A bastion fort or trace italienne ( a phrase derived from non-standard french, literally meaning Italian outline ) is a fortification in a stylus that evolved during the early modern menstruation of gunpowder when the cannon came to dominate the battlefield. It was first seen in the mid-fifteenth hundred in Italy. Some types, particularly when combined with ravelins and other outworks, resembled the refer star fort of the lapp earned run average. The design of the fortress is normally a polygon with bastions at the corners of the walls. These outcroppings eliminated protect blind spots, called “ dead zones ”, and allowed open fire along the curtain from positions protected from target displace. many bastion forts besides feature cavaliers, which are raised secondary structures based wholly inside the elementary structure .
Origins [edit ]
Fortification plan of Coevorden, laid out in a radial radiation pattern within polygonal fortifications and extensive outer earthworks as reconstructed in the early on seventeenth hundred by Maurice, Prince of Orange
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Their predecessors, chivalric fortresses, were normally placed on high hills. From there, arrows were shot at the enemies. The enemies ‘ promise was to either ram the gate or climb over the wall with ladders and overcome the defenders. For the invade force, these fortifications proved quite difficult to overcome, and consequently, fortresses occupied a key situation in war. passive annular ( Enceinte ) fortifications of the Medieval earned run average proved vulnerable to damage or end by cannon fire, when it could be directed from outside against a vertical masonry wall. In addition, an attacking impel that could get close to the wall was able to conduct cave operations in relative guard, as the defenders could not shoot at them from nearby walls, until the development of Machicolation. In contrast, the bastion fortress was a very flat social organization composed of many triangular bastions, specifically designed to cover each other, and a dump. To counteract the cannonballs, defensive walls were made lower and chummy. To counteract the fact that lower walls were easier to climb, the ditch was widened so that attacking infantry were silent exposed to fire from a higher elevation, including enfilading fire from the bastions. The out side of the trench was normally provided with a glacis to deflect cannonballs aimed at the lower part of the main wall. far structures, such as ravelins, tenailles, hornworks or crownworks, and evening detached forts could be added to create complex out works to further protect the main wall from artillery, and sometimes provide extra defensive positions. They were built of many materials, normally ground and brick, as brick does not shatter on impact from a cannonball as stone does. [ 2 ] bastion fortifications were far developed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, primarily in response to the french invasion of the italian peninsula. The french united states army was equipped with raw cannon and bombards that were easily able to destroy traditional fortifications built in the Middle Ages. Star forts were employed by Michelangelo in the defensive earthworks of Florence, and refined in the sixteenth hundred by Baldassare Peruzzi and Vincenzo Scamozzi. The design spread out of Italy in the 1530s and 1540s. It was employed heavily throughout Europe for the trace three centuries. italian engineers were heavily in demand throughout Europe to help build the newly fortifications. The late-seventeenth-century architects Menno avant-garde Coehoorn and specially Vauban, Louis XIV ‘s military engineer, are considered to have taken the form to its coherent extreme. “ Fortresses … acquired ravelins and redoubts, bonnettes and lunettes, tenailles and tenaillons, counterguards and crownworks and hornworks and curvettes and fausse brayes and escarpment and cordons and banquettes and counterscarps … ” [ 3 ] The asteroid fortification had a formative influence on the model of the Renaissance ideal city : “ The Renaissance was hypnotized by one city type which for a century and a half—from Filarete to Scamozzi—was shanghai upon all utopian schemes : this is the asteroid city. ” [ 4 ] In the nineteenth century, the development of the explosive shell changed the nature of defensive fortifications. Elvas, in Portugal is considered by some to be the best exist exercise of the dutch school of fortifications .
