Fortifications in Renaissance Italy

Fiammelli, Giovanni Francesco. Il principe difeso [...]. Nel quale si tratta di fortificazione, oppugnazione, espugnazione, e propugnazione, ò difesa.

€ 2.500,00

First edition of Fiamelli's work on military fortifications, extensively illustrated with woodcut diagrams. A Florentine mathematician and engineer who worked for the Duke of Parma in the Low Countries, Giovanni Fiammelli (1565-1614) was particularly interested not only in the engineering of these monumental Renaissance defenses, but also in debating the pros and cons of military fortifications in different defensive positions and battle plans. This stemmed in part from an older debate stirred up by the likes of Niccolò Machiavelli, whose writings a generation earlier discussed the varying usefulness of fortifications for a ruler. Machiavelli had suggested that extensive fortifications were useful only when the ruler of an Italian principality feared uprisings from their own people, but were not a particular advantage for foreign invasions; he stressed fortifications around cities rather than personal castles, and winning the loyalty (or at least lack of hatred) of the populace.

In "Il principe difeso", Fiammelli uses his greater engineering knowledge to design and examine the strengths and weaknesses of fortifications. He holds that good ones are useful, but that they have to be used competently in order to be effective. This is one of several military works that Fiammelli wrote while resident in Rome at the end of his life.