Appingedam in 1536: Een zeldzame gravure van het beleg van ‘den Dam’ door Georg Schenck van Toutenburg

A rare, unstudied engraving preserved at the British Museum in London is here identified as a depiction of the siege of Appingedam (also called Dam or Damme), a small town in the north of the Netherlands, between Groningen and Delfzijl, in 1536. Occupied by troops fighting on behalf of Charles of Egmond, Duke of Guelders, the town was besieged in the summer of 1536 by Habsburg troops under the command of Georg Schenck von Tautenburg, who was stadtholder of Frisia in the service of Emperor Charles V. This is the only known impression of the print, which until now was wrongly catalogued as a plan of Delfzijl. It is one of the oldest topographical siege prints from the Low Countries. No more than a handful of similar prints from before 1550 are known, and those are all woodcuts, not copper engravings. Hence this print is a unique visual source not only for the history of Appingedam and the Guelders Wars, but also for the early development of urban cartography.
Remarkably, the printed image is left-right reversed, a consequence of the printing process. Apart from that it offers a fairly accurate topographical view from the north of the besieged town, as is shown by comparison with Jacob van Deventer’s later town plan of Appingedam (c. 1568). Among the main buildings one recognizes the Nikolaïkerk (Nicholas church) and the Augustinian monastery, as well as the town’s earthen ramparts, which after the 1536 siege were demolished and hence are absent on Van Deventer’s plan. The besieger’s troops are installed in four camps, protected by field fortifications that completely encircle the town. Their guns are firing upon the town’s defences from the north side, shown in the foreground. Inscriptions identify the main army commanders, including Schenck and three members of the Frisian family Van Burmania. Schenck captured Appingedam on 6 September 1536, a few months after the town had been taken by Meindert van Ham, a commander in the service of the Duke of Guelders. This led to the Treaty of Grave (10 December 1536), which recognized Charles V as lord of Groningen, the Ommelanden and Drenthe. The engraving is signed by an unknown monogrammist IB (or HB). As a tentative hypothesis I suggest that it is perhaps an early work of the cartographic engraver Jacob Bos.