Arts Of The Siege: A Precis Of Poliorcetic Portrayals
Arts Of The Siege: A Precis Of Poliorcetic Portrayals
This is an online version of my essay which appeared in the 2022 edition of Theta Delta, the history journal of the Phi Alpha Theta historical society at Austin Peay State University. In place of most images, I have linked to the posts in which I developed the material in the essay.
Looking backwards with only pure reason and text evidence, Thomas Hobbes famously imagined that life during pre-history – that is, before the invention of the state – had been “nasty, brutish, and short.” A consensus of current scholarship on pre-state conflict largely agrees with this assessment, at least as regards the Neolithic period.[1] However, in the same thought, Hobbes said that “no arts or letters” had been possible before the state, either. Unaware of ancient paintings in caves and overhangs, nor blessed with museums full of curated objects, Hobbes might put it differently today. Late Mesolithic societies painted scenes, including scenes of war; arts have always been crucial in forming a shared history.[2] Although writing emerged in early polities as a form of record-keeping, records of kings and their battles are among the very first writings maintained by these states, and by design, these have always helped form a shared history. Mayan, Egyptian, Chinese, and Mesopotamian kings all wanted their combat glories to be remembered as their civilizations emerged. These works have shaped the historical discourse around their acts of violence. Historian Keith Jenkins tells us that “all history is the history of historians’ minds.”[3] For most of human history, the minds of royal historians and scribes and artists were focused on the peculiar politics of their particular courts, not the realistic details of warfare.
Archaeology has identified smaller fortified communities subject to violent attack in the Neolithic.[4] it appears that the siege and sack of cities followed closely on the invention of cities. The earliest siege uncovered by archaeology is at Tell Hamoukar. About half a square mile in size, the city’s ten-foot-high circular mud brick wall was not tall enough for defense, nor is there evidence of projecting towers. Like the walls of biblical Jericho, the walls of Tell Hamoukar appear more useful as flood protection than fortification, for the only tower is not a defensive structure.[5] Perhaps the city leaders considered these walls good enough to defend the city from attack as well as floods, making no effort to improve them as defenses. If so, it was a fatal error for the whole community.
Around 3,500 BC, an army from Uruk demolished and burned a large section of the wall. They left behind evidence of a concerted storming attack. Archaeologists found more than 1,200 walnut-sized, teardrop-shaped clay sling bullets and at least 120 more clay sling bullets the size of baseballs [Fig 2]. “The whole area of our most recent excavation was a war zone,” Clemens Reichel, Research Associate at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago said in a press release.[6] The bombardment did not reduce the wall. Instead, sappers made a breach protected by the supporting fire of a bombardment.[7] “Sappers lead the way,” the motto of US Army engineers, is not a brag. Sometimes referred to as “pioneers,” sappers breach and reduce obstacles to movement by the army, or build and maintain the same, making their duties the dirtiest, and often the most dangerous, in any siege or breaching operation. The assault force advanced through gaps or escalades that the sappers opened. It is very common in ancient siege for armies to take their time filling in moats, building up ramps, and so on as preparation for an attack.
Hoping for better terms, cities often capitulate after preparations for the assault have been completed. Indeed, the walls may have been wrecked and burned after the city surrendered, and not in the act of storming. Reducing walls is an ancient strategy to discourage renewed rebellion in subjugated communities. “Slighting and reduction” was a practice of the New Model Army, for example, which not only enforced such penalties on conquered royalist enclaves but also a conquered Parliament.[8] As Hobbes wrote his most famous words, the defenses of London were already rendered incomplete, disappearing soon after the Great Fire of 1666; there are hardly any traces left today.
