Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Jul 30, 2024A bowl of the original Corn Flakes made with only corn.
City/Region: Battle Creek, Michigan
Time Period: 1895Dr. John Kellogg was all about health, and when his brother, William (the financial brains of the operation), wanted to add sugar to the very bland original Corn Flakes, he flat out refused. Eventually, William bought the rights to Corn Flakes, changed the recipe, and the rest is history.
I don’t have the industrial rollers that the original recipe for Corn Flakes used, so I made a dough. The flakes turned out nice and crispy, but they are very bland. I would recommend using stone-ground cornmeal and adding some sugar and salt to make the whole process easier and the end product tastier.
Excerpt from Patent No. 558,393 [for] Flaked Cereals and Process of Preparing Same.
First. Soak the grain for some hours — say eight to twelve — in water at a temperature which is either between 40° and 60° Fahrenheit or 110° and 140° Fahrenheit, thus securing a preliminary digestion by aid of cerealin, a starch-digesting organic ferment contained in the hull of the grain or just beneath it. The temperature must be either so low or so high as to prevent actual fermentation while promoting the activity of the ferment. This digestion adds to the sweetness and flavor of the product.
Second. Cook the grain thoroughly. For this purpose it should be boiled in water for about an hour, and if steamed a longer time will be required. My process is distinctive in this step—that is to say, that the cooking is carried to the stage when all the starch is hydrated. If not thus thoroughly cooked, the product is unfit for digestion and practically worthless for immediate consumption.
Third. After steaming the grain is cooled and partially dried, then passed through cold rollers, from which it is removed by means of carefully-adjusted scrapers. The purpose of this process of rolling is to flatten the grain into extremely thin flakes in the shape of translucent films, whereby the bran covering (or the cellulose portions thereof) is disintegrated or broken into small particles, and the constituents of the grain are made readily accessible to the cooking process to which it is to be subsequently subjected and to the action of the digestive fluids when eaten.
Fourth. After rolling the compressed grain or flakes having been received upon suitable trays is subjected to a steaming process, whereby it is thoroughly cooked and is then baked or roasted in an oven until dry and crisp.
— John Harvey Kellogg. United States Patent Office, 1895
December 4, 2024
The Disturbing Origins of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes
QotD: What caused the (western) Roman Empire to fall?
I want to start with the observation I offer whenever I am asked (and being a Romanist, this happens frequently) “why did Rome fall?” which is to note that in asking that question we are essentially asking the wrong question or at least a less interesting one. This will, I promise, come back to our core question about diversity and the fall of Rome but first we need to frame this issue correctly, because Rome fell for the same reason all empires fall: gravity.
An analogy, if you will. Imagine I were to build a bridge over a stream and for twenty years the bridge stays up and then one day, quite unexpectedly, the bridge collapses. We can ask why the bridge fell down, but the fundamental force of gravity which caused its collapse was always working on the bridge. As we all know from our physics classes, the force of gravity was always active on the bridge and so some other set of forces, channeled through structural elements was needed to be continually resisting that downward pressure. What we really want to know is “what force which was keeping the bridge up in such an unnaturally elevated position stopped?” Perhaps some key support rotted away? Perhaps rain and weather shifted the ground so that what once was a stable position twenty years ago was no longer stable? Or perhaps the steady work of gravity itself slowly strained the materials, imperceptibly at first, until material fatigue finally collapse the bridge. Whatever the cause, we need to begin by conceding that, as normal as they may seem to us, bridges are not generally some natural construction, but rather a deeply unnatural one, which must be held up and maintained through continual effort; such a thing may fail even if no one actively destroys it, merely by lack of maintenance or changing conditions.
Large, prosperous and successful states are always and everywhere like that bridge: they are unnatural social organizations, elevated above the misery and fragmentation that is the natural state of humankind only by great effort; gravity ever tugs them downward. Of course when states collapse there are often many external factors that play a role, like external threats, climate shifts or economic changes, though in many cases these are pressures that the state in question has long endured. Consequently, the more useful question is not why they fall, but why they stay up at all.
