Review: Cities at War in Early Modern Europe, by Martha D. Pollak

Abstract

Martha D. Pollak. Cities at War in Early Modern Europe . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 370 pp., 223 b/w illus. $95, ISBN 9780521113441. The cities in Martha Pollak’s new book are not really at war. They are preparing for war and commemorating war, but the actual warfare is left out of the picture. Though most of the cities she discusses experienced one or more sieges, the military operations themselves are not the focus of her study. Likewise, Pollak does not examine fortifications as such, but rather their multifarious effect on the conception and representation of the city—what she calls “military urbanism”: “an international style of urban design characterized by uniformity, geometrical clarity, architectural economy, and unadorned monumentality” (i). The ambitious aim of Cities at War in Early Modern Europe is to demonstrate that the military component was of central importance in the history of urbanism between 1550 and 1700. Of course, the gripping conjunction between cities and war has been explored before; a fine example is La ville et la guerre , edited by Antoine Picon, oddly never cited by Pollak.1 But overall historians of urban design have hitherto downplayed military considerations. A notable exception is Enrico Guidoni and Angela Marino’s two-volume Storia dell’urbanistica , to which Pollak is evidently indebted.2 Pollak’s subject matter—urban design and military culture—remains that of her earlier book, Turin, 1564–1680 (1991), but she now expands her survey to the whole of Europe, and offers not a chronological narrative but a thematically organized study.3 She splendidly succeeds in rectifying the familiar picture by showing how well-known manifestations of baroque city planning were generated by military urbanism. The pan-European approach is particularly praiseworthy, for although war was the most international of phenomena, most modern studies of military architecture and urbanism remain confined within present-day national frontiers. Pollak’s comparative survey ranges from Valletta to Stockholm and from Naples to London. Her attention goes mainly to the leading and …