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Arts of the Siege: Volume II

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Arts of the Siege: Volume II

An annotated link post

Matt Osborne
Aug 8, 2023
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Arts of the Siege: Volume II

www.polemology.net
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A detail of the temple art at Thebes

Poliorcetics is the art of attacking and defending cities and fortresses. This is an annotated link post of my writing on artwork depicting the poliorcetic past. Vol. I is linked at the bottom.


Despite the destruction, the French garrison refused to surrender and a bloody storming operation loomed. Deliberate flooding slowed progress, yet pioneers were reportedly just finishing their second approach trench when the siege was raised. This is not a bad performance for a siege train in the 17th Century, and for Prussia it was an impressive one, but it was still not enough.

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The Art of Indirect Fire in the Seven Years' War
There is not much information on Simeon Ben Jochai, the Jewish engraver who etched the above image into colored copper. Few artistic professions were open to Jews in most of Germany at the time; printing, lithography, and engraving were exceptions. Like the Jewish cartographers who revolutionized mapmaking in Portugal during the 16th Century, he used sh…
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a year ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

Fire ought to appear in more siege paintings than it does. Just about every siege in history has involved things on fire, but so many otherwise terrific siege scenes lack so much as a candle-flame, let alone a real inferno. Smoke is sometimes used to darken the background, and Suchodolski did that too sometimes, but here he has used it to brighten the scene up, even cheer it on.

Polemology Positions
More Siege Paintings Should Have Fire
No, not the time when the ghost of Peter the Great drove Russian expansion under his niece, Anna Ioannovna. The other time, when Catherine the Great resumed the Russian imperial project in the Black Sea. American naval captain John Paul Jones took part as a rear admiral in the Russian Navy to cover the landings. Yes, the time when the Ottoman empire los…
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a year ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

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As seen in the illustration — which, again, was drawn to the order of an emperor with high standards and an eye for detail — the cannons are not being fired from the backs of the camels. Rather, the camels have been used to bring the light cannons to a firing position where they can be dismounted and aimed at upward angles for firing.

Polemology Positions
When China Conquered the West
By the end of the 17th Century, the Pax Mongolica had transformed the center of Asia with roads and walled towns. Yet the Golden Horde was a thing of the past, their empire in severe decline. Mongols hated sieges and their enemies knew it, fortifying points of control. An army’s horses ate out all the pasture aroun…
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a year ago · Matt Osborne

One story, perhaps apocryphal, says that during this abysmal first campaign, a company of soldiers lay siege to a single, well-located diao for weeks. Arrows and stones kept them at bay whenever they tried to climb the steep hillsides. Only when they captured a woman trying to draw water one night did they learn that she had been the sole occupant of the tiny fortress that whole time. Joke or not, the anecdote resonates with the embarrassments of the First Jinchuan War.

Polemology Positions
Qianlong and the Towers of Jinchuan
Kublai Khan converted to Tibetan Buddhism for political reasons, but direct control over the plateau was not established until 1621. Political unity was untenable in a rugged land where aristocratic families contested power so closely. Food insecurity also led to incessant raiding warfare in the border region between Szechuan and Kham, a downslope…
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a year ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

Although Twain describes the effects of ball ammunition in vivid prose, the missing roofs and chipped masonry were characteristic of bombardment with explosive shells, but this is not why the city lay in ruins. Twain saw the aftermath of an artillery opera that had lasted nearly a year. The greatest bombardment damage occurred during two of the six major artillery battles, the first by sea and the last by land, at the opening of the siege and then at its end — a stirring overture and triumphant climax of destruction. But this is still not what ruined the city, either.

Polemology Positions
Mark Twain on the Aesthetics of Siege
“Sebastopol is probably the worst battered town in Russia or anywhere else,” American satirist Mark Twain wrote in his 1869 travelogue The Innocents Abroad. Examining the wreck of a city that had hardly recovered in the fourteen years since the Crimean War, Twain compared Sevastopol…
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a year ago · Matt Osborne

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Ashurnasirpal II really liked his siege engines and included them in the bas-reliefs lining the walls of his palace at Nimrud. Every room was filled with elaborate scenes carved onto gypsum from a local quarry and painted in brilliant colors.

