A quantitative evaluation model of ancient military defense efficiency based on spatial strength—take Zhejiang of the Ming Dynasty as an example

Abstract

Abstract In the study of the defense capacity of ancient military settlements, most existing studies have evaluated the defense capacity of citadels qualitatively from a historiographical perspective. There are fewer quantitative studies on defense efficiency in a specific regional context. This paper takes the coastal defense citadels system of Zhejiang in the Ming Dynasty of China as the research object. It adopts a combination of digital historical data mining and quantitative research to study the defense efficiency of the military defense area in Zhejiang in the Ming Dynasty. This paper first analyzes the defense pattern of Zhejiang's sea defense citadels system in the Ming Dynasty. It determines the control points of defense groups, quantifies the defense group area with a Voronoi diagram, and classifies and assigns the entropy value to the deployment data of guard forts in historical data. Finally, the assigned forces are superimposed on the defense area to obtain the quantified defense efficiency of each defense group, and the defense results are verified. This paper innovatively proposes an "area-force" perspective. It introduces spatial segmentation and quantitative research methods to study the defense efficiency of a specific regional defense group system in ancient times. It proves that this method is feasible and can be applied to the study of other ancient military defense areas. It also expands the scientific perspective of ancient military fortification systems, which can contribute to systematically preserving ancient military settlement heritage on a larger scale.

Keywords

• Ming Dynasty
• Ancient citadel
• Military defense
• Areal control
• Force deployment