Cottonera Lines
The Cottonera Lines represent the large continuous fortified enceinte from the Hospitaller period ( full extent roughly eight kilometers). The Cottonera lines were begun in 1670 as a result of the fall of the Venetian outpost of Candia, in Crete, to the Turks in 1669, originally consisted of a massive trace of eight large bastions, encircling the earlier yet still-unfinished St. Margherita enceinte. This massive enceinte was intended to form one large defensive apron around the Three Cities of Vittoriosa, Senglea, and Cospicua in Malta, largely by sealing off the high ground overlooking these fortresses, thereby denying an invading army the ability to lay siege to the main positions in the Grand Harbour.
This defensive perimeter was named after Grand Master Nicolau Cotoner, who commissioned their construction, and was designed by Italian engineer Antonio Maurizio Valperga as part of his overall scheme for the defence of the harbours around Valletta. Work on the Cottonera Lines began in August 1670 and continued incessantly for a decade until the death of the Grand Master in 1680, by which time the main body of the enceinte had already been laid down. The funds allocated for the Cottonera fortifications had by then run out and the new Grand Master ordered the cessation of the project. As a result the ravelins and cavaliers, together with the ditch and the covertway that were originally part of the massive scheme proposed by Valperga, were never constructed.
The project remained virtually abandoned until well into the 18th century when some effort was made to bring the works to some semblance of completion but still lacking the crucial outworks and cavaliers. A fort (Fort San Salvador) was built into one of the bastions in 1724 and two large gunpowder magazines were constructed to house the reserve stocks of gunpowder.
In the 19th century the British made other alterations to the enceinte, namely the construction of a larger internal fort, called St Clement Retrenchment, and the demolition of the large Valperga Bastion and St Paul Curtain to make way for the construction of No. 1 Dock. The Cottonera lines today retain six (out of the seven) original Baroque gateways, and various sally-ports.
External links
- Cottonera Lines
- S.C. Spiteri, Fortresses of the Knights (Malta,2001), pages 295-300