Fort Manoel : une model de fortification fait avex soin : a study of the design and construction of an eighteenth-century bastioned fort

Abstract

Fort Manoel was the last major work of fortification built to the conventions of the bastioned trace by the Order of St. John in Malta. It is also, undisputedly, the most striking and beautifully proportioned bastioned fortress erected by the Hospitaller knights, complete with all the refined adjuncts of defence that military engineers could hope to devise in the early eighteenth-century. Its one salient characteristic feature which sets it distinctly apart from the other Hospitaller fortresses in Malta, however, is the fact that Fort Manoel was the undiluted product of French military architecture. It owes this quality to two important factors - firstly, the Order's drift from the Imperial to the French sphere of influence at the beginning of the eighteenth century, which saw the reorganization of the Hospitallers' military establishment on French military lines and, secondly, the genius of Sebastien le Prestre de Vauban, whose methods of fortification, considered as the perfection of the bastioned trace, came to dictate the pattern of many of the fortification projects employed by French military engineers in their numerous commissions outside France.