The War Shelf

What Flintlock Fantasy Books Get Right About Musket Warfare

20 min read By Sandro Andreatta, historian With sources

In Promise of Blood, reliably hitting a distant target is part of a powder mage's arsenal and, considering how hard it was to hit a single man much beyond close range, rightly so. Powder mages ingest gunpowder and use their powers to guide their bullets and hit targets at distances an ordinary musketeer could never hope to match.1 Similarly, in Naomi Novik's Temeraire, aimed fire is a specialist's job, left to a handful of riflemen strapped into a dragon's harness.2 Both books respect the musket's limitations, starting with its unrifled barrel.

A musket barrel was a smooth tube. Unlike a rifle, it had no rifling, the spiral grooves that grip a bullet and spin it so it flies straight. A musket ball was a sphere cast from lead. Musketeers often loaded lead balls a good deal smaller than the bore, which meant that when the musket was fired, the ball bounced off the barrel walls on its way out. It left the muzzle spinning in whatever direction the last bounce had given it, and that spin could curve its flight away from where the soldier had aimed.

That made the musket a poor weapon for hitting a single man beyond close range but a reasonable one for hitting a crowd. Commanders knew this and trained their soldiers accordingly. The military historian Rory Muir puts it bluntly: "Both the design of the musket and the training infantry received discouraged them from deliberate aiming; rather they were taught to load as quickly as possible, level the musket in the general direction of the enemy and—at least in theory—fire in simultaneous volleys."3 Range was the other limit. Leonard and Thomas Digges warned in 1590 that "our common shot, if they discharge not within an hundred pace [roughly 75 meters], they wil wast their powder, and do little or no hurt at all to their Enimies."4

Inside that range, a musket hit very hard. Modern tests put a well-charged 42.5 g musket ball at around 3,100 joules as it left the barrel.5 An arrow from an exceptionally strong archer reached 130 to 150 joules, and a heavy steel-bowed crossbow about 200.6 A musket ball was credited with piercing a top-quality corselet (a piece of armor protecting the torso) at about 180 meters and killing an unarmored man at about 550 meters. The military historian Clifford Rogers adds that a man hit by a musket ball was very unlikely to go on fighting, while men struck by several arrows or bolts often did (although that depends greatly on the type of arrow or bolt, the armor and the distance).7

Volleys were something officers came to love because they gave them control. A soldier allowed to fire at will could fire his musket somewhere in the general direction of an enemy just to have an easy excuse to step out of the line of fire. By contrast, a rank firing on command could not do that and thus offered an officer many more options to influence the outcome of a battle and maximize the effectiveness of the weapons at his disposal. Maurice de Saxe, the German-born Marshal of France, left a picture of what happened without that control, complaining about his men firing at night: "since the officers cannot see them in the dark, they are content to rest the muzzle on the palisade and blast away at random."

Even with that discipline, battlefield fire was wasteful. Muir estimates that at the end of the 18th century armies fired somewhere between 200 and 500 bullets for every fatal wound.8 That is a great deal of loading for one man to die. Mostly, they opened fire too early and at too long a range.

What the musket didn't need was years of practice. Humphrey Barwick, a 16th-century military writer, thought six days were enough to train a pikeman and sixty a handgunner, whereas an archer or a man-at-arms took years. It is worth noting that an archer can be trained somewhat quickly, but mastering the weapon takes time, especially at high draw weights, which are needed for penetrating power and require a great deal of strength. Of course, archers had advantages: for example, they had the next arrow ready to loose much faster than a musketeer could reload his musket. A matchlock musketeer had to look after his burning match as well as the powder, ball and priming, and a Dutch drill manual of 1607 breaks the procedure into forty-two motions.9 Barwick reckoned a skilled man could manage forty shots an hour on the practice ground, about one every ninety seconds, although many captains expected no more than ten an hour. Heavy muskets fired from a rest were slower still.10 In formation and under fire, Clifford J. Rogers considers one shot every two or three minutes realistic for a common arquebusier.11

The flintlock and the paper cartridge sped all of this up considerably. Django Wexler, author of The Shadow Campaigns series, has said he researched exactly this kind of detail: tearing paper cartridges open with your teeth until your mouth is dry and coated with powder.12 On the parade ground, a highly trained soldier could fire every fifteen to twenty seconds until black-powder fouling slowed him down.13 In battle, two or three rounds a minute was good going for the best units; many soldiers managed less as the battle dragged on.14

Powder mages get to ignore most of these difficulties. They hit enemies thousands of meters away and fire and reload faster than everybody else. To my mind, that is what makes McClellan's magic interesting. A hero in a musket line is generally expected to do what everyone else is doing. Magic gives him permission to be a nuisance to the formation.

