ARX Occasional Papers 5 - On the Study of Military Architecture

On the Study of Military Architecture The significance of military architecture, why it deserves to be studied and how

By Dr. Stephen C. Spiteri Ph.D.

ARX OCCASIONAL PAPERS ISSUE 5 / 2015

ARX

ARX Occasional Papers - ISSUE 5/ 2015

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ARX Occasional Papers ISSUE 5 / 2015

On the Study of Military Architecture Part 1: The significance of military architecture, why it deserves to be studied and how

By Dr. Stephen C. Spiteri Ph.D.

Introduction

There is no denying the fact that interest in historical castles and fortifications has increased significantly in recent years. A cursory search on the internet is enough to reveal the myriad of papers, articles, books and dedicated journals that are published each year on this subject and the extensive number of websites and organizations that have sprung up all around the world to promote the conservation, restoration, and interpretation of historic forts and fortifications. The last few decades have also seen hundreds of defensive works being restored and opened up to the public across the world, attracting an ever-increasing and discerning class of visitors intent on experiencing and exploring these intriguing monuments from the past.

But what, cynics may ask, is this attention really all about? What is it about these barren walls, huge piles of stones, and the bleak masses of sterile concrete, that excites the imagination? What makes these buildings, often devoid of any high architectural or artistic merit and usually surviving as abandoned wrecks, so special?

As someone who has dedicated a large chunk of his adult life studying fortifications, I often find myself provoked to come up with an explanation of sorts for this phenomenon. Admittedly, it is not an easy question to answer but I have found along the way that there are basically five main common reasons underpinning popular interest in the subject.

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The first, and most common allure of historic fortifications, I believe, is fuelled by that same universal fascination (some may even say a ‘morbid’ fascination) that many people find in warfare and ‘militarism’. For fortresses were, first and foremost, weapons of war and, as such, leading protagonists in the many sieges and battles that punctuate so emphatically the pages of history. They come across in our collective imagination not as neutral monuments or structures but as conjurers of potent images of a violent and heroic past, fully equipped with their deadly arsenals of guns and weapons, and defended by valiant garrisons. Witness how, for example, visitors to historical forts and castles tend to gravitate around the guns and armaments mounted on the ramparts or else disappear deep

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inside cavernous dungeons in search of the thrill engendered by the mystery of dark stories of torture and executions. As a matter of fact, a whole new industry of what Clay Calvert calls ‘reconstruction voyeurism’,1 otherwise known as historical reenactment, has evolved around many a castle, fortress, or tower in a bid to exploit this very craving for the ‘thrill of battle’ and that sense of ‘being there’.

1 Clay Calvert, Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture (Basic Books, 2009).

2 For a discussion of this subject see Siniša Malešević, The Sociology of War and Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

3 Jennifer Howard, ‘In Jefferson Lecture, Drew Faust Traces the Fascination of War, From Homer to Bin Laden’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 2011, http://chronicle.com/article/Harvards-Drew-FaustWhy/127369/.

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The psychological reasons behind this fascination with war and violence, what Drew Faust called ‘the seductiveness of war’, constitute a specialized and complex field of study in their own right 2 that goes far beyond the scope of this paper, but one can nonetheless observe that the fortress, as a weapon of war, ‘offers the attraction of the extraordinary,’3 and has the tendency to play up the romance of war and obscure its harsh realities. Unquestionably, a considerable degree of this enthralment with the fortress as an instrument of war is derived from an even deeper fascination with guns and cannon. Many people are simply drawn to fortifications by virtue of their armaments. One finds, however, that this type of attraction is often confined to the early-modern and modern types of fortifications, particularly the gun-forts and batteries of the industrial age, and rarely does it spill over onto pre-gunpowder defences, and the castles and citadels of antiquity since these, by their very nature, do not come readily equipped with guns and their mechanized adjuncts.

Gun emplacements, underground magazines, armoured turrets, disappearing carriages, ammunition hoists and searchlights all hold a special appeal to this category of fortress enthusiasts. The thrill of searching for old abandoned cannons and

The Bronze Age citadel of Mycenae, with its iconic Lion’s Gate, is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Greece. Its imposing walls built of massive cyclopean masonry are a constant source of fascination to visitors from countries unfamiliar with the organic nature of ancient military architectural shapes and forms.

(Image source: Author).

their related machinery, still mounted in situ, is what often drives the exploration of this class of modern concrete defences which, otherwise, tend to have very little else to offer in terms of architectural or aesthetic appeal.

A second important reason, I find, why people are attracted to fortifications, similarly linked to the past, but not necessarily tied to the experience of war, is the sense of nostalgia that fortifications, as historic landmarks, tend to exert over their surrounding communities. This sentiment, however, is not exclusive to fortifications and is also common to most other types of heritage ‘monuments’ – churches, palaces, archaeological sites etc. Fortifications, nonetheless, often tend to leave a greater impression than the other kinds of edifices since they are usually also symbols of decisive events that served to forge a collective identity. The overriding pull here is the strong sense of place and identity that historic works of fortification provide to their respective cultural milieus and social landscapes, whether manifested

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imbued with deep metaphysical significance’.6 ‘The ideas ruins evoke in me’, wrote Denis Diderot, the renowned French philosopher and art critic, in 1767, ‘are grand’.7

The medieval ruins of Goodrich Castle in Herefordshire, depicted by Hugh William in 1801, were already a tourist attraction in Victorian times.

(Image source: Wikipedia)

at the national or local level. This kind of fascination, however, is not directly proportionate to the scale and significance of the fortress itself and, patriotic or parochial feelings apart, is relatively generalistic and predominantly emotional in its nature as it is mostly related to the cultural sentiments of a people and their place.

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The third pull of fortifications is, I think, what Peter Ackroyd ‘calls the spectacle of desuetude and decay’4, the lust for ruins (the ‘Ruinenlust’ coined by the Germans) ˗ an insatiable desire for shattered monuments and crumbling stone fortresses and castles. Many people, in fact, take great relish in visiting and exploring crumbling fortresses, be they medieval remains or bombed-out WWII concrete bunkers, inspired, perhaps, by the vanished splendour that such incomplete hulks conjure in their imagination. Ever since Romantics took to ruination, and the castle ruin arrived centre-stage in European art and psyche in the eighteenth century, ruins of ancient and abandoned fortifications have continued to exert their strong ‘soporific spell of decay’5 on our minds, often taking ‘on the quality of memorials 4 Peter Ackroyd, Review of In Ruins by C. Woodward in The Times (2002).

5 Christopher Woodward, In Ruins, 2002.

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This is not, however, the same kind of fascination that is engendered by responses to history or architecture. It is not to be confused with the architect’s, historian’s or the archaeologist’s interest in ancient remains of fortifications or the obsession with their preservation. Russell Sturgis warned his students of architecture, in fact, to ‘admire the ruin to [their] heart’s content but to be careful not to allow too much of this ‘romantic association’ to enter into their love of the entity’.8 If anything, the appeal lies in the very fact that the ruin ‘has not been ‘debased’ by restoration or the destroying hand of the ruincleaner’.9 Rather, it is the ‘poetic and melancholic manner with which nature has moved in on the surviving structures’, transforming them into ‘oases of wilderness’10 that drives this form of appeal ̶ a reminder, perhaps, ‘that the apparent permanence of architecture is illusory’.11 Another type of interest in fortifications emanates from what can be termed ‘association’ - the

6 Rumiko Handa, Ruins in Sir Walter Scott’s Historical Novel:A Case of Diachronic Interpretation of Architecture, Universityof Nebraska-Lincoln.

7 Denis Diderot, 1767, ‘The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures. How old is this world! I walk between two eternities.’

8 Russell Sturgis, The appreciation of architecture; how to judge architecture (New York – 1903), 15.

9 Rose Macaulay, The Pleasure of Ruins, 404.

10 Lauren Smith Dickey, Redemptive Landscape in Rose Macaulay’s The World My Wilderness, a senior thesis submitted to the English Department of Haverford College, 2010 http://triceratops.brynmawr.edu/dspace/ bitstream/handle/10066/5617/2010DickeyLThesis. pdf?sequence=1.

11 John Coulthart, The Pleasures of Ruins, http:// www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2012/02/20/pleasure-ofruins/.

association of legends, myths and historical personalities to specific fortifications. Here, it is the feudal castle, perhaps more than anything else, that features prominently in this category, as it is richly encountered in folklore and literary material. Many people are fascinated by claims of haunting, buried treasures, incarceration and torture associated with ancient strongholds. To illustrate this point one can cite Bran Castle, which sits high up in the Carpathian Mountains in Romania, home to Vlad the Impaler (better known as Dracula’s Castle); Castell Coch and its buried treasure reputedly hidden in a nearby tunnel; and Predjama Castle, home of robber barons, built within a cave in the mountains of Slovenia and the site of some 700 years of violent history. The list is endless as every country and culture, from the ancient to the present, has dark legends, and stories woven around such mysterious sites.

The emotions and sensations that this type of architecture – what we call military architecture – manages to evoke, however, can be coaxed out of the structures through quiet study and observation. Deciphering the language of military architecture, therefore, requires venturing beyond the superficial veneer of the idealized and romantic notions of the fortress into the very heart of its materia prima.

