Bastion

[2] Compared with the medieval fortified towers they replaced, bastion fortifications offered a greater degree of passive resistance and more scope for ranged defence in the age of gunpowder artillery.

This was exemplified by the campaigns of Charles VII of France who reduced the towns and castles held by the English during the latter stages of the Hundred Years War, and by the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the large cannon of the Turkish army.

[3] During the Eighty Years War (1568–1648) Dutch military engineers developed the concepts further by lengthening the faces and shortening the curtain walls of the bastions.

[3] These ideas were further developed and incorporated into the trace italienne forts by Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban,[3] that remained in use during the Napoleonic Wars.

The top of the bastion was exposed to enemy fire, and normally would not be faced with masonry as cannonballs hitting the surface would scatter lethal stone shards among the defenders.

Drawing of a bastion
One of the semi-circular bastions at Deal Castle , a Device Fort on the south coast of England
Aerial photograph of Neuf-Brisach , a fortress in use during the Napoleonic Wars
A bastion in the Komárno Fortress (Slovakia).
Some of the first polygonal bulwarks that would define the trace italienne were built at Rhodes between 1486 and 1497. [ 6 ]