How to Defend a Star Fortress Forever in the 16th and Early 17th Century

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I just watched the entire thing. That was pretty cool.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/Dabat1 📅︎︎ Dec 09 2021 🗫︎ replies

Good watch, but the title is a little misleading and a bit of click bait which seems odd for a fortress siege video. Should likely be called how to defend a fortress for several years which admittedly isn't as exciting.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/TheUniverseInsideUs 📅︎︎ Dec 09 2021 🗫︎ replies

Long audiobook commercial in the middle of this, was interesting until that point. That was a painful segue.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/dr_root 📅︎︎ Dec 10 2021 🗫︎ replies

Interesting and well-made video, but you spent VERY little time explaining the significance of the star-shape... which is what was promised and the reason I watched the video. I wanted to understand how the star-shaped made it better, in comparison with other designs.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/SomeBodybuilder7910 📅︎︎ Dec 10 2021 🗫︎ replies
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A hostile army is marching towards your homeland. They come with siege engines, artillery, sappers and all sorts of equipment you definitely don't want to see being used in front of your city gates. Intelligence suggests that they come to lay siege to your city. The people and your town rely on you to stand strong. The best military technology of the time, the star fortress is at your disposal. You must keep it at all costs. But how do you actually do this? Whether you happen to be a military engineer, a 16th century general or just an interested history buff – in this video we will provide you with the most necessary knowledge to defend a star fortress forever. Choose your location wisely. Whether you build your fortress shaped as a star or not is secondary to where you build it. The most crucial element for the defense of a fortress is most probably water both as a barrier and a means of attack. Almost all hardwearing fortresses were built near rivers, lakes or the sea. The Dutch in particular were masters of the watery defense. With their low-lying country – large parts on sea level or even lower – they developed several very efficient ways of exploiting the power of this element. One of the most spectacular examples is the siege of Antwerp in 1584/85. Antwerp is situated at the river Schelde. When the Spaniards were attacking the town, they soon realized that they had to gain control over the river because Antwerp was constantly receiving reinforcements coming in from the river. However, to prevent the Spaniards from coming closer to the town, they simply broke several dikes and flooded the lowlands near the river and the town. This way, their allies could bring their fleet to the flooded area which resulted in a major sea battle. Flooding, as in Antwerp, was one of the favorite tactics of the Dutch. However, they did not always submerge whole regions. During the siege of Ostende in 1601 to 1604, the city’s defenders swept away a major assault by opening a sluice, which created an artificial riptide. The water broke the lines of the approaching Spaniards and swept many of them into the sea. But even if water isn't used in such an offensive manner, it provides a natural barrier. Water makes it much more difficult to seal off a city completely and makes it easier to provide it with supplies and reinforcements. This was utilized masterfully during the siege of Ostende as well. The city, if you look at this map, was located far away from Dutch territories, amidst the Spanish Netherlands but for almost four years the Dutch regularly brought supplies and reinforcements past the Spanish besiegers into the town by sea. Alongside water there are ideally several features of the terrain that help the defense. Difficult terrain such as cliffs, woods, hills, or swamps can act as natural defenses and bottlenecks. To fully exploit all the benefits of the location you need free sight. Thus, you’ll need to cut or burn down everything that hinders your view – trees, buildings and hedges. As a bonus, this will deprive your enemy from most natural covers. However, simply relying on the defenses of nature will not get you through a siege. Build your star fortress properly. The second factor you’ll need to address are your defensive constructions. The experts to learn from in this field are military engineers. These men turned cities into towers of strength by improving and erecting intricate constructions of earth, stone and wood. The backbone of polygonal fortresses were the bastions. A bastion had two faces that could accommodate several pieces of artillery. These could shoot approaching enemies from great distance. The shoulders were built as depicted here to fire at the shoulder of the next bastion. This way, there were no blind spots in the defense. Yet the most essential strength of a fortress were the walls. They were relatively low and thick so that they could withstand heavy artillery fire for a long time. This quality was needed direly in the early-modern period since “artillery was widely considered the most important means of attack.”1 At certain spots of the wall elevated artillery platforms callled cavaliers provided further space for canons and could therefore increase the firepower of the defenders greatly. At the bottom