Drill and volley fire

In The Thousand Names, Django Wexler makes his new recruits learn how to function as a regiment before letting them fight as one.15 He doesn't make learning to form square or present muskets look easy. The drill also serves a distinct function in the story beyond showing off period knowledge: it helps build companionship within a military unit, where Sergeant Winter has to find creative ways to protect her men from the higher-ups' irrational demands. This is a common trope in military fantasy: the chain of command is both a necessity and an obstacle, especially if you have a lieutenant who is a nobleman on horseback with no experience of battle under his belt. Later in the story, Winter has her men form square and fend off an enemy cavalry attack with volley fire, so it all pays off nicely.

Volley fire is the next aspect that makes Wexler's military feel realistic or immersive. Volley fire is quite a bit older than gunpowder, though. The crossbowmen of the Tang dynasty already fired in rotating groups. With firearms, the idea turns up in several places. The Ming general Qi Jiguang described volley fire for arquebusiers around 1560,16 and Ottoman Janissaries fired volleys during the long Ottoman–Habsburg war of 1593–1606.17 The Japanese under Oda Nobunaga are often said to have won at Nagashino in 1575 with three ranks of gunners firing in rotation. The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga, translated into English in 2011, describes massed gunfire but does not describe this system of rotating ranks.18

In Europe, the Dutch made it standard. In December 1594, William Louis of Nassau wrote to his cousin Maurice describing what became known as the countermarch: each rank fired together and marched to the back to reload while the next rank fired, so that "before the last ranks have fired, the first will have reloaded."19 Geoffrey Parker called the result "a production line of death."20 According to Tonio Andrade, "it was that Dutch system that, once it proved its value, was then copied throughout Europe."21

Firing in turns was only part of the problem. Since muskets in the 16th and 17th centuries took a lot of time to reload, men fired and then stepped back to reload, making space for the next rank (the film Alatriste portrays that quite nicely). The men who had fired had to get out of everybody else's way without setting anyone's powder alight. According to the historian Olaf van Nimwegen, each musketeer needed at least about 0.9 meters of room on either side, while making sure his burning match did not ignite another soldier's gunpowder.22 The files also had to keep lanes free for the men marching back to reload, which made the formation wide and loose and poorly protected against cavalry. The Dutch kept tinkering with it. By the Jülich campaign of 1610, the musketeers stood behind the pikes and stepped forward together to fire, often with the front rank kneeling, so that 144 men could fire a single volley.

The system only worked with drill. Thinner, wider formations put more men in the front rank, and Parker spells out the cost: "Changing a pike square perhaps fifty deep into a musketry line only ten deep inevitably exposed far more men to the challenge of face-to-face combat, calling for superior courage, proficiency and discipline in each individual soldier." Drill can also become a problem when it turns into habit. In Novik's Black Powder War, the Prussian army still fights the way Frederick the Great taught it, and at Jena it loses the way it lost in 1806.23

Squares and cavalry

Fantasy loves a cavalry charge. The Rohirrim riding down into the hordes of orcs in front of Minas Tirith are the prime example. Many readers see in this siege and its relief an echo of a pike-and-shot-era siege: Vienna in 1683, where the Polish Winged Hussars famously charged into the Ottoman lines besieging the city, although the impact of the charge is historically overstated. Tolkien never said so, though, and Tolkien scholars point instead to the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451, where the Visigothic king Theodoric fell from his horse and was trampled, much as Théoden is.

