St Martin's Tower
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St Martin's Tower , also Garzes Tower , Italian called Torre Garzes , was the first watchtower built by the Hospitallers on the Maltese islands . It served as a model for the Wignacourt Towers, which were built shortly thereafter, and is sometimes counted among these towers due to the time it was built . The fortification structure monitored the port of Mġarr on the island of Gozo .
history
At the turn of the 16th to the 17th century, Malta was facing a growing risk of attacks by Turkish warships and corsairs . Even if the siege of 1565 had failed from the perspective of the Ottomans and they had lost the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571, Turkish naval units repeatedly sailed threateningly close to the Maltese islands.In 1574 a fleet of around 300 Turkish ships sought refuge in the Gozo Canal . On Gozo itself there were looting in 1583 and again in 1598, during which the residents of Rabat were also abducted into slavery.
Under the rule of Grand Master Martin Garzes , the first plans arose to secure the Maltese islands with tower-like fortifications. The order of knights commissioned the Italian fortress builder Giovanni Rinaldini to reorganize the defense of Gozo. Grand Master Garzes died in 1601, leaving the sum of 12,000 Scudi for the construction of a defense tower on Gozo.
Construction began in 1605 and continued in 1607. The tower was used as a defensive structure until the end of the order, as the few descriptions and illustrations that have survived show. In 1848, under British rule, it was demolished and the stones were used to build a road through the valley of M Talarr.
description
The few picture sources only give an approximate representation of the size and outline of the tower. Stephen C. Spiteri , in his essay The Bastioned Towers , published in 2013, presented a three-dimensional reconstruction of St Martin's Tower based on these representations and descriptions.
Exterior
Similar to the fortress on Isola di Capo Passero , which dates from the same time as St Martin's Tower, the massive two-storey tower rose in the shape of a truncated pyramid on a square plan and was "built in the manner of a small fortress". As with the Wignacourt Towers built later, the entrance was on the first floor and could only be reached via stone stairs and a wooden drawbridge . The roof was surrounded by a parapet with four battlements on each side. At two of the corners of the flat roof there were sentry boxes ( guérite ). At times there was a square tower in the middle of the roof in the shape of a vedette , which was built around 1720 and no longer existed at the beginning of the 19th century.
Interior
The interior comprised, according to an entry in the files of the order, “the eponymous church of San Martino, in which Holy Mass is celebrated on all high feast days, [...] there are all amenities for the castellan, the soldiers and their families Families, armories, powder rooms, and everything else that serves the comfortable living of the people living there. ”There is even supposed to have been a tavern there. The tower was armed with artillery, muskets, halberds and other military equipment as well as ammunition such as powder, lead and cannon balls.
literature
- Stephen C. Spiteri : In the Defense of the Coast (I): The Bastioned Towers . In: ARX . International Journal of Military Architecture and Fortification. No. 3 , 2013, p. 4–10 (English, online ( memento of July 27, 2016 in the Internet Archive )).