Castle of Charles V — Artillery Changes the City
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Transcript
Lecce’s castle belongs to a Mediterranean world in which Ottoman expansion and new artillery forced cities to rethink defence. In the sixteenth century Charles V ordered the medieval stronghold enlarged into a bastioned fortress. Earlier Norman and Angevin fabric was absorbed into the new structure rather than simply erased.
The thick walls and projecting bastions reflect gunpowder warfare: defenders needed fields of fire and masonry capable of resisting cannon. This is a different Lecce from the carved churches nearby. Here stone is deliberately blunt.
The contrast is useful. The same imperial and Spanish period that helped create Lecce’s later Baroque environment also demanded military architecture designed around fear of attack from the Adriatic and eastern Mediterranean.