Weekends' Output

Fifer, Poseur and Spanish Pikeman

Dreadful lighting for photography and thus my apologies.

The collection is building apace. Apart from these, I dug out and renovated a half dozen cavalry. It will be time quite soon to examine the question of basing.

Spanish Lancer

Converted from the Willie mounted Arquebusier that they never seem to supply an arquebus for!

Sword and buckler guy and a few whores and powder monkeys.

From the current 1565 collection, L-R, a sword and buckler man, the baby-eating Bishop af Bath and Wells and Pizzaro.

A few new recruits

Landsknecht Pride Marchers

 Obviously the Herr Obrist has been out shaking the can for the Fähnleins!

Spanish Pike

More on the painting table.

Test Figures

Alzheimer Landsknecht Officers

 I've spent a little time this weekend painting a few test figures. In the inevitable blue are "die Blauen" of Alzheim. All painting has been done with acrylic colour washes on a white, sprayed-on, undercoat. My main inspirations for this method are Richard Marsh's "wash-and-line" technique and the excellent work of Doug Crowther. Everything old is new again!

Spanish Pike

I took a leaf out of the GW playbook for painting large units of non-uniformed troops so they look fairly unified. I chose red and yellow-ochre as a tip of the hat to the Spanish flag. These are likewise Willie Landsknecht figures, but wearing Pluderhosen.

Comments are always welcome.

Setting a First Milestone

As you may have realised, I like to set myself milestones in assembling a collection.

Ross has kindly put forth the germ of a scenario and considering that I know little enough about the period and what may or may not be plausible I have decided to go with it.

Why not?

So then:

Spanish
General
Company of 8 Arquebusiers
Company of 8 Sword and Bucklermen
24 Pike
Troop of 8 Mounted Arquebusiers

Alzheimers
General
Company of 8 Arquebusiers
24 Pike
Troop of 8 Gens d'Armes
1 Cannon and 6 crew

This talk of Spanish troops leads me to thinking about my "Great Siege" collection such as it is. The figures that went into it would feed this project quite nicely and vice versa. Plenty of whores and powder monkeys there for Stokes, too. Monks, bishops, all the usual lovely clutter.

Fort St. Elmo

Where better to start than with Fort St Elmo? It seems to me that there have been some misconceptions concerning its' trace as reported by Ernle Bradford in his book on the Siege.

The fort is described as a star fort with three outworks in the shape of a pair of ravelins (one built in some haste of timber and earth) and a cavalier. Now, how are we to interpret this?

Take the image above, an engraving of a fresco of Matteo Perez d'Aleccio. The fort under siege is St. Elmo. Note that it is simply a star fort. There is a structure to the side of the fort closest the peninsula-tip, and another to the left of the fort.

The image below is a modern interpretation of this image and others. I believe that what we have here is a star fort with a ravelin at it's left, another "ravelin" or more properly a "rivelino" (see the great "ravelin" at Sarnzello) oriented at face the tip of the peninsula. I'm not yet persuaded one way or the other that the tower-like structure is in fact a cavalier (or raised battery - the battle accounts don't read that way to me) or whether that might be the structure linking the two named outworks being pierced for artillery and arquebuses to command the ditch. Certainly I think that the tall structure still exists, having been integrated at a later date into the greater structure of the fort. Accounts of the siege do stress that once the Turks took it, they were able to dominate the interior of the fortification, as the Ravelin they captured was taller than the fort.

Discuss!