And that question is even more pointed for the Roman Empire than most. While not the largest empire of antiquity, the Roman empire was very large (Walter Scheidel figures that, as a percentage of the world’s population at the time, the Roman Empire was the fifth largest ever, rare company indeed); while not the longest lasting empire of antiquity, it did last an uncommonly long time at that size. It was also geographically positioned in a space that doesn’t seem particularly well-suited for building empires in. While the Mediterranean’s vast maritime-highway made the Roman Empire possible, the geography of the Mediterranean has historically encouraged quite a lot of fragmentation, particularly (but not exclusively) in Europe. Despite repeated attempts, no subsequent empire has managed to recreate Rome’s frontiers (the Ottomans got the closest, effectively occupying the Roman empire’s eastern half – with a bit more besides – but missing most of the west).
The Roman Empire was also, for its time, uncommonly prosperous. As we’ll see, there is at this quite a lot of evidence to suggest that the territory of the Roman Empire enjoyed a meaningfully higher standard of living and a more prosperous economy during the period of Roman control than it did either in the centuries directly before or directly after (though we should not overstate this to the point of assuming that Rome was more prosperous than any point during the Middle Ages). And while the process of creating the Roman empire was extremely violent and traumatic (again, a recommendation for G. Baker, Spare No One: Mass Violence in Roman Warfare (2021) for a sense of just how violent), subsequent to that, the evidence strongly suggests that life in the interior Roman Empire was remarkably peaceful during that period, with conflicts pushed out of the interior to the frontiers (though I would argue this almost certainly reflects an overall decrease in the total amount of military conflict, not merely a displacement of it).
The Roman Empire was thus a deeply unnatural, deeply unusual creature, a hot-house flower blooming untended on a rocky hillside. The question is not why the Roman empire eventually failed – all states do, if one takes a long enough time-horizon – but why it lasted so long in such a difficult position. Of course this isn’t the place to recount all of the reasons why the Roman Empire held together for so long, but we can focus on a few which are immediately relevant to our question about diversity in the empire.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing and Empire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-07-30.
December 3, 2024
“Granting more sovereign rights to others surprisingly means that these groups will pursue their own interests. Who could have seen this coming?”
In his weekend round-up, Niccolo Soldo pokes a bit of fun at Justin Trudeau’s federal government for apparently being surprised that First Nations are looking to deal directly with China for their natural resources, rather than through the feds:
Canada continues to be unintentionally hilarious, all thanks to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government.
The Great White North was forever a boring place politically, but the arrival of Trudeau Jr. on the scene shook things up. One of the first things that he and his government committed themselves to was to work to improve the country’s relations with its Native tribes, both politically and especially economically. The Trudeau government invented a genocide narrative based around residential schools.1 Canada too wanted a dark aspect to its own history, so that it could share in the self-flagellation that has coloured the recent history of its neighbour to its immediate south.
Maybe the intention here was to show these Native communities that Canada really, really did care and that by doing this, everything bad that had happened would be forgiven and forgotten? I dunno … what I do know is that Native bands are now seeking to directly do business with China, whereby they would sell natural resources under their control to Beijing:
Canada’s indigenous communities are seeking deals with China that could give Beijing access to the country’s natural resources, despite warnings from Canadian security services over doing business with Xi Jinping’s government.
This week the Canada China Business Council indigenous trade mission is in Beijing to discuss potential energy and other business deals in a trip that could put Canada’s national “reconciliation” with its First Nation communities at odds with its national security priorities.
Karen Ogen, the trade mission’s co-chair and chief executive of the First Nations Liquefied Natural Gas Alliance, said her goal on the trip, which starts on Wednesday, was to sell LNG for the benefit of the Wet’suwet’en communities in Canada’s western province of British Columbia.
“We’ve been oppressed and repressed by our own government,” she said. “I know the history with China is not good but we have an understanding of what we need and what they need.”
Canada purposely degraded its own national sovereignty in parts of its own country in the name of “reconciliation”. Granting more sovereign rights to others surprisingly means that these groups will pursue their own interests. Who could have seen this coming?
