In 1628 seven great sieges changed the course of european history. In the Netherlands, a city referred to as the “Dutch swamp dragon” refused to surrender despite an enormous engineering effort to divert the entire river system around it with newly built windmills. In France, the city of la Rochelle was blockaded by a massive sea dam fortified with artillery and sunken ships. In Italy, the city of Mantua held out on an Island for months by destroying a river blockade with an explosive raft, while the plague was ravaging the population. In Casale, the updated defenses of the city and the plague proved one of the greatest and eventually fatal of tests for the famous Ambrogio Spinola. In Germany, a Scotsman in Swedish service defiantly defended Stralsund and its protestant inhabitants against hailstorm-like bombardment and waves of assaults by the catholic imperial commander Albrecht von Wallenstein. In Magdeburg the plan of financing an imperial fleet in the Baltic fell through – and in Poland, the young Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus went toe to toe with the winged hussars outside his blockade of Gdansk. In this video, we investigate these 7 sieges in a somewhat unusual way. Normally, historians treat each of these events separately one at the time. But to explain properly how they were linked and how this influenced the Thirty Years’ War, we present them chronologically, jumping back and forth between different sieges while following the course of events in Europe.
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