Wallhausen, Johann Jacobi Von La Milice Romaine, 1616

What’s the best way to attack a walled citadel? According to Homer, the ancient Greeks did it with a giant wooden horse. La Milice Romaine, a 1616 book by Johann Jacobi Von Wallhausen, includes an illustration of assault troops attacking a walled city, using ladders to scale the walls. The image, one of many showing various ways to attack and scale with ingenious machines, demonstrates the evolution of military tactics in response to a challenge that armies had faced for thousands of years by then.