Fortuna Famagustae: Fortification Lines, Regions and Territories in Famagusta, Cyprus, 1308-1571 | Conference Program | Renaissance Society of America | Boston | 2016 (original) (raw)
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The Lusignans built a first walled enclosure at Famagusta in the XII-XIV cent. After the Genoese seize of the city in 1372 and the Venetian conquest of the island in 1489, many military engineers arrived from Italy to transform the city walls. Starting with the citadel built by Nicolo Foscarini in 1482, different interventions were accomplished through time. The construction of the west side of the Venetian walls is clearly dated on the Moratto bastion where a slab records the construction by Nicolo Prioli in 1486, " Nicolao Prioli Cypri Praefecto MCCCCLXXXXVI ". The Limassol bastion was finished in 1541, introducing the new Ravelin defence (Lorini, 1609). Giovanni Girolamo Sanmicheli, nephew of the famous designer of Verona's fortifications, arrived in Famagusta in 1550 (Vasari, 1568) and started working on the enforcement of the city walls. The port of Famagusta was strategic for the control of the eastern sea-routes, in danger of the Ottoman conquer. The paper will focus on Sanimicheli's project comparing it with his other projects, such as the fortresses of Zara, Corfu, and the fort S. Nicolò at the entrance of Sebenico Gulf and the coeval literature on military architecture. After his death in Famagusta at the age of 44 in 1558, on suspect of murder (Milizia, 1768), the defence works were continued by Luigi Brugnoli and completed in 1562 before the Ottomans conquered the city in 1571.
According to the developing defence techniques, the Venetian redesigned Nicosia walls in the Xvi cent. to protect the city from the Ottoman attacks. The Italian engineers Francesco Barbaro and Giulio Savorgnan conceived the new fortifications dismantling the older ones and reusing the stones of many other buildings. The plan has a stellar shape with eleven bastions, hendecagonal, so to have the Cathedral of S. Sofia in the middle, as in the ideal city of Renaissance times. The upper half of the wall section slopes like a pyramid, a shape more suitable for the protection from artillery. The walls were built from 1567 to 1570, surrounded by a deep ditch, about 80 mt. wide, supplied with the water of the river Pedeios, deviated from its course across the city. During the IV Ottoman-Venetian war (1570-1573) the city was seized and catpured by the Ottomans. The paper analyses the phases of the Venetian walls, considering the traces of the previous ones, by comparing them with other coeval poligonal forticiations, and with the indications provided by the treatises of architecture of the XVI century.
In recent decades, theories of multiplicity and hybridity have been proposed and applied towards the reimagining and reconstituting of a number of historical narratives that had been carefully constructed among (and because of) imperial, colonial or acculturative contexts. Sociology and anthropology, art and architectural history, and a host of other disciplines, have used these theories to reappraise issues of ethnic, linguistic and visual heritage, of cultural conflict and of understanding. This essay will attempt a similar study and discussion while engaging the scale of a complete city. Focusing on comprehending the urban development and physical disposition of the city of Famagusta, the largest port of Cyprus between the early fourteenth and late sixteenth centuries, questions of multiplicity and hybridity will be posed against a unique urban context of multiple identities and constructed narratives. The stories and streetscapes of Famagusta become a significant chapter of a larger urban history book, as they are studied and interpreted as inseparable pieces in a line of other late medieval fabrics in the Eastern Mediterranean such as those of Jerusalem, Tyre, Acre, Tripoli and Nicosia. How can issues of multiplicity and hybridity be transposed, via urban terms, into the constructed landscape of Famagusta? How can this landscape be simultaneously understood in late medieval geographic, topographic, cultural, artistic, religious and economic terms? Does this understanding place the Cypriot port apart from other cities, and if so, in which ways, physical, constructed or other, does this occur? Can Famagusta be defined as a further development of a mainstream regional urban model lineage, an exception to that lineage, or even the swan song of that lineage?
We know very about an early walled enclosure protecting Nicosia since Byzantine times. Later Henry I in 1211 built a castle to defend the city. Peter I started a complete city wall surrounding the city in 1368 and Peter I completed it in 1380. Janus I accomplished further works in 1426, and others were planned in 1450 following Nicholas V decision. In 1565, Giulio Savorgnano and Francesco Barbaro designed the new city walls demolishing the older ones. The paper analyses the case study of Nicosia, interpreting the ‘medievalisation’ process, in continuity between the Conzenian approach (Whitehand, 2012) and the Italian School of Urban Morphology (Marzot, 2002), (Maretto, 2013). The theory should cover in a more analytical manner what Muratori called ‘medievalisation’ (Muratori, 1959), (Caniggia, 1976) a term generically describing the transformation of urban routes occurring during the Middle Ages. The paper analyses the diachronic changes of routes in the city of Nicosia, Cyprus, and other multi-scalar occurrences of the attraction phenomenon (Charalambous, Geddes, 2015) applying attractors and repellers, already used in archaeological studies to interpret such changes. Only few routes change by attraction as revealed by the inflection analysis, other routes are instead bifurcated. The attractor causes the diachronic deformations of routes by pulling them away from their configuration, while the 'repeller' acts in the opposite direction. It is possible, therefore, to trace the path of the medieval walls of Nicosia, now disappeared, using the inflection analysis of urban routes, inferring the attractors and the diving lines. The Venetian city wall, determining a new dividing line and new gates acting as point attractors, can be analysed with the same methodology. The openings through those walls introduced in modern times, also seem to follow the very same morphological rules.
The Venetian defense of the Mediterranean: the Kyrenia Castle, Cyprus (1540-1544
The Venetian fortifications in the Mediterranean between the XV and XVII century constitute a complex defensive system, designed ''alla moderna'' and built to control territories and commercial routes leading to the East. The Byzantines built the first Kyrenia castle in the VII century. It is located in the Eastern end of Kyrenia, at the old harbor. King John d'Ibelin built large portions of the castle in 1208-1211. The Genoese destroyed the Castle in the XIV cent., the Venetians captured it in 1491. The entrance to the castle is on the NorthWest side through a vaulted corridor. The Venetians replaced the original drawbridge at the castle's entrance with the protected gatehouse that still exists today. The Venetian modifications include the W wall, the NW tower, the S wall and the SE and W towers. The towers on the NW and SE where built with a round shape in medieval times. In the XV century gunpowder came into use, cannons and artillery were developing quickly, so Italian engineers adopted a system of remodelling medieval fortresses. In Kyrenia the architects shaped the SW bastion with a polygonal plan, according to the new artillery systems. The castle has one entrance over a bridge on the W side, originally crossing the inner harbour, subsequently transformed by the Venetians into the surrounding moat. The proveditore Ascanio Savorgnano and the military engineer Sebastian Vernier both report the castle's transformation in 1562, but the works were complete by 1544. The paper will analyse the phases of the building, comparing it with other cases in Cyprus and in the eastern Mediterranean, finding parallels with the indications coming from the coeval architectural literature.