The design was employed by Michelangelo in the defensive earthworks of Florence, and refined in the sixteenth century by Alcazar Peruzzi and Scamozzi. The design spread out of Italy in the 1530s and 1540s. It was employed heavily throughout Europe for the following three centuries. Italian engineers were heavily in demand throughout Europe to help build the new fortifications.

Another important design modification were the bastions that characterized the new fortresses. In order to improve the defence of the fortress, covering fire had to be provided, often from multiple angles. The result was the development of star-shaped fortresses.

Star fortifications were further developed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries primarily in response to the French invasion of the Italian peninsula. The French army was equipped with new cannon and bombards that were easily able to destroy traditional fortifications built in the Middle Ages. In order to counteract the power of the new weapons, defensive walls were made lower and thicker. They were built of many materials, usually earth and brick, as brick does not shatter on impact from a cannonball as stone does.

In contrast, the star fortress was a very flat structure composed of many triangular or lozenge shaped bastions designed to cover each other, and a (typically dry) ditch.

It was first seen in the mid-15th century in Italy. Passive ring-shaped (enceinte) fortifications of the Medieval era proved vulnerable to damage or destruction by cannon fire, when it could be directed from outside against a perpendicular masonry wall. In addition, an attacking force that could get close to the wall was able to conduct undermining operations in relative safety, as the defenders could not shoot at them from nearby walls.

A star fort, or trace italienne, is a fortification in the style that evolved during the age of gunpowder when cannon came to dominate the battlefield.

Indentations in the base of each point on the star sheltered cannons. Those cannons would have a clear line of fire directly down the edge of the neighbouring points, while their point of the star was protected by fire from the base of those points.

A further and more subtle change was to move from a passive model of defence to an active one. The lower walls were more vulnerable to being stormed, and the protection that the earth banking provided against direct fire failed if the attackers could occupy the slope on the outside of the ditch and mount an attacking cannon there. Therefore, the shape was designed to make maximum use of enfilade (or "flanking") fire against any attackers who should reach the base of any of the walls.

Ditches and walls channeled attacking troops into carefully constructed killing grounds where defensive cannons could wreak havoc on troops attempting to storm the walls, with emplacements set so that the attacking troops had nowhere to shelter from defensive fire.

Where conditions allowed, as in Fort Manoel in Malta, ditches were cut into the native rock, and the wall at the inside of the ditch was simply unquarried native rock. As the walls became lower, they also became more vulnerable to assault. Worse still, the rounded shape that had previously been dominant for the design of turrets created "dead space", or "dead" zones which was relatively sheltered from defending fire, because direct fire from other parts of the walls could not be shot around the curved wall. To prevent this, what had previously been round or square turrets were extended into diamond-shaped points to give storming infantry no shelter.

When the newly effective manoeuvrable siege cannon came into military strategy in the fifteenth century, the response from military engineers was to arrange for walls to be embedded into ditches fronted by earth slopes so that they could not be attacked by direct fire and to have the walls topped by earth banks that absorbed and largely dissipated the energy of plunging fire.

The predecessors of star fortifications were medieval fortresses, usually placed on high hills. From there, arrows were shot at the enemies, and the higher the fortress was, the further the arrows flew. The enemies' hope was to either ram the gate or climb over the wall with ladders and overrun the defenders. For the invading force, these fortifications proved difficult to overcome.

The star-shaped fortification had a formative influence on the patterning of the Renaissance ideal city: "The Renaissance was hypnotized by one city type which for a century and a half—from Filarete to Scamozzi—was impressed upon all utopian schemes: this is the star-shaped city."

The late-seventeenth-century architect Menno van Coehoorn and Marshal de Vauban, Louis XIV's military engineer, are considered to have taken the form to its logical extreme. "Fortresses... acquired ravelins and redoubts, bonnettes and lunettes, tenailles and tenaillons, counterguards and crownworks and hornworks and curvettes and fausse brayes and scarps and cordons and banquettes and counterscarps..."