Clever Chinese:
China has spotted an opportunity in the sometimes fraught relations between Canada’s national and provincial governments and indigenous groups.
In 2021, shortly after Canada imposed sanctions on Beijing over the treatment of its Uyghur population, Chinese officials began to object to the “systemic violations of Indigenous people’s rights by the US, Canada and Australia” at the UN’s Human Rights Council.
“The PRC tries to undermine trust between Indigenous communities and Canada’s government by advancing a narrative that the PRC understands and empathises with the struggles of Indigenous communities stemming from colonialism and racism,” said a spokesperson for Canada’s security intelligence service.
A 2023 CSIS report accused China’s government of employing “grey zone, deceptive and clandestine means” to influence Canadian policymaking, including Indigenous communities.
“China knows how sensitive Indigenous reconciliation is to the Trudeau government,” said Phil Gurski, a former CSIS intelligence analyst.
A lot of these First Nations (Native bands) reside in the west of the country. Coincidentally, Canada’s third-largest city, Vancouver (located in Canada’s west), is roughly one-third Chinese in composition.
First Nations will continue to pursue these deals with the Chinese:
But CSIS remains concerned over Beijing’s possible access to resource-rich areas or geopolitically important waterways and regions such as the Arctic through First Nations groups.
“It not only undermines the government but is a way to potentially embarrass them on Canada’s past,” said Gurski.
But Matt Vickers, from Sechelt Nations land in Canada’s western province of British Columbia, who first visited China in the 1990s and is part of the CCBC delegation heading to Beijing this week, rejected the concerns of the security services.
“China now understands that for any major project to receive approval in Canada, you need First Nation consent, and not only consent but the First Nations require a majority equity play in those projects,” he said.
The CCBC is a bipartisan organisation consisting of Canada’s biggest companies, including Power Corp, which is the main sponsor of the Indigenous event.
This week’s trip marks the third time a group of Indigenous officials has travelled with the council to China in an effort to identify export markets, sources of capital and potential tourism projects.
“These missions have been developed in the spirit of reconciliation and collaboration, to help delegates better understand how China’s economy and economic development influences its desire for imports and investment opportunities,” said Sarah Kutulakos, executive director of the CCBC.
It gets even funnier:
Deteriorating relations between Ottawa and Beijing meant this year’s CCBC meeting would likely be “sombre”, said former Canadian ambassador to China Guy Saint-Jacques.
First Nations leaders should have “very limited expectations” from the trip. “I don’t expect big business coming out of it,” he said.
But Ogen, of the First Nations LNG Alliance, said she would put the controversy surrounding the trip to Beijing aside. “I … look at the global energy sector, China’s need for our gas, and how I can make the best deal for my people,” she said.
Trudeau scored an own-goal.
1. From wiki (because I am lazy): “The Canadian Indian residential school system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. The network was funded by the Canadian government’s Department of Indian Affairs and administered by various Christian churches. The school system was created to isolate Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and religion in order to assimilate them into the dominant Euro-Canadian culture.”
David Starkey’s view of history
At the Daily Sceptic, James Alexander summarizes how historian David Starkey’s views of history — British history specifically — provide a useful way to analyze British political issues today:
David Starkey, 2004.
Screenshot via IMDB.com
What David Starkey is trying to do is deliver to the British (or English) public a jeremiad informed not by moral posturing or theoretical commitment but by a sense of history. This is so valuable it should almost come without criticism. I think that Starkey’s vision of history is so arresting it deserves to be expressed in short form and so I will attempt a summary of the position. Starkey is an admirably entertaining speaker, and offers a vision that is several dimensions more complicated than we hear from anyone else at the moment. He is full of prepared lines, and has a ready mind: “Niall Ferguson, the good Niall Ferguson, not the bad Neil Ferguson …”; “All bad ideas begin with the French”; “The Union of England and Scotland made the modern world”; “The monarch changes religion as he crosses the border: he begins Anglican, and becomes Presbyterian”; “The Labour party is the equivalent of the Nomenklatura of Soviet Russia: a privileged class”; etc.