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The fifth reason why people are attracted to fortifications, likewise, has less to do with war and is to be found in the very shapes and forms of the fortresses themselves – in their architecture. For fortifications present a very strange and unique kind of buildings, set apart in their own class, with a distinct presence and identity ̶ a ‘look’ that, with some very notable exceptions, commands its authority differently from the spiritual reverence and architectural sophistication that emanate from cathedrals and churches. Nor do fortifications secrete the seductive allure of the sumptuous and overwhelming ostentations of palatial edifices. Their often misleadingly simple and straightforward architectural language hides a complexity and profundity of thought and ideas.

Prof J. Quentin Hughes’ seminal and acclaimed book on military architecture, first published in 1975, was the first modern publication to look at fortifications from the perspective of military architecture.

For the late Prof Hughes, the fascination of military architecture lay in its honesty; ‘Admittedly there are elements of façadism applied purely for their psychological impact, like the ornate decoration of fortified gates and the rusticated walls which suggests a strength greater than they posse, but military architecture is essentially a functional architecture … [requiring] an integrity of plan and section, the use of appropriate first rate materials and craftsmanship, and the strongest most resistant forms of construction’.12 This functional and structural honesty of fortifications is tied to the notion that fortified structures displayed their ‘true’ purpose and that their form was shaped on the basis of their intended function. The principle of ‘form ever follows function’,13 which we nowadays 12 13

Quentin Hughes, Military Architecture (1991) 7.

This phrase was coined by the American architect

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Below, The delicate mouldings and heraldic features of Grand Master D’Aubusson on Koskinou Gate, dated to the late 1400s, add a distinctive decorative character to the medieval walls of the Hopitaller fortress of Rhodes (Source of images: Author).

so much associate with modernist architecture and industrial design in the twentieth century, was in fact already determining the shape of fortified works, large and small, from their very first appearance in prehistoric times. Whenever military necessity, technology, and economic forces converged and made it necessary to adopt new defensive buildings, the new forms of military architecture quickly dropped precedent and moulded themselves to the latest requirements dictated by the urgency of their newly required function.

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I have long since come to realize that it is the special form of the architecture of fortifications that motivates my own fascination with the subject. The desire to understand the forces that shaped and forged the different types of defensive works over the centuries has dictated the direction of my own research for the past twenty years or so. I too, nevertheless, began my journey of discovery lured by the thrill of the stories of war – in my case, it was the desire to follow in the footsteps of the Hospitaller Knights of

Louis Sullivan, ‘The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered’, Lippincott’s Magazine (March 1896), 403– 409.

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St. John14 – a fascination which took me around the Mediterranean Sea and the Middle East ̶ but this fascination with the ‘fortress at war’ was eventually overtaken by a love for the sculptural and aesthetic qualities of fortifications and the need to identify those structural elements that truly define a fortress as a defensive work.15 I must confess that, nowadays, I am rarely moved by the sight of guns or other weapons neatly arrayed on a bastion rampart for I have long since come to realize that no amount of cannon alone (or other forms of weapons for that matter) ever made a fortress. The essence of military architecture lies not in the weapons that were used to protect it (vital as these were at times for its very survival) but in the very nature of those structural elements that define and shape its perimeters – the walls, ramparts and ditches. To borrow a concept from the theory of Intelligent Design, the walls, ramparts and ditches

14 See Stephen C. Spiteri, Fortresses of the Cross: Hospitaller Military Architecture (Malta, 1994), Armoury of the Knights (Malta, 2003), and The Great Siege: Knights vs Turks (Malta, 2005).

15 Stephen C. Spiteri, The Art of Fortress Building in Hospitaller Malta (Malta, 2008).

The architecture of fortifications, moreover, conveys more than just a combination of form and function. On a psychological level it imparts a sense of security and, in the material realm, also serves to enable it. Fortifications exude notions of impregnability which resonate with what is perhaps a deep-rooted sense of insecurity in the human psyche – the wall as the dividing line between safety and destruction, between order and disorder, between the rule of law and chaos, between civilization and barbarism. The solidity with which most works of fortifications were built also conveys a sense of permanence that kindles the impression that these monumental structures were laid down not only to countenance the effects of man but also of time itself.

Without a doubt, military architecture’s subconscious effect on our psyches has been profound throughout the course of history. A work of fortification has the ability, to cite the words of Danze and Sonnenberg out of context, to ‘transcend the physical realm and extend into our deepest consciousness’.17, To the Ancient Greeks, for example, city walls

Detail of a small section of the beautiful pattern and texture of the ancient polygonal masonry wall of Amelia (ancient Ameria), in Italy (Source of images: Author).

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are the basic elements in the ‘irreducible complexity’ of a work of military architecture that make up a defensible enclosure or barrier.16 In other words, remove the guns from the equation and you still have a fort; remove the walls, and you end up without a fort. Indeed, without this physical barrier, obstacle or enclosure ˗ be it a line of dragons teeth, a Roman agger or a bastioned enceinte à la Vauban ˗ there is no work of fortification to begin with. Ultimately, then, what makes and distinguishes one fortress or work of fortification from the next, boils down to its architectural and structural elements.

The monumental and aesthetic splendour of military architecture reached its apex in the Baroque age as witnessed by the gateway of Fort Manoel (left), a Hospitaller fort built in Malta by the Knights of the Order of St. John in 1723-1733. (Image Source- Author).

16 By ‘irreducible complexity’ is meant a single system composed of the minimum amount of different elements that contribute to the basic function of an entity or organism; see Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (1996); 17 Danze and Sonnenberg, Space & Psyche, cited in Stephen Sharpe, Headspace: Psychology and Architecture, http://www.aia.org/practicing/AIAB102121.

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The artistic appeal and visual power of fortifications - Eugène Flandin, Castle Yezdi-Kast, Persia (Image source: Voyage en Perse, avec Flandin, éd. Gide et Baudry, 1851, Wikipedia).

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were ‘manifestations of the will to Life’. They were ‘inspired by fear and erected as a barricade against death’.18 In many Greek cities, as a matter of fact, it was later customary to make a breach in the walls to allow for the entry of its champions returning from the sacred Olympian games. ‘Breaching the walls of a city’ after a native son had been victorious at Olympia demonstrated’, according to Avramenko, ‘that the city as a whole had overcome, through its deified athlete’ this fear of destruction’.

To be sure, the intellect of man has always responded, consciously or subconsciously, to the power and monumentality exerted by solidity and mass, and the assurance imparted by certain geometrical shapes and forms – features which

18 Richard Avramenko, Nietzsche and the Greek Idea of Immortality, 2006, Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (2006), 27-28. http://www. lsu.edu/artsci/groups/voegelin/society/2006%20Papers/ Richard%20Avramenko.pdf

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no other form of architecture so effectively and abundantly employs, or so well exploits, as a work of fortification. It is by no way a coincidence that fortresses like the Bronze Age citadel of Mycenae, the Crusader castle of Crac des Chevaliers and the bastioned city of Valletta never fail to instill a sense of awe and admiration, and this, despite the fact that they are now all shorn of their armament and strategic relevance. Their distinctive forms – their towers, bastions, gateways, and battlements – and their overwhelming silhouettes continue to communicate a clear and emphatic notion of resistance even to the modern eye. They are literally, majestic essays of force countering force.19 Moreover, certain fortification archetypes such as the tower, the gateway, and the ditch, have become, literally and visually, synonymous with the ideas of defence and power.

19 Stephen C. Spiteri, introduction to Fortress Malta 360 (Miranda Publications, Malta – 2006).

Simone Martini’s ‘Giudoriccio da Fogliano’ and its depiction of the castles of Montemassi and Sassoforte (c.1314-1334,) captures an Italian castle’s distinctive silhouette very effectively with a few simple shapes (Image source - Wikimedia Commons).

It is important, perhaps even critical, therefore, to understand that this inherent display of visual power was neither an accident nor a by-product of the fortification process. It was surely not merely ‘incidental’, as Mathieu Helie mistakenly points out, in my opinion, in his essay on the genesis of complex geometry, ‘that Vauban’s projects have artistic merits’.20 True, military necessity may have led Vauban ‘to employ geometric processes’ that significantly and unwittingly ‘increased the complexity’ of his fortifications’, but Vauban’s fortifications were more than just two-dimensional geometric exercises on paper that simply ‘aligned themselves as a result of the wall’s configuration’.21 A large part of their visual power was acquired through their three-dimensional sculptural qualities. Vauban may have ‘not been an artist at all’, as claimed by Helie, but he surely had a genius for beauty and monumental setting. And indeed, many forts and fortifications throughout the course of history were deliberately designed to impress and subdue the beholder with the grandeur of their design and their overwhelming physical presence.

Town and city walls, in other words, did not only ensure safety and protection against external threat, thereby allowing industry, commerce, technology, and, ultimately, the arts to grow and flourish, but they also brought a sense of order and aesthetic splendour to human settlements by virtue of their prominence, scale, design and monumentality.

In this manner, fortifications, as works of architecture, also appeal to another important human emotion – man’s sense of beauty. It is a beauty that fortifications impart on two essential levels – firstly, through the aesthetics of their constructs, such as can be seen, for example, in the richly textured patterns of polygonal masonry making up the walls of Hellenic or Etruscan citadels, or in the delicate carvings and trophies-of-arms decorating the gates of Baroque period fortresses, and, secondly, through the combined aesthetics of architecture and

20 Mathieu Helie, The genesis of complex geometry, see http://emergenturbanism.com/2009/06/21/the-genesisof-complex-geometry.

