1666 Les fortifications du Chevalier Antoine de Ville Tholosain.

Antoine Deville or de Ville (1596-1656), a military engineer born in Toulouse, owes his fame to his work entitled Les fortifications, the first edition of which appeared in Lyon in 1629, when he was thirty-two years old. Both a fine mathematician and a man of the field, Antoine Deville was probably educated at the Jesuit college in Toulouse. He began his military career at a very early age, participating in the various campaigns against the Protestants during the decade 1620-30. He was hired as a light horseman at the siege of Montauban in 1621, and in 1624 he took part in the siege of La Rochelle and then in the campaigns against the Huguenots in the south-west and in the south of the Massif Central. In 1626 he continued his career in the Netherlands in the battalions of the Duke of Savoy Charles Emmanuel I; he distinguished himself by obtaining the orders of Saint-Maurice and Saint Lazarus. Then, taking advantage of a short period of freedom, he travelled to Italy, in particular to Rome and the kingdom of Naples, during which he gathered the documentation necessary for the publication of his work on fortifications. This work was republished five times during the 17th century, in 1636 and 1666 in Paris, in 1640 in Lyon, and finally in 1672 and 1675 in Amsterdam. The later editions of the work did not make any changes, only the name of the publisher and the date of publication being modified on the frontispiece.
Unlike the contemporary work of Blaise de Pagan published in 1640, from which Vauban admitted having been inspired to modernise the principles of fortification "à la moderne", Deville's work is not notable for the novelty of the obsidional theories, but rather for its concern to rationalise the art of war. Giving great importance to the economy of siege, military logistics and the order of attacks and defence, his writings will be a major source of inspiration for Vauban's work.