Denis De Lucca: Jesuits And Fortifications: The Contribution of the Jesuits to Military Architecture in the Baroque Age, Brill Academic Publishers: Leiden and Boston, 2012.

This new book, volume 73 in the peer-reviewed Brill series on the History of Warfare, deals with the forgotten contribution of the Jesuits to the dissemination of ideas about military architecture in the Baroque age.

In the first chapter, the author provides evidence that the Jesuits developed an extraordinarily militant form of religious expression which included in its agenda their involvement in ‘just wars’ against Protestant ‘heretics’ or Turkish infidels, these being considered to be the two prime threats to the post-Tridentine Catholic Church.

The ‘military mind’ of St Ignatius of Loyola, the preaching, confessional and wider educational ministries of his Order and the compilation of early Jesuit books on war ethics are all addressed together with the relationship that quickly evolved between the mathematical disciplines entrenched in the Jesuit curriculum of studies known as the Ratio Studiorum and the geometry of war.

In the context of the great religious divides and numerous wars that characterised early modern Europe, it is shown in the second and third chapters how the Jesuits assisted Catholic leaders during and after the30 Years War, by using themathematical faculties attached to many of their colleges and seminaries for nobles to disseminate knowledge on fortification matters.

This was achieved through teaching, writing treatises, consultations and, at times, even active service in the field by Jesuit experts in fortification mathematics attached to Catholic armies.

Such military activity was by no means restricted to the European continent. In South America, the Philippines and China, the Jesuits formed armies, built fortresses and even manufactured cannon to protect and propagate their missionary work Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam.

The involvement of Jesuits in warfare and their many fortification treatises, not surprisingly, sometimes provoked a negative reaction from Generals of the Order who saw them running counter to Loyola’s religious vision of world evangelisation.

Extract from the Jesuit Francesco Eschinardi’s Trattato di fortificare alla moderna of 1660.

But this expertise was real and recognised as such by contemporaries. By examining a late 17th-century Spanish treatise on military architecture entitled Escuela de Palas, the third chapter of the book confirms that Jesuit mathematicians who taught and wrote on fortification (sometimes using pseudonyms to protect their identity) were often regarded as experts in military architecture, rivaling the achievements in this field of knowledge of leading military engineers such as Pagan and Vauban.

In the fourth chapter, the career of the Sicilian Jesuit mathematicus Giacomo Masò who ran a course in military mathematics in 17th-century Valletta has been examined in depth because it provides a good case study of the controversy and crisis of conscience that Jesuits contributing to the dissemination of fortification knowledge often had to face.

It is shown in the fifth and final chapter that the interest of several Jesuits in the subject of military architecture remained strong during the 1773-1814temporary suppression of the Jesuits, after which, however, it was discontinued.

De Lucca is the director of the International Institute for Baroque Studies and head of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Malta.