Mud-brick houses resisted cannon fire as well as engineered earthworks

Evidence

Galera did not need to construct such buffer earthworks. Its outer houses formed, quite naturally, an ideal defensive position capable of neutralizing much of the advantage accruing to the Spanish forces from their lavish deployment of artillery. The village had no outer defenses as such, but the houses piled one over the other up the hillside were largely built of tapia, that is to say, had earth walls. Tapia does not at first sound a very useful material in fortification, but its effect seems to have been exactly the same as what might have been achieved by a skillfully constructed outer earthwork: “Artillery could not inflict damage on them, nor could our men make progress,” and then, “The artillery had little effect on the houses, it simply drilled holes (solamente horadaba) in these walls, and did not even dislodge enough earth to allow the attackers to clamber up” (217). — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1048

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the reading on silence/wilderness themes in that earth and natural materials silently absorb destruction; also echoes Milgrom’s point that informal, unengineered systems can match formal engineered ones.
• SHARE: Send to anyone interested in premodern military history or the physics of earthen construction vs. cannon.