of the wall, there was a berm or a so-called fausse-braye. This is a small alleyway2 which together with a ditch prevented attackers from attempting to take the stronghold by storm. If the ditch was filled with water, the bridges over it became artificial bottlenecks. This lesson was brutally learned by the imperial troops besieging the city of Mantua in 1629/30. When the imperials wanted to storm a bridge after a cannonade, they suddenly found themselves in front of the muzzles of two cannons loaded with grapeshot, who then swept the bridge and killed a major part of the attackers. The imperials fared much better during the sabbat worlds crusade where they at defended the hive city of Vervunhive and repelled the Zoican forces at the Veyveyr gate. Wait… wrong universe. This is actually one of the greatest siege stories the Warhammer 40k universe has to offer. Written by no one else than Dan Abnett Necropolis is in my opinion a must read for anybody who likes military sci-fi. There is no place better than Audible to listen to it, so thanks to Audible for sponsoring this video. What they offer is thousands of popular and bingeworthy audiobooks, podcasts and more. What I really like about their app is that it actually remembers where you stopped your audiobook, you can also use it offline and they even offer a sleep timer, so you can fall asleep to some good old Warhammer 40k SIFI - and it is all easily accessible in one app! This is a service I wholeheartedly recommend; from stories to lectures on history, you get so much out of it. And it is free for the first 30 days! Visit Audible dot com slash sandrhoman (link in the pinned comment) or text sandrhoman to 500-500 to get audible right now while also supporting our channel- now let’s jump back to our universe. Ravelins, v-shaped outworks, protected the curtains from direct fire. After 1600, sometimes even further outworks were added. On the outer side of the ditch there was a so-called covered way. It was covered by the glacis, a parapet of a man’s height which on one hand covered the men fighting on the covered way and on the other hand – and much more importantly – matched in angle with the top of the wall so that an attacker could only fire at the wall from far away which was much less effective. Therefore, the enemy was forced to take the glacis before attempting to breach the walls. However, walls only protect vigilant defenders. Many cities were taken by a stratagem of war. This was for example the case with the French city of Amiens which was conquered by the Spanish in 1597. A group of them disguised as women and farmers and took carts loaded with nuts to the market. As they passed the city gates, they spilled the nuts all over the ground. Chaos ensued and people were swearing at the clumsy “farmers” while stealing the nuts. Taking advantage of the confusion, the intruders dropped their disguise and neutralized the guards at the gate. In less than half an hour they had taken over the city. The combined defenses of nature and man enhance the hardiness of a fortress massively, but stone by itself would not stop a determined attacker. Make sure you stock enough supplies. The most common reasons why beleaguered cities had to capitulate in the 16th and 17th century were hunger and thirst. This was the case, for example, in Antwerp where several bad decisions led to an inadequate supply of grain. In contrast, the inhabitants of Breda were so well supplied during the siege of 1624/25 that one commander of the besieging Spaniards allegedly noted that the garrison of the town was fed better than his own army. How important food was in sieges is best symbolized when the inhabitants of Haarlem resolved to psychological warfare and threw loafs of bread over the walls to show they could easily hold out much longer. The second vital stock was gunpowder. If your powder magazines were empty, you couldn’t push back enemy approaches and they advanced towards your walls much faster. The amounts of powder and ammunition needed during a siege were absolutely insane. According to the Dutch historian Olaf van Nimwegen the defenders of Ostend shot their way through an average of 2’000 pounds of powder on each day of the siege.3 Therefore you better fill your powder towers to the brim. All in all, the most crucial lesson is that food and water are, essentially, a ticking clock. It is a matter of time until the town is starved into surrender once its supply routes have been completely cut off. If you want to succeed, you must keep your supply lines open. There are several cases in which the defenders managed this and could bring food, powder and even reinforcements to the city. Two examples for this are the siege of Ostend that has already been mentioned and the 21 year long siege of Candia. In both cases, the cities were provided with fresh troops and food by sea. However, it is difficult work to keep these lines open and your enemy will do everything they can to intercept. The same goes for intelligence. Once your city is confined you need to find a way to communicate with the outside world and sneak information past your enemies. This was done with success during the siege of Vienna in 1683, when messengers successfully swam the Danube and sneaked through the Ottoman camp at night. Such missions came at great risk though. With full granaries, well-supplied treasuries, filled powder houses and a constant flow of information, your chances to defend a fortress increase