I have some criticisms. But first, his vision of our history.
Let me begin by summarising Starkey’s view of history as it conditions the present. He argues the following:
1. On the nature and relevance of history. History is fundamental. We cannot understand ourselves using theory. Avoid abstraction. Use history instead. It is concrete. He suggests that we have always studied history for the sake of the present, though in recent centuries we have also studied it for its own sake. He adds that we should make analogies between past and present.
2. On English history. Starkey says that we were first part of Greater Scandinavia, then, from 1066, were part of an Anglo-French order. The third stage of our history began with the Reformation. Starkey likens the Latin Christendom of the Papacy to the European Union: and so calls Henry VIII the first Brexiteer. The consequence of the Reformation was that Britain and Europe become antagonists. For the first time the sea was reconfigured as a barrier, defended by the navy: and this happened at the same time that energies were thrown outward to the rest of the world. What the English managed to do, along with the Scots, was build something out of the strong language that rises from Chaucer to Shakespeare: the two home countries united to make it impossible to be invaded; they united to make an empire in the world; and they united to make use of remarkable innovations in finance and later industry.
One of Starkey’s great themes is this Union of England and Scotland: first by King in 1603 and second by Parliament in 1707. Starkey says England is not a nation. It lacks a ridiculous national dress (since its national dress, of coat and trousers with tie, was given to the world as universal official dress). And the Union was wholly original, as it subjugated Scotland to England’s Parliament, abolishing the Scottish Parliament, while leaving Scottish law, religion, military tradition and heraldry alone. England and Scotland are politically united, but only politically united. Starkey’s point about all this is that it was never about “identity”. There was no such thing as a “Briton”. There was no national system of education. So there was no nonsense of any modern-style post-French Revolution nationalism. Instead, we were natural liberals, able to take in immigrants without difficulty. However, throughout all this England is politically dominant in Great Britain and in the Empire.
3. On the present time. Starkey has two points of reference. One is the 1970s, when things went wrong, with a short reversal under Thatcher, and in the 1990s, when things went even more wrong, and perhaps permanently wrong, because constitutionally wrong. The 1970s was the culmination of the Labour politics of welfare, accepted weakly by Macmillan and Heath, but the 1990s was worse because political and constitutional. Labour took things in the wrong direction by making the Bank of England independent and by enabling a new Scottish Parliament to emerge: also by bringing about the Equality Act of 2010 (actually an innovation of Gordon Brown); also by creating a Supreme Court. Then, finally, Charles III removed Parliament from the Coronation, and there was no mention of politics: whereas, since 1688, the Coronation had been a political act. Political power has been fragmented and dispersed from the King-in-Parliament to the quangos, to the Bank of England, to the lawyers. The principle of balance is lost, as every institution has become an interest group, pursuing single issues: an entire raft of Anti-Corn Law Leagues.
Starkey suggests that England will remain an idea, much as the idea of Rome survived the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. This is pessimistic judgement. His optimistic judgement, or hope, is that some sort of “restoration”, like the Glorious Revolution, can be enacted. As far as I have heard, he has not yet sketched the form of his restoration, though it has been promised.
Is this clear? Henry VIII broke the monasteries, threw out the Papists, built Oxford and Cambridge in new form, fortified the coast and began the story of Greater England. If we fill the gaps, there were difficulties with the consequences, religious and political, through the reigns of Mary, Elizabeth, James and Charles, but these were resolved in 1688 and then 1707. Then Great Britain became a great power. This remarkable creation was politically and constitutionally destroyed by the theorists and politicians of the late 20th century, since they demoted England within Britain, unleashed petty nationalisms in political form, and, in passing, did not do enough to restrain the welfare state or, we might add, enough to prevent English tolerance being twisted to accommodate net immigration of 700,000 people of fairly antagonistic cultures per year. Britain is now ruled not by Government-in-Parliament but by delegated arbitrary powers and influences which offer sops to partial interests and mean that nothing can be done. No one has an adequate conception of the entire state.
