Jacopo Aconcio. Treatise on fortifications (Trattato sulle fortificazioni). Edited by Paola Giacomoni. Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 2011

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Jacopo Aconcio
Trattato sulle fortificazioni
[Treatise on fortifications]

Edited by Paola Giacomoni
With the collaboration of Giovanni Maria Fara e Renato Giacomelli
Edition and translation by Omar Khalaf

Florence, Leo S. Olschki, 2011

[1] James Aconcio wrote a Treatise on fortifications during the years he spent in England. He himself let us know, in his letter of November 1562, that he is taking steps to translate a treatise on military architecture from Italian to Latin, a treatise which he had first written in Italian (but we do not know how much sooner). The Latin translation is intended to make the script accessible to an audience of more international nature, and of course, in England, where Aconcio was called because of his reputation as technician. The Latin manuscript is called Ars muniendum oppidorum. Unfortunately, the manuscript went lost. In the very last years, however, another manuscript was found in the Archives of Petworth House (with the mark HMC 143), dated June 14 1573. It is the translation from Latin to English of the Treatise of fortifications, translation made by Thomas Blundeville (booke of fortefyinge). The steps that have occurred are therefore the following: (i) preparation of the treaty in Italian by Aconcio; (ii) translation from Italian to Latin, again by Aconcio; (iii) translation from Latin to English, by Blundeville; (iv) modern translation of Blundeville’s text (the one in this book) from English into Italian (with facing-page translation). Edition and modern translation are by Omar Khalaf. Of course, we would not be able to guarantee that, in all of these steps, the text has not been more or less involuntary subject to changes or distortions.

Jacopo Aconcio, Treatise on fortifications. Fig. XXVI
(with the kind permission of the Publishing House)

[2] A theologian, jurist, and philosopher: we would never have expected that Jacopo Aconcio would even write a treatise on fortifications. Yet, despite not being a military engineer, Aconcio had a good knowledge of the subject, knowledge that, by his own admission, derived from stays in the courts of northern Italy (particularly in Milan around 1555) and thanks to his personal attendance of engineers in charge of the fortifications of the city (see. pp. 40-41). It is this knowledge that allows him, in a life of forced displacement due to his unorthodox religious beliefs, to move to England in 1559, at the service of Queen Elizabeth I, with the task of dealing with the construction of the fortress of Berwick, a bulwark against possible Franco-Scottish attacks.

[3] Because of the variety of the interests of Aconcio, the volume is authored by three specialists. In the introduction, Paola Giacomoni dwells mainly on the similarities between the Treatise on fortifications and the Stratagemata Satanae (The stratagems of Satan), a religious text published by Aconcio in 1565 that, as the title implies, also shares lexical features with the booke of fortefyinge. A survey by Renato Giacomelli follows, with the Methodological reflection of Jacopo Aconcio in the Treatise on fortifications; here he dwells more on the philosopher, author in 1558 of De methodo (On the method). "The De methodo represented a manifesto for the re-foundation of the arts and sciences; to Aconcio himself, however, a merely theoretical treatise appeared insufficient to demonstrate the real practical potentialities." (p. 23). Precisely for this, "Aconcio announced ... the preparation of some examples of a systematic discussion on the method, namely the discussion of some arts according to methodological precepts" (ibid). There is no doubt that the Treatise on fortifications was fully part of this effort to raise to art a discipline which had been hitherto particularly prone only to an engineering description of techniques: a script, then, that would abstract from the particular case in favour of the systematic nature of the discussion.

Jacopo Aconcio, Treatise on fortifications. Fig. II
(with the kind permission of the Publishing House)

[4] In The booke of fortefyinge and military architecture in the time of Aconcio, Giovanni Maria Fara examines the manuscript from the point of view of specific military issues. "Jacopo Aconcio, the expert of fortifications, is not a leader or a man of war; in a complete sense, he is even not a designer nor a builder of fortresses "(p. 60). Aconcio is "certainly not original in terms of the solutions he offered, which, again, are based on the Italian treatises preceding him (and then – once more – de 'Zanchi, Lanteri, Cataneo, Maggi and Castriotto). Moreover, it is in these parts where… his role of mediator emerges more clearly: within the universe of another language and culture, a mediation with a cultural tradition and technique that had been forming under his own eyes" (ibid). Just having regard to sources, Fara (well aware that Aconcio himself says he had almost completed the translation of the Treatise in a letter of 1562) considers he must move the date of its compilation forward by a few years: "The sources which Aconcio precisely quotes and which I was able to recognize, relate all to treaties of military architecture in Northern Italy, printed in the region between Brescia and Venice between 1557 and 1564 "(p. 44 n. 4). It is to be remember that in addition to the authors mentioned above, Aconcio was certainly not ashamed to turn his attention to classical sources, and in particular to Vitruvius and Palladio Rutilio Tauro Emiliano, which he retrieved through the Annotations to Vitruvius by Guillaime Philandrier