Siege laid siege to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, for nearly two months in 1453. Other sieges lasted much longer.]]
A siege is a prolonged military assault on and blockade of a city or fortress with the intent of conquering by force or attrition. A siege occurs when an attacker encounters a city or fortress that refuses to surrender and cannot be easily taken by a frontal assault. Sieges usually involve surrounding the target and blocking the provision of supplies, typically coupled with artillery bombardment, sapping and mining to reduce fortifications.
Sieges probably predate the the development of cities as large population centers. Ancient cities in the Middle East show archeological evidence of having had fortified city walls. During the Renaissance and the Early Modern period, siege warfare dominated the conduct of war in Europe. Leonardo da Vinci gained as much of his renown from the design of fortifications as from his artwork.
Campaigns were generally designed around a succession of sieges. It was not until the Napoleonic period when dynamic striking columns forced armies into the field and the ever increasing use of, ever more powerful, cannon reduced the value of fortifications. In modern times, trenches replaced walls, and bunkers replaced castles. In the 20th century, the significance of the classical siege declined. With the advent of mobile warfare, one single fortified stronghold is no longer as decisive as it once was. While sieges do still occur, they are not as common as they once were due to changes in modes of battle, principally the ease by which huge volumes of destructive power can be directed onto a static target.
Sieges in the age of gunpowder\nThe introduction of gunpowder and the use of cannons brought about a new age in siege warfare. Cannons were first used in the early 13th century, they did not become significant weapons for another 150 years or so. By the 16th century, they were an essential and regularized part of any campaigning army, or castle's defences. The greatest advantage of cannons over other siege weapons was the ability to fire a heavier projectile, further, faster and more often than previous weapons. Thus, 'old fashioned' walls—that is high and, relatively, thin—were excellent targets and, over time, easily demolished. In 1453, the great walls of Constantinople were broken through in just six weeks by the 62 cannon of Mehmet II's army. However new fortifications, designed to withstand gunpowder weapons, were soon constructed throughout Europe. During the Renaissance and the Early Modern period, siege warfare continued to dominate the conduct of war in Europe.Emerging theories on improving fortifications\nThe castles that in earlier years had been formidable obstacles were easily breached by the new weapons. For example, in Spain, the newly equipped army of Ferdinand and Isabella was able to conquer Moorish strongholds in Granada in 1482–92 that had held out for centuries before the invention of cannons. In the early 15th century, Italian architect Leon Battista Alberti wrote a treatise entitled De Re aedificatoria which theorized methods of building fortifications capable of withstanding the new guns. He proposed that walls be "built in uneven lines, like the teeth of a saw." He proposed star-shaped fortresses with low thick walls. However, few rulers paid any attention to his theories. A few towns in Italy began building in the new style late in the 1480s, but it was only with the French invasion of the Italian peninsula in 1494–95 that the new fortifications were built on a large scale. Charles VIII invaded Italy with an army of 18,000 men and a horse-drawn siege-train. As a result he could defeat virtually any city or state, no matter how well defended. In a panic, military strategy was completely rethought throughout the Italian states of the time, with a strong emphasis on the new fortifications that could withstand a modern siege.New styles of fortresses employed\nThe most effective way to protect walls against cannon fire proved to be depth (increasing the width of the defences) and angles (ensuring that attackers could only fire on walls at an oblique angle, not square on). Initially walls were lowered and backed, in front and behind, with earth. Towers were reformed into triangular bastions. This design matured into the trace italienne. Star-shaped fortresses surrounding towns and even cities with outlying defenses proved very difficult to capture, even for a well equipped army. Fortresses built in this style throughout the 16th century did not become fully obsolete until the 19th century, and were still in use throughout World War I (though modified for 20th century warfare). However, the cost of building such vast modern fortifications was incredibly high, and was often too much for individual cities to undertake. Many were bankrupted in the process of building them; others, such as Siena, spent so much money on fortifications that they were unable to maintain their armies properly, and so lost their wars anyway. Nonetheless, innumerable large and impressive fortresses were built throughout northern Italy in the first decades of the 16th century to resist repeated French invasions that became known as the Wars of Italy. Many stand to this day. In the 1530s and 1540s, the new style of fortification began to spread out of Italy into the rest of Europe, particularly to France, the Netherlands, and Spain. Italian engineers were in enormous demand throughout Europe, especially in war-torn areas such as the Netherlands, which became dotted by towns encircled in modern fortifications. For many years, defensive and offensive tactics were well balanced leading to protracted and costly wars such as Europe had never known, involving more and more planning and government involvement. The new fortresses ensured that war rarely extended beyond a series of sieges. Because the new fortresses could easily hold 10,000 men, an attacking army could not ignore a powerfully fortified position without serious risk of counterattack. As a result, virtually all towns had to be taken, and that was usually a long, drawn-out affair, potentially lasting from several months to years, while the members of the town were starved to death. Most battles in this period were between besieging armies and relief columns sent to rescue the besieged.Marshal Vauban\n refined siege warfare by designing fortresses to withstand attacks and planning attacks.]]
