Demolire per difendere. Lo smantellamento di fortezze nel XVII secolo

Territories and cities were shaped by war. The construction of defensive buildings strongly influenced urban design while the surrounding countryside was molded both by permanent and temporary fortifications, and the trenches dug by besiegers. Although it is of course clear that the necessities of defence were closely linked to the construction of fortified walls, territories were also affected in a significant way when fortifications were demolished. In fact, as early as the seventeenth century, some important fortresses such as the forts of Breme and Sandoval were demolished, only a few decades after construction. This was well before the Napoleonic dismantling and demolition which took place in the nineteenth century. The seventeenth century demolitions were motivated by an attempt to moderate the expensive defensive system of the state of Milan. In other cases the intention was to make newly-conquered territories innocuous, while sometimes a fortress was considered useless from a defensive point of view because of its bad design. What changed above all was the political context: in particular, after the Treaty of the Pyrenees of 1659, the ambitions of Spain were forcibly silenced, especially in the north of the Italian peninsula. The state of Milan was heading towards a slow but inexorable fragmentation. Many of the fortified city walls and fortresses, which had been constantly strengthened for almost a century, were now destined to be abandoned and, in some cases, to be dismantled prematurely.