Negotiating early-modernity in Azemmour, Morocco: military architecture in transition

Abstract

Azemmour was the last big Portuguese conquest in the Maghreb, marking a strategic stage for the expansion of the crown between fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Portuguese presence here, which lasted from 1513 to 1542 would irreversibly influence the town’s image, dimension and limits deriving from a drastic downsizing procedure undertaken. This technique was joined by important phases of military architecture experiment as its defences would play a key role in the early 1500s’ renovation that all the Portuguese Northern Africa possessions were witnessing. The occupation of Azemmour happens at the very same time as changes in taste and architectural needs were being revised by novel warfare technologies and early-modern ideologies in Europe. Framed within a period of transition, military architecture in Azemmour requires a cross-disciplinary study that goes beyond architectural form to embrace urban space, archaeology and history. Thus, historical sources were completed by a thorough architectural survey and field work to provide plans and 3D models for analysis. This article seeks the original drawing intentions by royal masters Diogo and Francisco de Arruda in order to expose the revolutionary concepts associated with the construction of a Manueline fortification. Many times sieged by a hostile hinterland where walls and bastions were, in fact, the borders of Portuguese sovereignty, it is important to measure defensive structures, related geometries and measure fire capacity or range. Averaging the resilience of medieval rhetorical patterns with highly innovative proto-bastioned design, the influence of Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s studies to the work of the Arruda can be pointed out at a time when theorization began to circulate in Europe. Partly ruined, partly renewed, the Azemmouri military built heritage still testifies for its central role for the understanding of the transitional architectural style between the Late Middle Ages and Early Modernity, within a broad regional laboratorial experience in the Maghreb at the same time Portugal’s overseas empire was at the centre of science experimentation and diffusion of knowledge in the field.