The story goes that, when he was still a young man, he fell in love with a Greek woman who was being held prisoner. He kept her with him inside his tent for three full days and nights. The soldiers began to mutter among themselves, calling him henpecked, a milksop, that sort of thing. Once he had spent a while enjoying the girl, the sheikh found out about the rumors. He dragged the poor Byzantine girl out of the tent and — pam! — slit her throat with his scimitar. Then, with the army in formation before him, he bellowed the words: “Who out of you will follow this sword of mine, so powerful it severs even the bonds of love?”
The sheikh’s onslaughts initially comprised the usuaclass="underline" thousands of Janissaries roasted, scalded with boiling pitch, and to a greater or lesser degree, taken to pieces at the foot of the ramparts.
But then a small group of Hungarian and, mainly, Italian engineers (those Italians, always making trouble!) offered their services to the Moorish king. And this sheikh charged them with designing the largest cannon ever known.
Gunpowder was in use by that time, although in battle merely as fireworks, which would frighten the less battle-hardened and aid the morale of one’s own side, but little else. But this Turk was very — very — serious about cannons. The result was the Great Bombard, a thirty-foot-long cannon. Once it was assembled, a team of three hundred bullocks was needed to pull it to Constantinople. They covered no more than a mile and a half of ground a day, it was so heavy. But they got there in the end.
The Great Bombard fired half-ton balls of stone. As hard as the Byzantines tried to fill the breaches, what could they do against this? One discharge would be followed by another and another. And though it was hard to be accurate with the Bombard, it was impossible to miss ramparts that high and vertical.
Everybody knows the rest. The Turks poured through the breaches, the Byzantine emperor died fighting on the front line. Throughout Europe, engineers shuddered — for, from that moment on, what use were ramparts? Fortifying a city was a very costly affair, and kings were not prepared to spend fortunes on useless works. The big question was: Now how to protect our cities? (And in private: Now how to conserve our wages as royal engineers?)
Formulas were devised, proposals made, the majority of them unreliable, confused, doubtful. And the only mind ever to succeed in solving all aspects of the problem was the man strolling at my side: Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban.
Given that pyroballistics had become the principal threat to city ramparts, in order to protect against them, everything had to be reinvented. Vauban glanced at me inquisitively. “Well? What would you do in such a case, Cadet Zuviría?”
What a question. I had not the faintest idea. “I’m afraid I don’t know, monsieur,” I mused aloud. “How to avoid a bombardment by artillery? Only two formulas occur to me: attacking the cannons or hiding from them. Attacking would seem like suicide. If cannons can destroy the strongest ramparts, what would they do to human flesh? As for fleeing, that would save the garrison but condemn the city. And there is no way to hide ramparts.”
Vauban clicked his fingers. “The last one you said. You were on the right track.”
I had to stop myself from laughing. “But monsieur, how to hide the entire walled perimeter of a city?”
“By burying it.”
6
In the Middle Ages, city ramparts were tall and vertical. The thicker the ramparts and the taller the battlements, the stronger the defenses. And to make them even stronger, there you had your turrets all the way around.
The might of medieval ramparts was there for all to see, and to this day, they are so associated in people’s minds with the idea of what a fortress is that if we ask a child to draw a picture of a rampart, he’ll do one in the old style, even though he has never seen one like that, rather than a modern one, the kind he spends every day playing at the foot of.
Vauban turned traditional fortress-making principles on their head by introducing more of a slope to his ramparts, at times to an incline of sixty degrees; the angle meant that cannonballs would bounce off rather than punch through. Given that cannonballs tended to skew off in all directions, they were extremely inaccurate.
Moreover, the height of medieval ramparts had become a disadvantage, so that the Vaubanian system built them behind a very deep concealing moat. In certain of Vauban’s projects, the fortifications stood even lower than the town buildings. This produced a curious effect: An army approaching the city would barely be able to make out the defenses, but the civil buildings behind would be in plain sight.
I include a print to give a better idea. (This one, you German flabber face. Here! Not before, not after. Here!)
The medieval turrets, at intervals along the walled enclosures, came to be replaced by bastions. A bastion was a sort of smaller fort embedded in the walls, normally five-sided. See, in this next image, the spear point construction sticking out from the ramparts?
This is a basic bastion, in fact a rather unassuming one in terms of its size. The bastions in the larger fortresses would be gigantic, immense bulks garrisoned by up to a thousand men, with dozens of cannon and underground ammunition stores inside. In the fortifications built by the modern Maganons, thus, the ramparts were protected by bastions, and these in turn provided one another with covering fire.
Let us imagine that an invader decides to try to take the stronghold. The bastion has been expressly designed with five sides. The attackers will have no choice but to scale one of the outwardly projecting bastion walls. Whichever they choose, the adjacent bastions will cover their fellow defenders with sustained fire. As the attackers advance, arrows and cannonballs will rain down from the ramparts and the bastions, as well as thousands of liters of burning pitch.
If, rather than the bastions, they attack one of the rampart’s central portions, they’ll have an even worse time of it. The poor fools who go down into the moat will never get out. They’ll be fired on from three sides: from the rampart, and from the covering bastions to the left and right.
Cross fire. Two words that, on paper, are just an engineer’s design concept. But when ink becomes stone, these two words become the light of a very hell.
Cross fire! Hundreds, thousands, of uniforms descending into and rising out of an everlasting ditch, fired at, bombarded, exterminated by an invisible army. The ditch may have been flooded or, as in most cases, packed with sharpened stakes over five feet in length. Those who impaled themselves would have to be clambered over by the rest until, finally, any advance would become impossible. If the attack were by a small troop, not a man would be left alive; if it comprised thousands, the ditch would fill up with writhing bodies.
This callous marvel to which Vauban gave his name could be multiplied infinitely. For still more protection, a “moon” or “half-moon” fortification could be set before one of the flat sections. Before they could attack the rampart’s first line, the invader would have to expend thousands of projectiles to demolish the half-moon. And in the unlikely case that it was taken, the defenders would draw back to the next rampart, raising the drawbridges after them.
And the game would begin again, the fallback still viable. The attackers would have succeeded in taking only an outcrop — at a cost of hundreds of dead. What resources could they call on to resume the attack? Moons, half-moons, ravelins, pincers. . an endless variety of defensive architecture that does not bear describing to the uninitiated. In any case, anyone who wants to can look up the technical details of a fully equipped armature.