Introduction

In 1509 Manuel I of Portugal sent a squire named Duarte de Armas on a journey to the fortified border between the Kingdoms of Portugal and Spain. The product of this mission (popularly known as the Book of Fortresses) is a compelling snapshot of late medieval and early modern military architecture that contains 120 perspective drawings and 51 plan drawings of 55 castles and fortified towns. The book was executed with a rare degree of completeness, geographic spread and complexity. It has most commonly been used by archaeologists looking at individual sites, or architectural historians attempting to create a typology of fortress forms from the plan drawings. Similarly, images of ‘daily life’ in the landscapes, and of distant ships in the backgrounds of some of the perspective drawings have excited social and naval historians, who treat these elements in isolation from the rest of the codex. In most of these studies, the book is mined for information rather than considered as a holistic product representing multiple scales of space. This encyclopaedic rather than analytical approach is in no way antithetical to the original purpose of the book, but there is a larger story about the visual communication of places in the Book of Fortresses that still needs to be addressed.