At the end of the 17th century, Marshal Vauban, a French military engineer, developed modern fortification to its pinnacle, refining siege warfare without fundamentally altering it: ditches would be dug; walls would be protected by glacis; and bastions would enfilade an attacker. He was also a master of planning sieges themselves. Before Vauban, sieges had been somewhat slapdash operations. Vauban refined besieging to a science with a methodical process that, if uninterrupted, would break even the strongest fortifications.
Examples of Vauban-style fortresses in North America include Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland, Fort Ticonderoga in New York State, and La Citadelle in Quebec City.
Planning and maintaining a siege is just as difficult as fending one off. A besieging army must be prepared to repel both sorties from the besieged area and also any attack that may try to relieve the defenders. It was thus usual to construct lines of trenches and defenses facing in both directions. The outermost lines, known as the lines of circumvallation, would surround the entire besieging army and protect it from attackers. This would be the first construction effort of a besieging army, built soon after a fortress or city had been invested. A line of contravallation would also be constructed, facing in towards the besieged area, to protect against sorties by the defenders and to prevent the besieged from escaping.
The next line, which Vauban usually placed at about 600 meters from the target, would contain the main batteries of heavy cannons so that they could hit the target without being vulnerable themselves. Once this line was established, work crews would move forward creating another line at 250 meters. This line contained smaller guns. The final line would be constructed only 30 to 60 meters from the fortress. This line would contain the mortars and would act as a staging area for attack parties once the walls were breached. It would also be from there that sappers working to undermine the fortress would operate.
The trenches connecting the various lines of the besiegers could not be built perpendicular to the walls of the fortress, as the defenders would have a clear line of fire along the whole trench. Thus, these lines (known as saps) needed to be sharply jagged.
Another element of a fortress was the citadel. Usually a citadel was a "mini fortress" within the larger fortress, sometimes designed as a last bastion of defense, but more often as a means of protecting the garrison from potential revolt in the city. The citadel was used in wartime and peacetime to keep the residents of the city in line.
As in ages past, most sieges were decided with very little fighting between the opposing armies. An attacker's army was poorly served incurring the high casualties that a direct assault on a fortress would entail. Usually they would wait until supplies inside the fortifications were exhausted or disease had weakened the defenders to the point that they were willing to surrender. At the same time, diseases, especially typhus were a constant danger to the encamped armies outside the fortress, and often forced a premature retreat. Sieges were often won by the army that lasted the longest.
An important element of strategy for the besieging army was whether or not to allow the encamped city to surrender. Usually it was preferable to graciously allow a surrender, both to save on casualties, and to set an example for future defending cities. A city that was allowed to surrender with minimal loss of life was much better off than a city that held out for a long time and was brutally butchered at the end. However, if an attacking army had a reputation of killing and pillaging regardless of a surrender, then other cities' defensive efforts would be redoubled.
Advent of mobile warfare\nSiege warfare dominated in Western Europe for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An entire campaign, or longer, could be used in a single siege (for example, Ostend in 1601–04; La Rochelle in 1627–28). This resulted in extremely elongated conflicts. The balance was that while siege warfare was extremely expensive and very slow, it was very successful—or, at least, more so than encounters in the field. Battles arose through clashes between besiegers and punative relieving armies, but the principle was a slow grinding victory by the greater economic power. The relatively rare attempts at forcing pitched battles (Gustavus Adolphus in 1630; the French against the Dutch in 1672 or 1688) were almost always expensive failures. However, this pattern was eradicated by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. New techniques stressed rapidly moving armies that would clash on the open field of battle, and one single fortified stronghold was no longer as decisive as it used to be. Advances in artillery made previously impregnable defenses useless. For example, the walls of Vienna that had held off the Turks in the mid-seventeenth century were no obstacle to Napoleon in the late eighteenth. Where sieges occurred, the attackers were usually able to defeat the defences within a matter of days or weeks, rather than weeks or months as previously. This era of rapidly moving armies continued through the 19th century, reaching its peak in the Franco-Prussian War. For example, the great Swedish white-elephant fortress of Karlsborg was built in the tradition of Vauban and intended as a reserve capital for Sweden, but it was obsolete before it was completed in 1869.Modern warfare to 1865, Union soldiers laid siege against Confederate positions in the siege at Petersburg, Virginia during the American Civil War.]]
