Johan van Valckenburgh

Johan (Jan) van Valckenburgh (* around 1575; † 1625 in Voorburg, today Leidschendam-Voorburg ) was a Dutch engineer who was best known for building fortifications .

In 1606 he became an engineer in the service of the Dutch Prince Moritz of Orange, like the fortress builder Johan van Rijswijck before him . He delivered his first major job as an independent engineer in the Hanseatic city of Lüneburg . He designed 10 important fortresses , including the Hamburg ramparts (from 1616), the Bremen ramparts , the Lübeck bastionary fortifications (from 1613), the Rostock city fortifications in 1624 and the Emder Wall . The Hanseatic cities coordinated their respective fortresses at least temporarily through the military commander in chief, Colonel Friedrich Graf zu Solms-Rödelheim, who was jointly commissioned by them . Johan van Valckenburgh's activity was not limited to northern Germany, among other things, he was also responsible for the conversion and expansion of the medieval Ulm city ​​fortifications into an early modern bastionary fortification (1617–1619).

Memorial plaque to the construction of the Hamburg ramparts, erected by the Patriotic Society

The Eighty Years War between Spain and its breakaway province, the Netherlands, had flared up again after years of truce. Johan van Valckenburgh was killed in action against the Spaniards in Voorburg near The Hague in 1625 . In Hamburg's Planten un Blomen in the Hamburg ramparts , a Johan van Valckenburgh bridge commemorates him. In the Huckelriede district of Bremer Neustadt you will find Valckenburghstraße and in Ulm , in a version of the name without an h, the Valckenburg school and a footpath and cycle path along the Danube called Valckenburgufer.

literature

• Jürgen Soenke: Johan van Rijswijck and Johan van Valckenburgh - The fortification of German cities and residences 1600-1625 by Dutch engineer officers . Announcements of the Minden History Society, year 46 (1974), pp. 9–39.
• Karl-Klaus Weber: Johan van Valckenburgh. The work of the Dutch fortress builder in Germany 1609–1625 . Böhlau, Cologne a. a. 1995, ISBN 3-412-04495-4 (also dissertation from the University of Hamburg, 1993). Bernd Kappelhoff wrote a review ("successful overall picture of Valkenburg's [sic] work") and an extensive addendum to the Emden ramparts : Johann von Valkenburg, the expansion of the city of Emden and its fortifications around 1600 and the role of the Netherlands in it. Comments on a new release. In: Emder yearbook for historical regional studies of East Frisia. 75 (1995). Pp. 127-156.
• Karl-Klaus Weber: Hamburg, the impregnable city: Johan van Valckenburgh's fortifications. In: Martin Knauer, Sven Tode (ed.): The war at the gates. Hamburg in the Thirty Years War 1618–1648 . Hamburg 2000, pp. 77-100, ISBN 3-923356-93-5 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Johan van Valckenburgh in the catalog of the German National Library