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P R E F A C E.

The construction of cities, if one looks to their invention, is not new, nor freshly devised; on the contrary, it began with the first age of the world. To assure ourselves of a certain author, we shall find none more ancient than Cain, who, driven by the remorse of his evil conscience and filled with a continual fear because of the murder of his brother, was the first to surround his city with an enclosure. But for this, one should not reproach the art of architecture simply because the author was a murderer; for it often happens that the most wicked men have devised admirable inventions and greatly benefited their posterity. Thus we have seen that bad customs and crimes have given birth to beautiful Laws; likewise, Empires began with Nimrod, that great hunter of men In biblical tradition, Nimrod is often depicted as the first powerful monarch and the builder of the Tower of Babel., though not without the spilling of much blood. Nevertheless, good laws and empires will always be held in honor, nor will they lack duration, inasmuch as the Divine Majesty has established them and will always maintain them, provided that justice is preserved therein with a suitable rigor.

In the first liberty of men, there was no fear that obliged them to seek shelter or to place themselves in any enclosure. Fear coming after crime, it was the cause for men to distrust the rest of the living and to shut themselves into a voluntary prison. But such a fashion of building was, without doubt, quite crude, as we commonly see that inventions are never brought to their highest point by their original inventors. And to say what I think of it, I would not hold that to be the first trial of fortification, as the world was not yet so advanced as to be able to field armies and handle weapons with any dexterity. It was rather a hedge, to guard against beasts, than a fortification to resist the force of men.

But we will very willingly confess that this science was invented shortly after the world renewed its face, which had been drowned and plunged for a time into an abyss of waters A reference to the Great Flood.. This will be easy to demonstrate by looking at the events that occurred then. For war began to heat up furiously in that age; after several great slaughters, it brought with it prisons and servitude. Men, having then found an abundant and fertile land, began to build a tower, or rather a castle, with a city—the most superb that could be seen—which was thereafter always the throne of the empire and its principal fortress. Which construction we shall take, for more just reasons, as the first Fortification and the beginning of this art. The invention having been found, this science immediately increased, seeing [that]...