21 Ibid.

landscape. In describing the characteristic features of the ancient Greek fortifications in Sicily, Scalisi rightfully remarks that their most striking feature is the texture of their walls whose stones had not been laid ‘randomly and lifeless’ by their builders, but were rather ‘harmoniously organized’ with each block a ‘part of a pre-determined order’;22 ‘The form given to each stone, its size in relation to others and the totality of the wall, the manner of assembly, the weaving of the material and the handling of the parameters, (which is presented differently each time), constitute the elements that give the wall its special look.’23 The second aesthetic quality mentioned above is transmitted through the sculptural qualities which fortifications impose upon a landscape - a genius of siting and location that has, in turn, inspired many a famous landscape painting through the centuries,

22 F. Scalisi, ‘Technological features in Greek Fortifications in Sicily’, CIPA 2005 XX International Symposium, 26 September – 01 October, 2005, Torino, Italy, at http://cipa.icomos.org/fileadmin/template/doc/ TURIN/1121.pdf.

23 Scalisi, op.cit.

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Frontispieces of the treatises on fortification by Gabrielle Busca (1619) and Allessandro Capra (1717). Despite the fact that the occupations of the architect and military engineer took on different trajectories, treatises on fortification continued to refer to ‘military architecture’ rather than ‘military engineering’ in their titles. Bottom, Illustration of a bastion flank from Della Fortificatione delle Città, by Maggi and Castriotto (Venice,1564).

from Simone Martini’s ‘Giudoriccio da Fogliano’ and its depiction of the castles of Montemassi and Sassoforte (c.1314-1334,) through Antonio Joli’s detailed aerial views of Naples and its Castel dell’Ovo (1740), down to Eugène Flandin’s (18091889) Castle Yezd-i-Kast, to mention but a few.

Was it not Lendy who wrote, in his textbook on fortifications, that a military engineer ‘sees his fortress completely modelled on a plateau, a hill, a plain, or a rock, just as a sculptor sees his statue in a block of marble’!24

Common Perceptions

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In reality, the appeal of fortifications to most people is actually to be found in a combination, or mixture, of all the factors mentioned above. Many people, nevertheless, fail to distinguish between the very process of fortification and defence, and the nuances of military architecture. Very often there is also confusion, even in expert circles, of the basic concepts: the lack of a clear distinction between the terms ‘fortification’ and ‘military architecture’, for example, mirrored in the indiscriminate and imprecise use of both words, is the cause of much muddled thinking, imprecise communication and a poor grasp of the essence of subject. I have had to sit through too many a talk, and read through many a paper, purporting to deal with ‘military architecture’ when these never managed to rise beyond a discussion of a fortress’ history or its armaments (i.e., guns, guns, and more guns) – enough to appreciate the difficulties and pitfalls of unwarily venturing into this field of study with little preparation.

Confronted with these type of arguments, I have often been asked to write down my thoughts on the subject and how best to approach its study.

This paper is the consequence. It should not be seen as more than an incipient attempt, a first draft so to speak, since many of the arguments I raise,

24 A. F. Lendy, Treatise on fortification, or, Lectures delivered to officers reading for the staff (London - 1862), 436.

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will certainly need to be developed further in due course and, hopefully, expanded into a book. What this paper sets out to achieve, however, is to take a quick look at three fundamental questions, namely, what the art of military architecture is all about, why it should be studied, and how it best deserves to be studied.

1. Defining Military Architecture Military architecture is the art and science of designing and building fortifications. In other words, it is the art of creating dedicated structures intended to provide protection or resist attack. It is one of the two main pillars in the art of fortification, which is the military art of strengthening a position against attack. It is important to stress that the two are not the same though they deal with the same matter of defence. For the word fortification is derived from the Latin words fortis (strong) and facere (to make) and implies the establishment of obstacles and enclosures armed with the weapons needed to enable resistance against attack. Military architecture, on the other hand, is concerned solely with building the defensive structures. Thus, to use a very simple illustration, a group of soldiers can establish a fortified position merely by entrenching themselves on a hilltop site, making use only of natural obstacles to protect themselves from attack – although this becomes a defensible, naturally fortified

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Chart showing the relationship between military architecture and a landscape’s topographical features (Image source - Author).

position, it is not a work of military architecture because it involves no construction of any form of building or structure.

Put differently, fortifications are the product of the sum of their defensive perimeter and their defensive weaponry, hence Fortification = defensive perimeter / structure + weapons, or F= D +w Where the defensive structure D is a direct product of the amount of construction invested in it, i.e.

D = d (1+ ma) Where d is the scale of the fortress and where ma constitutes the military architecture factor of a work of fortification, where ma = 0 for a naturally defensible site (i.e. it contains no construction) and ma = 1 for sites with more architectural complexity, thus

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F = d(1+ ma) +w Military architecture, therefore equates to F-w, that is, that part of fortification minus its armaments It may help to identify at this stage what classifies here as a work of military architecture. Although the term is often employed to refer to various types of buildings, including non-fortified structures such as barrack blocks, military hospitals, storage areas etc., it is here restricted solely to buildings endowed with a direct defensive or protective function – in other words, structures designed to withstand and resist attack and bombardment, and, in most instances, ones that allow their occupants to fight back at their attackers. Mullary and Ottar defined such structures as the ‘architecture of aggression’,25 implying perhaps that fortifications are elements of a building designed to be permanently at war, even if rather than being aggressive, most fortifications are actually passive in their resistance and defensive in nature.

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It is also important to point out that the term ‘military engineering’ is often used in various texts and in general historical parlance to mean military architecture. In its modern usage, however, ‘military engineering’ encapsulates a broader spectrum that includes not only the art of designing and building fortifications and other works of a military nature (such barracks, camps, magazines etc.,) but also that of maintaining lines of military transport and communications and other forms of logistical support. From around the sixteenth century onwards, as the new technology of gunpowder warfare called for greater specialization, the absorption of the architect into the soldierly profession increased, and the architect came to be referred more explicitly as a military engineer, a title which is still in use today in various armies around the world, to distinguish the military builders from their civilian counterparts.

Despite the fact that the occupations of architect and military engineer took on different trajectories, treatises on fortification continued to refer to ‘military architecture’ rather than ‘military engineering’ in

25 Keith Mullary and Arvid Ottar, The Architecture of Aggression (Architectural Press - 1973)

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their titles as clearly demonstrated by the treatises of Gabrielle Busca (Milan, 1619) 26 and Allessandro Capra (Cremona, 1717).27 (See page 10) Moreover, as rightly claimed by Kruft, the separation between civil architecture and fortification was never clearly demarcated, since despite the practical emphasis on fortifications, aesthetic considerations were never completely abandoned and would indeed reach a climax in the Baroque age.28 It must also be stated that most modern books on defensive military structures tend to speak of ‘fortification’ rather than of ‘military architecture’.

A quick online search through the bibliography on fortification will quickly conform this. Prof. Quentin Hughes was perhaps the first, and one of the few modern authors who approached the subject from an architectural point of view. His seminal work, already referred to above, entitled Military Architecture, first published in 1982, was unique in its perspective and broadness of reach. Few however, picked up the cue and most approaches to the subject continue to display an ingrained reluctance in separating the weaponry from the structure – hence the preference for the word ‘fortification’ rather than ‘architecture’.

It is not surprising, therefore, to note that in most periodical publications on fortification, practically 6 out of every 10 articles are generally concerned with guns, or gun-related elements, rather than with the walls of the defensive structures themselves.

26 Gabriello Busca, L’ architettura militare di Gabriello Busca, milanese nella quale si da contezza ad ogni professore, e seguace della guerra tanto di grande, quanto di basso titolo, Del modo di fortificare luochi deboli, cinger cittadi, fabricar fortezze, cosi al monte, come alla pianura, e della maniera di diffenderle da qualsiuoglia batteria, & assalto (Milan, 1619).

27 Alessandro Capra, La nuova architettura civile, e militare In questa nuova impressione diligentemente corretta, ed accresciuta. di Alessandro Capra ... ; divisa in due tomi (Cremona, 1717).

28 H.W. Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present (New York, 1994), 109, https://books.google.com.mt/books?id=OPTfVyHyVW4C& q=fortification#v=onepage&q&f=false.

Despite the insistence of the early theoreticians to leave the planning of fortifications in the hands soldiers experienced in artillery and war, it was always understood that the actual construction of fortified structures had to be entrusted to architects and master builders in possession of sound architectural principles. Despite their advocacy of the importance of artillery, Giovanni Battista Belluci, Francesco de Marchi and Pietro Cataneo all came to the conclusion that the construction of fortifications, ultimately, could not rely solely on the soldier alone and could only be carried out by a team. In other words, military men appreciated the fact that before any work of military architecture could be put to the onerous task of defence, it had first to be designed and built, and the skills that were required to undertake these initial tasks, that is planning, designing, and construction, were not the same as those that were needed to attack or defend it. The men who designed and built fortifications, consequently, had to be expert architects and builders first, and soldiers second. A few, like the renowned Marshal Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, were expert at both but the majority struggled to combine the two distinct aspects of their profession.

So much so, that the history of military architecture is ripe with examples of works of fortification that were either poorly designed and sited or badly constructed with inadequate materials, or erected on loose foundations, to show that not all military men who were assigned the task of constructing defences had an expert grasp of the art of fortress-building.

