Fighting with Fire
Strategies and Tactics of Siege Warfare to 1600
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The devices and methods developed for siege warfare before the 17th Century ran from the ingeniously simple to the diabolically complex. No formula for siege has ever been proof against all defenses, and no defense was ever completely impervious to assault. Engineering was the principal discipline employed in siegecraft, but diplomacy, animal husbandry, chemistry, espionage, and horticulture were also put to use. Both attackers and defenders employed their finest minds and the most desperate measures to conduct and to break sieges.
The Decision to Lay Siege
Though the Romans were the first known builders of extensive siege trains, savvy warriors probably practiced siege operations millennia before the bad boys on the Tiber started flexing their muscle. The Egyptians undertook the first recorded siege in history at Megiddo, just after the first recorded battle in 1457 BC. Middle Eastern cities like Jericho and Aleppo had walls twenty or more feet thick at the base that surrounded the center of the town, and enclosed several wells. Although low-mortar construction explains much of this thickness, walls didn't need to be over 20 feet high if they only had to keep out nomadic brigands. The gate tower remnants at the 5th Century BC Acre fortress, the elaborate towers near Troy VIIa, and the triple walls of Antioch were too elaborate and expensive unless they had to withstand serious attacks.
The strategic situation for sieges was never simple. An attacker had two contradicting imperatives in a siege: overcoming the enemy’s defenses—which often required painstaking construction—and not becoming a sitting target for a relief force, which meant they had to work fast. Most attackers were on the move, often far from home. Sieges, even of simple curtain-wall fortifications, required equipment not obtainable locally, but they mostly required time that few attackers wanted to spend standing still. Thus, any attacking force had to be ready to conduct a siege when they invaded another country or, sometimes, had to be prepared to ignore a potential siege situation. The first required bringing specialized parts for siege engines in the initial invasion, even if only to be used just-in case. The second was to prosecute the conflict in such a way that any bottled-up forces were not important to victory. While the siege was going on, the attacker was usually feeding off the countryside, but not always. Henry V conducted his 1415 siege of Harfleur after the French had already destroyed much of the surrounding area, but Henry was ready and paid and fed his men using his fleet from England. The Mongols under the Khans didn’t have that concern and were content to do with the area around 14th Century Kiev what they usually did, which was to take what they needed and destroy what they didn’t. Scipio and his cosmopolitan Roman army plundered Carthage during the three-year 2nd Century BC siege, knowing that it was his job to crush Rome’s chief rival once and for all.
The Decision to Be Besieged
If the attacker was willing to wage a siege, the defender usually had only a few days or even hours to take their forces and resources into their forts. At which point the clock began, and it could run for a very long time. The siege of Troy was traditionally ten years long; Venetian-ruled Candia, on the island of Crete, fell after an Ottoman siege that lasted over two decades (1648-1669). Preparing to defend against a siege was not much removed, logistically, from conducting one. A defender had to be prepared to live essentially stationary, sometimes for years at a time.
This meant that a besieged fortification had to have a source of food and water to survive. They also needed to defend the place, repair breaches in the walls, and repair any other damage done to the structures while the enemy was waiting to exploit any weakness. So, the besieged needed labor and raw materials. Builders repairing a wall could not also fight off attacks at the same time, so the labor force had to include at least some non-combatants. Getting ready for a siege was easier than it looked, since fortresses were often either cities themselves or were near them. Walled towns and cities dotted Europe and the Middle East. The Templars on Malta had an underground cistern that took nearly three years to fill. Chinese city planners buried enough material to recreate half the city of Beijing before the 15th Century. In 1658, Copenhagen decreed that all male citizens had to join "fertile women” and approved the death of women who did not bear children by their 20th year because of the demands of the siege of the island city.
Raising sieges sometimes created brief alliances. A French force led by Joan of Arc lifted the English siege of Orleans, leading a combination of French nobles who would otherwise not have cooperated if not for her charismatic leadership. A coalition of English and Scottish forces that was only interested in resolving the conflict between Mary of Scotland and Elizabeth I quickly raised the siege of Dunbar in the 16th Century.