The early modern period as a whole was less kind to cavalry charges than Vienna in 1683 suggests. Infantry used long pikes, which made the horses' lives increasingly difficult from the late medieval period onwards. To make matters worse for horsemen, pike squares also sheltered musketeers, who fired from within the protection of the pikes. Again, the period's warfare is probably best illustrated by the film The Profession of Arms or, as mentioned before, Alatriste, if you want to see an example on the silver screen. Cavalry was still used, and still effective, all the way to the Napoleonic Wars, but it increasingly struggled to have the same impact as a knightly charge in, let's say, the 1100s.

Even the Polish Winged Hussars found this out, more than half a century before Vienna. At Mewe in 1626, they swept the first Swedish line off the high ground, but a salvo from the Swedish second line halted the assault, and the hussars had to withdraw in disorder. Gustavus Adolphus had given his musketeers Dutch-made muskets of 18 to 22 mm caliber, heavy enough to pierce the hussars' armor, and deployed them to fire three ranks at once.

William Garrard, writing in 1591, thought a pike square was "as hard to be pierced by a horse as an angry porcupine or hedgehog with the end of a bare finger"24, at least as long as the men in it stood their ground. When the bayonet replaced the pike around 1700, the square stayed and the pikemen went. Every soldier was now, so to speak, a musketeer and a pikeman at the same time.

At Waterloo, Marshal Ney sent his cavalry against Wellington's squares with no infantry to follow up and no guns brought close enough to break them. The horsemen could only circle the squares looking for a weak spot while the infantry shot at them, and in the end they had to pull back. The bayonets kept the horses off and the muskets did the killing. A fantasy battle that gets this right, where the cavalry hesitates, circles and dies under musket fire unless something else breaks the square first, has an author who's read their history. Again, Django Wexler gets this exactly right in The Thousand Names. Musketeers even drill how to form a square, and don't do badly, given that this was a maneuver that required experience and well-trained officers.

The fight against the Redeemers is the clearest example.25 Winter forms her square near a river, and her men hold their fire until the Redeemer horsemen are in range, which is what saves them. The volleys bring down the front riders, and the bodies pile up in front of the square and hem in the riders charging behind them. The horses won't charge home into the bayonets, so the square only has to stay where it is. It is a simple order to understand and a horrible one to obey: stand still while the horses come straight at you. A square that holds its ground is close to impenetrable for cavalry, and one that panics and breaks gives the horsemen exactly the gaps they were circling for.

Temeraire hints at what a fantasy army might do about squares. Novik's dragons carry bombs and drop them on formations on the ground. A square concentrates men in a stationary formation, making it an inviting target for anything falling from above. Formations that could stand off cavalry had that problem with artillery long before anyone thought of dragons. At Rocroi in 1643, the last six Spanish tercios beat off several cavalry attacks but lost heavily to the French guns, and the French still never broke them.

Nobody knows who's winning

Django Wexler has said he writes battles in which the participants "may not even know whether they've won or lost" until the rout begins.26 In the same 2013 essay, written as advice for fantasy authors, he recommends Rory Muir's book, the one quoted above. The history supports him. Infantry fights were mostly decided by morale, and the bayonet charge shows it most clearly. Muir points out that bayonet wounds were rare: the charge worked by frightening the enemy, and usually one side gave way before the lines met.27

Sir John Stuart's report of the Battle of Maida in 1806 describes that moment as he wanted it remembered. After a few rounds of fire, the two lines "advanced towards each other, until their bayonets began to cross. At this momentous crisis the enemy became appalled. They broke, and endeavored to fly, but it was too late; they were overtaken with the most dreadful slaughter."28 In fact, the French ran before the bayonets crossed.

A British officer at Barrosa in 1811 described the other side of it, after his regiment charged into a French unit that broke: "I could not, confused and flying as they were, cut down one, although I might have twenty, they seemed so confounded and so frightened. They made, while we were among them (about quarter of an hour), little or no opposition."29

When nobody gave way, the lines rarely met at all. They stopped and shot at each other, sometimes in firefights that lasted hours and settled very little.

