Playing around with GIS
More samples of maps I made in a few hours. These are drawn from my War of the Spanish Succession siege dataset, derived from the research appearing in my Vauban under Siege book. In that book I created some maps of the Low Countries theater using Adobe Illustrator – some were decent, others not so much. I’ve posted a few other examples of early modern European military maps here, mostly from the Iberian theater, which I discussed in a Spanish-language article I authored (some examples here).
But now, with QGIS in da house, I can make them a lot quicker. So here are a few examples of my entire WSS siege database mapped, with a few mistakes and a few errors, of course. Ideally, maps like this would’ve been in my dissertation, but that would have meant me graduating in late 2003 instead of late 2002.
The process, for those playing at home: I took my Excel spreadsheet listing 116 sieges (I deleted a few fort sieges because I didn’t want to have to research their lengths and locations), added a column identifying the modern country of each place, converted the spreadsheet into a UTF-8 csv file, then used QGIS’s MMQGIS Geocode plugin to get the lat and long coordinates from Google for each place, placing it as a new layer on top of the Natural Earth base map. I then had to change a few of the coordinates in the QGIS attribute table, mostly because either a) I didn’t specify which Castiglione (or Reggio or Aire) was besieged, or I thought it was Haguenau, Germany, when it was actually Haguenau, France. Fortunately, most of these were pretty obvious from looking at the map, given my knowledge of where the campaigns were conducted. You use the Numerical Vertex Edit plugin to edit coordinates – they cannot be edited in the attribute table. And, fortunately, changing the feature on any level updates it on all other layers.
Then I had to make a new calculated field for the siege length values, because they were imported in as a text string field rather than a decimal numerical field (‘3.8’ instead of 3.8). Once the data was cleaned up, I either used rule-based formatting or graduated symbols to display various attributes about the sieges. Now that I know the procedure, it’ll take just a few minutes to make variations of the map. No more calculating circle diameters in Excel and manually placing them on the map!
First, a map showing 116 siege locations during the war, with black circles indicating those sieges where the besiegers managed to capture the fortress (about 85% overall).
Next, the same map (sans the Layers Panel), but with rule-based symbolism where red circles indicate Allied-conducted sieges, and blue circles indicate sieges undertaken by the Bourbons.
Now, the same basic map, but this time we’re using the numerical siege length field to create graduated point symbols, so we can see the relative length of the sieges. I could, of course, define any min-max diameter for the circles, but if they get too large, you lose the smaller sieges.
Of course, if you just want to be goofy, or simulate what my vision will be like in another ten years, you can make a raster heat map, using the Layer Style-Heatmap option, create your own color ramp from transparent to red, and make a smaller radius. That gives you a map that emphasizes regions which saw many sieges:
Miscellaneous Notes:
I turned on the modern political boundaries, which helps distinguish the Iberian vs. Spanish sieges. Digitized early modern boundaries, and other features, will have to wait until sabbatical.
I haven’t offset those siege symbols for towns that were besieged more than once. Thus, for the first two maps, only one symbol is visible. This is particularly germane for Landau near the Rhine, which saw four sieges, but even the third map doesn’t help much, since three of the sieges lasted between 2.3 and 2.8 months and therefore all three have the same-sized point symbol stacked on top of each other. The heat map, however, emphasizes Landau’s four sieges.
That being said, I did change the render oder (Symbol Levels) on map 1 to have the white circles be drawn on top (Layer Order, white = 1, black = 0). I also put a white outline around each black circle for both maps 1 and 3, so you can see when the circles of several proximate, successful sieges overlap each other (for map 3, Layer Order with smallest/shortest circle drawn on top, with largest circle drawn on the bottom).
Most importantly, I haven’t yet figured out how to combine two attributes into one point symbol (e.g. size of circle as length and besieging side as color of the same circle), but you always need to have goals.
But wait, there’s more! There’s probably some way I could split the Allied and Bourbon into separate layers, make a raster heat map for each of those, and then overlay them.
Just spitballin’ here, but you could also calculate a siege index (maybe number of siege-days) and map that, possibly as a raster heat map. If you run the raster heat map on the siege length layer, you get a rasterized version of map 3:
And, of course, the beauty of GIS is that you can combine this data in any way you’d like, combine it with other data, and focus on subsets of the data. Maybe you want a separate map for each campaign year. Throw in field battles, or the amphibious landings. Add in roads, fortresses, logistical centers, and so on. Maybe you want to spatially analyze these features. The world’s your oyster. Mine too.