In a letter to François-Michel Louvois Le Tellier, the French Minister of War during the reign of Louis XIV, Vauban remarked that he could ‘make any officer with a little bit of common sense, able to conduct trenchworks, and a counterscarp’s lodging … in the space of three normal sieges’, but it took him ‘fifteen years of application to make a good [fortress] builder’.

Such was the level of technical specialization required in building fortifications that, by the eighteenth century, most European armies had learnt to divide the task of building and manning permanent defences between their engineering, garrisoning, and

artillery corps. The first built the defensive works, and the other two manned the ramparts and worked the guns respectively.

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1.1 The Art and Practice of Building Defences

‘My concern’, wrote the Papal military engineer Francasco Laparelli to Grand Master Jean de Valette in one of his reports outlining the works to be taken in hand during the construction of the new fortified city of Valletta in 1566, ‘is only with building the curtain walls and bastions of the enceinte’, leaving to any others (‘lascio achi tocca’) the responsibility of acquiring the armaments, supplies of munitions, food, and other stores required for an impregnable fortress’. 29 Likewise, John Muller opened his treatise containing ‘the elementary part of fortification, regular and irregular’ (London, 1774) by listing those tasks which, in his opinion, comprised the primary concerns of a military engineer in the establishment of a new work of fortification, namely, ‘… to choose such a situation as will answer the intent in the best manner, to adapt the works properly, and to use no more than is necessary, to make from the plans and profile an estimate of the quantity of masonry requisite, and of the earth to be removed, to trace the plan on the ground, to lay the found in any kind of soil, so complete the walls, ramparts and all the military buildings, such as drawbridges, town-gates, powder magazines, sore-houses, casemates, and sally-ports’ ..... to know the proper thickness of the walls which support earth, so that they may be strong and durable yet no more than is necessary ... these are the subjects of practical fortification’.

Evidently, although military architecture fell within the ambit, and under the umbrella, of the wider phenomenon of war, it was in itself not only about war but, primarily, about building. It was concerned with the creative impulses that allowed a fortress to take shape rather than with the darker destructive forces that led to its obliteration.

29

Dr. Roger Vella Bonavita, personal communication.

13

The Sicilian architect Tomaso Maria Napoli clearly emphasized this point in his Breve ristretto dell’architettura militare... (1723) when he subdivided military architecture, vulgarmente chiamata fortificatione, into Munitiva and Polemica, with the former being that part of the art of fortification which was concerned with the task of designing and laying out the fortifications’30 ‘la Munitiva e arte che insignia a fortificare una piazza di maniera che possa resistere alle machine di querra … e invece la Polemica o Arte Militare e quell ache insegna la strategemme, e maniere , con le quali si deve offendere, o defendere la Piazza’.

1.2 The Rampart vs the Gun

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This distinction between ‘military architecture’ and ‘fortification’, however, starts to blur very rapidly once we reach the late 1800s. This was largely because by this stage in the history of warfare, it was the gun and not the stone and mortar of the structure which housed it which had become the most important element in defence. The forts of the industrial age came to be increasingly designed around their artillery and the huge machinery required to work the ponderous guns, with the weapons, their emplacements and magazines becoming deeply and seamlessly interwoven into the architectural fabric of the structure. As a result, the modern ‘automated’ fort became little more than a glorified container for cannon – a large gun battery.

In a manner of speaking, its one primary function was reduced to that of servicing and protecting the massive and expensive guns which were now necessary to provide the real barrier against attack and invasion. Long-range strategic defence – made possible by the great ranges which guns were now capable of – took over and replaced close-in defences. Modern forts, as a result, began to shed any remaining sense of formal enclosure and the notion of a protective perimeter, losing their bastions,

30 2015).

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Denis De Lucca, Tomaso Maria Napoli, (Malta

flanking devices, ditches, and other components in the process. Furthermore, the more weaponized the design, the less adaptable the modern fort became to take on newer armament and, hence, the shorter its shelf-life. A good example of this can be seen in the obsolescence of late nineteenth century forts designed for rifled muzzle loading guns which were abandoned, after less than 20 years, in favour of new workers designed for breach-loading guns.

Moreover, the forts and fortifications of the industrial age made very little provision for aesthetic considerations and visual statements – they were conceived and built as efficient, yet impersonal, killing machines, and for the greater part the military engineers’ concern was to hide their forts away from view like concealed predators lying in ambush.

By the early 1900s, even the limited appeal of the subdued geometric forms of the earth-andconcrete-type of Victorian-era polygonal forts finally disappeared altogether once the suppression of outline became the rule. By the early twentieth century, art and architecture no longer had a privileged place in fortress design.

The seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries also saw an increasing concern with another form of fortification – field fortifications. Most military architecture treatises from the late 1500s onwards began to subdivide their subject matter in two main classes, permanent fortifications and field fortifications. Fieldworks, however, were little more than ephemeral earthen works employed on the battlefield or in siege craft. These, generally, but not exclusively, were more concerned with ‘cult of the offensive’,31 rather than defence. Although great importance was placed on teaching the art of field defences in military engineering circles, fieldworks were actually little more than trenches dug into the ground, protected by ephemeral palisades, breastworks or gabions, and in modern times, by barbed wire entanglements and sandbags, and, as such, required little specialized architectural skills. As

31 A short description of Jamel Ostwald’s book, Vauban under Siege: Engineering Efficiency and Martial Vigor in the War of the Spanish Succession (2009) can be found at http://www.brill.com/vauban-under-siege.

The ever-increasing reliance, from the nineteenth century onwards, on a combination of ephemeral but nonetheless effective field works and weaponry confronts the students of ‘modern-period’ military architecture with a more difficult job when it comes to deciding where one discipline ends and the other begins. At some stage it becomes practically impossible to talk about military architecture altogether because all one is left with is just the gun.

At that point, the study of fortification is no longer the study of military architecture, but of weaponry.

The litmus test, then, which separates the two fields of study can perhaps be demarcated by what can be labelled as the ‘weapons factor’ (Wg). When Wg > d, to the point that F=w, then it is no longer about military architecture.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that when the gun (read ‘weapon’) is removed from the equation, (as was the case for many millennia in the fortifications of antiquity before the appearance

32 N. Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture, 1943: ‘A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.’

of cannon) then one is obliged to fall back on those basic elements that comprise a work of fortification. Many will be quick to retort that prior to the introduction of cannon, fortifications were only able to provide a ‘passive’ form of defence while modern gun-operated fortifications, on the other hand, provided an ‘active’ defence. But what many are quick to dismiss as a ‘passive’ form of defence is actually that intrinsic and inherent quality provided by the very shape, form and structure of

The bastioned fort sought to create a seamless combination of rampart and gun (left), a symbiosis that endured for nearly three hundred years. Despite the ever-increasing reliance on guns for defence, the bastioned trace of walls remained intact during this period.

The formal shapes of walled enclosures, however, began to disintegrate towards the late 19th century when the complexity and increased power of guns began to call for other defensive solutions that placed less reliance on the wall and more on the weapons.

Fort Chaberton, built by the Italians in 1898, to consist solely of eight turretted guns mounted on 12-metre high cylindrical masonry plinths, on the summit of a mountain (shown in the drawing, left), perhaps best epitomizes this final transformation of the modern gun-fort into a container for cannon, designed to engage solely in long range artillery duels.

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a matter of fact, they were generally thrown up very quickly by the soldiers themselves, hence the slightly deprecating term opere soldatesche. In the hierarchy of military architectural achievements, they feature low down the list. Nicholas Pevsner’s32 dictum that ‘A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture’ holds equally true here if one substitutes the words ‘bicycle shed’ with ‘trench’, and ‘Lincoln Cathedral’ with ‘Chateau Gaillard’ or Vauban’s citadel of Belfort. There are a few notable exceptions, nonetheless. Caesar’s circumvallation at the siege of Alesia in 52 BC, Vauban’s system of parallels and zigzags and the trenches of the First World War are perhaps some of the best known examples. Even so, these fieldworks were impressive largely for their scale and labyrinthine complexity rather than for the architectural sophistication or the aesthetics of their constructs.

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The ‘architecture of aggression’ - the menacing shape of a casemated gun embrasure at Fort Bingemma (built in 1875), in Malta, reflects the military engineers’ last attempt to manipulate the formal lines of fortress design prior to the onset of the shapeless profiles of earthen massifs and field defences that came to dominate the forms of modern fortifications in the 1900s, where concealment rather than architectural statements became the order of the day. By this late stage in the evolution of military architecture, art no longer had a place in fortress design (image source: Author).

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2. Why Study Military Architecture in Today’s World?

A view of the scale of the restoration works on the bastions of Valletta, undertaken by the Maltese government with the assistance of European Union (ERDF), as part of a national effort to revalorize Malta’s rich military architecture heritage of historic forts and fortifications – an important and central element in the Island’s tourism product (Image source: Courtesy of the Restoration Directorate, MJCA).

There are many valid justifications for the study of military architecture. For the scope of this paper, however, I will highlight only the two most salient.

As with any serious discipline, one studies military architecture for both epistemological and utilitarian interests.

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a work of fortification which is at the very essence of the subject – it is that very structural quality of a fort which places an attacker at a disadvantage, and provides protection for the defenders. The ideal fortress, then, is perhaps one which manages to rely predominantly on the properties of its own defences to neutralize the force of the attacker without having to resort to weapons. It is not, to use a modern phrase, just a ‘weapons platform’.

