Castles in Middle Ages Europe

Local lords of all they surveyed, but not much more, showed little regard for ”national” claims of a distant king, let alone the universalist pretensions of pope or emperor. Greater authority in law was defied by force majeure in fact, by armed and armored men hunkered with their private armies inside nearly unbreachable stone perimeters. Control of castles and the lands they dominated was thus the principal issue at stake in most local quarrels and in the great ”national” wars of the Middle Ages. For instance, many Austrian, German, Italian, and Swiss castles date to the 11thcentury Wars of Investiture with the papacy, which saw local uprisings against an excommunicated emperor that produced outright anarchy in Saxony and areas of southern Germany. The reality of fragmented polities and private military power together made the Middle Ages an era of chronic if low-level warfare in which a scourge of warlords defined politics by the crudest forms of force majeure. This near-anarchy of the Medieval countryside separated that period from the era of universal law and empire that ended with the fall of Rome, and from the era of political and military consolidation that followed with the rise of powerful monarchies and then the nation-state.

A wave of castle-building began around 1000 C.E., representing political fragmentation as well as physical fortification of the countryside. Castles could be as simple as an earth and wood motte-and-bailey fort or a round tower like those of coastal Ireland. Or they might rise above already grand natural heights as some extraordinary multi-towered and bastioned edifice, as in Normandy and the Aquitaine, Castile and Catalonia, or Syria and Palestine. In the 12th and 13th centuries stone fortifications remained nearly unbreachable by torsion artillery, although a patient and well-organized attacker might be able to sap under thick walls, or batter down thin ones with a catapult or trebuchet. Alternately, a surrender might be forced through surprise attack at night or at dawn, or intimidation by slow torture or execution of prisoners in view of the defenders. If the attacker could afford the money and the men, assault from a siege tower might bring a mighty castle down.

This was rarely tried, however, as loss of life in a storming-froma siege tower or through a breach in the wall-was usually prohibitive. Also, the solution to such direct assaults was simple and obvious: build stone walls higher at the top and thicker at the base. That proved an effective response by military architects at least until the advent of truly effective gunpowder artillery forced defensive walls to shorten and demanded their reinforcement and insulation with external earthworks. Castles rose to dominate the countryside in region after region. The most heavily encastellated region of Europe was Italy, because it was the richest and most worth the expense of erecting stone defenses. Castle-building was extensive even in modestly urbanized areas, such as Castile, southern England, Normandy, Saxony, and Thuringia. Castles were built along important overland trade routes to better sweep in taxes and monitor suspicious travelers, or as centers for local administration, or to display private overlordship, power, wealth, and privilege. Given the option of simply out-waiting an enemy, defenders became ever more reluctant to fight a numerically superior, equal, or even slightly inferior army on the battlefield.