Sometimes nobody knew even after the battle. Swedish and Polish accounts of Dirschau in 1627 report everything from a Swedish victory to a draw to a Polish one, each side mostly writing its own story. Historians now judge by what happened next: the Swedes advanced and the Poles withdrew, so most give the Swedes the edge.30

The Thousand Names shows the defenders' side of this later in the book, when the Colonials face a Redeemer infantry line out in the desert. The ranks wait for Janus's command before they fire, and their superior fire halts the Redeemers and frightens them. Smoke covers everything. The cannon switch to canister, tin cans packed with musket balls that turn a field gun into an enormous shotgun at close range, and the shot tears through the ranks. Once the first few ranks of an army that size go down, the men behind them stop, and the charge loses the momentum it needs to reach the defenders. That momentum can give the attacker an advantage, but the balance is fragile: a well-timed volley can stop the onslaught and give the defenders their chance to countercharge. Wexler gets this right. A big army is not much use if its front ranks won't keep walking.

Sieges

Most wars of the period were fought as sieges rather than battles, but battles decided who got to besiege. John Bingham, an English officer who served in the Dutch army, said the master of the field "may lay siege to what Towne he is disposed, he may raise any siege that the Enemy hath layed against him. Nor can any Man be Master of field without Battaile."31

Sieges in this period followed a method. Vauban, Louis XIV's military engineer, worked out a system the French first used at Maastricht in 1673: the attackers dug trenches parallel to the walls, linked them with zigzag approach trenches so the defenders could not fire straight down them, and brought their batteries forward one parallel at a time until the guns could open a breach. Sappers also tunneled under the walls to blow them up from below. It was slow and it was mostly digging, but done properly it made a siege largely a question of how many days it would take.

The fight at South Pike in Promise of Blood starts out looking like one of these. Shouldercrown, the Adran fortress guarding the mountain, is under attack from the Kez, and Taniel spends his time there killing Kez Privileged with redstripe bullets, rounds Ka-poel has charmed to get through their shields. The Kez have sappers too, but their tunnels don't go under the fortress. They go around it, bored through the mountain so that Julene and the Kez forces can reach Kresim Kurga, the ruined holy city at the summit, where she means to summon Kresimir.32 The Adrans are fighting to save a fortress the Kez don't need to take.

That is a good twist on a period siege, and the sappers are the most period thing in it. The ending has nothing to do with Vauban: Kresimir arrives and Taniel shoots him in the eye.

In my own novel, The Witch Field, I took the opposite route to McClellan. One of the main characters, Stepan, goes through the entire course of a siege at the fortress of Karnhelm: the arrival of the enemy army, a garrison sortie against the besiegers' first parallel, the battle for the covered way and the ditch, the fight for the wall, the breach, the retrenchment behind it, the final assault and, last of all, a defense in depth through the streets. The fortress loses its defenses one layer at a time, until the surviving garrison has to fight for the city street by street.

Karnhelm follows Vauban's routine, only seen from inside the walls. His siege of Ath in 1697 was called "not so much a siege as an idealized version of one."33 Vauban promised "an infallible success without a day's extra delay if you will defer to my opinion and follow faithfully the rules I lay down."34 Following his rules, attackers could take a well-defended fortress in about forty-eight days.35

The garrison of Karnhelm hits back where that routine was weakest. The sortie strikes the first parallel before a single Khaskir gun has hit the wall. The fight for the covered way was usually the costliest phase of a siege, so costly that Vauban built raised firing platforms for infantry, the cavaliers de tranchée, to avoid a direct assault on it. Losing the glacis would let the attackers drag their breaching batteries up to the edge of the ditch, which is exactly where Vauban placed them, thirty to fifty meters from the wall. Behind the breach, the retrenchment answers a problem Vauban described himself: "In an ordinary fortress, when the bastions are breached the whole enceinte is breached."36

Where Karnhelm leaves the routine is at the end. At Ath, the garrison raised a white flag before the general assault had even begun, and that was usual: once the breaches were wide enough, a garrison often negotiated its surrender. Karnhelm fights on, through the retrenchment and into the streets.

Bibliography

Allent, Pierre-Alexandre-Joseph. Histoire du corps impérial du génie ... depuis l'origine de la fortification moderne jusqu'à la fin du règne de Louis XIV. Paris, 1805.