In a way, therefore, one can claim that there are two main paradigm shifts in the long evolution of military architecture, both occurring in a relatively short span of time from one another. The first involved a shift in the reliance and onus of defence from the walls to the weapons, and the second, the shift from the need of the fortress to be seen in order to exercise its authority and enforce its deterrence, to that of having to hide itself in order to survive.

Having thus broadly identified the boundaries of the subject, the table is now set for a discussion of the manner of its study.

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The first of these reasons I like to define as ‘the pursuit of knowledge’. Not only is this a noble endeavour in its own right but it is precisely the proper understanding of the origin, nature and methods of knowledge and, the limits thereof, that gives rise to practical sciences. For the men who designed and built some of the most impressive works of fortification did so by thinking powerful thoughts and went on to create potent and impressive structures and forms. Indeed, even if these defensive works were to have no history whatsoever, and were built, for the sake of the argument, yesterday, they would still be worth taking seriously. The fact then that many of the most formidable defensive structures were constructed with great technical limitations, without the benefit of modern machinery, only makes them all the more impressive and worthy of study.

The study of military architecture, therefore, enables us to think clearly about these specialized buildings; it makes us ask how these structures were conceived and brought into being – it trains students to observe and inculcates in them a knowledge of principles and a sound judgment of the proprieties of construction and design. In a nutshell, it is, to use the title of Sturgis’ book, all about ‘the appreciation of architecture’.33 Any real voyage of discovery, wrote Marcel Proust, consists not in seeing new things, but in having new eyes.

In many ways one can compare a study of military architecture today to the study of classical

33 Sturgis, op.cit.

As for the second ‘utilitarian’ reasons, these are perhaps a bit less immediately evident. For surely, no one in this day and age is going to commission a medieval castle or bastioned fortress for military purposes. Gone are the days of Sangallo, Marshal Vauban, or Col. Jervois, when it was possible to carve a military and architectural career designing and building fortifications. At its peak, the subject was thought in specialized schools for military engineers and dedicated textbooks and treatises published to teach the subject. The Jesuits, a very influential religious institution, for example, used its educational faculties to teach the subject of fortification to the nobles of Europe while its learned members published treatises on fortification theory and provided consultations on the subject to warring princes.34 There was a time when the fortress represented man’s highest form of architectural, technical, and urbanistic achievements and the status of the fortress builder soared high to the envy of all the other professions, architects included. Even so, this does not necessarily mean that the practical application of its theories and ideas are now all past their sell-by date. The principles of defence, as a matter of fact, are still taught to military engineers because many of the theories still hold true in modern warfare – flanking fire, enfilade, defilade etc.

Furthermore, beyond the immediate relevancy to the military engineer, knowledge of military architecture is also beneficial to modern architects and civil engineers in general, particularly since there were many innovations in architecture / construction

34 D. de Lucca, Jesuits and Fortifications: The Contribution of the Jesuits to Military Architecture in the Baroque Age (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2012).

/ engineering that were first applied for military use before being extended to general application.

Amongst these, for example, one can cite the square parade grounds, grand avenues, the beltways (ringroads) and the orderly grids of modern cities, all of which are the product, to cite Martha Pollak, of the ‘military urbanism’ that evolved in response to the widespread construction of bastioned fortifications in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.35 The bascule drawbridges of modern canals, for instance, find their inspiration in the many forms of counterweight drawbridges that were first invented to protect castles gateways and entrances into forts, while the axonometric style of drawing used by draughtsmen in their architectural drawings today was first invented by the artist-engineers of the quattrocento.

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languages. One does not choose to study these ancient languages because of their practical everyday use but because they enable a person to acquire a better understanding of modern languages – they force careful and analytical thinking, and provide a deeper insight into, and a greater comprehension and appreciation of, culture and history.

Of primary concern to the student of architecture, as a matter of fact, is the direct relationship between military architecture and town planning. As pointed out by Hans Simon in 1975, an appreciation of this relationship is ‘especially appropriate at the present time’ because many of the old historic environments are being endangered by the modern changes ‘in the way of life and in economic conditions’.36 The ancient centres, characterized by their clusters of social buildings and their enveloping walls have lost their ‘dominant position’ only to be replaced with new areas which are ‘not suitable for the task in most cases’.

This relationship between the city /town wall and its houses developed either in the direction of geometric formalism or through organic growth. ‘In nearly all newly-founded townships of the past, in the colonial cities of the Hellenistic period, in the garrison encampments of the Romans, in the ideal cities of Renaissance princes’, wrote Hans Simon, the plans ‘were based on strict geometric patterns’ while many fortified townships of the middle ages, especially those which sought to secure their safety by establishing themselves on dominant points in

35 M. Pollak, Cities at War in Early Modern Europe (University of Illinois, Chicago, 2010), 1.

36 Hans Simon, The Heart of Medieval Cities; Sketches of european town centres (Essen, 1975), 7.

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Left, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s bird’s eye view of an ideal planned hill town in Tuscany, drawn around the middle of the fourteenth century, is perhaps one of the earliest artistic attempts in the Renaissance to depict the relationship between the streets, squares and important buildings and the enveloping shell of protective walls (Image source: Wikimedia Commons).

The management and running of historic fortified sites and places, also offers other opportunities for careers related to administering and marketing historic forts as visitor attractions for tourism and cultural activities.

the landscape evolved organically ‘according to the contours of the site and to ‘practical needs, necessity and functional differentiation’,37 acquiring ‘loose and flexible site plan[s]’ and distinctive and exciting profiles. Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s bird’s eye view of an ideal planned hill town in Tuscany, drawn around the middle of the fourteenth century, is perhaps one of the earliest artistic attempts in the Renaissance to depict the relationship between the streets, squares and important buildings and the enveloping shell of protective walls.

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It is in the fields of conservation and restoration, rather than that of design proper, therefore, where several opportunities for the practical application of studies in fortification history and technology are to be found today. Here, an expert knowledge of military architecture is very much a valid and practical asset and one that has taken a whole new relevance in those countries which strive to restore and rehabilitate their heritage of historic forts and fortifications. An understanding of fortress-building methods and techniques, together with a knowledge of the minutiae of the design and construction of fortifications are, invariably, important requisites for careful and authentic repairs and reconstructions.

The conservation process itself also generates a host of other specialized technical and bureaucratic activities in the fields of restoration, documentation, inventorization and cataloguing of the fortified heritage, all of which require, at the very least, a basic understanding of fortification and the ability to identify and recognize the value and significance of defensive structures.

37

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Ibid., 10.

To a large degree, this growing investment in the restoration of fortifications is being driven by a growing cultural tourism industry. The past few decades have seen some important and impressive large-scale restoration projects financed by a variety of institutions on both international and national levels, and these in turn have generated new opportunities for new research and archaeological investigations. Hopefully, this trend will continue to grow in the coming years and serve to fuel further academic work in this regard.

The best form of conservation, nevertheless, remains ‘information’. For long after the structures themselves will have disappeared in time, which is often, unfortunately, the nature of things, it will be down to the information and data gathered about such structures in books and other media that will serve to perpetuate their memory to future generations. Take the case, for example, of the mastio of the medieval castle of San Stefano di Sessanio, in Abruzzo, Italy, which collapsed in the terrible earthquake that hit L’Aquila and its surrounding territories in 2009 and is, sadly, no longer standing. No amount of restoration prior to 2009 could have saved it. Had it not been documented, measured and studied, then it would have been truly lost forever to future generations.

Documenting such structures is in itself an important product of the military architecture historian’s studies.

Books on military architecture, therefore, also assume an added value as an important source of data on fortified structures, especially where they deal with the structural elements and other aspects of these constructs. Today, perhaps more than ever before, historians of military architecture have the advantage of capturing highly accurate and detailed records of fortified structures as they stand through laser scanning techniques and other forms of threedimensional digital recording.

An illustration taken from Daniel Speckle’s Architectura von Vestungen (Brussels,1589) showing the basic principles of perspective employed in the depiction of a pentagonal fortress.

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3. How to Study Military Architecture

Up until only a few decades ago, many of the structures which today form the focus of so much attention were not even considered ‘cultural’ enough or worthy of study. As late as 1977, J. R. Hale, the renowned renaissance fortification historian, could still write that ‘in the main stream of architectural history, fortifications [were] accorded but a fitful or embarrassed attention.’ 38 In many ways, this long exclusion of fortifications from mainstream architectural studies was largely the result of the fact that fortifications were deemed to lack the aesthetical and intellectual content of the other higher forms of architecture. The plain functional forms and absence of decorative and artistic qualities that characterize most military works of fortification often discouraged the inclusion of defensive architecture in important architectural studies. The chapter on Romanesque architecture in Sir Banister’s Fletcher’s monumental opus on The History of Architecture (18th Edition 1975), for example, which runs to some 122 pages, only devoted a mere five pages of text to military buildings and castles, such as Crac de Chevaliers.

Kruft summed up the situation well when he wrote that: ‘The hiving-off of military architecture, and the implicit disdain of it as a form of engineering, contributed to the virtual exclusion of this type of construction and its theory from the history and theory of architecture. As far as the history of art was concerned, it became part of ‘military science’. This historical attitude is questionable, for it overlooked the interdependence of fortification and town-planning, and ignored the aesthetic premises implicit in fortification.’

