A Pirate King Footnote
With tidbits about Renaissance fort technology and 17th century climate change chaos
I began this morning with a simple goal. I wanted to publish a short “footnote style” newsletter post featuring three paragraphs from Tonio Andrade’s Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China’s First Great Victory over the West that had proven too unwieldy to fit into yesterday’s installment of my series on Leibniz and Chinese computing, (and, as it has evolved, a few other things!) Lost Colony is, to my knowledge, the best account in English of how Koxinga, aka “the pirate king of Taiwan,” expelled the Dutch from their colony on Taiwan in 1662.
It also happens to be the book that introduced me, years ago, to the “military revolution model” of history I referenced yesterday. The three paragraphs I planned to excerpt are a pithy introduction to that theory via the evolution of the “Renaissance Fort.”
But as I was thinking about my plans for the day while in the shower, it occurred to me that it was interesting that the Thirty Years War (1618-48) occurred at roughly the same time as what historians of China call “the Ming-Qing transition” (1618-1683), a period that starts with the Manchu leader Nurhachi’s publication of his “Seven Grievances” against the Ming, and his ensuing declaration of war, and ends when the Manchus finally defeat Koxinga’s successor state in Taiwan.
That’s a lot of chaos in the two richest and most advanced sectors of the world happening at exactly the same time. I wondered if there might be a climate aspect involved. One post-breakfast keyword search later, I found myself reading the introduction to Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century.
Short answer: Yes, there is a climate aspect. Long answer: It’s complicated. More on this later, I am quite sure.
I googled Geoffrey Parker, and discovered that his most famous book is The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800. Huh, I thought, that seems pretty relevant to my current interests. And then, while searching the UC Berkeley library catalogue to see if both of Parker’s books were available, I happened to notice that Tonio Andrade had co-edited a book titled: The Limits of Empire: European Imperial Formations in Early Modern World History: Essays in Honor of Geoffrey Parker.
Really!? A quick trip to Wikipedia revealed that not only were Andrade’s doctoral advisers Geoffrey Parker and Jonathan Spence, but one of Andrade’s more recent published works is The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History.
Ok then! A simple task turned into one of those mornings where new additions to my reading list vastly outpace my capacity to absorb new information, which is always intimidating but also always a good problem to have.
Anyway, here is Andrade on “the Renaissance Fort”
“The key innovation was an angled bastion that thrust out from each corner, a huge arrow of menace. With each bastion placed to complement its neighbors, the renaissance fortress could spew flanking fire like no other type of fort. Attackers used to be able to find a few islands of peace to place their ladders, which scholars call dead zones, places cannons couldn’t hit. But the renaissance fort covered all the angles. So long as it was fully manned and armed, it was nearly impossible to take by storm. Any troops foolish enough to try scaling the walls or battering a gate would be shredded by crossfire, from above, from below, from the left, from the right, even from behind, where bastions stuck out in back of them.
The new design spread rapidly, first within Italy and then beyond. Wherever it went, everything changed. Since the renaissance fort was so difficult to storm, you had to surround it and either slowly batter it into submission, a process that took weeks and required building counter-fortifications, hundreds of yards of walls and trenches and batteries to protect your own troops and gunners, or starve it into submission, which required a tight cordon around it, and which could take months or even years. In either case, you needed a huge army. So wherever there were renaissance forts, armies tended to get larger. This was expensive. And the forts themselves were expensive, orders of magnitude more massive than medieval castles.
The Renaissance fort may have changed not just the conduct of war and the size of armies, but also politics and society. To pay for the forts and armies, you needed more effective taxation policies and fiscal structures. The Military Revolution Model holds that the evolution of new social and political structures in Europe was catalyzed by – or a least the process was reinforced by – the military changes occurring in the sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe, changes that were probably brought about by the renaissance fortress.”
Footnote to the Footnote:
The portrait of Koxinga the Pirate King that illustrates this newsletter hangs on my kitchen wall opposite my wok station and has an amusing history. In an another lifetime, when I was blogging for Salon about globalization, Felix Salmon, who at the time was a prodigious blogger on financial matters, asked me why my handle on Twitter was “koxinga21.” I explained that it dated all the way back to the ancient days of yore when I first registered on the texting service ICQ, and that I chose it as a tongue-in-cheek way of honoring my connection with Taiwan, where I had lived my first four years after college. (It is still my handle on Instagram and Bluesky.) Salmon responded by telling me that his wife, the artist Michelle Vaughn, had created a series of paintings of “Sea Warriors” that included Koxinga. I decided I had to own a print, but Vaughn offered me something even better, a version printed on canvas that had been displayed in a gallery presentation of all the Sea Warriors.
And finally, my memory is a little hazy on this point, but I think that Tonio Andrade sent me a review copy of his very first book How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish, and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century, because he too was intrigued by my Twitter handle.