Although it is impossible to perfectly reconstruct the sequence of events that led to the conflict at Tell Hamoukar, and what exactly took place there, the dig team concluded that Uruk occupied the city afterwards.[9] We are left with the picture of an imperial city-state at the dawn of civilization marching and sailing thousands of troops hundreds of miles up the Tigris River, equipping and supplying and training them to attack city defenses, and successfully carrying out that extended campaign in the face of stubborn resistance. Getting an army to a battle is impressive all on its own; camping that army outside of a city, and then attacking it successfully after a period of preparation requires a greater scale of military development than battle. To make a rather long analysis short, the material, logistical, and even moral costs of siege are higher than that of field battles.[10] Troops do not like to occupy the same place for very long, for as many armies learned to their chagrin, the sanitation issues and resulting disease outbreaks of prolonged encampment are more deadly than combat. Nor are most troops eager for the high-risk mission of storming defenses. To sack a city with walls, even bad ones like Tell Hamoukar, requires such administration, organization, preparation, and most of all systems of reward and punishment, that a state is practically required in order to achieve it.
Just as walls are intimately related to state formation, so is the art of poliorcetics, defending and defeating those walls, as well as artistic portrayals of poliorcetic events. Artistic portrayals of poliorcetic events first appear in Mesopotamia. Yet as historian John Keegan warns us, these fragmentary scenes are not reliable guides to siegecraft before the 4th Century BC.[11] To begin our survey, we will wxamine the wall of the temple of Pharaoh Ramesses II at Thebes [Fig1]. Celebrating his siege of Dapur circa 1269 BC, Ramesses is overlarge, a hero in his chariot taking up half the scene, while the great investment and assault of the hill city has been cramped into one-third of the available space. We see ladders, the original siege technology, used in escalade with supporting fire from archers (because ancient artillery will not be invented for another millennium). Sappers dig mines under the walls to make them collapse and open breaches. The Siege of Dapur is at best a fair depiction of early poliorcetic arts in the ideal during Bronze Age.
The priests who painted the scene of Dapur at Thebes were not concerned with accurate portrayal; they were making propaganda for the reign of Ramesses. By the time their temple art was finished, Dapur had long since tossed out the Egyptian garrison and returned to the Hittite fold.[12] Ramesses had in fact surpassed the material limits of Egyptian imperial potential. His cult effectively flew a “Mission Accomplished” banner over a military and diplomatic fiasco. Plus ça change.
Although space only allows for a brief look at eastern traditions, the Arabs deserve particular praise for illustrating the poliorcetic arms race with crusaders coming through Byzantine lands. The counterweight trebuchet is a fascinating study in early technological globalization.[13] Selling their services to the Mongols, Arab engineers took part in the vast campaigns of the Golden Horde throughout Jin China, Russia, Hungary, and Persia. The last case is especially notorious: Khwarazmshah brought the Golden Horde down on his own head by killing ambassadors of the Mongol court, so Tolui, a son of Genghis Khan, subjected Khorasan to utter brutality, destroying every city and population which did not submit.[14]
A 14th Century manuscript of Rashid-al-Din Hamadani’s Jami’ al-Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles) held at the University of Edinburg Library [Fig. 3] includes an illustration of a counterweight trebuchet in action during one of these sieges. Note the turbaned Arab specialist handling the ammunition; some Mongol troops engage in an archery duel with the defenders, while others walk on the treadmill mechanism that cocks the trebuchet in place. The machine is little more than a very-evolved sling. Moreover, the wall is brick, which turns out to be a very resistant material even against gunpowder cannons. Nevertheless, the Yuanshi (History of Yuan) records that a Muslim trebuchet struck a gate tower of Xiangyang in 1272, “making a sound like a clap of thunder and shaking the inside of the city.”[15] The Song general, are told, capitulated after the engine opened a breach.[16] One wonders just how big the breach really had to be.
Virtually undefeated on the battlefield, Mongols had a mixed poliorcetic record, finding progress most difficult wherever stone fortifications were most complete: northern China, Korea, Krakow.[17] The preponderance of advanced fortifications the further they advanced west appears to have been a factor in the Mongols’ decision to discontinue the invasion of Europe in 1242 after the death of Ögedei Khan. Indeed, the only Khan ever killed in combat was likely felled by an artillery projectile during the siege of Diaoyu Fortress in China, though the sources are understandably unclear, since any record of such a death would be distasteful to Mongols.[18] Upon hearing of the death of Möngke, son of Tolui, Hulagu Khan withdrew from Palestine and the ashes of Baghdad to carve out a private dominion in Persia.[19] Kublai Khan would finish off China after a civil war with his younger brother, but the unity of the Golden Horde had been smashed forever, lucky for Europe.