I sure do love Lincoln and Washington
Because they give us U.S. faculty on a MWF teaching schedule a full week off in the Spring, and that’s before Spring Break. Which, combined with the two consecutive snow days last Friday and this past Monday, mean I’ve had the time to finish up my siege capitulation chapter (okay, 99% done) that I’ve been working on forever. Literally. I wrote a graduate seminar paper on the subject circa 1994.
Why has it taken so long to finish this chapter with a target length of only 12,000 words? Let me count the ways, leaving aside non-project issues: Read More…
When it rains, it pours
Early modern European military history (EMEMH) is a small field. Or so I thought, until I started to dust off my old grad school projects (late 1990s) on the French side of the Louis XIV’s last war. Then I discover, as I’ve already detailed, that there are quite a few French scholars now interested in the subject.
So it’s only fitting that, as I draft the final few pages of my book chapter on siege capitulations (only 18 years in the making!), I discover yet another scholar (not-French) interested in this particular subject:
Swart, Erik. “Defeat, Honour and the News: The Case of the Fall of Breda (1625) and the Dutch Republic.” European History Quarterly 46, no. 1 (January 2016): 6–26.
Early modern movie battles
I’m thinking about making a few minor changes to my European Warfare, 1337-1815 course next semester. Past versions have focused a fair amount on the narratives of various wars: out of the 38 class meetings (50 minutes each), I devote one class meeting each on the 100YW, the Ottoman wars, the Wars of Italy, the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch Revolt, the 30YW, L14’s wars, Frederick the Great’s wars, the French Revolutionary wars, and the Napoleonic Wars. The rest are topical.
This time I’ll be condensing a few of the war narratives and warfare topics into a single class (sorry Dutch Revolt, sorry French Wars of Religion). Thus I’ll focus on the Italian Wars, the 30YW, Frederick’s wars, the Revolutionary/Napoleonic wars, but more and more Louis XIV’s wars. This will give me more space to read a few of the new French books out, and focus a bit more on the actual process of campaigning, Louis XIV-style. This includes dedicated classes on small war, professionalization (military ranks/organization…), maybe even the fiscal-military state. Shockingly, I hardly mention the Military Revolution in the course – I’m not a big fan of sweeping historiography at the undergrad level. Even in a course that covers almost 500 years of European military history!
But to the reason for my post: Any suggestions for good early modern combat sequences from movies? I’ll include a few scenes from Alatriste, and there are a few things on YouTube, but if you have any other favorites, let us know in the comments.
Love and Death
A new one for the Safe Sex Manual, from the Daily Mail (among others):
Couple fall to their deaths from Vauban Fort into the moat whilst having sex.
I must admit that I too had a close call once – slipping atop the Le Quesnoy ramparts on a rainy October day. I was, however, fully clothed. And the only erotic element of my tour was the slight frisson I experienced visiting one of Vauban’s creations.
And for those seeking historical accuracy: assuming the scene of the accident was the Fort Vauban (on one of Normandy’s Chausey islands), it was actually constructed in the 1860s. But when you’re famous, you get all sorts of things named after you.
Help identifying things
I’m finishing up my edits for the final version of my West Point History of Warfare iBook chapter on the War of the Spanish Succession. Eventually they’ll release it beyond those lucky cadets who get to read it for their course.
Among other tweaks, it was suggested I incorporate the following image and include various hotspots. Here’s a low-res version of the whole thing:
The image is available from the Rijksmuseum to view and download in all its gory and glorious detail (once you register). All rights belong to them, of course.
I’ve spoken about the bombardment of Gelder before, and will have plenty to say about it for this image. One of the features of the chapter, however, is to give the reader a sense of the nitty-gritty reality of war. And since I’ve personally participated in at least thirteen early modern sieges (and have the wounds to show for it), I’m obviously the expert who can explain what all of these things are.
And yet, somehow, I don’t know everything. In fact, there are a few things in this panorama of a bombardment battery that I don’t know. A few others, I have speculations. But we certainly can’t let the West Point cadets rely on guesswork.
Since I’m leaving for France in the morning, I don’t have time to look through my Saint-Rémy and various other artillery manuals right now. Thus I’m hoping someone already knows what these things are, and is looking to impress. (Bonus points if you can cite a source or point to other examples.)