It was military historians, on the other hand, who took up the academic study of fortification. Their approach was rooted predominantly in a functional

38 J.R. Hale, Renaissance Fortification: Art or Engineering? (London, 1977).

analysis which saw the development of fortification exclusively as a reaction to advances in weaponry and changes in defensive strategy. 39 It was these specialist military historians who came up with the typological analyses and classifications, and went on to create the specialized chronologies that continue to underpin the subject today. For many years, it was the ‘military’ concerns that dominated the attitudes within fortification studies. Many of

From around the sixteenth century onwards, a large part of military planning efforts came to be increasingly invested in acquiring an understanding of the landscape in order to ensure the most efficient exploitation of its features. A very important tool employed to this end was the humble scale model, built of wood, stone or wax.

Scale models were the most practical and effective means of conveying the three dimensional qualities of both terrain features and the complexity of fortification projects alike, bridging the bridge the gap ‘between concept and reality’.

39 S. Pepper, ‘The meaning of the Renaissance Fortress’ in FORT, Vol 7, 1979, 3-12.

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these criteria still continue to dictate the nature of fortification studies today, for military historians have consistently remained at the forefront of the subject.

Indeed, it is an attitude very much still evident and pronounced in the approaches that underline the growing interest and study of the ‘modern’ industrialized fort, a relatively late phenomenon, where the distinction between a fortress’s armament and its architecture are so blurred that most such studies spend more time and space discussing a fortress’ guns rather than its architecture.

Despite the persistence of these dominant trends, various other important inroads have been made in the study of fortifications in recent years by other disciplines. An array of new methodological and critical approaches have been applied to the subject of defensive architecture by a new generation of fortification historians driven by a commitment to interdisciplinary research. 40 The strictly typological analysis of earlier works is being slowly superseded by both an archaeological approach that focuses on building processes and materials41 as well as by academic debates of the artistic, literary, ideological, philosophical, symbolical, urbanistic and social qualities of fortifications.42 Looking at the various approaches in the study of fortification undertaken over the course of the past years one can discern three main points of departure. Namely, these include: i) The study of fortress as a WEAPON of WAR (the traditional military-history approach) : ARX - OCCASIONAL PAPERS - ISSUE 5/ 2015

• its influence and role in the wider geo-strategic, political, and military struggles • its defensive armament • siege warfare

40 A. Wheatley, The Idea of the Castle in Medieval England (York, 2004).

41 F. Cobos-Guerra, Metodologia, valoracion y criterios de intervencion en l arquitectura fortificada de Casilla y Leon (Valladoid, 2012): 42 Wheatley, op.cit.

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ii) The study of fortress as a CONTAINER of military and social activities (basically, what happened in and around a fortress) • garrison life, • military and social activity (archaeology) • urbanism iii) the study of the fortress as a STRUCTURE • architecture, engineering, • design, building materials and techniques and organization • architects and military engineers Of these, it is the third aspect that is of direct and primary concern to the student of military architecture. This does not mean, however, that one should in any way ignore the two other aspects.

On the contrary, the student of military architecture must at all times command an expert knowledge of warfare, siegecraft, and weaponry. As once stated

by Hector Straith in the preface to his Introductory essay to the study of fortifications for young officers of the army published in 1852, ‘In order to obtain an intelligent knowledge of the whole subject, an officer ... should make himself acquainted with the principles of the great arm of Artillery, without which, no enlarged conceptions can be formed of the powers either of attack or defence’ Lendy’s magnum opus on fortification (1862), prepared as a text book for the teaching of the subject to officers in the British army, also began with a chapter on artillery before it went on to discuss the principles of defence and the various systems of fortification. A knowledge of warfare, therefore, must always form part of the foundations and preparations of any study of military architecture, before this can afford to move on in search of its own specific concerns in the various fields of architecture.

Having thus attempted to define, in a ‘Socratic’ manner, the meaning and boundaries of military

‘Fortifications were a matter of geography’ – they exploited the landscape and were in turn conditioned by it. Different geographic regions and climatic conditions provide different building materials from which fortifications could be readily constructed, often in urgency and as cheaply as possible.

architecture, one finds that this term has far deeper meaning than it implies. For military architecture, as a discipline, encapsulates within itself various fields of human endeavor, including art, material science, physics, engineering and urbanism.43 It is, in point of fact, one of the most diverse subjects one can encounter. It requires what today is termed as a multi-disciplinary approach.

Timber

Even the celebrated Vauban had to acknowledge that military architecture and engineering ‘embraced too many things for a man to be able to make himself perfectly master of it.’ And what has been difficult to practice, observed the late Prof Quentin Hughes in his seminal work on Military Architecture (1974), has been likewise difficult to ‘study and write about’. And a great part of this difficulty arises from the fact that the fortress, as a building, was moulded by a great variety of factors. Sir George Sydenham Clarke, remarked in his introduction to his book Fortification (1907) that ‘No science is so delightfully empirical as that of Fortification. The test of experiment cannot satisfactorily be applied to it; that of practical experiment is generally ambiguous. No fad is so unimportant that an instance cannot be found which affects to illustrate its utility; no theory so unpractical that evidence of some sort cannot be produced for its support. For the data are never scientifically complete, and each successful or unsuccessful attack or defence may generally be traced to any one of a dozen of causes in accordance with the personal predilections of the writer.’

Surely, all throughout its long history, military architecture has been protean - by its very nature it has had to keep changing to adapt to new challenges, continually responding to new weapons, new tactics, new materials, and to diverse geographical, political and social scenarios. It was

43 For military urbanism see Martha Pollack, The Europen City at War, op.cit.

this very need of military architecture to continually transform itself that created the vast and bewildering variety of shape, forms and styles of fortification to be found all around the world. In many ways it is this vast variety of shapes and forms that makes the subject unceasingly fascinating.

For the late Prof. Quentin Hughes, military architecture revolved around two basic considerations – the ‘choice of site and choice of building to place on that site.’ It was these primary concerns that ultimately dictated the shape and form of any defensive structure. These considerations were in turn influenced by three fundamental factors, namely, (i)

Strategy: which determined WHY a fortress needed to be built - and hence the role it was required to play;

(ii) Geography: which determined WHERE a

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By the early eighteenth century, military engineers had developed an accepted convention for drawing fortification plans, using an established colour code (which included red for exisiting stone ramparts and yellow for proposed or unfinished works).

An element of depth was often also added to the drawings by means of shading and, as a rule, a scale was included to assist the reader acquire a sense of the size and dimensions of the structure.

Leonardo da Vinci viewed the fortress as a living organism that could react and respond against both assault and the ever-increasing penetrative power of projectiles. His innovative and experimental fortress designs, examined through the medium of disegno, explored unconventional shapes and forms, and sought to bring together architecture, science and technology.

fortress could be built and the type of readily available building materials which could be used in its construction; and (iii) Technology: which determined HOW a fortress was designed and built, and armed

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Even so, all this typological diversity cannot all be explained solely by a Toynbeean challenge-andresponse model, for, as eloquently summed up Prof.

Simon Pepper in his study on The Meaning of the Renaissance Fortress, there are many aspects of fortress design that did not evolve out of pressing military concerns, ‘With very few exceptions architectural historians have treated the fortress as little more than a vehicle for the study of technical evolution in building form. Frequently a Toynbeean method is adopted, the development of military architecture being seen as a series of responses to challenges posed by improved weapons or new siege tactics. (1) This approach is, of course, essential to the understanding of fundamental physical changes, such as those which followed the introduction of effective gunpowder artillery during the second half of the fifteenth century

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and which led, by the mid-sixteenth century, to the redundancy of the medieval tower and curtain fortifications, and to their replacement by new systems of squat, earth filled ramparts, sunk in deep ditches and protected by triangular bastions. (2) Here, if ever there was one, is a copper bottomed case of evolution in architectural form brought about by the need to resist and accommodate a new type of weapon.

There are, however, severe histographical limitations on the usefulness of the purely technical approach – even when it is applied to so suitable an example as the Renaissance Fortress. It helps very little when one attempts to explain counter-revolutionary tendencies, such as popular resistance to the essential modernization of city walls, or the persistence of highly decorated gates, non-functional towers, and the merlatura…. Some of these features were not merely redundant, but positively dangerous in fortifications designed to resist ‘modern’ artillery.

Their perpetuation must be explained. Yet technical historians are liable to treat counterrevolutionary tendencies as aberrations – if they notice them at all.’

3.1 The Importance of Disegno

To the military engineers themselves, the men who designed and built these fortifications, military architecture was defined by one word … disegno (design, drawing). ‘Disegno’, wrote Pietro Cataneo in his Quattro primi libri di architectura (Venice,1554),44 ‘is one of the two main prerequisites in architecture, both civil and military.’ Architects and military engineers had to rely heavily on drawing skills to create, illustrate, and present concepts and designs to their military patrons. Even the courtier-warrior, according to Baldassare Castiglione, had to know how to draw and paint since a ‘knowledge of art’ gave the soldier the ability to sketch ‘castelles, houldes, fortresses, and suche other matters’,45 which otherwise could not be easily described to others. His sentiments can still be found echoed by the Dutch architect and trattatista Nicholas Goldman, in his La Nouvelle Fortification, published in 1644, where he claimed that a military engineer could not afford to be ‘ignorant of painting, nor of perspective for it would be a great shame for a master of great merit to not have the technique or the skill to draw a plan of a work one has undertaken to do when his general demands it of him’. 46

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Three 3-dimensional computer models of the Hospitaller castle of Crac des Chevaliers.

