#daniel vertangen

i’m moving across the country, so things are a little wild right now

here’s ma face(s): 

Attributed to Daniel Vertangen - Cimon and Iphigenia - 1598

Daniel Vertangen - The assault of Copenhagen on the night between 10 and 11 February 1659 - 1659

The assault on Copenhagen on 11 February 1659 was a major battle during the Second Northern War, taking place during the siege of Copenhagen by the Swedish army.

During the Northern Wars, the Swedish army under Charles X Gustav of Sweden, after invading the Danish mainland of Jutland, swiftly crossed the frozen straits and occupied most of the Danish island of Zealand, with the invasion beginning on February 11, 1658. This forced the Danes to sue for peace. A preliminary treaty, the Treaty of Taastrup, was signed on February 18, 1658 with the final treaty, the Treaty of Roskilde, signed on February 26, 1658, granting Sweden major territorial gains.

The Swedish king, however, was not content with his stunning victory, and at the Privy Council held at Gottorp on July 7, Charles X Gustav resolved to wipe his inconvenient rival from the map of Europe. Without any warning, in defiance of international treaty, he ordered his troops to attack Denmark-Norway a second time.

The Swedish armies had never left Denmark after the peace and already occupied all of Denmark apart from the capital, Copenhagen. After a failed assault, Copenhagen was put under siege in the hope of breaking the defense by starvation. In October 1658 however a Dutch relief fleet under Lieutenant-Admiral Jacob van Wassenaer Obdam defeated the Swedish fleet in the Battle of the Sound and lifted the sea blockade so that supplies and an auxiliary army could reach the capital. The Dutch were an ally of Denmark from the Anglo-Dutch Wars and were afraid that Swedish control of the Baltic would ruin their profitable trade in this area.

The Swedes started the action by making a diversionary attack at Christianshavn and Slotsholmen at the evening on 9 February. They were repulsed, and the Swedes left one of their assault bridges behind, which the Danes captured and measured. They found that the Swedish assault bridges were 36 feet long, and thus they realised that they could render these bridges useless by making the ice free parts of the moats wider than that.

The main assaults were made against Christianshavn and Vestervold, but the chopped-up ice and the massed weaponry on the wall made the densely packed attackers pay a horrific toll in lives. Still, they fought their way to the top of the wall, and fierce hand-to-hand fighting broke out.

When the Swedes realised that the assaults on the Western part of the wall were in trouble, the choice was made to make a supporting attack at Østerport. The Swedes got very close to Nyboder and were in the process of crossing the moat, when they fell victim to a well-conducted ambush, and they withdrew with heavy losses.

At about five in the morning the Swedes gave up and retreated. They had taken severe losses. Before the walls 600 bodies were counted, and many more had perished in the ice-cold water and were never found. On top of that there were many wounded. The Danes had only suffered about 14 dead.

The Dutch in the spring of 1659 sent a second fleet and army under Vice-Admiral De Ruyter to further reinforce the city and cut the Swedish supply lines so that the siege would have to be lifted altogether. After Nyborg had been taken by a Dutch-Danish force, the Danish Isles were abandoned by the Swedes. Negotiations were opened and the Treaty of Copenhagen was signed on May 27, 1660, and it marked the conclusion of the Second Northern War between Sweden and the alliance of Denmark and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In conjunction with the Treaty of Roskilde, it ended a generation of warfare and established the present-day borders of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

Daniel Vertangen - Double portrait of Jan Valckenburgh and of Dina Lems, Valckeburgh's wife - ca. 1660

Jan Valckenburgh (1623 – 8 July 1667) was a civil servant of the Dutch West India Company. Valckenburgh began as a simple assistant-trader, but managed to make career up to one of the highest ranks, that of Director-General of the Dutch Gold Coast, twice.

Valckenburgh became a commissioner in food supplies in Luanda in 1643 and returned to Amsterdam in 1649, after the recapture of Luanda by the Portuguese. It is likely that he married the same year to Dina Lems from Flushing, a daughter of former Governor of Dutch Brazil and later Luanda, Adriaen Lems.

During his leave in Amsterdam between 1659 and 1662, Valckenburgh commissioned a portrait of himself and his wife with the painter Daniel Vertangen. In 2002 it was considered the only painting of a Director-General of the Gold Goast in service of the Dutch West India Company, but a portrait of Director-General Jan Pranger has been identified since as well. He is painted with a black house slave and with Fort George on the background.

Both portraits were bought by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2002.