To help contextualize, recall that this depiction of a battery is only a bombardment of a poorly-garrisoned town, not a full-blown siege, which means there aren’t approach trenches or saps, and the bombarding side likely isn’t expecting sallying troops to charge all the way to the battery across all that open ground. (See the appendix in my Vauban under Siege if you’re still unclear on the difference between a bombardment and a siege.)
Let the quiz begin.
First up, what are these bucket-like objects resting on the parapet in the guard trench in front of the battery? What were they used for? And please don’t say they’re helmets. (And I sure hope they’re not airing out their chamber pots either.)
Next up, I’m thinking this might be a mechanical planer of some sort (given the boards, possibly a rough pre-board in the back and an after-planing straight board in the front). Can anyone confirm?
And what are these things on the ground at the bottom, which look like a metal container with some black cloth attached to their tops?
I’m guessing they might be funnels: I’d speculate the pliable cloth opening is pushed into whatever-size hole and then you tip up the container and gunpowder goes in – either down a muzzle or in a bomb. The other staff-like objects are for loading and cleaning cannon obviously.
Next question: What goodies do these little huts hold?
Less-likely speculation: are these fascine-topped huts gunpowder storage? In the entire image, there’s surprisingly little gunpowder that I can see, apart from (possibly) a few pony kegs. Admittedly, one would rather not have gunpowder lying around willy-nilly, but this strikes me as a very clean battery. There’s a solid-looking red shed on the far left that would be a logical place to store gunpowder barrels, but you’d think they’d have more illustration of gunpowder being transported to the different guns (unless maybe those funnel-like containers are actually gunpowder carrying case + funnel. Which might make sense now that I think about it).
More-likely speculation: Or perhaps the fascine-roofed sheds store pre-filled mortar bombs? I don’t see any obvious equipment (other than possibly the funnels) that indicates that they are filling the gunpowder-filled bombs on-site, so possibly they were delivered to the battery already full, or filled all at once, and then placed in the shelters for some minimal protection. The fact that these fascine sheds are directly behind the mortars, whereas the grates heating the red-hot shot are behind the cannon, might support this idea.
Final question: Who’s a brave doggie?
You are!
Où est le Michigan?
Faithful skulker John Grenier points us towards a recent exhibition at the University of Michigan Library’s Special Collections on 18C British fortifications in the Americas.
A Salon story on it is here, while the online exhibit is here.
And no, your memory isn’t failing you. Oxford University’s Museum of the History of Science also held its own exhibit entitled “The Geometry of War” back in 1996. You can check out its online catalog here, which deals more with instruments of war (hey, there’s a book title in there somewhere I think).
Speaking of memories, I have fond ones of Michigan’s library, which offered innumerable printed riches to an interloping grad student from “that state down south.” I spent many a dime on photocopies there – this was in the days when libraries still kept 18C books in the stacks, rather than hide them away in rare book rooms. But maybe it’s for the best that Ohio State’s library recalled the copies of Deidier’s 1757 Le parfait ingénieur français and Lamberty’s 1724 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du XVIII siècle that I had on a floor bookcase for several years – I’m lucky my cat didn’t pee on them.
The staff at EYM (the library’s OCLC code – another tidbit you needed to know pre-Google Books) were also incredibly helpful. On one of my research jaunts to the land of maize and blue, they were kind enough to digitize several dozen maps from Pelet’s atlas companion to Vault’s Mémoires militaries, and even place them online. And, of course, Michigan has been at the forefront of Hathi Trust, which means that I can finally throw away all those paper copies I made 15 years ago of the Europische Mercurius and Santa Cruz de Marcenado’s Reflexions militaires. So thanks to the Spauldings, who made much of it possible:
And, if you plan a trip there, don’t forget to take a peak at the 18C Spanish mortar nearby.
Sometimes we have no idea what we’re talking about
When not teaching and serving, I’m trying to get some researching done on the side. The small chunk I’ve been working on of late is examining how contemporaries discussed the surrender of the French garrison at the citadel of Tournai in 1709. Reminder to self: this takes forever if you have 100+ accounts to go through (and that’s only for Tournai).