Evolution of Airborne Armour
The Tank Museum
Published Jul 19, 2024Lightly armed airborne troops are at a huge disadvantage when faced with regular troops with heavy weapons and armour. In World War II this led to huge losses for paratroops on Crete and at Arnhem. Since then, many attempts have been made to level the playing field, to give airborne soldiers a fighting chance.
From the Hamilcar gliders of World War II to the C17 Globemaster, we look at how to make a tank fly.
00:00 | Intro
00:47 | The Origins of Airbourne Operations
02:34 | Gliders
07:20 | A Tank Light Enough to Fly?
09:02 | Success & Failure
14:24 | Post-War Solutions
17:41 | Better Aircraft – Better Tanks?
20:15 | Strategic Deployment
21:39 | ConclusionThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé. This video features imagery courtesy of http://www.hamilcar.co.uk/
#tankmuseum
QotD: Old fashioned communists
Theodore Dalrymple, “A Matter of Respect”, Taki’s Magazine, 2019-12-31.
December 2, 2024
USS Constitution – “Old Ironsides” – 1950’s newsreel
Charlie Dean Archives
Published Jan 1, 2014USS Constitution is a wooden-hulled, three-masted heavy frigate of the United States Navy. Named by President George Washington after the Constitution of the United States of America, she is the world’s oldest floating commissioned naval vessel. Launched in 1797, Constitution was one of six original frigates authorized for construction by the Naval Act of 1794. Joshua Humphreys designed the frigates to be the young Navy’s capital ships, and so Constitution and her sisters were larger and more heavily armed and built than standard frigates of the period. Built in Boston, Massachusetts at Edmund Hartt’s shipyard, her first duties with the newly formed United States Navy were to provide protection for American merchant shipping during the Quasi-War with France and to defeat the Barbary pirates in the First Barbary War.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cons…
CharlieDeanArchives – Archive footage from the 20th century making history come alive!
December 1, 2024
“Huntziger must be shot!” – WW2 Commentary 1939-1940
World War Two
Published 30 Nov 2024Today Indy and Spartacus sit down to answer all kinds of questions about the first year of WW2. How phony was the Phony War? How do you go around the Maginot Line? And much more! Also, Indy sings a song about Charles Huntziger.
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QotD: Recording and codifying the land that William conquered
[…]
In brief, Scott argues that the process of making a society “legible” to government officials obscures social reality, to the point where the government’s maps and charts and graphs take on a life of their own. It’s recursive, such that those well-intentioned schemes end up first measuring, then manipulating, the wrong thing in the wrong way, to the point that the social “problem” the process was supposed to address drops out entirely — all you have, at the end, is powerpoint girls critiquing spreadsheet boys because their spreadsheets don’t have enough animation, and vice versa.
Scott doesn’t use the Domesday Book as an example (IIRC from a graduate school class 20-odd years ago, anyway), but it’s one we’re probably all familiar with. The first thing William the Conqueror needed to know is: what, exactly, have I conquered? So he sent out the high-medieval version of spreadsheet boys to take a comprehensive survey of the kingdom. Turns out the Duke of Earl’s demense runs from this creek to that rock. He has five underlings, and their domains run from etc.
The point of all this, of course, was so that Billy C. could call the Duke of Earl on the carpet, point to the spreadsheet, and say “You owe me a cow, three chickens, and two months in the saddle as back taxes.” It worked great, except when — as, it seems, is inevitable — the high-medieval equivalent of the spreadsheet boys did the high-medieval version of “ctrl-c”; just copying and pasting the information over. Eventually the tax situation got way out of whack, as it did for most every pre-modern government running a similar system — one of the reasons declining Chinese dynasties had such fiscal problems, for instance, is that the tax surveys only got updated every two centuries or so, such that a major provincial lord was still only paying 20 silver pieces in taxes, when he should’ve been paying 20,000 (and his peasants were all paying 20 when all they could afford was 2).
