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Gabriele Tadino was a military engineer at a time when the art of siege craft had been transformed by the development of increasingly powerful artillery. The first major sign of this revolution in warfare had come in 1453 when Ottoman guns blasted their way through the walls of Constantinople, ending the Byzantine Empire. In western Europe the moment of truth came in 1494 when Charles VIII of France invaded Italy, bringing with him a modern siege train. Castles that had withstood sieges of months or even years fell in days, and he conquered the kingdom of Naples almost without a fight. Charles himself didn’t benefit from his success for long – he had to fight his way back from Naples to France, losing most of his war booty on the way, while the garrison he left behind in Naples was soon overwhelmed. However this marked the start of sixty years of conflict in Italy, which evolved into a proxy war between France and the Hapsburgs, and ended with large parts of Italy under foreign rule and a permanent transformation of siege warfare.
Gabriele Tadino was born in Martinengo, a small town near Bergamo, at the western edge of Venetian territory. His father was a doctor, but the young Gabriele trained as a military engineer, moving to Bergamo at some point before 1498 to study under a French military engineer. He remained there for ten years, before joining the Venetian army in 1508. After that his career is well documented – service for Venice, including some time in disgrace, and ended when he was sent to work on the defences of Crete. However he wouldn’t spent long there. In 1522 Suleiman the Magnificent decided to capture Rhodes, which at the time was the base of the order of Knights Hospitaller. They had been using it as a base to attack Muslim shipping soon after being expelled from Acre in 1291. A first siege, in 1480, had failed, but Suleiman was determined that this second siege would succeed. He gathered a vast army, and accompanied it in person. The Hospitallers made desperate calls for help from Christian Europe, but the main powers were all distracted by the ongoing Italian Wars and failed to provide any help. Venice even forbad its agents to help the knights, having already signed a treaty with the Ottomans. By this point Tadino’s reputation was well established, and the Hospitallers attempted to gain his help. When he was refused permission to go by the governor of Crete he simply ignored him, and was smuggled away to Rhodes. After an adventurous trip he was able to get through the loose Ottoman blockade.
The siege of Rhodes is the centre-piece of the story, although it doesn’t take up as much of the book as one might expect – seven chapters out of 41. However many of the earlier themes come together here. The first is that military engineers had reacted very quickly to the French revolution in artillery, developing the trace italienne, replacing the high thin stone walls of the Medieval fortress with the low, wide walls surrounded by deep (often dry) moats and with bastions build out at the corners to make sure there were no blind spots. This work had already been done at Rhodes and several of the illustrations compare the medieval defences and their 1522 developments at several key locations. These show the key changes – extra lines of defences, lower walls, bastions, all providing flat fighting surfaces for the defenders to place their cannon. However on Rhodes one key battle would be fought underground, and here we see Tadino at his best. The medieval city of Rhodes was built on top of the ruins of the much larger Classical city, and the Ottomans were able to dig a large number of tunnels in the hope of getting under the defences and blowing them up. We see how Tadino detected this work and led the dangerous work of counter-mining, as well as developing a new technique to deal with mines by digging vents that would dissipate some of the force of the explosion. His work helped prolong the siege into the winter of 1522, when Suleiman agreed to generous terms to end it. The Knights were allowed to leave with full military honours and with their possessions. Suleiman would go on to regret these terms after his two attempts to capture their new base at Malta failed (it’s these two failures that the author uses to justify his title, on the grounds that if the Knights had been wiped out at Rhodes, Malta wouldn’t have held against the Ottomans, still led by the now aged Suleiman).
Tadino is a fascinating character. He fits nicely into his period, a time in which the medieval ideals of chivalry and the crusade still gripped the imagination of many in western Europe, while at the same time being largely ignored in reality. On the one had he was a master of the new technical warfare, engineering and maths, and the scientific systems of fortification, on the other hand at one point he was disgraced after taking part in what might have seemed to be a chivalric attempt to rescue a relative’s beloved (but which turned out to be rather more of a kidnapping…), repeatedly led sorties out of the fortress of Rhodes, and was only present at the siege because of his religious beliefs. He is also very well documented, which means that there are very few occasions where the author has try and fill significant gaps in his career. This all makes him a valid target for a full length biography, and Albert has produced a high quality work.
Chapters
1 – The War for the Heart of the World
2 – A Boy’s Life
3 – The Tadini of Martinengo
4 – Short and Ugly
5 – Bringing a Cannon to a Sword Fight
6 – The New Ways of War
7 – The Education of a Military Engineer
8 – A Peach, Ripe for Plucking
9 - A Life Without Women
10 – The Italian Wars Kick into High Gear
11 – Why Everyone was Fighting Everyone Else
12 – The Warrior Pope
13 – The Patron Pope
14 – First Blood at Agnadello
15 – The Siege of Padua
16 – Whisperes and Gossip
17 – The Sack of Brescia
18 – A Life Like Lightning
19 – A Not-So-Romantic Interlude
20 – The Dregs of War
21 – A Military Engineer Abroad
22 – How Venice Became Rich
23 – Venice and the Ottomoans
24 – The World Gets Bigger
25 – Suleiman
26 – The Other Emperor
27 – The Last Knight of Christendom
28 – A Short History of the Knight’s Hospitaller
29 – How to Get into a Besieged City
30 – War Underground
31 – War Overground
32 – An Eye for an Arquebus
33 – Facing General Winter
34 – The Chancellor’s Downfall
35 – ‘Nothing in the World was ever so well lost…’
36 – The Emperor’s New Man
37 – Long Nose Versus Big Jaw, or ‘All is lost save life and honour’
38 – A Famous Victory and a Forgotten Siege
39 – Two Emperors is One Too Many
40 – When an Old Soldier Leaves the Field
41 – The Last Knight of Christendom: The First Man of the Modern World
Author: Edoardo Albert
Edition: Hardcover
Pages: 304
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2026