Andrade, Tonio. "The Arquebus Volley Technique in China, c. 1560: Evidence from the Writings of Qi Jiguang." In The Maritime Defense of China: Ming General Qi Jiguang and Beyond, edited by Y. H. Teddy Sim, 73–92. Singapore: Springer, 2017.

Andrade, Tonio. The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.

Barwick, Humfrey. A Breefe Discourse, Concerning the Force and Effect of All Manuall Weapons of Fire. London, [1592?].

Börekçi, Günhan. "A Contribution to the Military Revolution Debate: The Janissaries' Use of Volley Fire during the Long Ottoman–Habsburg War of 1593–1606 and the Problem of Origins." Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 59, no. 4 (2006): 407–38.

"Brown Bess (UK), small arms of the Napoleonic Wars." History of War. https://www.historyofwar.org/articles/weapons_brown_bess.html.

Digges, Leonard, and Thomas Digges. An Arithmeticall Warlike Treatise Named Stratioticos. London, 1579; 2nd ed. 1590.

Duffy, Christopher. Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World, 1494–1660. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.

Falkner, James. "Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban: Father of the Fortress." Military History, September 2012. https://historynet.com/sebastien-le-prestre-de-vauban-father-fortress/.

Frost, Robert I. The Northern Wars: War, State and Society in Northeastern Europe, 1558–1721. Harlow: Longman, 2000.

Garrard, William. The Arte of Warre. London, 1591.

Gheyn, Jacob de. Wapenhandelinghe van roers, musquetten ende spiessen. The Hague, 1607.

Kalaus, P. "Schiessversuche mit historischen Feuerwaffen." In Von alten Handfeuerwaffen, 51–92. Graz, 1989.

McClellan, Brian. Promise of Blood. New York: Orbit, 2013.

Muir, Rory. Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Nimwegen, Olaf van. The Dutch Army and the Military Revolutions, 1588–1688. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010.

Novik, Naomi. Black Powder War. New York: Del Rey, 2006.

Novik, Naomi. His Majesty's Dragon. New York: Del Rey, 2006.

Ōta Gyūichi. The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga. Translated and edited by J. S. A. Elisonas and J. P. Lamers. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

Parker, Geoffrey. "From the House of Orange to the House of Bush: 400 Years of Revolutions in Military Affairs." Militaire Spectator 172, no. 4 (2003): 177–93.

Rambo, Cat. "An Interview with Django Wexler." SFWA, 12 September 2013. https://sfwa.org/2013/09/12/interview-django-wexler/.

Rogers, Clifford J. "Tactics and the Face of Battle." In European Warfare, 1350–1750, edited by Frank Tallett and D. J. B. Trim, 203–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Roberts, Keith. Pike and Shot Tactics 1590–1660. Elite 179. Oxford: Osprey, 2010.

Ross, Steven T. From Flintlock to Rifle: Infantry Tactics, 1740–1866. London: Frank Cass, 1979.

Strickland, Matthew, and Robert Hardy. The Great Warbow: From Hastings to the Mary Rose. Stroud: Sutton, 2005.

Vauban, Sébastien Le Prestre de. A Manual of Siegecraft and Fortification. Translated by George A. Rothrock. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968.

Wexler, Django. "So You Want to Have a War?" A Dribble of Ink, April 2013. https://aidanmoher.com/blog/featured-article/2013/04/so-you-want-to-have-a-war-by-django-wexler/.

Wexler, Django. The Thousand Names. New York: Roc, 2013.

William Louis of Nassau to Maurice of Nassau, 8 December 1594. Koninklijk Huisarchief, The Hague, Ms. A22-1XE-79.