In other words: unless the spreadsheet boys periodically go out and check that the numbers on their spreadsheets actually correspond in some systematic, more-or-less representative way to some underlying social reality, government policy is being set by make-believe.
Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.
November 30, 2024
Forgotten War Ep 5 – Chindits 2 – The Empire Strikes
HardThrasher
Published 29 Nov 202402:00 – Here We Go Again
06:36 – Perfect Planning
13:16 – Death of a Prophet
14:51 – The Fly In
18:56 – Dazed and Confused (in the Monsoon)
20:40 – Can’t Fly in This
31:54 – Survivor’s ClubPlease consider donations of any size to the Burma Star Memorial Fund who aim to ensure remembrance of those who fought with, in and against 14th Army 1941–1945 — https://burmastarmemorial.org/
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QotD: Unrealized promises of a “Great Society”
Amity Shlaes, Great Society: A New History, 2020.
November 29, 2024
Why the Communists subjugated half of Europe
World War Two
Published 28 Nov 2024From the Bolshevik Revolution to post-war dominance, Stalin’s plans forever changed Europe’s political landscape. Discover how the Soviet Union used ideology, diplomacy, military power, and ruthless suppression to control Eastern Europe and establish a new world order.
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Greek History and Civilization, Part 8 – The Hellenistic Age
seangabb
Published Jul 17, 2024This eighth lecture in the course covers the Hellenistic Age of Greece — from the death of Alexander in 323 BC to about the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC.
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November 28, 2024
Town-class destroyers – Guide 400
Drachinifel
Published Aug 3, 2024The Town class destroyers, old Wickes, Clemson and Cadwell class vessels of the US Navy, transferred to the British Royal Navy and others, are today’s subject.
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QotD: The trace italienne in fortification design
Since the goal remains preventing an enemy from entering a place, be that a city or a fortress, the first step has to be to develop a wall that can’t simply be demolished by artillery in a good afternoon or two. The solution that is come upon ends up looking a lot like those Chinese rammed earth walls: earthworks are very good at absorbing the impact of cannon balls (which, remember, are at this point just that: stone and metal balls; they do not explode yet): small air pockets absorb some of the energy of impact and dirt doesn’t shatter, it just displaces (and not very far: again, no high explosive shells, so nothing to blow up the earthwork). Facing an earthwork mound with stonework lets the earth absorb the impacts while giving your wall a good, climb-resistant face.
So you have your form: a stonework or brick-faced wall that is backed up by essentially a thick earthen berm like the Roman agger. Now you want to make sure incoming cannon balls aren’t striking it dead on: you want to literally play the angles. Inclining the wall slightly makes its construction easier and the end result more stable (because earthworks tend not to stand straight up) and gives you an non-perpendicular angle of impact from cannon when they’re firing at very short range (and thus at very low trajectory), which is when they are most dangerous since that’s when they’ll have the most energy in impact. Ideally, you’ll want more angles than this, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
Because we now have a problem: escalade. Remember escalade?
Earthworks need to be wide at the base to support a meaningful amount of height, tall-and-thin isn’t an option. Which means that in building these cannon resistant walls, for a given amount of labor and resources and a given wall circuit, we’re going to end up with substantially lower walls. We can enhance their relative height with a ditch several out in front (and we will), but that doesn’t change the fact that our walls are lower and also that they now incline backwards slightly, which makes them easier to scale or get ladders on. But obviously we can’t achieved much if we’ve rendered our walls safe from bombardment only to have them taken by escalade. We need some way to stop people just climbing over the wall.
The solution here is firepower. Whereas a castle was designed under the assumption the enemy would reach the foot of the wall (and then have their escalade defeated), if our defenders can develop enough fire, both against approaching enemies and also against any enemy that reaches the wall, they can prohibit escalade. And good news: gunpowder has, by this point, delivered much more lethal anti-personnel weapons, in the form of lighter cannon but also in the form of muskets and arquebuses. At close range, those weapons were powerful enough to defeat any shield or armor a man could carry, meaning that enemies at close range trying to approach the wall, set up ladders and scale would be extremely vulnerable: in practice, if you could get enough muskets and small cannon firing at them, they wouldn’t even be able to make the attempt.
