Citadel of Antwerp

The Duke of Alba became governor of the Spanish Netherlands in 1567, after the departure of Margaret of Parma, charged with putting down the iconoclasm of the year before. On arrival he began looking for ground for a fortress meant above all to smother any rising by the people of Antwerp. The Italian engineer Francesco Paciotto drew the plans, which were altered after his departure by his compatriot Bartolomeo Campi.

The result, raised between 1567 and 1572 at the southern end of the town wall, was a pentagon of five hectares with a broken-flanked bastion at each angle, named Hernando, Toledo, Paciotto, d'Albe and Le Duc, the whole ringed by a ditch. Inside stood barracks, powder magazines, bomb-proof shelters and a chapel. It has been described as "doubtlesse the most matchlesse piece of modern Fortification in the World" and as "one of the most studied urban installations of the sixteenth century".

In the Eighty Years' War the citadel served as the base from which the sack of Antwerp of 1576 — the Spanish Fury — was launched, under Sancho d'Ávila, then its commander. After the sack the citizens partly demolished the fortification. It was reconstructed following the fall of Antwerp in 1585. In Spanish the post of governor carried the title Castellano de Amberes, Castellan of Antwerp; Cristóbal de Mondragón held it from 1587 to 1596 and Íñigo de Borja from 1606 to 1622.

After the French conquest of September 1792 the republican general Francisco de Miranda had a liberty tree planted in place of the statue of the Duke of Alba, and the five bastions renamed: Albe, Du Duc, Hernando, Toledo and Paciotto became Dumouriez, Pétion, Mirabeau, Rousseau and Helvétius. The citadel saw action again at the close of the Napoleonic Wars, held by determined Bonapartists; the siege of Antwerp of 1814 ran on for a month after Napoleon's abdication. Under the United Kingdom of the Netherlands the works were folded into the Wellington Barrier raised against France, and the citadel quartered the 15th afdeeling.

During the Belgian Revolution the citadel was commanded by the Dutch general David Hendrik Chassé, who directed the 4th grand military command from it. When Belgian revolutionaries took the city on 27 October 1830 after heavy fighting, he withdrew into the fortress and, following a prolonged exchange of fire, agreed a ceasefire with the Belgian command which the Belgian volunteers did not observe. He then submitted to the orders of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, who directed him to bombard the city from the citadel, the Tête de Flandre fort and the flotilla on the Scheldt under Jan Evert Lewe van Aduard. The bombardment started a major fire, wrecked 230 houses and cost 85 lives. The citadel did not surrender, and Dutch forces held it through the first Belgian victories and through the recognition of Belgian independence by the powers meeting at the London conference.

Two years later France, allied to the new kingdom, sent an expeditionary corps under General Étienne Maurice Gérard, which opened the siege on 30 November 1832. Chassé surrendered on 24 December 1832 after heavy artillery bombardment. The citadel was one of the last classic forts to be taken by the tested siege method of opening a decisive breach in the walls.

Under the kingdom of Belgium the city was given a modern ring of fortifications between 1878 and 1885. The citadel had outlived its use, and its demolition was completed in 1881. The ground became a new quarter of the city, Het Zuid, in which the most prominent construction was the new building for the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp. The stones bearing the names of the five bastions were given by Belgium to the Netherlands and built into the monument raised at Ginneken in 1874 to the Dutch soldiers who died in the siege. Excavations in 2006 and 2012 uncovered foundations, wall bases and construction debris.