The 1673 conquest of the strongest fortress of the Dutch Republic, Maastricht, in a mere thirteen days, was one of the great triumphs of the French King Louis XIV. It was also the first widely resounding feat of arms of his “ingénieur ordinaire”, Sébastien le Prestre, Marquis de Vauban, who planned the strategies of the siege, and whose later works on warfare, in particular on fortification, would remain relevant to the arts of war at least until the late 19th century. Immediately after the surrender of the town, the King commissioned Vauban to prepare a large, detailed map documenting the entire siege, showing not only the attacks, but also the encirclement and encampments of the French armies.

This long-neglected map, preserved in the French military archives, the Service Historique de la Défense at the Château de Vincennes, has recently been restored. The lecture will present this and another manuscript map documenting the siege, relate it to Vauban’s Abrégé aphabétique – the unpublished brief journal of the major events of the siege he wrote to accompany his map – and attempt to define its functions.

Dr. Dirk Jacob Jansen war von 2015 bis 2022 Mitarbeiter am Forschungszentrum Gotha im DFG-Projekt Jacopo Stradas Magnum ac Novum Opus. Ein numismatischer Corpus des 16. Jahrhunderts, zusammen mit Dr. Volker Heenes. Seine Forschungsgebiete umfassen Höfisches Mäzenat, Samm-lungsgeschichte, Antiquarianismus und Architekturgeschichte der Renaissance. Als Bibliothekar und Kurator am Centre Céramique / Stadsbibliotheek Maastricht war er verantwortlich für die Ausstellung zur Belagerung der Stadt durch Ludwig XIV. im Jahr 1673 (D’Artagnan: Gevallen vóór Maastricht, 2003), worauf sich der hier angekündigte Vortrag bezieht. Seine Publikationen umfassen u.a. Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at The Imperial Court: The Antique as Innovation (2019) und, zusammen mit Dr. Volker Heenes, Jacopo Strada’s Magnum ac Novum Opus: A Sixteenth-Century Corpus of ancient Numismatics (2022).