significantly. But the situation is not cut and dried just yet. Use your weapons well. First and foremost, get your artillery in place. Artillery was not only the most important means of attack, but also vital to a sturdy defense. You’ll need to equip all positions on your walls, most importantly the bastions, ravelins and cavaliers. Constant firing at your enemy with your artillery does not only inflict losses, but more importantly slows down their approach. When under fire, they cannot simply march towards your walls. They have to cover every step they make. Once they're within firing distance, they have to dig what is called saps. Saps were shoveled out zigzag ways, so that the guns of the fortress could not shoot along them. In addition, the attackers had to build redoubts, cover their trenches and erect artillery platforms. This slowed them down and multiplied the costs of the siege for them because in addition to an army of fighters, they also needed an army of sappers. Along with artillery, there was one other vital weapon, which is now rather unknown: hand grenades. These were usually round bodies of ceramics or glass filled with gunpowder. An extensive use of hand grenades is reported for the siege of Vienna, during which the Viennese relentlessly pelted the Ottoman attackers with such grenades. Another fiery piece of preparation you can't do without are explosive charges for your mines. The extent of the explosives varied greatly, but they mostly consisted of barrels filled with powder. These were then placed under the target in a tunnel. Although mines were primarily an offensive weapon, a defender could not be without them either. Mine tunnels were not only a threat to the trenches and redoubts of the approaching enemy but also indispensable to detect and destroy the mines of the attacker before they could do major damage. This was demonstrated in the Siege of Vienna, when the defenders not only heavily invested in mine warfare but also positioned a man in every basement with the sole purpose of listening for digging and tapping noises to detect mine attacks early. Another siege known for the extensive use of mines is the 21 year siege of Candia. The Venetian defenders of the town blew up a major mine under the approaches of the Ottomans and later, they blew up multiple of their own bastions in a last-ditch effort, after they had been taken by the attackers. Beware, however, the flipside of fire. One thing the defender of a fortress must always keep in mind is firefighting. The initial cannonade of a city was often not aimed at the defenses but at the town itself in the hope of stirring up an uprising against the garrison. Because of this, it is vital to reinforce buildings, especially their roofs with layers of earth and have men and means ready to put out potential fires early. For example, the siege of Venlo in 1637 was lost because the besieging Spanish set the town ablaze, whereupon the inhabitants “sought to take control of the person of the governor, of the arsenal and lastly of a gateway”4. They forced the governor to negotiate with the besiegers and Venlo capitulated the next day.5 So, be ready to bring fire upon your enemy and extinguish fire within you walls. Do that and there’s not much missing for a successful defense. Gather the able bodied. You will need every hand and brain. Manpower is not only needed on the walls but also in logistics, earthwork, and numerous other tasks. Every hand within the walls – old people, children, women and men alike – are needed. Civilians often formed a militia and fought alongside the soldiers. One famous example for this is the siege of Haarlem in 1572, when a company of women under the lead of Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaer joined the militia and defended their town with steel in hand. But most importantly a garrison with too few men will have its hands bound and will not be able to spare soldiers for extra tasks such as sorties. Sorties were the core of a forward defense but in order to launch one, a garrison needed a surplus of combatants, since only those who were not needed to secure the walls could be sent out and put at risk. A sortie could be conducted in various ways but its main goal always was to weaken the position of the besiegers, for example by invading their trenches to destroy their earthworks and artillery. The success of a sortie depended on the element of surprise and the number of men deployed. The defenders of Breda, for example, launched a sortie against the Spaniards, who were establishing an encirclement, every other day. When such a sortie was executed cleverly it was very likely that the shoveling attackers were caught on the wrong foot. In such cases they suffered high losses and were often driven from their current position. Along with fighting people in numbers, it came in handy to have an experienced commander and an ingenious engineer. In multiple cases their crazy siege engines saved the day for a town under siege. One particularly spectacular example were the fireships created by Frederico Giambelli during the siege of Antwerp. When the Dutch flooded the region, the Spaniards built a massive pontoon bridge. To destroy this obstacle, the engineer stuffed two ships with about 7’000 pounds of gunpowder topped with a layer of improvised shrapnel and swept the two 'infernal machines' down the river towards the bridge. Moments later, an ear-splitting explosion tore apart the peaceful silence of