It is unnecessary to add, that Croye was afterwards taken by the Turks, in 1477. During this interval of twelve years, it is not improbable that other alterations had been made in the works, and that the Turkish engineers might have found in Croye the models of their constructions at Otranto. Whatever additions they may have made, it appears certainly from the detail of Barletus, that the first great effort towards the modern art of fortification originated in the genius of the Christian hero, whose history deserves to be more accurately known. But their rapid degeneracy in military knowledge deprived the Turks of the be nefit of their own inventions. The people who first constructed bastions, and who first opened trenches before towns, were proved, two hundred years afterwards, by the siege of Vienna, in 1683, to have sunk into the depth of stupid barbarity. Embarrassed by their own numbers, and encamped without precaution, they fled before a handful of light cavalry. The Polygonal bastions of Rhodes, as they appear in the plans of Dapper, and the Due de Choiseul, present an unfor-. tunate attempt to modernize the Roman towers, of the same form. I believe very few instances of a similar construction are to be found, excepting the lines of Precop. The slope of the summit of the parapet, seems, from the account of the accurate SANDYS, to have been first practised in the works of the VALETTA, after the deliverance of Malta from the Turks. "The walls on the inside," says he," are not above six foot high, unimbattald, and shelving on the outside." *To have noticed this construction, after having seen the principal cities of Italy, would have been trifling, if the method had not then been new.. In ANTELLA's plan of the Valetta, published in 1600, we find casemates in * P. 233. the flanks of the bastions: the Turks were now stimulating their enemies to excel them. The effects of retired flanks were long and dreadfully felt by them, some years afterwards, during the siege of CANDIA, by the celebrated defence of the bastions of St. Andrea, and Panigra. |