Nicolas Doxat

Nicolas Doxat de Démoret also Nicolas Doxat von Morez (3 November 1682 – 20 March 1738) was a Swiss general in the army of the Habsburg Monarchy. He is also known as the engineer who rebuilt the Kalemegdan Fortress and as the first foreign Belgrade urban planner and builder.

Biography Nicolas Doxat, born in 1682 in Yverdon, a Swiss canton of Bern, was the son of Joseph zu Démoret (co-lord of Démoret) (1643–1718) and Marguerite von Stürler (b. 1645). They received the noble title of baron from Emperor Ferdianand. His parents were of the Reformed faith (Protestants) and a citizen of Démoret. Nicolas remained single and his wealth was estimated at 30,000 florin in gold). At the age of 18, Nikola Doxat joined the Dutch army, which sends him to school to become a fortification officer. As an engineer officer, he participated in the War of the Spanish Succession and in Flanders (1702–1714). After the siege of Lille, he joined the Austrian Imperial Army, where he advanced rapidly, rising to the rank of general. He participated in the Habsburg-Ottoman war in the Danube region (1716–1718) and in the war in Sicily (1718–1720). He was seriously wounded during the siege of Timisoara. A bullet hit him in the right knee, his left shoulder was crushed, and his left hip was severely injured. Because of these injuries, Nikola Doxat remained crippled for the rest of his life. The specificity of this complex of buildings is the network of underground passages that connected them to each other, and it is believed to also be the fortress on Kalemegdan. The court of Eugene of Savoy and the house of Nikola Doxat, which were located in today's Dušanova Street, were connected to the fortress by these tunnels. The length of these underground passages, the routes they pass through and what they connect, due to strategic reasons, most probably only Nikola Doxat himself knew. Allegedly, he kept the plans to himself hidden and never disclosed, not even to his superiors. According to some beliefs, there are tunnels leading from the Belgrade fortress to Zemun, and their role was to supply the city in case of siege and a safe retreat in case of extreme emergency

Conflict with Prince Alexander von Wittenberg During his service in Belgrade, Nikola Doxat came into conflict with Prince Alexander von Wittenberg, the man who before him made plans for the reconstruction of Belgrade, but those ideas were dismissed as amateurism. Doxat did not get along well with him and tried to bring him back to Vienna on several occasions, but Alexander was left in Belgrade to participate in large works that were financed even by Pope Benedict XIII. In 1735, Doxat determined that Prince Alexander von Wittenberg was stealing money from the secret funds of the empire, and the disgraced prince was sent back to Vienna. Using the influence and connections he had, he managed to cover up the affair, but he remained determined to take revenge on the Belgrade urban planner Nikola Doxat. The only thing that prevented him was the fact that Doxat, due to an exceptionally well-done job in the fortification and reconstruction of Belgrade, found himself at the mercy of the court and was given the rank of general.