Notes

  1. Brian McClellan, Promise of Blood (New York: Orbit, 2013). ↩

  2. Naomi Novik, His Majesty's Dragon (New York: Del Rey, 2006). ↩

  3. Rory Muir, Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). ↩

  4. Leonard Digges and Thomas Digges, An Arithmeticall Warlike Treatise Named Stratioticos (London, 1590), 122. ↩

  5. P. Kalaus, "Schiessversuche mit historischen Feuerwaffen," in Von alten Handfeuerwaffen (Graz, 1989), 51–92. ↩

  6. Clifford J. Rogers, "Tactics and the Face of Battle," in European Warfare, 1350–1750, ed. Frank Tallett and D. J. B. Trim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 210. ↩

  7. Rogers, "Tactics and the Face of Battle." ↩

  8. Muir, Tactics and the Experience of Battle. ↩

  9. Jacob de Gheyn, Wapenhandelinghe van roers, musquetten ende spiessen (The Hague, 1607). ↩

  10. Matthew Strickland and Robert Hardy, The Great Warbow: From Hastings to the Mary Rose (Stroud: Sutton, 2005), 31. ↩

  11. Rogers, "Tactics and the Face of Battle," 213. ↩

  12. Cat Rambo, "An Interview with Django Wexler," SFWA, 12 September 2013, https://sfwa.org/2013/09/12/interview-django-wexler/. ↩

  13. Steven T. Ross, From Flintlock to Rifle: Infantry Tactics, 1740–1866 (London: Frank Cass, 1979), 25. ↩

  14. "Brown Bess (UK), small arms of the Napoleonic Wars," History of War, https://www.historyofwar.org/articles/weapons_brown_bess.html. ↩

  15. Django Wexler, The Thousand Names (New York: Roc, 2013). ↩

  16. Tonio Andrade, "The Arquebus Volley Technique in China, c. 1560: Evidence from the Writings of Qi Jiguang," in The Maritime Defense of China: Ming General Qi Jiguang and Beyond, ed. Y. H. Teddy Sim (Singapore: Springer, 2017), 73–92. ↩

  17. Günhan Börekçi, "A Contribution to the Military Revolution Debate: The Janissaries' Use of Volley Fire during the Long Ottoman–Habsburg War of 1593–1606 and the Problem of Origins," Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 59, no. 4 (2006): 407–38. ↩

  18. Ōta Gyūichi, The Chronicle of Lord Nobunaga, trans. and ed. J. S. A. Elisonas and J. P. Lamers (Leiden: Brill, 2011). ↩

  19. William Louis of Nassau to Maurice of Nassau, 8 December 1594, Koninklijk Huisarchief, The Hague, Ms. A22-1XE-79; translated in Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 145. ↩

  20. Geoffrey Parker, "From the House of Orange to the House of Bush: 400 Years of Revolutions in Military Affairs," Militaire Spectator 172, no. 4 (2003): 184. ↩

  21. Andrade, "Arquebus Volley Technique in China." ↩

  22. Olaf van Nimwegen, The Dutch Army and the Military Revolutions, 1588–1688 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010). ↩

  23. Naomi Novik, Black Powder War (New York: Del Rey, 2006). ↩

  24. William Garrard, The Arte of Warre (London, 1591), 229. ↩

  25. Wexler, Thousand Names. ↩

  26. Django Wexler, "So You Want to Have a War?," A Dribble of Ink, April 2013, https://aidanmoher.com/blog/featured-article/2013/04/so-you-want-to-have-a-war-by-django-wexler/. ↩

  27. Muir, Tactics and the Experience of Battle. ↩

  28. Sir John Stuart, quoted in Muir, Tactics and the Experience of Battle, 86. ↩

  29. Muir, Tactics and the Experience of Battle, 88. ↩

  30. Robert I. Frost, The Northern Wars: War, State and Society in Northeastern Europe, 1558–1721 (Harlow: Longman, 2000). ↩

  31. John Bingham, quoted in Keith Roberts, Pike and Shot Tactics 1590–1660, Elite 179 (Oxford: Osprey, 2010), 7. ↩

  32. McClellan, Promise of Blood. ↩

  33. Pierre-Alexandre-Joseph Allent, Histoire du corps impérial du génie ... depuis l'origine de la fortification moderne jusqu'à la fin du règne de Louis XIV (Paris, 1805), 351. ↩

  34. Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, A Manual of Siegecraft and Fortification, trans. George A. Rothrock (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), 65. ↩

  35. James Falkner, "Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban: Father of the Fortress," Military History, September 2012, https://historynet.com/sebastien-le-prestre-de-vauban-father-fortress/. ↩

  36. Christopher Duffy, Siege Warfare: The Fortress in the Early Modern World, 1494–1660 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 83. ↩