Fort Tigné 1792

Abstract

The Maltese eighteenth-century fortified landscape was an exciting one. For the settecento in Malta was a period of astounding reach, where new works of fortification were introduced at a breathtaking pace and with verve, across the whole length and breadth of the archipelago. Scores of batteries, redoubts, entrenchments, and fougasses took root around the islands’ shores, while new forts and many of the existing fortified cities were re-dressed in monumental architecture and equipped with the latest sophisticated adjuncts of defence in the form of aggressive outerworks bristling with traverses, places-of-arms, and countermines. Above all, it was a time of new ideas, new shapes and forms, innovative solutions and, towards the close of the century, also a period of drastic change.