Anke Fischer-Kattner and Jamel Ostwald (eds.)

The World of the Siege: Representations of Early Modern Positional Warfare

(Brill, 2019) 316 pp. $126.00

It was a proverbial truism that an early modern soldier would spend far more time sitting out sieges (whether as attacked or defender) than on the battlefield- a ratio of twenty to one was suggested. The present volume collects contributions from across Eurasia to consider aspects of the culture of siege warfare in the early modern period- though the nominal connecting thread of how sieges were portrayed by and to contemporaries (not necessarily those engaged in the fighting) is interpreted so widely as to provide a relatively weak focus.

The first three items are labelled “Participants and Audiences”. Sigrun Haude provides an account of how various members of the regular clergy in Bavaria coped with the ebb and flow of events in the Thirty Years War, especially the massive disruption unleashed by the Swedish invasion of Catholic Bavaria in the early 1630’s. In practice there were very few sustained sieges because few towns were well enough fortified to withstand a serious assault and Haude’s chosen subjects are often writing about the impact of warfare in general on them and their institutions (for instance the problems Prioress Maria Magdalena Kurz, head of a Dominican convent in Augsburg, faced in obtaining accurate news about developments in order to inform decisions on whether to flee the city and the conflicting advice she was given on what to do). Anke Fischer-Kattner examines the 1648 siege of Colchester (very much a media event of its day) primarily through the prism of one broadsheet map with commentary published in London at the point when the town was about to capitulate (or possibly just after it did so). She has no difficulty establishing that this depiction fitted events in England firmly into well established European patterns of describing sieges for a wider audience, though rather disappointingly she remains focused on Colchester with only intermittent analysis of how her chosen publication related to its European comparators. Finally Jamal Ostwald considers what one might call the baroque theatre of garrison surrenders, focusing on capitulations in Flanders and Northern France during the War of the Spanish Succession. In a stimulating revisionist piece, he argues that recent historiography has paid far too much attention to the finer points of ceremonial etiquette in such events as part of a culture of honourable surrender. Regulating such issues was done in an ad hoc way with few standard guidelines, the honours accorded a surrendering garrison had little direct link to whether its members were deemed prisoners or not and above all they bore little relationship to how contemporaries assessed whether a defence had been conducted “well” or “badly”.

The next four items are labelled “Imperial Boundaries”. Eric Dursteler considers the events of 1596 at the Ottoman fortress of Klis in present day Croatia; captured in a surprise attack from Venetian territory by members of the local elites looking to Habsburg support and eventually recaptured by Ottoman forces with considerable Venetian assistance. As befits current interpretations of such borderland territories (Klis sat near the intersection of three empires), Dursteler makes much of the complex, intertwined cross-border linkages between individuals and groups on both sides of the fighting, which qualify the religious aspects of the confrontation- though it is striking that the Christian elites of present day Split, subject to Venetian rule though they were, strongly supported the attackers, who appear to have hoped to spark a general uprising against Ottoman rule in the Balkans. Further east, Philip Stern examines the 1689 Mogul siege of Bombay in a wider context. Often portrayed as a fiasco for the English East India Company, he suggests that the Company did not let a good crisis go to waste. They used the aftermath of the siege to tighten control over Bombay and its surroundings by changing land ownership patterns to favour those who had stood by it and prayed the events of 1689 in aid when justifying major fortification works and an enhanced military force. Also in India but at an earlier date, Pratyay Nath looks at how the Mogul Emperor Akbar’s involvement in five sieges, all in the earlier years of his reign, was represented in three more or less contemporary chronicles. All three in slightly different ways fitted Akbar’s role into patterns drawn from Persian cultural models designed to portray him as a perfect universal sovereign, with a divine mandate to rule the whole world. Obviously the fact that all five sieges were successful was a considerable assistance in this project. Finally Kahraman Şakul recounts the successful Ottoman siege in 1672 of Kamianiets-Podilskyi, a Polish-held fortress in present day Ukraine as it was told by contemporary Ottoman writers. Even though the Ottomans held the place for little more than twenty five years, the conquest left traces in Turkish and Polish cultural memory which endure to this day. This piece creates some interesting dialogues with other contributions; for instance some of the tropes applied to Sultan Mehmed IV’s role in the siege look very similar to those identified for Akbar by Nath while the rather dismissive approach Ottoman writers take to the honours of war offered to the garrison in order to encourage a surrender suggest that Ostwald’s arguments apply well beyond western Europe. Perhaps the key take-away from this piece, however, is that, while it differed in some points of detail, Ottoman siege-craft sat very much within a common approach which prevailed from Western Europe to India.

China, however, was different, as Tonio Andrade explains in his contribution (part of a section labelled “Definitions”, though it would go equally well into the previous section). China came late to heavy siege guns because Chinese city walls had always been massively thick with an earth core and Chinese armies adopted hand firearms first. As a result when Chinese forces came up against European-style basionated fortifications- even small, thinly defended ones- they struggled. Both sieges Andrade analyses (one involving a Dutch fortress, the other a Russian one) ended in Chinese victories but only after very heavy losses. The Dutch fortress on Taiwan fell largely because one of the garrison deserted to the besiegers and remodeled their approach while the Russian one on the Amur River had to be starved into submission and was eventually surrendered through a diplomatic settlement. Switching right back to the other end of Eurasia, Brian Sandberg considers the terminology used during the French Wars of Religion in respect of attacks on towns and fortified places. In a rather fluid set of wars marked by surprise attacks, intense local divisions and betrayals of fortified positions from within, a whole set of terms emerged to supplement those of conventional siege-craft. Finally Philip Wilson sets out a taxonomy designed to help in defining the early modern siege. This is based on five elements; scale (both in terms of numbers involved and time), objective (capturing a specific position), the existence of a clear “inside” and “outside”, a distinction between attack and defence and the role of time and delay. Wilson draws on nineteenth and even twentieth century examples (some distinctly obscure) to make his points; surprisingly he has nothing to say about medieval sieges though his taxonomy would (more or less) work for them too.

As so often with conference papers, the collection stands more on the quality of individual contributions than for a coherent overall message, beyond perhaps the existence of a common Eurasian model of siege-craft with China as a notable outlier. This raises issues which may need to be further teased out over convergences and differences between sieges in different cultures.

Brian G H Ditcham
Independent Scholar