Inherently political, poliorcetics is a perilous subgenre of art. Let us look to northern Italy, where the western concepts of painting and republic were born in the clash of fortified city-states. Some controversy exists as to exactly when Guidoriccio da Fogliano and his horse were added to the famous fresco in the Italian town of Siena [Fig. 4], or whether one person really painted it.[20] The work has been dated to 1328, but who really knows.[21] A successful siege was still something to crow about in the 14th Century, so Simone Martini may or may not have painted Guidoriccio da Fogliano at the Siege of Montemassi (with or without Fogliano) inside the central civic structure of the city to remind everyone that they had done something great, once. If this was a normal art history essay, here is where the reader would be subjected to the arguments over that mercenary figure centered in the fresco, his career being hero and then traitor and then hero again, the rod of command in his hand, the caparison on his horse, and the boring intersection of political with personal in the presentational.
For a nuanced historiography of Martini’s(?) seminal influence on the Renaissance, read elsewhere. This essay is about siege art.
Just look at the fieldworks that someone may or may not have partially obscured under a forgettable horse and rider. Gasp with the author at the circumvallating palisade. The castle and fortified town of Montemassi are locked in the besieging army’s grip. Without an army to relieve them, eventual surrender is a material certainty. Engineers and diggers did all this work. They are an unseen human mass represented by pike heads; one man gets the individual glory, but the story of the siege belongs to the people of Siena. Nineteenth Century art historian Anna Jameson wrote that Martini’s fresco “might just be the first secular painting of the epoch.”[22] One could even discern an early stirring of nationalism, for a single work of siege art contains multitudes.
I should like to see this famous scene with my own eyes one day. The impressionistic terrain and vibrant colors look spectacular. The tall towers and battlements without crenellations tell the story of a Montemassi castle that was already obsolete. Compare it to the fortress behind the dashing condottiere, the one flying the Siena flag, which is a state-of the-art construction. The tents of Siena’s great army are painted in vanishing perspective, the thing which made Martini famous and inspired so many imitators. However, Martini’s fresco had barely dried before the advent of gunpowder siege artillery in Italy. Sad to report, the military might of Siena represented in their civic artwork lasted until 1494, when Charles VIII battered their suddenly-obsolete walls to smithereens with cannons on behalf of Florence. Rather than capitulate, Siena resisted the storm and suffered a massacre.
Now we come to the final wonderful detail of this glorious masterwork, the arm of a counterweight trebuchet inside the castle, positioned for counterbattery shooting against siege machinery [Fig. 5]. The throwing arm appears made of bound wooden beams; the sling end has a curious curve that may have been intended to add leverage; the guy ropes are used to crank it back into place after shooting. We might hope that Martini, or whoever we take for Martini, got to see such an engine, and perhaps even observe it working, or at least had its workings described in detail by witnesses.
Gunpowder came into use right alongside the printing press, and an argument over which of them had more impact on history misses the point that their combined effects were an order of magnitude greater than either invention could have achieved on its own. When Francis Malthus wrote his Treatise of Artificial Fireworks in 1629, it was a very new thing in the world for an individual person to create a widely-seen work of art depicting a siege without some sort of political, and therefore personal, intent behind it [Fig. 6]. His pineapple-like grenado is fanciful, but forward-thinking. The previous century had seen rapid experimentation and development of artillery technology, with tools such as the quadrant in the upper left corner becoming standardized equipment. It is not surprising at all that someone would want to maximize the shrapnel effect of the charge, or that their fusing system would be primitive, or that the idea would excite interest. Malthus has glorified the mortar battery instead of the man or the city. It is almost a marketing brochure. We have found the antipode to Thebes!
