Faust Vrančić’s Design for the Siege of Ostend from the Year 1603
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| Abstract |
In the early autumn of 1603, Faust Vrančić (Faustus Verantius, Fausto Veranzio) – at the time residing in the imperial capital of Prague, in the service of Emperor Rudolph II – made a design for the obstruction of maritime access to the port of Ostend and sent it to Archduke Albert VII, the commander of a considerable, 100,000-men army that had been unsuccessfully attacking the town of Ostend as of the summer of 1601. Since then the besieged town had been supplied with troops and victuals by sea and all the assailants’ efforts to cut off that vital communication had failed.Albeit there is no evidence that Vrančić’s design had been taken into consideration, let alone that his machine had actually come into being at the battlefield, his project for Ostend, preserved in the Royal Archives of Belgium in Brussels, is in several respects an important testimony of his activity as inventor. Firstly, besides those presented in his book Machinae novae (Venice, 1615), it remains the only surviving drawing of any of his devices. Secondly, the design for Ostend is not a ‘conceptual’ invention, but a custom-made solution for a specific purpose and, thirdly, it was apparently developed on his own initiative. |
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