Polemology Positions
The Daleks Of Ancient Mesopotamia
Chronology is a bit soft, but in 877 or 876 BC Assyria came to blows with the city of Bit Adini, which had sided with another city against the Assyrians. Assur conceived the entire world as a place that owed submission and tribute to the gods, so anyone who went against their order of the world was going…
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a year ago · 2 likes · Matt Osborne

Padua, the city of Dante Alighieri, is defended by the heavenly intercession of Mark the Evangelist (patron saint of Venice, left) and Anthony of Padua (patron saint of Padua, right). But the real-world story is also included in the visual telling.

Polemology Positions
Two Italian Saints Against A Sirocco Of Steel
After defeat by a Holy Roman force at the Battle of Agnadello, the Venetians fled to their swamps, leaving the rest of the Serene Republic to be overrun. It seemed that the French King, Louis XII, had won the great Italian victory his Milanese allies wanted…
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10 months ago · Matt Osborne

It is a striking view of how “trench warfare” emerged during the 19th century industrial revolution — a kind of transitional fossil, a primary source account of the mass fire revolution, when positional battles started to resemble sieges.

Polemology Positions
'Burglar's Plan': Storming The Fort Hill Crater
Alfred Edward Mathews, an enlisted soldier of the 31st Ohio Infantry Regiment, created this lithograph the same year as the bloody assault it depicts. He witnessed the very first siege mine ever detonated in North America to create the breach. It is a striking view of how “trench warfare” emerged during the 19th century industrial revolution — a k…
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8 months ago · Matt Osborne

Baqet joined Thebes and helped reunite the kingdom in a rapid military campaign that likely included storming walls defended by fellow Egyptians with assault parties made up of Libyans or Nubians or Sherdens. From the perspective of an Egyptian general, this approach would have seemed the least costly in terms of Egyptian blood and treasure.

Polemology Positions
The Fine Art Of Assaulting Mud Brick Fortifications In The Middle Kingdom
Symbolism, as well as the archaeology of defensive walls, point to an epoch of cities at war, and wars over control of cities, from before the First Dynasty. Before the Old Kingdom coalesced, th…
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7 months ago · 1 like · Matt Osborne

When he left left after “three fruitless weeks,” in the words of Ruth Putnam, his army was broken along with his nearly-perfect winning streak. Thereafter, Charles the Bold made increasingly bad decisions and suffered embarrassing defeats until his own soldiers finally ended him. He had met a woman, they say — a mighty fury of a French woman — and he was never the same after that. PAYWALLED.

Polemology Positions
Jeanne Hachette Against Charles The Bold
When Charles I Duke of Burgundy, known to history as Charles the Bold, arrived under the walls of Roye in 1472, he “had never had such a fine army,” Philippe de Commines wrote in his memoir on The Reign of Louis XI 1461-83. So intimidated was the garrison by this formidable host of 80,0000 that the next morning, some of the archers on the walls began climbing or jumping down to surrender. He accepted the town’s capitulation the next day, and even graciously allowed the French king’s men-at-arms to leave with part of their baggage, such was his chivalry. Of course, his army had destroyed every town on their way to Roye hoping to incentivize this very response…
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5 months ago · 3 likes · Matt Osborne

The ‘Napoleonic complex,’ in which short men become more aggressive to make up for insecurity about their height, did not apply to the real Napoleon. His soldiers referred to him as ‘the little corporal’ out of affection, not description. This lasting falsehood is instead a legacy of Cruikshank and other British cartoonists of the period drawing caricatures of Napoleon. They reduced his size in order to highlight his real megalomania. PAYWALLED.

Polemology Positions
The Siege Of Toulon And The Revised Stature Of Napoleon Bonaparte
Napoleone Buonaparte (Italian spelling) saw Toulon as his destiny, Phillip Dwyer writes in his 2008 Napoleon: The Path to Power. Two weeks after his arrival the delegates of the Committee of Public Safety, Augustin Robespierre and Antoine Christophe Saliceti, recommended the Corsican captain for promotion to major and…
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2 months ago · 3 likes · Matt Osborne

Polemology Positions
Arts of the Siege: Volume I
Historians are supposed to look for their own niche interest that no one has covered before, or at least not covered in their way. Academics call this sort of opportunity a lacuna. Only after looking through old term papers last fall did I realize that such a lacuna existed on the topic of siege art. Whereas there is plenty of it, and no shortage of it …
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2 years ago · 3 likes · Matt Osborne

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Arts of the Siege: Volume II

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