A full review of the early modern period and the military revolution hypothesis is beyond the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, this author maintains that from the mid-1300s to 1792, Europeans had a genuine golden age of poliorcetic art. Books on artillery and fortification were best-sellers, all gilded in illustrations. Frontispieces show Mars and Bellona with cannons.[23] Maps and star-fortress cities in miniature were both planning tools and artistic masterpieces. It was the dull 19th Century, when peacetime snobs were setting rules for what ‘real art’ is, that produced the disappointing duds of the subgenre by imagining the past.
Take Dominique Papety’s Siege of Acre, which is a fairly famous work of art [Fig. 7]. No really, someone please take it and put it away. We should all stop looking at it. A dramatic scene, to be sure, it adorns the covers of popular books on the Crusades and medieval combat. It also gets used for silly internet memes taped to the doors of college history professors worldwide. Ostensibly a rendering of events in 1291, when the Europeans lost their foothold in the so-called Holy Land, it was painted around 1840, long after gunpowder had obsoleted every ancient siege weapon, including the ram or pick in the foreground. The author has visited Acre (Akka), making an extensive tour of the walls and main gate. This painting has no resemblance to any part of Acre’s remaining crusader fortifications that the author saw. Of course, there had been centuries of reconstruction by that time. This is not a criticism of Papety’s skill or technique, or even his view of a past Acre, for which real accuracy would be impossible. As it was an Ottoman prison colony at the time, there were no photos or even good illustrations to use as models, the scene does not depict a real Acre at all.
Rather, this painting has clear nationalist symbolism: Guillaume de Clermont, Hospitaller Master of the garrison, is shown personally defending the walls from the Saracen menace. France was still an empire at this time, with interests in the Levant and Algeria. Papety was alive at the moment of Greek independence and inspired by Hellenic art, so a painting of a Christian Frenchman squashing a Muslim upstart has obvious context in his present. He has transformed a famous defeat of the past into a moral victory for his own settling-colonizing-imperial France. Thus, as with most art depicting the siege and sack of cities, The Siege of Acre is another political statement.
The siege engine is what this author has always found bothersome. To be sure, Papety never got to see an actual battering ram, screw, or pick at work, since none had been constructed or used anywhere in the world for hundreds of years, no museum examples existed, and all drawings of ancient siege engines available to him in the 19th Century were drawn from pure fancy by people who had never seen the real thing, either. Short of building his own experimental designs, no physical models were available. It is as unreal as his Acre. Still, we are left to wonder what Papety was thinking here. The workings of the machine are left mysterious. The ropes seem unattached to anything. Yet the machine has scored solid masonry at an upward angle, with no leverage. If it was part of an assault tower that smashed the parapet, and then got demolished, the remains of the engine should be in the scene. The one thing most noticeably missing is fire. Granting the artist room for imagination, it is unclear what exactly he imagined had been going on during the hour before his scene takes place.
Or maybe we understand things perfectly. A powerful weapon has been circumcised, and thus transformed into a symbol of effeminate eastern impotence. Eliding the real ingenuity of Arab engineers in attacking crusader castles, Papety projected onto his subject through a cultural chauvinist lens. Papety’s Acre is what Orientalism looks like.
To the author’s mind, the happening scene of 19th Century poliorcetic art is photography. Consider the bastion at Peachtree Street in Atlanta [Fig. 8], which is a study in the possibilities of earlier times. While it cannot be held up as 1:1 replacement of, say, a Prussian earthwork bastion during the late Seven Years’ War, the idea of defensive artillery strongpoints, consisting of dirt ramparts with various wooden or fibrous reinforcement, was quite well established long before the American Civil War. If we used Photoshop to lay the foreground image from Atlanta on top of a 17th Century London skyline, it would probably not be far off from the artillery platforms ”laid with strong oaken planks” that travel writer William Lithgow described during the English Civil War as he toured the Lines of Communication.[24] These platforms prevent the guns from getting stuck in muddy holes or ruts and also provide a firm, safe walking surface for crew drill. Protected from the flat-trajectory cannonballs aimed at them by enemy gun crews, defenders can dominate their respective fire lanes with ball, grape, or chain shot. Two of these positions with interlocking fire lanes will pulverize any frontal assault. You can only take a position like this by maneuver, as Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman did.