But the old projecting tower of the castle, you will recall, was designed to allow only a handful of defenders fire down any given section of wall; we still want that good enfilade fire effect, but we need a lot more space to get enough muskets up there to develop that fire. The solution: the bastion. A bastion was an often diamond or triangular-shaped projection from the wall of the fort, which provided a longer stretch of protected wall which could fire down the length of the curtain wall. It consists of two “flanks” which meet the curtain wall and are perpendicular to it, allowing fire along the wall; the “faces” (also two) then face outward, away from the fort to direct fire at distant besiegers. When places at the corners of forts, this setup tends to produce outward-spiked diamonds, while a bastion set along a flat face of curtain wall tends to resemble an irregular pentagon (“home plate”) shape [Wiki]. The added benefit for these angles? From the enemy siege lines, they present an oblique profile to enemy artillery, making the bastions quite hard to batter down with cannon, since shots will tend to ricochet off of the slanted line.
In the simplest trace italienne forts [Wiki], this is all you will need: four or five thick-and-low curtain walls to make the shape, plus a bastion at each corner (also thick-and-low, sometimes hollow, sometimes all at the height of the wall-walk), with a dry moat (read: big ditch) running the perimeter to slow down attackers, increase the effective height of the wall and shield the base of the curtain wall from artillery fire.
But why stay simple, there’s so much more we can do! First of all, our enemy, we assume, have cannon. Probably lots of cannon. And while our walls are now cannon resistant, they’re not cannon immune; pound on them long enough and there will be a breach. Of course collapsing a bastion is both hard (because it is angled) and doesn’t produce a breach, but the curtain walls both have to run perpendicular to the enemy’s firing position (because they have to enclose something) and if breached will allow access to the fort. We have to protect them! Of course one option is to protect them with fire, which is why our bastions have faces; note above how while the flanks of the bastions are designed for small arms, the faces are built with cannon in mind: this is for counter-battery fire against a besieger, to silence his cannon and protect the curtain wall. But our besieger wouldn’t be here if they didn’t think they could decisively outshoot our defensive guns.
But we can protect the curtain further, and further complicate the attack with outworks [Wiki], effectively little mini-bastions projecting off of the main wall which both provide advanced firing positions (which do not provide access to the fort and so which can be safely abandoned if necessary) and physically obstruct the curtain wall itself from enemy fire. The most basic of these was a ravelin (also called a “demi-lune”), which was essentially a “flying” bastion – a triangular earthwork set out from the walls. Ravelins are almost always hollow (that is, the walls only face away from the fort), so that if attackers were to seize a ravelin, they’d have no cover from fire coming from the main bastions and the curtain wall.
And now, unlike the Modern Major-General, you know what is meant by a ravelin … but are you still, in matters vegetable, animal and mineral, the very model of a modern Major-General?
But we can take this even further (can you tell I just love these damn forts?). A big part of our defense is developing fire from our bastions with our own cannon to force back enemy artillery. But our bastions are potentially vulnerable themselves; our ravelins cover their flanks, but the bastion faces could be battered down. We need some way to prevent the enemy from aiming effective fire at the base of our bastion. The solution? A crownwork. Essentially a super-ravelin, the crownwork contains a full bastion at its center (but lower than our main bastion, so we can fire over it), along with two half-bastions (called, wait for it, “demi-bastions”) to provide a ton of enfilade fire along the curtain wall, physically shielding our bastion from fire and giving us a forward fighting position we can use to protect our big guns up in the bastion. A smaller version of the crownwork, called a hornwork can also be used: this is just the two half-bastions with the full bastion removed, often used to shield ravelins (so you have a hornwork shielding a ravelin shielding the curtain wall shielding the fort). For good measure, we can connect these outworks to the main fort with removable little wooden bridges so we can easily move from the main fort out to the outworks, but if the enemy takes an outwork, we can quickly cut it off and – because the outworks are all made hollow – shoot down the attackers who cannot take cover within the hollow shape.
