Qualla: Liauckamastate

Liauckamastate: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Taks, Public domain. What you see when you arrive is a gate without a castle. The brick gatehouse has a keystone dated 1604, a tiled saddle roof, two gables, and pilasters on top - a small, formal entrance into nothing in particular. Beyond it, where one of Friesland's largest country houses once stood with thirty soldiers on permanent duty, there is a windbreak of trees, a moat, a 19th-century farmhouse, and a day laborer's cottage. The castle was demolished in 1824. Its foundations are still there, filled in with rubble and earth. The well in the front garden is supposedly the original well. Five centuries of Liauckama family power lie quietly under the lawn, and the gate to a vanished house remains a monument in its own right.

Read more: Liauckamastate on Qualla

Image: Taks | Public domain

Liauckamastate: A Crusade, Or So They Said

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nicolaas Wieringa, Public domain. The family liked their origin myth. A sixteenth-century historiography traced the Liauckamas back to two cousins, Eelko and Sicko, who supposedly rode east with the First Crusade in 1096, were knighted after the conquest of Jerusalem, and lost Sicko at the siege of Nicaea the fol...

Read more: Liauckamastate on Qualla

Image: Nicolaas Wieringa | Public domain

Liauckamastate: Vetkopers and Pitchforks

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ziko, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. The Liauckamas chose sides early in the Frisian civil wars. Schelte Liauckema, the family's first historically documented head, allied himself with Albert I, Duke of Bavaria, and the Vetkoper faction. The duke rewarded him with the feudal administration of seven villages - Pieter...

Read more: Liauckamastate on Qualla

Image: Ziko | CC BY-SA 3.0 nl

Liauckamastate: Local Power, In Detail

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wybrand de Geest, Public domain. By 1500, the family controlled most of Sexbierum in a way that the modern word lordship doesn't quite capture. They ran the poor relief - deciding who ate during bad winters. They controlled water management, which on a coast this flat is the difference between fields and tidal f...

Read more: Liauckamastate on Qualla

Image: Wybrand de Geest | Public domain

Liauckamastate: The Last Heir

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wybrand de Geest, Public domain. The Liauckama name itself ran out in 1670 when Sophia Anna van Pipenpoy died childless. The estate passed to a nephew, Alexander Josephus van der Laen, and then through a series of inheritances that grew more international and more distant from Sexbierum with each generation - a ...

Read more: Liauckamastate on Qualla

Image: Wybrand de Geest | Public domain

Liauckamastate: What Survives

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A. J. van der Wal, CC BY-SA 4.0. The site became a vegetable garden, neatly fitted between the old moats. A farm went up. In 1860 the notary Jacob Wiebes Hanekuyk bought it, tore down the dilapidated farm, and built a new one slightly farther from the moat, so he could keep the old one as a summer house alongsid...

Read more: Liauckamastate on Qualla

Image: A. J. van der Wal | CC BY-SA 4.0