Using classic Frederician tactics, his entire campaign for Atlanta was a series of outflanking movements that dislodged the Confederacy from one defensive position after another, and finally from the city itself, without a bloody assault. Gen. John B. Hood simply lacked the wherewithal to extend lines of resistance indefinitely. Sherman won by extending his flanks until southern numbers, weapons, and logistics gave out. This was attritional doctrine, which it is always present in siegecraft, both part and parcel with engineering. If we could time-travel, we might go pick up Charles VIII’s master gunner in 1494, whisk him to English Civil War London and then American Civil War Atlanta, and ask him what the similarities and differences with his own siegeworks are. No doubt there would be plenty of both, yet he would probably not be confused at all by his surroundings.
As the new technology of photography propelled artists to experiment in abstraction, Paris itself came under siege. Practically synonymous with art, the city’s very name is imbued with European culture and civilization, not to mention French stubbornness. The Siege of Paris was huge, for the city was enormous and ringed with powerful fortresses. No single painting could possibly take in its full scale. After Napoleon III was surrounded and forced to surrender, the French nation fought on largely because Paris would not surrender. When Helmuth von Moltke had finished the encirclement of Paris and destroyed both armies still resisting in the field, the government capitulated — only to see Paris continue resisting. Ultimately, Bismarck chose to let the new French government do the work of crushing resistance in Paris for him. German artillery did much of the work to win the war but left barely a scratch on the City of Lights.
This is why I like Ernest Meissonier’s “Siege of Paris” [Fig. 9]. The famous capital is completely absent — it might as well not even exist. Instead, his scene is nakedly symbolic and allegorical. Gloom and smoke dominate the skyline. A ghastly phantom figure vaguely resembling the new Emperor Wilhelm I bears a vulture-like Prussian eagle.[25] Sailors man the cannon, a notable detail with historicity. Man and beast alike suffer the torments of wounding and war. Meissonier, who lost beloved mounts to military conscription, has made a very personal portrait.[26] Rather than France as a naked-breasted Marianne, Paris is represented by a mother of dead sons. (Meissonier’s model, Elisa Bonaparte, helped to soothe the sting of defeat, becoming his lover and then wife after the war.[27]) The mortally wounded man leaning against her on the left is Henri Regnault, one of many French artists who marched off to war in 1870.[28] Regnault was killed in a futile sortie from a besieged Paris while serving in the Garde Mobile; Meissonier, who had judged him to be the future of art in France, personally recovered his friend’s body and gave the funeral oration.[29] Around this, Meissonier has painted the pathos of war. A woman mourns a dying man. A mother on her knees presents a dead baby to her husband. A crowd of regulars and irregulars exits stage right, burdened by the trauma, disappearing into memory, moving on to lives of regret, or to inhabit living memory as ghosts. Meissonier, who began sketching this work during the siege, arrived home four months later experiencing “the bitterest sorrow I have ever felt.”[30]
Hunger and crime killed far more Parisians than bullets or cannons did. That is normal in sieges. Switch the cannon out with a catapult, replace the uniforms with bronze armor, and the portrait would remain true to life. Meissonier, who commanded a scratch unit during the siege, chose not to show us the actual fighting. Defeated but still defiant, he is processing the fall of Paris in this painting. All five stages of grief are present: the gun firing in anger, the denial inherent in the tattered tricolor banner, a pleading negotiation, a depressed atmosphere, the mute acceptance of death. He painted a portrait of his own mind amid the despair of a nation. He called it “an act of revenge” on the hated Germans, but Meissonier can only fool himself.[31] Abstract as it is, The Siege of Paris is a work of brutal psychological realism.