These images how the model in its various stages of construction by the author. Computer aided design (CAD) software has become an important tool in creating models, plans and drawings of historical fortifications, allowing for a better ‘all-round’ analysis of their shape, form and structural features.

Ever since the Renaissance, the systematic integration of images into discussions of architecture and fortifications has become a sine qua non of

44 Pietro Cataneo, I quattro primi libri di architettura di Pietro Cataneo senese .. 1554 see https://archive.org/ details/iquattroprimilib00cata.

45 Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1528) translated to English by Sir Thomas Hoby (1561), cited in J.R. Hale, Warfare and Cartography, ca. 1450 to ca. 1640 (http://www.press.uchicago.edu/books/HOC/ HOC_V3_Pt1/HOC_VOLUME3_Part1_chapter29.pdf), see pdf version at https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/ bitstream/handle/1794/671/courtier.pdf.

46 Nicholas Goldman, La Nouvelle Fortification (Leiden, 1644), as cited in K.H. Veltman, ‘Military Surveying and Topography: The Practical Dimension of Renaissance Linear Perspective’, in Revista de Universidade de Coimbra, Vol. XXVII, 1979 (Coimbra, 1979), 263-279.

all self-respecting treatises and books on military architecture. The most original contribution of Mariano di Iacopo (k.a.Taccola), Francesco di Giorgio, Leonardo da Vinci and other artistengineers of the quattro cento lay in the innovative and ‘expository functions which they gave to their images’.47 In so doing, they established ‘a primacy of graphics over words’. This reliance on 47

P. Galluzzi, Renaissance Engineers: From Brunelleschi to Leonardo da Vinci (Florence, 1996), 19.

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Foremost amongst the drawings which were created to give form to ideas and provide technical guides to construction of fortifications were orthographic representations - the plan and sectional elevation, as shown in this sheet depicting a proposal for a defensive project for a small islet inside Marsamxett Harbour, designed by the military engineers of the Knights of the Order of St. John in Malta sometime after 1716 (Image source: Courtesy of the National Library of Malta).

Orthographic representation was considered to be the most objective representation of architectural form because all dimensions, although scaled down, where shown in true size and relation to each other. Yet, despite being the easiest to draw, especially when compared to aerial views or perspectives, orthographic drawings were the most difficult to comprehend since none of the visual information, whether in plan or elevation, is presented as it would appear in reality.

Orthographic representations were conveyed in terms of lines since line drawings are particular effective in conveying shape and form, largely because of the fact that the human eye tends to perceive edges first.

(See G. Ditmar, K. Rogers and E. Ginis, ‘Architecture and Depiction’ -1980).

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Below, Textured three-dimensional computer reconstruction of Fort St. Rocco, a British coastal fort built in 1872 to protect the approaches to the Grand Harbour in Malta.

Bleow, right, 3D spatial simulation of a bulwark on the walls of the fortified city of Rhodes, generated from a photogrammetric processing of digital images (Source of images: Author).

graphics ushered in a culture of visual observation and description, and led to the development of draughtsmanship – the technical language of design in architecture.

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These drawings – plans, elevations, aerial perspectives – were not simply drawings for drawing’s sake. Then as now, fortifications, as all forms of buildings, began as drawings; and as ‘concepts on paper’, to cite Thomas Wells Schaller48 architectural drawings have always been the ‘very essence of planning, designing, and executing structures’.

Indeed, such was the importance that military engineers came to assign to the art of projecting fortifications on paper that they also developed their own special form of graphic representation.

Eventually termed ‘military perspective’ (prospettiva soldatesca or prospettiva cavaliera militare) this axonometric form of representation solved the

48 T. W. Schaller, The Art of Architectural Drawing: Imagination & Technique’ (1997).

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problem of conveying complex three-dimensional visual information by raising the point of view to enable a better representation of the whole ensemble and reveal the interior layout, without, however, introducing the distortions to the geometrical layout of the plan of a fortress and loss of equal scale that the use of perspective served to cause. Francesco di Giorgio Martini was able to demonstrate this new invention in his Codex Saluzziano in the late 1480s,49 and, thereafter, most military illustrators came to rely on it.50

49 Miguel Ángel Alonso-Rodríguez and José CalvoLópez, ‘Prospettiva Soldatesca: An Empirical Approach to the Representation of Military Architecture in the Early Modern Period’, in Nexus Network Journal Architecture and Mathematics (Turin, 2014), http://link.springer.com/ article/10.1007/s00004-014-0216-6/fulltext.html 50 The reception of Francesco De Giorio Martini’s solutions is encountered in the highly successful treatise Del modo di fortificar le città by G. Zanchi (1554), which espoused the use of bird’s eye views and so-called ‘military perspectives’ and, soon after, by Girolamo Maggi

An ability to visualize the three-dimensional qualities of fortification and to master the graphic language of communication is, as a result, one of the special demands that the study of military architecture places on its student. In military architecture, the well-worn saying that a picture tells a thousand words is not a cliché.

Students of fortification and military architecture must also be aware that there are particular terms of art, of which they must by no means be ignorant. ‘Over the centuries’, wrote Quentin Hughes in his masterly overview on the subject, ‘military architecture has evolved a language of its own. In order to express succinctly the intricate techniques which have been introduced into the art it was necessary to evolve a large number of specialist words.’ A mastery of this highly nuanced and sophisticated lexicon is necessary if the subject is to be understood and properly explained.

A command of technical issues and drawing alone, important and critical as these surely are, nevertheless, can never provide the full picture and the military architecture historian must turn to other sources of information in order to be able to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the subject and its development. The main sources of information, here, as in the study of all historic architecture, are generally the following:

and Giacomo Fusto Castriotto in Della fortificatione delle città, in 1564.

Most of the valuable structural information on historic fortifications, especially where these are no longer standing, is best found (and, in some cases, can only be found) in the original period plans and elevations.

This manuscript plan of the Cavalier of Fort St. Elmo, Malta, drawn in iron gall ink

by Mederico Blondel, shows the manner in which the spur of the triangular structure was truncated to make way for a new bastioned enceinte erected outside the fort (Image source: National Library of Malta).

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Disegno, likewise, remains the basic tool in any study of Military architecture today. The camera and computer nowadays also add to this power of visual analysis and all three together need to be duly exploited in the preparation of any modern study on the subject. It is the drawings - the elevations and sections, together with cut-away diagrams and aerial sketches - that really provide insight into the three-dimensional complexities of fortress construction. Laser scanning technology has also opened up new possibilities for highly accurate threedimensional computer modelling and documentation of fortifications.

Right, Detail from the account books of the Knights of the Order of St. John, showing the money paid out to various contractors for the quarrying and supply of stone in the building of a section of the walls of Fort Chambrai, in Gozo, during the 1750s.

Papers such as these, documenting the day-to-day activities of a fortress building site, are an indispensable source of information shedding light on the manner in which a fortified structure actually took shape.

(National Library of Malta).

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There are generally two routes into discussing military architecture. The first involves a theoretical approach - a study of the development and evolution of the various schools and systems of fortification. In trying to understand why the Hospitaller fortifications of Malta evolved as they did, for example, João M. Mateus suggested that they need to be studied

View of the remains of a hitherto unknown base of a late medieval gun-platform (a type of cubete artilleros) which was unearthed in Mdina, Malta in 2009. This unique discovery, brought to light in the course of conservation works, showed that the medieval defences of Malta, prior to 1530, were more sophisticated than previously thought.

‘in the context of the technical publications and military academies of the period. The science of fortification that developed during the three-century presence of the Knights on the island is a European science and the result both of theoretical debate and practical trials.

This debate, which went on in military academies and in a variety of texts, discussed the merits and limitations of different models of attack and defence’. 51 • the physical evidence itself derived from the standing architecture or archaeological remains; • historical documentation and archival material culled from contemporary primary sources : engineers’ and commissioners’ reports, architectural plans, building contracts and ‘appalti’, minutes of the meetings of the military and technical committees, testimonials, and numerous petitions by individual, master-masons and skilled craftsmen etc; and • contemporary treatises, hand books and textbooks of military architecture and fortification

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Nowadays, the student of military architect also has the great benefit of having ready at his disposal an extensive corpus of published books and papers and other secondary sources of literature on most aspects of the discipline. Certain topics, such as Roman military architecture, crusader and medieval castle architecture, Vauban’s bastioned fortifications, for example, have attracted considerable attention while other themes and paths of inquiry are still less well trodden on and poorly documented, providing opportunities for new original studies. When Allen Brown’s English Castles was first published in 1954, there were only a handful of books on the subject.

Half a century later, English castle studies run into their hundreds.

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Many studies also seek to trace the evolution of military architecture, through the use of notable case studies and extensive surveys or try to examine how concepts and ideas were translated into fortification schemes at different stages in the development of military architecture, frequently by examining the correlation between the technological factors, the geographical and topographical constraints, and the military and political exigencies which drove the implementation of major projects.

