with the Netherlands emerging as the Dutch Republic, independent of Spain. Established in 1602, the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) sailed 'round the globe, ultimately eclipsing the naval commercial endeavors of such nations as Portugal, England and Spain. For the last couple of decades of the 18th century, Fort Rammekens served as a hospital for sailors of the VOC who were in need of tendin' while their ships awaited favorable winds in nearby Antwerp.

At the end of the 18th century all of France went collectively nuts and killed itself...or more precisely it killed its king, Louis XVI (1754-1793), in January of 1793. In short order, the rest of Europe found itself embroiled in a series of wars that emenated from France and its sudden determination to rule the world, with Napoleon (1769-1821) leading the way. Republicans in the Netherlands thought what the French were doing was swell, and declared their own Batavian Republic in 1795: Stadtholder William V of Orange (1748-1806), who was king of the Netherlands but don't you dare call him a king, because he was stadtholder, was ejected from the continent and fled to England. Napoleon plopped his younger brother, Louis Bonaparte (1778-1846) into the Kingdom of Holland as its king in 1806. Given this turn of events, Great Britain logically concluded that sooner or later Antwerp would be used by the French as a naval base, which it would be best to prevent: Napoleon's dearest wish was to cross the English Channel in force and subdue the pesky British once and for all, and the huge harbor at Antwerp could potentially be used as a French naval staging area. In order to forestall such an endeavor, the British landed on the Dutch island of Walcheren on July 30, 1809. Walcheren is the name of the landmass where Middelburg and Fort Rammekens happen to reside: It doesn't look much like an island today, but we are assured that, in 1809, it was a particularly marshy, inhospitable island.

Middelburg, one of the cities that Fort Rammekens was built to protect, was and is a pretty darned interesting place too: Here we see it in 1567 and today. Middelburg lies 37 miles northwest of Antwerp, and I think we'll all agree that the city has done an excellent job of keeping its moat nice and tidy for 450 years!

Prior to their amphibious landing, British Intelligence learned that French troops recently stationed on Walcheren had found it virtually impossible to not catch malaria and die...and, sure enough, British troops on the Walcheren Campaign were immediately beset by the same disease. This campaign was a dismal failure, in that it failed to knock the French out of Antwerp, and of the 39,000 troops that landed on Walcheren in July, nearly 4,000 died of malaria (a grand total of 106 British troops died in actual battle during the campaign), and when the British finally pulled out in December, they did so dragging another 12,000 dreadfully sick soldiers back home, many of whom never fully recovered.

Napoleon was surely chuffed by this British failure, but he realized that sooner or later somebody in England would just check Wikipedia and learn how to effectively combat malaria (murder all mosquitoes), and set his eye firmly on The Starfort of Our Current Interest. Somehow our fort had avoided action during the Walcheren Campaign, but if the British were to make another attempt on Antwerp, they would have to deal with a Frenchily upgraded Fort Rammekens.

Once Napoleon was put back in his box for good in 1815, the Congress of Vienna was charged with piecing back together the Europe that the Tiny Tyrant had so effectively broken. Results varied, but in the case of the Netherlands, the Congress joined the northern and southern portions together as one nation, displeasing those in the south, which had been culturally separated from the north since 1581. Rebellion ensued, and Belgium was established as a separate country in 1830.

The Germans of this age were a nasty bunch indeed, but they did generally appreciate a good starfort, and Fort Rammekens was integrated into their Atlantic Wall. This was a system of fortifications intended to keep non-Europeans, such as the English or (heaven forbid) the Americans, from intruding on their happy continental swastika party. The Germans did their part for Fort Rammekens by adding two batteries of the Tobruk variety, and a searchlight, to the fort's terreplein. A Tobruk was a two-man stutzpunkt that usually mounted a machine gun...which type of fortification got its name from the Libyan city of Tobruk, where the Italians first built this pillbox design.

Much of the historically marshy and unhealthy island of Walcheren had been "reclaimed" since so many British soldiers had caught diseases thereupon in the previous century, of which solidity the Germans took advantage by installing several artillery pieces, effectively preventing an Allied seaborne approach to Antwerp.

Britain's Royal Air Force bombed the dike to the east of Fort Rammekens in October of 1944, hoping to reflood Walcheren and wipe out those German positions. The Germans were at the very least extremely inconvenienced by the resulting flood, which unfortunately also did away with the French crownwork. A series of amphibious landings by Canadian and British troops at the end of the month finished the job that the flood had started: Surely, before proceeding on their assigned mission, those troops observed a moment of silence in memory of the crownwork.

*1992's Nonsuch is my third-favorite album by English power pop band XTC.