The Fortifications of Malta 1530–1945

All the Knight’s major works, except the last, utilised the bastioned trace, a technique of fortification that dominated the science of European fortification for 300 years. Bastions project the defence forward beyond a simple linear wall, and thus allow defenders to subject an attacker to fire from more than one direction. In the bastioned trace there is no ‘dead’ ground, and the idea, with other refinements such as, for example, the erection of cavaliers behind the parapet of the curtain or in the bastions, held the field until near the end of the 18th century.