It’s an interesting surrender for numerous reasons which I won’t get into. But if you do bother to read through enough capitulation texts (beyond Tournai as well), dissect discussion of the capitulation process in various contemporary treatises, and peruse discussion of specific surrenders in the participants’ correspondence, in the contemporary newspapers and prints, and in the histories of the war, you start to see some patterns. So when you’ve immersed yourself in the primary accounts, you just have to cringe when you come across something like this, from Archdeacon William Coxe’s 19C multi-volume biography of Marlborough (v2:427):
The Allies “…forced at length the commandant to surrender at discretion. The two generals, respecting the bravery of the garrison, mitigated the hardship of their lot, by permitting them to march out with the honours of war, retaining their swords and baggage, on the condition of leaving behind them their other arms and colours. They were to return to France, and not to serve till an equal number of prisoners, captured from the allies, were restored in exchange. On the 3d of September the gate of the citadel was delivered to the confederates, and on the 5th the garrison was conducted to Condé.”
The problem, if you happened to read an exchange in the comments on a previous post, is that Coxe has unfortunately butchered contemporary categories almost beyond recognition. As I explained in that exchange, contemporaries c. 1700 viewed a garrison’s ultimate fate as one of two broad possibilities. First was the possibility of a successful garrison defense, retaining the fortress and forcing the besiegers to abandon their attacks. A rare beast for the War of the Spanish Succession. More likely, a fortress would be forced to surrender. In this case, the garrison could receive any one of several outcomes:
- The garrison could be given an “honorable” surrender (the standard phrasing used), which meant that a variety of symbolic “marks of honor” would be granted the garrison upon its evacuation – things like drums beating, flags flying, &c. Most importantly, the garrison would be allowed to return to action by rejoining their field army.
- Alternately, the garrison could be denied their status as free combatants, and taken prisoner. Within this broad imprisoned fate were several important gradations, however. If a garrison was “taken prisoner”, the capitulation might dictate that the garrison be exchanged immediately, or the capitulation might remain mute on this point, which meant that the garrison might instead linger until a later point. Sometimes prisoners might be allowed some of the marks of honor.
- Distinct, however from a garrison taken prisoner, was one taken “at discretion”. Hard-pressed defenders taken at discretion still ended up prisoners, it’s true, but taken “at discretion” was the early modern equivalent of unconditional surrender. This was a far more shameful way to be captured, and more dangerous, for their treatment was technically at the discretion of the commander. There was, in other words, no capitulation document that provided written protection for the garrison (or almost never – like I said, these things are complicated). Nevertheless, contemporaries made clear distinctions between defenders taken prisoners and those taken at discretion (unless of course one side wanted to inflate their own honor by blurring the lines – it gets complicated). So while there’s definitely a fair amount of gray, it’s completely confusing for Coxe to say that the garrison was taken at discretion yet they were given the honors of war. It’s possible there may have been some garrison somewhere that received such mixed terms, but I’ve yet to see one, and this certainly wasn’t the case with Tournai. Keeping (only) their swords and baggage was a significant step down from being allowed the standard marks of honor – I don’t think contemporaries even referred to “swords and baggage” as “marks of honor” (though I’d have to check to be sure).
- The worst fate of all was to be put to the sword. Defenders that resisted to the bitter end would likely be slaughtered in the breach or in the streets. This fate became increasingly rare as the 17C progressed.
In case you weren’t yet confused with the above categories, I provide my confusing visualization of how this all played out in the Low Countries during the Spanish Succession war (a diagram for my paper presentation created, I should note, while at the Charlotte airport a mere three hours before my presentation):
So what Coxe has done is give me whiplash. First, contemporaries were quite explicit that Tournai’s garrison was not taken “at discretion” – they earned a slightly more honorable fate than that, though not particularly honorable all the same. Coxe is partially correct when he says they were allowed to march out with “honours of war”, but he muddies the point with his use of the definitive article. “The honors of war” was an oft-used phrase at the time, but being given “the honors of war” while being denied arms and flags would have made little sense to contemporaries. In short, Tournai’s surrender was largely shameful for the garrison: they had defended far more briefly than might be expected given their fortifications, and their initial demands for a truly “honorable” surrender (free evacuation, all the honors of war) was rejected, only for them to abjectly accept the besieger’s harsh conditions within three days. It gets even more confusing (and interesting) when it comes to the garrison’s actual evacuation, but I need to save something for the inevitable book chapter/article. (For readers who care, it looks like the conference organizers may try to publish something off of the World of the Siege conference.)
