1The 1500s, their artistic encounter and their creative effervescence between flamboyant Gothic and Renaissance, the shift of European states and armies towards modernity, are at the heart of the current concerns of our disciplinary fields. We just have to remember the magnificent exhibition « France 1500 » at the Grand Palais in the autumn of 2010 showing the extraordinary explosion of precious production around those years. And also the « Artillery and fortification » symposium held in Parthenay in 2008; « The genesis of the bastioned system in Europe (1500 – 1550) – new discoveries, new perspectives « symposium, published in 2014; the « archeology of siege wars on the border between France and the former Southern Netherlands (XVI-XVIII century) » symposium, held in Valenciennes in 2015. They clearly show the level of renewal in our discipline, and also the renewal in war architecture that was confronted with the emergence of the bullet that causes wall breach. Our symposium is part of the aforementioned ones. We are in fact dealing with the irruption of the new artillery of bronze with metallic balls in the middle of the 15th century and its architectural response, the bastioned system in Europe in the 1530s. Our question relates to the design of the transitional fortifications that were to develop during the experimentations made by the emerging European entities around 1500. Were they an adapted response to the cannon or just a band-aid solution? In other words, was it an equilibrium or a breakthrough? These years are marked by three fundamental ruptures that we will consider successively; an administrative rupture, a strategic rupture and finally a technological rupture.

An administrative rupture

2At the end of the Hundred Years’ War emerged in France, England, Castile and Aragon, and later in the Britannic and Burgundian principalities, a permanent professionnal army, even in times of peace. It was a corollary to the institution of tax and a substitute for the non-professionalized army. Apart from the cavalry and the infantry, the first technical personnel of these emerging states are the artillerymen. They were present as early as the 1445s as an elite corps, soon followed in the 1520s by the military engineers, who operated as builders as well as poliorcetes. These professional armies operate now at the frontiers of the European states, therefore leading to a spatial rupture between castles-residences in the land and castles-defenses at the borders. Fortification had become a matter of states.

A strategic rupture

3The first model of the castle-defense is constituted by the urban citadel that appeared simultaneously in the united provinces and in the capital cities attached to the kingdom of France in the second part of the fifteenth century. This urban citadel is a new reality of war and of the centralized state. It is a logistics base controlling the civilian city and concentrating all the means of modern warfare such as arsenal, powder store, food and fodder store, barracks. At the fort of Salses in 1497, for the first time, the fortification leaves the city and is projected to the border of the state; born all-armed from the will of a king, Ferdinand of Aragon, Salses is at the same time a carapace intercepting an invasion route and a logistic base to bring the war close to the enemy. Henceforth, only states could be able to maintain a series of forts between France and Spain ; fortresses were then working arranged by pairs looking at each other on a border line that had become linear (Doullens / Bapaume, Salses / Leucate, Villeneuve-Loubet and Saint -Paul de Vence / Nice). On top of that, there was a series of large depots (for France they were in Bayonne, Narbonne, Lyon, Amiens, etc.). The disputed provinces between France and Spain received an original status. Buffer zones were installed for those indecisive principalities, sometimes faithful to France, sometimes to the Empire, sometimes to themselves. The Guise family acted this way, so did the Gondi de Retz and Rene, the great bastard of Savoy, as well as the kings of Navarre, or Evrard de la Marck around Sedan.

A technological rupture

4Regarding means of attack, the period sees the development of radically new techniques, that will remain valid for the next four centuries. Firstly, the new cannon, now cast in bronze, firing a cast iron ball and mounted on a mobile carriage on wheels allowing both transport and shooting. If the model is already used by the artillery bands of the King of France as early as the 1440s, it should be noted that the breach at the base of the wall will become possible only after 1490. Secondly, we must emphasize the extremely quick development of the explosive mine, that becomes effective around the same time in all its effects of masonry dislocation (as examplified by the siege of the New Castle in Naples in 1495). Finally, a buried path can be built on a ground (the so-called glacis) that is protected by the grazing fire shots of the defense, zigzag trenches can protect the soldiers close to the edge of the ditch. For the defense, in the period under consideration, appear standardized band-aid solutions without a future as well as formulas with a promising future.

5On the one hand, the development of an international model of cannon tower called torrione in Italy, round in the Germanic world, bourdzi in the Ottoman world, leads to an impasse in the terrestrial fortification ; for example, the tower of the Constable at Ham (1477) has walls that are 11 m thick, involvig a cost completely out of proportion. On the other hand, the development of a circular type plan for the tower at sea (for example the large tower in Toulon and the Megalos Kules in Heraklion, 1514) offers renewed possibilities of shooting in all-out directions against ships.

6On the other hand, the development around 1490 of the French-style, “X” shaped embrasure, powerfully ventilated by a vent, is going to represent a formula for the future. It allows a sweeping shot ensuring the safety of the servant as well as the stability of the wall. Other solutions include the thick parapet, the glacis reprofiled beyond the counterscarp of the ditch, the boulevard and the retaining wall, the escarp gallery at the bottom of the ditch to serve as a countermine. In this context, a special place must be given to the caponniere, a shielded stone chest, lying at the bottom of the ditch and turning into action only at the time of the assault, a flagship formula for the transitional period because it was adapted to firearm at a lower cost. It lasted until the Religion Wars (Orléans, Nantes, Bridoré, Loches) and then flourished again in the polygonal forts of Séré-de-Rivières after 1874.

7The responses to artillery attack we are going to examine together, are identical from Utrecht to Otranto and from Cologne to Fontarabia. They constitute a sort of equilibrium in the forms of war architecture, this symposium should help to demonstrate it.