Mainly as a result of the increasing firepower (such as machine guns) available to defensive forces, First World War trench warfare briefly revived a form of siege warfare. Although siege warfare had moved out from an urban setting because city walls had become ineffective against modern weapons, trench warfare was nonetheless able to utilize many of the techniques of siege warfare in its prosecution (sapping, mining, barrage and, of course, attrition) but on a much larger scale and on a greatly extended front. The development of the armoured tank at the end of World War I swung the pendulum back in favour of maneuver.
The Blitzkrieg of the Second World War truly showed that fixed fortifications are easily defeated by maneuver instead of frontal assault or long sieges. Battles that would have taken weeks of siege could now be avoided with the careful application of air power (such as the German paratrooper capture of Fort Eban, Belgium, early in World War II). The most important sieges of the Second World War were on the Eastern Front where bloody urban warfare marked the battles of Leningrad and Stalingrad. In these battles, the ruins of an urban landscape proved to be just as effective an obstacle to an advancing army as any fortifications.
During the Vietnam War the battles of Dien Bien Phu (1954) and Khe Sanh (1968) possessed siege-like characteristics. In both cases, the Vietminh and Vietcong were able to cut off the opposing army by capturing the surrounding rugged terrain. At Dien Bien Phu, the French were unable to use air power to overcome the siege and were defeated. However, at Khe Sanh a mere 14 years later, advances in air power allowed the United States to withstand the siege. The resistance of US forces was assisted by the PAVN and PLAF forces' decision to use the Khe Sanh siege as strategic distraction to allow their mobile warfare offensive, the first Tet offensive to unfold securely. The siege as Khe Sanh displays typical features of modern sieges, as the defender has greater capacity to withstand siege, the attacker's main aim is to bottle operational forces, or create a strategic distraction, rather than take a siege to conclusion.
Recent seiges:\n* From 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996 the Siege of Sarajevo took place, where Sarajevo, then controlled by the Bosnian government, was besieged by Serb paramilitaries. \n* In 2004, United States forces lay seige to the Iraqi city of Fallujah, killing over 600 in an attempt to quell dissent and destroy militants responsible for the killing of 4 American contractors.
Police actions\nDespite the overwhelming might of the modern state, siege tactics continue to be employed in police conflicts. This has been due to a number of factors, primarily risk to life, whether that of the police, the besieged, bystanders or hostages. Police make use of trained negotiators, psychologists and, if necessary, force, generally being able to rely on the support of their nation's armed forces if required. The 1993 United States police siege on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas was atypically long at 51 days. Unlike traditional military sieges, police sieges tend to last for hours or days rather than weeks, months or years.See also\n* List of sieges\n* Biological warfare\n* Infiltration\n* MoleReferences\n#May, Timothy. "Mongol Arms." Explorations in Empire, Pre-Modern Imperialism Tutorial: the Mongols. University of Wisconsin-Madison. 27 June 2004.Further reading\n* Duffy, Christopher. Fire & Stone: The Science of Fortress Warfare (1660–1860). 1975. 2nd ed. New York: Stackpole Books, 1996. \n* Duffy, Christopher. Siege Warfare: Fortress in the Early Modern World, 1494–1660. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1996. \n* Duffy, Christopher. Siege Warfare, Volume II: The Fortress in the Age of Vauban and Frederick the Great. Routledge and Kegan Paul: London, 1985.\n* Lynn, John A. The Wars of Louis XIV.External links\n* Secrets of Lost Empires: Medieval Siege (PBS) Informative and interactive webpages about medieval siege tactics.\n* Siege Warfare in Ancient Egypt\n* Three Ancient Egyptian Sieges: Megiddo, Dapur, Hermopolis\n* The Siege Of The City Biblical perspectives. Category:Warfare Category:Fortification Category:Military terms Category:Wikipedia Featured Articles \n\n |
||
"When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before." - Mae West (1892-1980) |
slung about two projectiles per hour at medieval enemy positions.]]
Ancient sources contain many stories of sieges, such as the siege of 
in Ireland was besieged and captured three times: in 