The Waal was running high on the night of 10 August 1589. Heavy summer rains had pushed the river past its normal August stage, closer to spring flood than to the lazy late-summer flow Maarten Schenck van Nydeggen had counted on. He had 20 barges and roughly 200 soldiers, a clever plan involving open windows and scaling hooks, and a reputation for brutality that preceded him into every town he approached. By morning Schenck was dead in the river, his men were scattered, and the people of Nijmegen were telling and retelling the story of a mercenary defeated by a wedding party. It was the second-to-last action of the Cologne War.
Nijmegen sits where the Waal and Rhine come close to one another, at the inland gateway between the Dutch provinces and the German Electorate of Cologne. Whoever held it controlled river traffic on two of northern Europe's main commercial arteries and the only easy land approach to Friesland from the south. By 1588 the Cologne War - touched off in 1582 when the Archbishop-Elector Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg converted to Calvinism, married Agnes von Mansfeld-Eisleben, and tried to declare religious parity in his electorate - had ground down most of his territory. Only Rheinberg remained outside the Spanish grasp. Securing Nijmegen for the rebellious Dutch provinces, fortifying and provisioning it for the inevitable Spanish siege under Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, was Schenck's task. He had defeated seven companies of foot marching to reinforce Francisco Verdugo earlier that year. He thought a night raid on Nijmegen would be the next step. He thought he could surprise the city.
Schenck's scheme had the kind of theatrical simplicity that works in stories and rarely in practice. Twenty barges of soldiers would drift quietly down the Waal in the dark. A small advance team would find a house with its windows open, climb in using scaling hooks and ropes, secure the building, then move to the nearest city gate and open it from inside. The waiting force on the river landing would pour in, overpower the small local garrison and any citizens foolish enough to resist, and have the town secured by dawn. There would be plunder. There would be a fortified bridgehead for the larger war. The plan depended on three things: the current cooperating, the chosen house being asleep, and the citizens of Nijmegen being too frightened or disorganized to fight back. None of the three held.
The house Schenck picked happened to belong to a man hosting a wedding. The windows were open because of summer heat, the guests were awake, many were armed - this was a frontier town in wartime, and people did not go to evening gatherings unarmed - and the celebration was in full voice when strangers came through the windows on grappling hooks. The party-goers raised the alarm and fought back. They drove Schenck and his small advance team back through the house room by room, back to the windows they had climbed in through, back out into the dark. By the time the soldiers reached the entry points the river had shifted the barges away from the walls. Men jumped for the gunwales and missed. The current took them. The wedding guests stood at the windows above, yelling and firing into the dark.
Meanwhile the rest of the barges - the ones carrying more than half of Schenck's men - had failed to make the landing at all. The strong Waal current had swept them past both the chosen entry point and the gate they were supposed to attack. Their crews struggled to bring them back, and as they did the alarm spread through the city. More citizens came out, this time to defend Nijmegen against the new group of marauders trying to land downstream. Schenck's force was now split, beset on all sides, and being pushed back into the river. Soldiers tried to push the barges out and pull comrades aboard, but the darkness and the current and the arrows and small-arms fire from the bank made it almost impossible work. In the end men gave up on the ropes and grappling hooks entirely and simply jumped into the Waal, hoping to swim to a barge. Many drowned. Maarten Schenck van Nydeggen drowned with them. His body was recovered later. The night raid had cost him his life and his army, and Nijmegen had not even lost a section of wall.
Schenck had built his career on raw fear. In Westphalia, in Neuss, in Bonn, in Godesburg, he and his men had done such damage that the political cause they nominally served - the Calvinist Elector of Cologne's claim to his see - was poisoned by association. Allies dreaded his arrival almost as much as enemies did. His death in the Waal was a blow to the military cause of Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg, but it was a relief for the cause's reputation. Two years later, on 21 October 1591, Nijmegen was finally taken by a Dutch and English force under Maurice of Nassau. By then the wedding party was a piece of local legend - the night the mercenary came through the window and the celebrating citizens, drunk and armed and possibly singing, threw him back into a river that finished what they had started. The city would face many sieges over the following centuries. This was not one of them.
Nijmegen sits at 51.84 N, 5.85 E on the south bank of the Waal river - the coordinates with this article are slightly south of the historic city center. From cruise altitude the strategic geography is obvious: the Waal sweeps east-to-west in a wide arc just below the city, the Rhine runs roughly parallel a few kilometers north, and on a clear day you can see the German border 12 km east. Eindhoven Airport (EHEH) lies 30 nm south-southwest; Dusseldorf (EDDL) 40 nm east-southeast. The hills south of the city are unusually pronounced for the Netherlands - the only true relief in the Low Countries' otherwise flat delta landscape.