Then as the Belle Epoque followed on the defeats of 1870-71, our final artist turned again to the past for current inspiration.
Although it took place during a century of titanic sieges, La Rochelle still stands out for its scope and suffering. France was less a kingdom than a medieval patchwork of sovereigns divided by religion in the early 17th Century, and Cardinal Richelieu was determined to forge a single unified state that could withstand her enemies abroad. Faith was a secondary concern; he aided Protestant Germans against Catholic Hapsburgs without a care for hollow consistencies. The French wars of religion were terrible, to be sure, but Richelieu was not waging a strictly religious war. After all, the foe being defeated in this painting is not the Protestant French city, but the hated English.
All that mattered to him was France.
Indeed, the English made great efforts to support the Huguenot city on the southwestern Atlantic coast, with the Duke of Buckingham leading three attempts to relieve La Rochelle from the sea. The city had become a privateer base by this time, a scourge of the coasts and a real menace to trade, “the refuge of every malcontent, the support of every rebel” according to Hillaire Belloc.[32] Indeed, even to oppose La Rochelle, Richelieu had to hire English and Dutch ships.[33] Facing this inferiority at sea, Richelieu took the medieval title of High Admiral in order to abolish it.[34] France needed a real navy, a professional one responsive only to the monarch, and so the Marine Nationale was born.[35] Historians call this “the early modern period.” It is defined by gunpowder arms becoming the primary mode of warfare, with all that entailed for a state: a new kind of fortifications designed for artillery, with roads and bridges connected these points of control and ships on the high seas to defend it all.
However, navies take time to build. Inspired by the story of Alexander the Great building a great causeway to invest Tyre, Richelieu ordered the construction of a mile-long sea wall to cut the city off from resupply. This was accomplished by lashing together boats as pontoons and then filling them with rubble. Then he sent his scratch fleet on a suicidal mission to relieve the garrison on Île de Ré, possession of which allowed royal cannons to batter English ships trying to relieve the city. His cargo ships succeeded in landing badly-needed supplies, although several fighting ships were lost in the battle to get them there. Their loss had succeeded in closing Richelieu’s grip around La Rochelle. Beset by disease and high casualty rates in siege conditions, the English soon departed in failure, leaving their fellow Protestants to a grim fate.
Thus our final scene, painted in 1881 by Henri-Paul Motte [Fig. 10]. Le Cardinal de Richelieu au siège de La Rochelle shows the eponymous figure in his red robes and breastplate, restlessly watching the relief of Île de Ré. A small staff of clerics huddles nearby, prayerfully observing the progress of the battle. Everything is wet with sea foam and spray, reflecting the human tempest in the background. Damage to the obstacles protecting the causeway suggests danger: a random cannonball could alter history in an instant, indeed one seems to have just missed him. Obvious symbolism is obvious: Richelieu is the wall, the wall is the state, the man and the state defend France. Motte painted this during the Third Republic, a decade after the Franco-Prussian War, so his heroic portrayal reflects a nationalist view of Richelieu as the man who made a modern, unified France possible. Poliorcetic art is always political, but it is most political when it is most personal. Whatever I think of his skills, Motte has captured the spirit of revanchism well.
Civic communities are often galvanized by siege, even a defeat. “London was never truly London until now,” William Lithgow wrote after touring the Lines of Communication in 1643.[36] According to Xenophon, Athenians overthrew their Long Walls in collective celebration in order to have peace with Sparta, such was their suffering.[37] War never comes without suffering, yet the greatest suffering always accompanies the destruction of cities, for civilizations are made of their populous urban centers and not their battlefields. Writing in the ashes of post-fire London, Hobbes expressed cautious optimism that a renewed monarchy could maintain the peace in England.[38] The walls had come down, so he was free at last to speak his mind a little; for persons and peoples, siege is as much a state of mind as it ever was a material endeavor.
