Castles in Middle Ages Europe

Encastellation thus led to a characteristic form of medieval warfare wherein battles took place almost exclusively between besieging and relieving armies. Otherwise, commanders stayed behind high stone walls to try to outlast enemy besiegers, perhaps occasionally sending out a sortie to disrupt and kill sappers or overturn and burn a siege engine. If caught in the open, defenders tried to regain the castle or sometimes just ran away. The most effective way to entice defenders out to give battle was to assault their economic base by burning crops and killing livestock. In short, by ravaging the land around the castle with a blockade or chevauche´e. Castle innovation moved in step with improvements in siegecraft, after some earlier design was proven faulty by being overcome. Earth and timber also gave way to stone with rising wealth. Then came improved central design around a keep (or donjon). Walls grew higher and thinner to deny assault from various siege engines, while gate design grew more complicated and deceptive in order to protect what was the weakest point of any fortification. Moats, dry ditches, and earth banks were added to slow and expose attackers to defensive fire. As artillery improved, square fac¸ades became too vulnerable and were displaced by rounded keeps and towers to deflect rather than absorb high velocity stone or iron shot. Walls also dropped in height as bombardment rather than storming emerged as the main danger to defenders.

Castles grew in scale with the expansion of economic activity and enclosure of additional buildings within the outer walls. Multiple towers were now located along extended curtain walls, linked by wall-walks and sited within crossbow shot of one another. The larger enclosed areas could accommodate expanded garrisons; some later castles had more than one large enceinte. Architecturally attractive, but principally functional defensive features proliferated: merlons and crenels atop the curtain wall, machicolations and barbicans above the gates. These modifications were fitted into a grand redesign of the whole fortification on a geometric pattern such as a quadrangle. Some late castles were built as complex octagons with their many sides supported by boulevards and bastions, features also added to older structures to extend their useful life. At the end of the castlebuilding era, around 1450 in Europe (170 years later in Japan), stone walls were fitted with slings and swivel guns. Larger defensive cannon were placed inside or atop specially built artillery towers, while squat gun platforms were built behind preexisting curtain walls with gun ports cut close to ground level.