the night. The debris of the Spanish bridge kept on raining down on the surroundings for several minutes. As for the deeds of commanders let’s venture back to the siege of Ostend. Sir Francis Vere, an Englishman in Dutch service, commanded the defense of the town for most of the siege. After months of fighting, his men and defenses were worn down to the point of breaking under the pressure from daily attacks. In this dire moment Vere learned that a major assault was being planned. Knowing that he could never fend off such an assault, he sought refuge in a risky stratagem of war. First, he offered parley to the Spaniards. He then drew out the negotiations for about a month to win time. Then, at last, on the very day on which reinforcements were finally arriving, he broke off the negotiations. With a town so crowded, limited access to clean water and inadequate sewage systems diseases and epidemics become a major threat. It is therefore crucial to maintain strict hygiene, bury the fallen and create space for the additional defenders to live and sleep. This was a problem during the siege of Ostend, when the men of the garrison had to share rooms in groups of thirty to fifty.6 This caused widespread sicknesses and made the men in the overcrowded city easy targets to Spanish artillery fire. A similar fate befell the defenders of Vienna as they were struck by dysentery. During the siege of Mantua the defenders even brought the plague to the city from the camps of the attacker who had retired to his winter quarters. In the end the attackers returned and Mantua fell because the plague was ravaging the city. Nonetheless, it is usually impossible to defend a city only with the tools, hands and brains within the walls. If you have no allies helping you out, no mighty friends influencing politics and no relief army to harass the besiegers or even drive them off you are almost hopelessly lost, especially once your supply routes are cut. Take the example of Candia. The Venetian town on Crete withstood an Ottoman siege for 21 years. If the Venetians hadn’t had the pope lobbying for them and spreading the aura of crusade all over Europe, or if they hadn't received numerous reinforcements of other European states by ship, it would have been impossible to resist for this long. Candia eventually fell, but there are cities which were rescued by relief forces. The most famous example for this is the siege of Vienna. In the defenders' most dire hour, with Ottoman mines under their walls ready to be lit, the relief army arrived in the nick of time and stormed down the hill to drive the attackers back. In their most famous charge, the Polish winged hussars charged the Turkish lines and swept through their camp to save the day for Vienna. With enough manpower, reliable allies, a capable commander and a witty ingenious engineer, you are certainly well prepared. Still, there are two more things to understand before you get to work. If you have been able to keep the big picture in sight while we were focusing on all these details, you might be guessing by now that all the actions described so far aim at one single goal: wining time. This is on one hand because this video promised to teach you exactly this, to hold out forever. On the other hand because the only way to hold a fortress is by winning time. While your enemies slowly work their way closer to you, you have to do everything to slow them down, to fight for every single minute and every inch of ground. In the most extreme of defenses you could imagine, the defenders even resolved to a last-ditch effort. In the final moments of the siege of Ostend, the defenders were digging another redoubt within the city center. This redoubt, made of earth, debris and bodies was called New Troy. While most of the outer defenses were lost, some of the city was still being defended. Because of this the siege is also known as The Siege of New Troy. However, as soon as a place is completely surrounded and all ways of bringing in reinforcements and supplies are cut off, it is a matter of time until the defenders are starved into surrender. By meeting all the requirements above you make sure that you’re not conquered at once and you may hope to stand strong until a relief army arrives, as for example at Vienna. If no help from outside is on its way, then your only hope, is to outdo your enemy in resources and simply wait until they can’t afford the siege anymore. But we don’t want to raise false hopes. All the examples mentioned, except for Vienna, were won by the attackers in the end. A determined siege almost always resulted in the fall of the fortress. However, losing a siege in a drawn-out conflict, may be a loss for you, but it might be decisive for your homeland’s war. Fortresses are not meant to be invulnerable — their real purpose is it to be horribly costly to capture.
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Channel: SandRhoman History
Views: 1,755,580
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Keywords: star fortress, bastion fort, siege warfare, sieges, siege, 16th century history, staggering sieges, siege of antwerp, siege of ostende, siege of ostend, siege of vienna, siege of vienna 1683, battle of vienna 1683, siege of candia, siege of haarlem, 17th century, history, documentary
Id: iQG7iVaFSGs
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Length: 23min 20sec (1400 seconds)
Published: Sun Jun 13 2021
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