Historyzine 006: Siege Warfare

In episode 6 of Historyzine we look at early 18th century sieges, the changing nature of warfare and some of the reasons behind the reticence to commit troops to a fully fledged battle in this War of the Spanish Succession. We will focus particularly on the great French engineer Vauban, his fortresses and his techniques for laying siege to a fortress. There’s a plan of a Vauban type fortress here If you take a look at this pdf document you will be able to see some really good aerial photographs of Vauban fortresses that give a fine indication of how it works as a piece of defensive technology. Finally here’s a picture showing the lines of circumvallation and contravallation and the three parallels the besiegers would dig as part of the siege of a fortress town. We mention in the podcast one of the finest references on the net for the War of the Spanish Succession and also give a shout out to the Genealogy Gems podcast plus a mention for a site simply jammed full of history podcast reviews Latest news on the Oudenaarde re-enactment for the 300th anniversary of the battle of Oudenaarde is that I have booked my hotel room and the reenactment will be taking place over the weekend 12th and 13th of July. Our review this time is of a podcast from the History Network and is an audio tour of a walk around Soho in London. If you wish to leave feedback on the podcast then do so through the site or use the contact page to send a form email

You can listen to Historyzine 006: Siege Warfare online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Historyzine 006: Siege Warfare is an episode from Historyzine: The History Podcast by Jim Mowatt.

This episode is 31:28 long.

This episode was published on Feb 7, 2008.

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