Slopes [edit ]
When the newly-effective maneuverable siege cannon came into military scheme in the fifteenth century, the response from military engineers was to arrange for the walls to be embedded into ditches fronted by earthen slopes ( glacis ) so that they could not be attacked by destructive mastermind fire and to have the walls topped by earthen banks that absorbed and largely dissipated the energy of plunging fire. Where conditions allowed, as in Fort Manoel in Malta, the ditches were cut into the native rock, and the wall at the inside of the ditch was merely unquarried native rock. As the walls became lower, they besides became more vulnerable to assault .
dead zone [edit ]
The polish shape that had previously been dominant for the design of turrets created “ dead space ”, or “ dead zones ”, which were relatively sheltered from defending fire, because address fire from other parts of the defences could not be directed around curl walls. To prevent this, what had previously been round or squarely turrets were extended into diamond-shaped points to eliminate potential cover for attacking troops. The ditches and walls channelled the attackers into cautiously constructed zwinger, bailey, or exchangeable “ kill zone “ areas where the attackers had no place to shelter from the fire of the defenders .
enfilade [edit ]
A further and more insidious change was to move from a passive model of defense to an active voice matchless. The lower walls were more vulnerable to being stormed, and the protection that the earthen bank provided against send fire failed if the attackers could occupy the slope on the outside of the chuck and mount an attacking cannon there. consequently, the shape was designed to make maximum habit of enfilade ( or flanking ) fire against any attackers who should reach the base of any of the walls. The indentations in the base of each item on the star sheltered cannons. Those cannons would have a clear line of fire directly down the edge of the neighbor points, while their point of the star was protected by open fire from the base of those points. The development of these ideas can be seen in transitional fortifications such as Sarzana in northwest Italy. [ 5 ]
other changes [edit ]
Ideal fortified city : a design of Nové Zámky ( Neuhäusel ) in Slovakia, built in 1663, drawn c. 1680 therefore forts evolved complex shapes that allowed defensive batteries of cannon to command interlocking fields of fire. Forward batteries commanded the slopes which defended walls deeper in the complex from direct fire. The defending cannon were not plainly intended to deal with attempts to storm the walls, but to actively challenge attacking cannon and deny them approach close enough to the fort to engage in directly fire against the vulnerable walls. The identify to the fort ‘s defense moved to the out border of the ditch surrounding the fort, known as the traverse means, or covert way. Defenders could move relatively safely in the cover of the ditch and could engage in active countermeasures to keep dominance of the glacis, the open gradient that lay outside the trench, by creating defensive earthworks to deny the foe access to the glacis and therefore to firing points that could bear directly onto the walls and by digging anticipate mines to intercept and disrupt attempts to mine the fortify walls. Compared to medieval fortifications, forts became both lower and larger in area, providing defense in depth, with tiers of defences that an attacker needed to overcome in orderliness to bring carom to bear on the inner layers of defences. Firing emplacements for defending cannon were heavily defended from barrage by external burn, but open towards the inside of the fortify, not only to diminish their utility to the attacker should they be overcome, but besides to allow the large volumes of smoke that the fight cannon would generate to dissipate .
[6] Yedikule, which was built in 1458, is the oldest known asteroid fortification.
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Fortifications of this type continued to be effective while the attackers were armed merely with cannon, where the majority of the damage inflicted was caused by momentum from the impact of solid shooting. Because only low explosives such as black powder were available, explosive shells were largely ineffective against such fortifications. The development of mortars, high explosives, and the attendant bombastic increase in the destructive exponent of explosive shells and thus plunging fire rendered the intricate geometry of such fortifications irrelevant. Warfare was to become more mobile. It took, however, many years to abandon the old fortress think .
Cyclopaedia mesa of Fortification, from the 1728
construction [edit ]
bastion forts were very expensive. Amsterdam ‘s 22 bastions cost 11 million florins, and Siena in 1544 bankrupted itself to pay for its defences. For this reason, bastion forts were frequently improvised from earlier defences. Medieval curtain walls were torn depressed, and a ditch was dug in front of them. The earth used from the dig was piled behind the walls to create a solid social organization. While purpose-built fortifications would frequently have a brick dashboard because of the material ‘s ability to absorb the shock of weapon fuel, many improvised defences cut costs by leaving this phase out and alternatively opting for more earth. extemporization could besides consist of lowering medieval round towers and infilling them with worldly concern to strengthen the structures. It was besides frequently necessary to widen and deepen the dump outside the walls to create a more effective barrier to frontlet rape and mine. Engineers from the 1520s were besides building massive, gently sloping banks of earth called glacis in movement of ditches so that the walls were about wholly hidden from horizontal weapon burn. The main benefit of the glaces was to deny enemy artillery the ability to fire point-blank. The lower the angle of aggrandizement, the higher the stopping world power .
