Primary source analysis. 1000-word analysis of ONE of the following primary source extracts or images giving particular attention to (1) the nature of the source (2) the historical context and (3) what the source can tell the historian.

The early use of gunpowder and the approximate dates for the advent and dispersal of related technologies are reasonably well known in Asia, bringing with the Qing dynasty through the silk road to Europe, but the impact of these events on architecture has not been adequately studied.1 The study of fortifications is an essential tool in understanding the dispersal and reception of gunpowder technologies. Yet, there are few comprehensive or regional studies on the fortifications of Europe. Barring some research by Jean Deloche and Klaus Rötzer, there is almost no analysis of the development of military architecture as a response to fast-changing war technologies. The continuous occupation of many fortified settlements and fortresses until at least the nineteenth century has meant that historical accretions and associations of later rulers (or sometimes very early ones) are often erroneously and disproportionately misunderstood without any study of the phased construction of these sites. This paper will examine some of the architectural changes that were impacted by the rapidly changing military technology during the sixteenth century.

The evidence suggests that as early as the fifteenth century, the attitudes towards gunpowder technologies and related architectural innovations between the great powers of Europe were already quite divergent, as reflected in the fortifications. Architecture and settlement patterns are better indices of changes in military technology than literary sources if they can be recovered adequately and sensitively. Of course, architectural studies often face the same problems as readings of historical texts, in that layers of subsequent additions, accretions, and modifications have to be recognized and imagined away before uncovering the reality of any given point in time. However, the real advantage lies in the raison d’être of military architecture, which is necessarily utilitarian. In contrast, literary sources can only provide images and projections of military processes and products, as imagined and viewed within the context of the mass adoption of gunpowder base warfare.

For the greater part of the Millennium, sieges far outnumbered battles – the defence of places is central to war, and their capture is the principal strategic objective. The inevitability of the siege as the dominant form of warfare, from the Crusades until Napoleon, was imposed by certain simple continuities – indeed, we might consider this a kind of military Longue durée. Chief among these continuities is the fact that armies could not keep the field throughout the year. An invading army could occupy territory and yet be forced to withdraw unless it could find winter quarters. These would inevitably be in a defended place, and that place could not be acquired without a siege.

Moreover, obligations of service within a feudal army seldom extended beyond a short campaigning season. Secondly, the economic limitations on the size of armies throughout most of the Millennium, and the poor condition of roads and the limited food surpluses to be had from the countryside into the eighteenth century, meant that the political objective of war had to be limited to capturing a region or a province. This would be achieved by besieging one or two key places. Warfare could seldom be decisive, save by steady attrition that would be Witnessed during the Muslims’ long struggle to remove the European invaders from Outremer, the Hundred Years War, and the Eighty Years War. Cities served as the means of dominating the surrounding countryside, as did castles. Hence, urban space had to be defended in all but the small handful of pacified regions in Europe. As urban centres of commerce and trade being critical strategic locations for invading armies, Sieges were part of the typical experience of urban dwellers, and fortifications were welcomed by most of them as a source of security. The continuity in the military and social role of de? Fended places between 1500 and 1800 contrast with the fundamental discontinuity in their form. As The castle developed, its structure deliberately created an imbalance between the forces needed to defend it and those required to besiege it. Medieval castles were frequently strategic in their location and often part of a plan of expansion and control. They were a means of domination over captured territories and bases of resistance against forces far large.

As The castle developed, form deliberately created an imbalance between the forces needed to defend it and those required to besiege it. Only later, when artillery had become plentiful, as the prevalence of combined warfare of powder and melee-based armies began to become the staple of Europe’s armies during the fifteenth century, did defences based on high walls begin to give way to ones in which the crucial concern is to screen vertical surfaces against artillery. We tend to regard the walled palace, the castle or the city as ancient forms that go back as far as the sieges of the Assyrians or the wars between cities in Hellenic Sicily. But in the fifteenth century, when vertical stone fortifications were rendered obsolete by gunpowder, they were, in fact, relatively new to Western Europe. Moreover, they were the product of a rapid evolution, highly sophisticated and in no way inferior to their successors, either in terms of architectural technique or of military function. From the sixth to the tenth centuries, stone buildings had been a rarity. Western Europe was too poor and too decentralized to copy or even to conserve Roman achievements and legacies. Before the tenth century, defences were based on earth ditches and wooden palings (Motte and bailey castles were effective against raids, and few pirates or local feudal foes had the means to mount a proper siege.

The bastioned style fortress was subject to no less radical a domination of the structure by the spatial demands of its form of use than the panopticon. Artillery fortification in its developed form was conditioned by geometry, space being governed by functional demands, and the resultant structures are a consequence of this logic rather than of stylistic considerations. The entire space surrounding the walls of the city the resultant structures are a consequence of this logic rather than of stylistic concerns. Space as the whole surrounding the walls of the city was subjected to interlocking fields of fire over a kilometre or more of open ground and also along the faces of the adjoining bastions and curtains, thus creating a zone swept by artillery in which there is no ‘dead’ ground. The Renaissance fortress is therefore of considerable interest in terms of architectural form

A more practical structure, if less elegant and less apparently ‘teleological, is Baldassare Peruzzi’s bastion at Porta San Viene in Siena (1527), which concentrates the limited artillery available in a three-tiered casemate. In conditions of artillery shortage, weak places or ‘intermediate designs could prove effective not only strategically but economically as artillery was extremely scarce until the very end of the sixteenth century. Small bastions made economical use of the available guns. The history of the development of the bastioned fortress is therefore very different from that of a simple and inevitable engineering solution. There was a range of other spatial systems, and the choice of one technology over another cannot be understood in purely technical terms. The issues encompass intellectual, political and economic concerns as well

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