The Spanish, under Spinola’s able leadership, have…
September 1604 CE
The Spanish, under Spinola’s able leadership, have torn Ostend's outer defenses from the exhausted Dutch and put what remains of the city under the muzzles of their guns, compelling the Dutch to surrender on September 22, 1604.
By this point the Spanish have lost almost sixty thousand men in the blasted trenches and dugouts surrounding the ruined city.
The siege has taken three years and eighty days.
Described as a "long carnival of death", with on both sides combined more than eighty thousand dead or wounded, the ruin and devastation of the siege leads to negotiations that are to produce a Twelve-Year Truce (1609-1621) between Spain and the United Provinces.
The years since the Battle of Nieuwpoort have shown an apparent stalemate.
Meanwhile the stadtholders have mopped up some more Spanish fortresses, like Grave in Brabant and Sluys and Aardenburg in what is to become States Flanders.
Though these victories have deprived the Archdukes of much of the propaganda value of their own victory at Ostend, the loss of the city is a severe blow to the Republic, and it brings about another Protestant exodus to the North.
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