Osječki zbornik, Vol. Vol. 35 No. xx, 2020.
Original scientific paper
The Pinnacle of Development of Osijek’s Baroque Fortifications, the Third Phase 1727-1731 – the Contribution of Nicolas Doxat de Demoret
Zlatko Uzelac
; Institut za povijest umjetnosti
Abstract
The Baroque fortifications of Osijek, the largest fortified complex built in Croatia in the eighteenth century, were constructed from the end of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century in four major stages that differed in plan and conceptual approach. These differences were largely linked to changes in political and/or broader historical circumstances, with the participation of a number of different key historical protagonists and the designers they engaged. The city, which is located at an important strategic crossing over the River Drava, was at a later stage of the Great Turkish War transformed into a city-fortress with new bastion fortifications. Designed by Mathias von Kaisersfeld, they were executed in 1692 in preparation for the Battle of Slankamen in 1692, in which Louis William, Margrave of Baden-Baden, won an important victory, and they were also to serve for the continuation of the war after this battle until the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699. Besides Petrovaradin, whose construction began one year later also to the design of engineer Mathias von Kaisersfeld, Osijek was the first new city-fortress built in the newly-liberated territories, on the new frontier with the Ottoman Empire. Its design was very similar to that of Kaiserswerth, the fortress of the Diocese of Cologne on the Rhine; it had three landward-facing bastions and two demi-bastions facing the River Drava. The construction featured earth embankments excavated from a wide trench into which water from the Drava could be let. Construction stopped after the peace treaty was signed and resumed in 1710, when the fortifications were clad with bricks because Prince Eugene of Savoy and Emperor Joseph I concluded, in 1709, that there was danger of the Ottoman Empire becoming involved in the War of the Spanish Succession between the Alliance and France. In the same year, Prince Eugene started to build, to the design of his architect Lucas von Hildebrandt, his bastioned castle in Bilje on his Belje estate near Osijek, as the centre of his demesne. The castle was built for defence against the Hungarian rebellion, but was also to serve as his future personal headquarters in preparation of a new war against the Ottoman Empire. A new plan for the modernization of the Osijek fortifications was drawn up in 1712 for the same purpose. It was an integral plan for the layout of the cityfortress combined with the final design for a Baroque city with a new square (Paradenplatz) in the centre and a new arrangement of city streets to replace the inherited, older, urban tissue. The plan was designed by engineer Jean Petis de la Croix, and it became a model for the entire future system of new city-fortresses whose construction Prince Eugene of Savoy organized and headed after the war. At that time Petis de la Croix also made the plan for Szeged, and the construction of a new fortress in Slavonski Brod began in 1715 in preparation for the war. In the same year engineer Visconti made a plan for Carlsburg, the main fortress in Transylvania (Alba Iulia). After the triumph in the war of 1716-1718 and the conquest of Timişoara and Belgrade, Prince Eugene of Savoy proposed, in a memorandum to Emperor Charles VI, the construction of a large system of fortresses on the new south-eastern border, with Belgrade at its centre. It was to be composed mostly of old historic cities located at key strategic sites and interconnected by large, navigable, Pannonian rivers, and partly also of new city-fortresses planned between them on the remaining particularly prominent sites. To this end, even before the peace treaty was signed, the modernization began of Belgrade’s old Citadel at the mouth of the Sava into the Danube, and then the construction of new city fortifications to the design of engineer F.N. Sully, but after complaints that construction according to this plan was too expensive, in 1722 a new design was selected by engineer Nicolas Doxat de Démoret, who had previously designed new Timişoara. The following year, Prince Eugene appointed engineer Doxat as Chief Planner of Belgrade, as well as of all the other new fortresses on the Frontier. Originally Swiss, born in Yverdon, Nicolas Doxat de Démoret trained in the Netherlands as a fortification engineer, and then participated in the rebuilding of Mannheim in the service of the Prince Palatinate. To the project of Menno van Coehorn, this town was transformed from a late-Renaissance to an oval Baroque city-fortress. After that, he entered the service of General Mercy, who became a successful Governor of the Timişoara Banat. Following his appointment as Chief Planner of all the fortresses, in the next less than a decade-and-a-half, Nicolas Doxat realized, with the full support and confidence of Prince Eugene of Savoy, a great and remarkable architectural oeuvre and become the Austrian “Vauban”, a builder and designer not only of Belgrade and Timişoara, but also of most of the other major city-fortresses in the whole new system. However, due to a series of adverse circumstances, his oeuvre has to this day largely remained forgotten and disregarded, and partly overshadowed by his unwarranted death sentence and execution in the new war against the Ottoman Empire in 1738, following an intrigue by von Seckendorf. By designing and systematically supervising the construction of the fortress system as a whole, and after designing and monitoring the construction in its middle and the east wing, after 1727 Doxat especially devoted itself to new projects in the west wing of the system, in Slavonia and Croatia. First he designed the modernization of the Brod Fortress (Slavonski Brod) in 1728 at the invitation of the Commander-in-Chief of the Slavonian General Command John Joseph O’Dwyer, and next year he completed a plan to modernize the Osijek fortifications. There Doxat developed the basic design of the Osijek engineer von Haisse into a completely new concept of fortifications along the River Drava, which we can look on as a separate, third stage and the culmination in the development of the Baroque fortifications of the Osijek city-fortress. The landward fortifications were strengthened by additional fortified accesses to the fleches placed at the top of the double glacis, the new casemate bastion of St Eugene was built into the previous riverbed, and a new, seventh bastion of St Elizabeth was added. Between them, Doxat designed an intricate and original system of canals and embankments with a separated redoubt, designed as a fleche but as big as one of the bastions, extending deep into the riverbed. This complex was a kind of architectural mechanism for filling the fortress moat with water even when the water level of the river was low. Together with the double trench around the crownwork on the opposite side of the river, it enabled water management for the purpose of defence, but also served for continued navigation on the river even at low water levels. The project was completely executed in the next few years in the last period of Prince Eugene of Savoy’s life, and in 1731 it was supplemented by one of Doxat’s architectural “miniatures” in the form of a reduced lunette in front of the Water Gate, which cleverly resolved access to the gate during different water levels. In the second half of the century, under the reign of Empress and Queen Maria Theresa, the Osijek fortifications were once again reconstructed to the design of engineer Johann Philip von Harsch. In that last, fourth stage of development, the landward fortifications were reduced by eliminating the double glacis, and during the reign of Emperor and King Joseph II, a passage was opened through the until then impenetrable hornwork directly into the Lower Town suburb, but the fortifications on the Drava remained unchanged.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
236412
URI
Publication date:
31.1.2020.
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