An ideal form of a bastion fortress to show each kind of common work and outwork.
Drawing by Francis Lima via Wikimedia Commons.We can also do some work with the moat. By adding an earthwork directly in front of it, which arcs slightly uphill, called a glacis, we can both put the enemy at an angle where shots from our wall will run parallel to the ground, thus exposing the attackers further as they advance, and create a position for our own troops to come out of the fort and fire from further forward, by having them crouch in the moat behind the glacis. Indeed, having prepared, covered forward positions (which are designed to be entirely open to the fort) for firing from at defenders is extremely handy, so we could even put such firing positions – set up in these same, carefully mathematically calculated angle shapes, but much lower to the ground – out in front of the glacis; these get all sorts of names: a counterguard or couvreface if they’re a simple triangle-shape, a redan if they have something closer to a shallow bastion shape, and a flèche if they have a sharper, more pronounced face. Thus as an enemy advances, defending skirmishers can first fire from the redans and flèches, before falling back to fire from the glacis while the main garrison fires over their heads into the enemy from the bastions and outworks themselves.
A diagram showing a glacis supporting a pair of bastions, one hollow, one not.
Diagram by Arch via Wikimedia Commons.At the same time, a bastion fortress complex might connect multiple complete circuits. In some cases, an entire bastion fort might be placed within the first, merely elevated above it (the term for this is a “cavalier“) so that both could fire, one over the other. Alternately, when entire cities were enclosed in these fortification systems (and that was common along the fracture zones between the emerging European great powers), something as large as a city might require an extensive fortress system, with bastions and outworks running the whole perimeter of the city, sometimes with nearly complete bastion fortresses placed within the network as citadels.
Fort Saint-Nicolas, which dominates the Old Port of Marseille. The fort forms part of a system with the low outwork you see here and also an older refitted castle, Fort Saint-Jean, on the other side of the harbor.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.All of this geometry needed to be carefully laid out to ensure that all lines of approach were covered with as much fire as possible and that there were no blindspots along the wall. That in turn meant that the designers of these fortresses needed to be careful with their layout: the spacing, angles and lines all needed to be right, which required quite a lot of math and geometry to manage. Combined with the increasing importance of ballistics for calculating artillery trajectories, this led to an increasing emphasis on mathematics in the “science of warfare”, to the point that some military theorists began to argue (particularly as one pushes into the Enlightenment with its emphasis on the power of reason, logic and empirical investigation to answer all questions) that military affairs could be reduced to pure calculation, a “hard science” as it were, a point which Clausewitz (drink!) goes out of his way to dismiss (as does Ardant du Picq in Battle Studies, but at substantially greater length). But it isn’t hard to see how, in the heady centuries between 1500 and 1800 how the rapid way that science had revolutionized war and reduced activities once governed by tradition and habit to exercises in geometry, one might look forward and assume that trend would continue until the whole affair of war could be reduced to a set of theorems and postulates. It cannot be, of course – the problem is the human element (though the military training of those centuries worked hard to try to turn men into “mechanical soldiers” who could be expected to perform their role with the same neat mathmatical precision of a trace italienne ravelin). Nevertheless this tension – between the science of war and its art – was not new (it dates back at least as far as Hellenistic military manuals) nor is it yet settled.
An aerial view of the Bourtange Fortress in Groningen, Netherlands. Built in 1593, the fort has been restored to its 1750s configuration, seen here.
Photo by Dack9 via Wikimedia Commons.But coming back to our fancy forts, of course such fortresses required larger and larger garrisons to fire all of the muskets and cannon that their firepower oriented defense plans required. Fortunately for the fortress designers, state capacity in Europe was rising rapidly and so larger and larger armies were ready to hand. That causes all sorts of other knock on effects we’re not directly concerned with here (but see the bibliography at the top). For us, the more immediate problem is, well, now we’ve built one of these things … how on earth does one besiege it?
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part IV: French Guns and Italian Lines”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-12-17.
