Qualla: Siege of Saint-Omer

Siege of Saint-Omer: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Snayers, Public domain. Marechal de Chatillon had a thousand Spanish defenders to his front and a kingdom's hopes on his shoulders. He had promised Louis XIII that he would take Saint-Omer, the great fortified town that anchored the Spanish Netherlands' western frontier, and on 24 May 1638 his army closed in. The garrison was preposterously small - barely 1,300 men in a town that needed three times that to hold its walls. The siege should have ended in three weeks. Instead it lasted fifty-three days, ground through nighttime artillery assaults in the rain, the suspected betrayal of townspeople, the death of an Imperial general from his wounds in a captured fort, and finally a Spanish relief operation that came up through the marshes of the Aa and broke the French siege from inside its own lines. When Chatillon left on 16 July, he left burning bridges, abandoned supplies, and a career in ruins.

Read more: Siege of Saint-Omer on Qualla

Image: Peter Snayers | Public domain

Siege of Saint-Omer: The Frontier of Two Empires

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit anonymous, Public domain. By 1638 the Thirty Years' War had ground on for two decades and France had finally joined openly, fighting Spain along the long northern frontier of Flanders and Artois. Saint-Omer was a Spanish town - it had been Habsburg since the sixteenth century - and it sat on the road from...

Read more: Siege of Saint-Omer on Qualla

Image: anonymous | Public domain

Siege of Saint-Omer: A War Fought in a Marsh

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthäus Merian, Public domain. Saint-Omer is surrounded by marshes - the Audomarois - and any seventeenth-century siege of the town meant fighting in water. Chatillon cut the canals, captured the small forts that ringed the marshes, and built his own forts to seal them up. The Spanish defenders were a polyglot...

Read more: Siege of Saint-Omer on Qualla

Image: Matthäus Merian | Public domain

Siege of Saint-Omer: The Rain and the Storm

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bierologue59, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 2 July a Spanish sortie under Captain Rodrigo de Rojas tried to assault the French works and ran straight into the Scottish Regiment of Colonel Lord James Douglas - one more reminder of how many nations were tangled together on this small piece of ground. Days later, with rain...

Read more: Siege of Saint-Omer on Qualla

Image: Bierologue59 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Siege of Saint-Omer: Surrender of Fort Bacq

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Diego Velázquez, Public domain. By 16 July the French were holding only the great Fort Bacq on the southern side of the siege ring, and it was defended by two thousand men under the Sieur de Manican. Piccolomini's troops rejected three assaults. On the fourth, as the Spanish tercios were leaping into the moat w...

Read more: Siege of Saint-Omer on Qualla

Image: Diego Velázquez | Public domain