plan of bastion fortress
plan of Geneva in 1841. The colossal fortifications, among the most authoritative in Europe, were demolished ten years late. The first key example of a trace Italianate was at the Papal port of Civitavecchia, where the master walls were lowered and thickened because the stone tended to shatter under bombing .
effectiveness [edit ]
The first major conflict which truly showed the effectiveness of trace Italienne was the defense of Pisa in 1500 against a compound Florentine and french united states army. With the original medieval fortifications beginning to crumble to French cannon fire, the Pisans constructed an earthen rampart behind the threatened sector. It was discovered that the sloping earthen rampart could be defended against escalade and was besides much more immune to cannon fire than the curtain rampart it had replaced. The second siege was that of Padua in 1509. A monk mastermind named Fra Giocondo, trusted with the defense mechanism of the Venetian city, cut down the city ‘s chivalric wall and surrounded the city with a broad dump that could be swept by flanking fire from gun ports set low in projections extending into the ditch. Finding that their cannon fire made little impression on these low ramparts, the french and allied besiegers made several bally and bootless assaults and then withdrew. The new type of fortification besides played a role in the numerous Mediterranean wars, slowing down the Ottoman expansion. Although Rhodes had been partially upgraded to the new type of fortifications after the 1480 siege, it was still conquered in 1522 ; nevertheless it was a long and bloody siege, and the besieged had no hope of outside relief because the island was close to the Ottoman power foundation and far from any allies. On the early hand, the Ottomans failed to take Corfu in 1537 in no humble part because of the new fortifications, and respective attempts spanning about two centuries ( another major one was in 1716 ) besides failed. [ 7 ] [ 8 ]
Two asterisk forts were built by the Order of Saint John on the island of Malta in 1552, Fort Saint Elmo and Fort Saint Michael. Fort Saint Elmo played a critical function in the Ottoman siege of 1565 when it managed to hold out big barrage for over a calendar month. finally it fell, but the Ottoman casualties were very high, and it bought time for the relief force which arrived from Sicily to relieve the rest of the besieged island. The star fort therefore played a all-important and decisive role in the siege. [ 9 ] After the fall of Venice to Napoleon, Corfu was occupied in 1797 by the french republican armies. The now ancient fortifications were still of some prize at this point. A Russian–Ottoman–English alliance led at ocean by Admiral Ushakov and with troops sent by Ali Pasha retake Corfu in 1799 after a four-month siege, when the garrison led by general Louis François Jean Chabot, being inadequate of provisions and having lost the key island of Vido at the capture of the larboard, surrendered and was allowed passage back to France. [ 10 ] [ 11 ]
Role in the military revolution [edit ]
According to Geoffrey Parker in his article, The Military Revolution 1560–1660: A Myth?, the appearance of the trace Italienne in early mod Europe, and the difficulty of taking such fortifications, resulted in a profound change in military scheme, most importantly, Parker argued, an increase in united states army sizes necessity to attack these forts. “ Wars became a serial of drawn-out sieges, ” Parker suggests, and open-pitch battles became “ irrelevant ” in regions where the trace Italienne existed. ultimately, Parker argues, “ military geography ”, in early words, the being or absence of the trace Italienne in a given area, shaped military strategy in the early advanced period. This is a profound alteration of the Military Revolution thesis originally proposed by Michael Roberts in 1955. Parker ‘s stress on the fortification as the key component has attracted substantial criticism from some academics, such as John A. Lynn and M. S. Kingra, peculiarly with respect to the claimed causal connect between the new fortress purpose and increases in army sizes during this period. [ 12 ]
obsolescence [edit ]
In the nineteenth century, with the development of more brawny weapon and explosive shells, star forts were replaced by dim-witted but more robust polygonal forts. In the twentieth century, with the development of tanks and antenna war during and after the first World War, pay back fortifications became and have remained less significant than in previous centuries .
See besides [edit ]
Notes [edit ]
References [edit ]
- af Hällström, Olof (2004) Sveaborg – The island fortress off Helsinki, ISBN 978-952-91-7378-5
- Duffy, C. (1975) Fire & Stone, The Science of Fortress Warfare 1660–1860, ISBN 978-0-7858-2109-0