Yet this leaves us with a problem. Coxe was born in 1748, and therefore lived as an adult through several of Europe’s wars of the late 18C and early 19C, all of which were covered in the British press. So why didn’t he know the difference between prisoners/discretion, and between the various marks of honor? Had these conventions changed by the end of the century? (Just what I need, the suggestion that I have to look at even later discussions of surrender conventions. Ugh.) Or maybe the Archdeacon was a clueless pointy-headed prelate, armchair quarterbacking without an understanding of the conventions of a previous generation? Or was he just being literary and trampling historical understanding in the process?
So I’m not sure what the lesson is, other than to pay closer attention to the language used by contemporaries. But that’s a good lesson to start with.
Do you read Spanish?
If you do, and if you were intrigued by the comments left by Björn in a previous post about Spanish siegecraft, you should check out a short article I published a few months back in the lavishly-produced Spanish popular military history magazine Desperta Ferro (moderno). The article surveys the nature of siege warfare in the Iberian theater during the Spanish Succession, and is based on yet more research from grad school, when I thought my dissertation would cover the sieges in all four theaters (silly me). Yet more research that never saw the light of day, till now.
Perhaps the article can best be summed up in the abstract:
Vauban y la guerra de los ingenieros por Jamel Ostwald (Eastern Connecticut State University). La imagen más extendida hoy día sobre la guerra de sitio en la Edad Moderna es la de una coreografiada y contenida partida de ajedrez en la que cada contendiente mueve mecánicamente sus piezas sobre el tablero según unas reglas estrictas, hasta que el rey es capturado sin apenas derramamiento de sangre. Sin embargo, a pesar de estos estereotipos contemporáneos, capturar una fortaleza alrededor del 1700 no era una operación mecánica que se desarrollaba con precisión científica. Más que seguir una fórmula concreta, los sitiadores de la Edad Moderna podían elegir entre un gran abanico de tácticas posibles y su misión era usar las herramientas a su disposición para tomar la plaza elegida tan pronto como fuera posible y al menor coste. Mapa de Carlos De La Rocha.
My own, English, summary: Sieges in Iberia were much more rudimentary, and desperate, than those in the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy.
The article includes a very nice map of the main sieges in the theater (drawn from the data in my Vauban under Siege), with graduated circles illustrating the location, side, duration, and result of the theater’s various sieges. Here’s my bare-bones 15-year-old attempt (with a few errors):
Hopefully an English version of the Desperta article (or at least the map) will come out sometime.
Define your start and end dates
I’m going through old Excel worksheets on siege data (it’s good to know you can open 20-year old Excel files).
Found this graphic, so I thought I’d throw it up here. In case you ever wanted a look behind the scenes of my dataset in the Appendices to my Vauban under Siege: Welcome.
This chart illustrates how spotty even secondary sources can be: sieges only have a limited number of possible start and end dates, yet historical narratives don’t find it worth their while to actually be consistent when they report these dates. Hence my need to develop a crazy-complex siege dataset: comparing multiple sources’ accounts of 100+ sieges, many of which had different stats, depending on whether you’re talking about the fortification under attack: fort(s), citadel, town.
Even after using a consistent method, the following graph should give you an idea of what’s available with English secondary sources on the Iberian theater (Kamen, Francis and Hugill mostly, along with a few articles):
You can see that there was much more consensus among historians concerning the end date of a siege, when the town capitulated, contrasted with when to measure the ‘start’ of a siege. You can also contrast it with a related visualization of sieges lengths throughout the campaign season in a previous post.
The number of days’ difference between the stages on both margins (BA to OT, Capit to BL) are usually not very great, so the margin of error is relatively small. But ideally you’d go to the primary sources (or maybe a detailed Spanish account) to make sure you’re comparing apples to apples. Overall I suppose I’m pretty content: at least my Spanish dataset was comparing oranges (Valencian) to oranges (Sanguinello, aka blood oranges). Of course I’m still expecting Björn Thegby and Andy Tumath to provide us all with a more complete dataset some time soon.
* For those not in the know: BA= Besiegers Arrive, IS= Investment Started, OT= Open trenches, OF= Open Fire, Chamade= self-explanatory, Capit= Capitulation, Garrison Evacuation, Besiegers Leave. Each start and end date pair means something slightly different, depending on what point you’re trying to make. Just make sure to be consistent and have a good reason why you chose the particular start-end pairing you did. And, please, avoid definitively exclaiming that there was only one ‘true’ start and end date. The study of siegecraft has suffered enough already from such formulaic thinking.
Skulking in Holes and Corners 
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