[1] Armit, Ian. Iron Age Headhunting and the Body in Iron Age Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2012; Keeley, Lawrence. War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. Oxford University Press, 1997; Guilane, Jean and Zammit, Jean. The Origins of War. Blackwell Publishing, 2005; Schulting, Rick and Fibiger, Linda, editors. Sticks, Stones, and Broken Bones: Neolithic Violence in a European Perspective. Oxford University Press, 2012; Turney-High, Harry Holbert. Primitive Warfare: Its Practices and Concepts. University of South Carolina Press, 1971; all passim
[2] Ibid
[3] Jenkins, Keith. In Defense of History. W.W. Norton & Co., 2000
[4] Armit, Keeley, Guilane and Zammit, Schulting and Fibiger, Turney-High, all passim
[5] Bar-Yosef, Ofer. “The Walls of Jericho: An Alternative Interpretation.” Current Anthropology, Vol. 27, No. 2, Apr. 1986, pp. 157-162
[6] Oriental Institute. “University of Chicago-Syrian team finds first evidence of warfare in ancient Mesopotamia.” 2005 press release, Oriental Institute of Chicago. Accessed at https://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/hamoukar-expedition
[7] Ibid
[8] Bull, Stephen. The Furie of the Ordnance: Artillery in the English Civil Wars. Boydell and Brewer Ltd, 2008. 166 notes that this practice was already ancient at the time.
[9] Oriental Institute: “Dug into the destruction debris that covered the buildings excavated this season were numerous large pits that contained vast amount of southern Uruk pottery from the south. The picture is compelling. If the Uruk people weren’t the ones firing the sling bullets they certainly benefited from it. They took over this place right after its destruction.”
[10] Keegan 150-152
[11] Ibid
[12] Bury, J.B. et al, editors. The Egyptian and Hittite empires to c. 1000 B.C. Cambridge University Press, 1924. 265
[13] Cheveddon, Paul. “The Invention of the Counterweight Trebuchet: A Study in Cultural Diffusion.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers No. 54, 2000. passim
[14] Morgan, David. Medieval Persia 1040-1797. Routledge, 2016. 58-59
[15] Corbyn, James. “The Shortcomings of the Mongol Art of War as seen in China, Korea and Eastern Europe.” Dissertation published online. 21
[16] Ibid
[17] See Pow 2017 passim and Corbyn 25-34 for Europe, Corbyn 10-24 for China and Korea
[18] Pow, Lindsey Stephen. “Deep Ditches and Well-built Walls: A Reappraisal of the Mongol Withdrawal from Europe in 1242.” Thesis published online, 2012. 100-105
[19] Morgan 61-62
[20] De Wesselow, Thomas. “The Guidoriccio fresco: a new attribution.” Apollo Magazine, 2004. passim
[21] Smart, Alistair. The Dawn of Italian Painting, 1240-1400. Cornell University Press, 1978. 93
[22] Crowe, Joseph Archer, Jameson, Anna, and Cavalcaselle, Giovanni Battista. Early Italian Painting. Parkstone International, 2011. 162
[23] Hale, John Rigby. Renaissance War Studies. Bloomsbury, 2003. 371-372
[24] Lithgow, William. “The present surveigh of London and Englands state Containing a topographicall description of all the particular forts, redoubts, breast-works, and trenches newly erected round about the citie on both sides of the river, with the severall fortifications thereof. And a perfect relation of some fatall accidents, and other disasters, which fell out in the city and countrey, during the Authors abode there. Intermingled also with certaine severall observations worthie of light and memorie.” 1643. 14
[25] King, Ross. The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism. Walker Publishing Co., 2006. 296
[26] King 295-296
[27] King 296
[28] King 283
[29] King 295
[30] King 288, 295
[31] King 296
[32] Belloc, Hilaire. Richelieu: A Study. Sun Dial Press, 1929. 239-240, 253
[33] Beloc 249
[34] Belloc 249
[35] Belloc 240-241
[36] Lithgow 14
[37] Xenophon. Helenica, 2.2.23
[38] Tomaz, Mastnak. Hobbes's Behemoth: Religion and Democracy. Luton, 2012. 6