Another venue of research which has gained ground in recent years is that related to the study of military engineers and their formation. Amongst these has been the need to understand how the field of military architecture evolved from being the domain of the medieval master masons and the artists-engineers of the rinascimento to that of the specialist military engineers of the cinquecento and later. One seminal study in this regard, published in 2012 by Prof Denis De Lucca, examined the important contribution of the Jesuits religious Order to the teaching and theory of military architecture in the Baroque age.52 Leading

51 João M. Mateus, The Science of Fortification in Malta in the Context of European Architectural Treatises and Military Academies, http://www.arct.cam.ac.uk/ Downloads/ichs/vol-2-2125-2138-mateus.pdf.

52 D. de Lucca, The Contribution of the Jesuits, op.cit.

The real face of war – fortifications under attack - (top) dead soldiers who fell defending field fortifications at Chanclerosville during the American Civil War and, (bottom) the walls of Fort Pulaski pounded and breached. These are not the type of neat and manicured ‘monuments’ that often welcome visitors to historic fortified sites today. (Source of images: Wikipedia).

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military engineers like Sangallo, Pagan, De Ville, Menno Van Cohoen, have attracted considerable attention and have also been the focus of much scholarly work. The tri-centenary of Marshal Sébastien Le Preste de Vauban’s death, in particular, resulted in several new books in France in 2007.

The second main route of investigation involves a dissection of forts and their structures in order to glean the minutiae of design and construction, and their building materials. Often the first challenge, here, is the need to find a scale of analysis (i.e., micro vs macro approach) that permits the best level of conceptualization.

Recent years have seen a growing momentum in the compilation of carefully documented investigations of individual fortifications and sites, coupled with scholarly archaeological analysis of surviving remains and fabric, and in many an instance these are also serving to transform our knowledge of particular fortifications and their architectural development, at times leading to reappraisals of commonly held tenets.

Very often, a second important demand that the study of military architecture places on its student is the difficulty of old languages. It is one thing reading a type-written report on the constructional details of a WWII concrete bunker and quite another trying to read and decipher an old medieval script – that is, of course, assuming one has managed to trace and unearth the old document in the first place.

The issue of old languages and the need of translating the texts into their modern equivalent also creates problems of interpretation. The use of the word ‘barbican’, for example, etymologically derived from the Arabic bab khan (meaning the great gate and applied to gatehouses or gate-towers) acquired various different meanings in medieval texts, from bent entrances and tête de pontes designed to provide extra protection to castle gates, antemurale and other outworks providing outer lines of defence (such as the faussebraye). Applying the wrong definition can misguide the overall understanding of an old fortified structure.

As in all disciplines which contain a degree of history in their structural DNA, one also needs to

be very much aware that military architecture can be, in many ways, a non-definitive subject – that is, it remains continually open to reinterpretation and review whenever new historical facts and studies are slowly brought to light.

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4. Conclusion

The modern art of luring tourists to fortifications - the spectacle of ‘infotainment’. The images (above and right) show a colourful romantic parade purporting to depict a Hospitaller garrison at Fort St. Elmo, in Valletta, Malta (Source images: Author).

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Right, Accurate reconstruction of the interior of a WWII concrete pillbox at Manikata in Malta, showing how the weapons were mounted. This is an excellent example of the ‘ergonometric’ usefulness of historical ‘re-enactment’ and how it can be used in the study of fortification in the absence of documentation that sheds light on such issues. (Image source: Author, Re-enactment courtesy of Malta Command, a history group specializing in WWII military equipment, tactics and uniforms of the British army in Malta.)

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To recapitulate, and bring to a close this introductory essay, it is important to reiterate that the study of military architecture is the study of the art and science of designing and building fortifications.

Hopefully this paper has managed to show that there is a difference between the study of fortification and the study of military architecture for although both overlap and deal with the same subject, each goes in search of different types of information. One is concerned with war and the art of defence, and the other, with design and construction. As already stated earlier, although military architecture falls under the wider umbrella of the arts of war, it is itself not all about war but, primarily, about the creative skill of building. Actually, military architecture, to cite the words of the late Prof. Hughes once again, is ‘not of a warlike or provocative nature, rather it is the very essence of peaceful co-existence’; ‘Fortresses were designed to maintain authority, not to usurp it, Military architecture is the art of defence, not of attack. Permanent fortifications are in essence non-aggressive and unprovocative’53 Certainly, of all the sophisticated instruments of war created by man, fortifications are perhaps the only ones which were intended to protect life rather than destroy it. Granted, there were many a work of fortification which were used to control and subdue alienated and conquered peoples, and many such strongholds served more as repressive prisons rather than as centres for collective shelter.

But, on the whole, most works of fortification were intrinsically protective and it is particularly this noble and dignified nature of military architecture, coupled with its strong aesthetic qualities, that has helped me justify, both philosophically and morally, the study of the subject in my own mind. For I have no illusions about the ugliness, cruelty and futility of war and the last thing I have wanted to do all along is to be an inadvertent and naïve participant in its glorification.

53

J. Quentin Hughes, Military Architecture (1975).

Below, The author at Crac des Chevaliers in Syria in 2010, and right and below, at Fort St. Nicholas during the filming of a TVM documentary on the Hospitaller fortifications of Rhodes in 2007; at Devil’s Gap Battery (built in 1902), in Gibraltar, in 2001; and, bottom right, drawing a reconstruction of Fort St. Elmo to commemorate the 450th anniversary of the Siege of Malta in 1565, in 2015.

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To the student of military architecture, then, the finality of the pursuit of his subject cannot lie, as I believe, in displays of mock-sieges, in the firing of blank cannon charges or in colourful pageants purporting to re-create garrison life, as some are inclined to think. Nor does he really need to know the details and the size of the metal bolts holding the wheels of a garrison carriage or the colours of the lapels on the uniforms of soldiers who stood guard at a fortress gate in order to appreciate a work of military architecture. Such information may prove very useful in allowing for a faithful staging of a historical setting inside a fort but at the end of the day it tells us nothing at all about how that particular work of fortification was conceived,

designed and built. Many are those students of the subject, nevertheless, who go in search of fortifications precisely for such experiences and when they fail to find ‘the narrative of war configured as the story of boys and their toys’, to cite Jay Winters, they are left ‘perplexed, annoyed, or disappointed’.54 In fact, the exploitation of this narrative of militarism through re-enactments, for which many a castle, citadel, and fortress provides a convenient theatre stage, is actually more

54 Jay Winters, Museums and the Representation of War, 2012.

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The proud ruins of the Hospitaller castle of Archangelos, on the island of Rhodes (image source: Author).

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View of the circular albarra type of tower keep at the castlepalace of Bellvar in Majorca (Image source: Author).

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Despite its convincing appearance, the so-called Zammitello Tower, situated in the north of Malta, is not a work of fortification but a 19th-century romantic architectural folly, a product of the ingenious Romanticism of the Victorian era and entirely useless from a defensive point of view. In the 1800s, rich land owners considered it de rigueur to have such towers erected on their estates. Zammitello Tower, like other follies, shows the great influence that the distinctive shapes and forms of military architecture have had, and still continue to exert, on popular imagination.

widespread today than ever before. Yet, in reality, few works of fortification really require such ‘added value’ to enable them to be appreciated since most forts and fortresses already possess more than enough gravitas to command genuine attention on their own clear terms. This is not to say, however, that historical re-enactment cannot contribute anything to the appreciation and understanding of military architecture – in fact, it can, at times, prove very useful in throwing light on the ‘ergonometrics’ of fortress design – but that such displays, especially where configured for entertainment purposes, often serve to deflect attention away from those elements that should be the source of focus. Instead, the real satisfaction for the student of military architecture should be found simply, and primarily, in the very exploration of the fortress – a journey of discovery in the pursuit of its architecture, driven by the need to understand both the minutiae of design and construction as well as the ideas and concepts behind its design and features. Indeed, the beauty of the study of this subject lies in its vast wealth of shapes, forms, styles and typologies, spanning across millennia, continents, civilizations and cultures – a myriad of fascinating buildings and structures waiting to be re-discovered, documented and studied. Truly, the whole world is one large open-air museum of military architecture.

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Acknowledgements -The author is greatly indebted to the late Prof. J. Quentin Hughes, and to Prof. Denis de Lucca, Arch.

Hermann Bonnici, Arch. Claude Busuttil , and Dr. Theresa Vella Ph.D, Dr. Emilie d’Orgeix Ph.D, Dr. Simon Mifsud MD, and Mr. Christian Mifsud M.A. for their inspiration and assistance in the preparation and finalization of this paper. A special thanks also go to the staff of the National Library of Malta for permission to reproduce the plans and documents included in this publication.

This work has benefitted immensely from the many excellent studies published by various historians and researchers over the course of the past decades and is greatly indebted to them in many ways.

Dr. Stephen C. Spiteri Dipl. (Int. Des.) RI, B.A. (Hons), Ph.D, specializes in the military architecture of the Hospitaller Knights of St John and the fortifications of the Maltese islands. He is the author of a number of books and studies on the military history and fortifications of Malta, the Knights of St John, and British Colonial defences in Malta. He is a founding member of the Sacra Militia Foundation for the Study of Hospitaller Military and Naval History and edits ARX, the on-line journal on fortification.

Dr. Spiteri was also involved in the setting up of the Fortifications Interpretation Centre in Valletta, Malta and is also a part-time lecturer at the International Institute for Baroque Studies at the University of Malta, where he lectures and teaches on the history and development of military architecture, and on the art and science of fortress-building. Dr. Spiteri is currently reading for his second Ph.D degree at the University of Malta, in which he is exploring the relationship between art and fortification.

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