The Jesuit contribution to the compilation of the Escuela de Palas treatise on Baroque-age fortifications

Abstract

Prof. Denis De Lucca has argued in his 2012 book entitled Jesuits and fortifications that the many treatises on military architecture produced by Jesuit mathematicians in the Baroque age reflected the interest of individual members of the Jesuit Order to record their thorough knowledge about a subject that was regularly communicated to students attending their classes and private lessons. In so doing these Jesuits attracted the attention of the people that mattered in contemporary society. Despite repeated warnings from Rome and General Vincenzo Carafa's De Forti.ficationibus prohibition of 1648, many were those Jesuit mathematicians who persisted in their studies, teachings and publications about fortifications. Some of the works outlining their ideas about improving fortification systems were even summarized and publicly acknowledged in a late seventeenth-century treatise produced for the exclusive use of the Spanish armies stationed in Milan. This unique and impressive Escuela de Palas document, the subject of this contribution, took the form of an illustrated 430-folio encyclopaedia of fortification knowledge demonstrating the synergy that existed in Baroque Spain between Jesuit thinking about military mathematics and the various improved f01iification systems that had and were then still being devised by the leading military theorists of early modem Europe.