If relief was not forthcoming, the fortification had to hold out long enough for its attacker to just give up. If unprepared, famine, drought, plague or fire (intentional or not) could debilitate the besieged early. A combination of famine and disease, combined with a stealthy Greek attack on earthquake-weakened gates, finished the siege of Troy. Caesar built two lines of fortifications at Alesia—one facing in and one out—to hold off the German-Gaul counterattacks that imperiled his 52 BC siege. Gibraltar, besieged fourteen times in its history, has become a hollow rock, where much of the population lived underground for decades.
Smashing the Walls
Fortifications of any description begin with a defined space enclosed by an obstacle. This runs the gamut from stacks of sticks a few feet high to mortar and block ramparts yards thick and dozens of feet high surrounded by moats, canals, or other water-filled obstacles. But too, they depend on some level of active defense so that any attacker outside the walls, which can never be absolutely impervious, can be driven away from whatever damage they can do. Fortress walls need to be wide enough at the top to accommodate defenders and their equipment. The walls of Harlech in Wales are nearly ten feet wide; parts of the wall surrounding the Forbidden City in Beijing are nearly twenty yards wide. Most fortresses employed other means of impeding attack, including moats, ditches, smaller fortifications, and more movable obstacles like abatis and even simple fences. A glacis wider than any French cannon could reach protected the Lines of Torres Vedras in Portugal during the Peninsula War in the 19th Century.
The simplest means for an attacker to breach a wall is to knock it down. As simple as that sounds, the measures the defenders could take to prevent it made it difficult. Most of the advantage was on the side of the defender since initiative was moot and surprise was difficult, at best. Which left direct assault, but before gunpowder, this rarely destroyed or even damaged the walls themselves. Attacking over the walls was risky and costly in terms of human life, and rarely successful. The defenders had most of the advantages and nearly none of the liabilities that the attacker had during an assault. Therefore, brute force attacks with ladders and towers were infrequently staged.
There were novelties used in siege warfare that often worked; both attackers and defenders employed flame, biological and chemical weapons with varying effects. Defending against the Romans from 214 to 212 BC, Syracuse’s Archimedes devised several counter-siege weapons that kept attackers at bay for nearly two years, including a sulfur gas ejector. The outnumbered Byzantines developed both liquid and solid fuel weapons in a family of devices known as Greek Fire. Polish-Lithuanian forces threw plague-infested meat over the walls of Marienburg in 1410; days later, the Teutonic Order defenders hurled plague-infested bodies back. The Spanish forces at Tenochtitlán in 1541 built warships on the surrounding lake to interdict Aztec supply lines.
Sieges could make or break an empire.
A besieger could never afford to get too weak while besieging; there was always a possibility that an army once besieged might defeat any retreating army. Once the siege of Troy began, after about nine years of war, the Greek’s relentless campaign that had cowed all of Troy’s allies in Asia Minor and the eastern Mediterranean weakened the once-prosperous kingdom. A Norse kingdom that ranged and dominated northern Europe from the Don to the Mersey undertook a siege of Paris from 885 to 886. Its failure changed the entire balance of power in the Baltic and North Sea.
A siege always brings initiative to a standstill, where the defender and attacker must react to each other instead of acting freely, except to concede. Siege, though popular throughout warfare, is always a risk to both the besieger and the besieged. As technology improved, new tactics and strategies came along in a constant cycle of paper-scissors-rock parity. Even in the 21st Century, siege strategies defy absolute formulation.
The Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan
American plans before 1941 called for a siege/blockade of Japan, but as the war dragged on, Japan’s leaders didn’t seem interested in giving up. This was part of the reasoning behind the firebombing campaign that began in March 1945.
And Finally...
On 21 March:
3952 BC: According to the Venerable Bede’s De Temporibus ("On Time"), completed in 703 AD, God created the Sun, the Moon, and time on this day. Other scholars would expand and refute his dating of Genesis for centuries.
1918: The first phase of the German 1918 offensive codenamed MICHAEL begins in Flanders. The offensive failed to eject British forces from Flanders before large numbers of American reinforcements joined the war, and ironically, American forces helped stop the offensive’s last attacks in June.
And today is NATIONAL COMMON COURTESY DAY, serving as a reminder to practice simple acts of politeness, respect, and consideration, like saying “please” and “thank you,” holding doors, or letting someone merge in traffic, to improve daily interactions and create a more positive society. It has nothing to do with the 2006 founding of Twitter at New York University on this day, since courtesy and social media don’t meet, ever.