The 10th and 11th centuries by and large were a period of uncertainty, impetuousness and reorganization after the chaos of the early Middle Ages. In the 12th century, the boisterous feudal society seemed to expand and mature. The 13th century marks a period of balance and prosperity considered the apogee of medieval civilization and the golden age of castles. In France, for example, royal authority was greatly restored, the feudal independent local lords were on the decline, and the political and financial situation was more or less stabilized, allowing the Capetian sovereigns to integrate fortifications in a wide state strategy.
The Crusades enabled the West to learn much of eastern military engineering. Intercourse between European and Arab civilizations was constant, and new ideas developed there were used at home. Both siege warfare and European fortifications underwent a significant evolution in the 13th and 14th centuries.
Royal creations in the 13th and 14th centuries were astonishing in their scale and sophistication. The introduction of coherent systems marks a radical transformation. The most significant evolution was the development of the external wall, called the enceinte, increasing space within the castle for a larger garrison and providing more combat emplacements. While bulky but passive donjons had been the main defense works in the previous centuries, castles of the 13th and 14th centuries were more often homogeneous and comprehensive sophisticated fortresses composed of right walls flanked by cylindrical towers. Though irregular ground-plans were in some cases imposed by natural sites, the tendency was to build castles following a regular, symmetrical, geometrical and rigorous layout; the castles of Vitre and Poitiers (France) and Caerlaverok (Great-Britain) were triangular. But the most commonly used outline was a regular rectangle as seen in the Tower of London and in the castles Harlech, Bodiam and Beaumaris (Great Britain), Muiden (Netherlands), and Vil-landraut, Dourdan and Vincennes (France) just to mention a few. This kind of regular rectangle fortress was sometimes called a yard-castle. Defense was improved with passive obstacles, easy communications, efficient flanking, and active combat emplacements spread out in better positions that gave them more autonomy, increasing the defensive capability of the castle.
These great improvements, reviving the essential principles of fortification, permitted the building of castles in sites totally deprived of natural defenses. The rectangular disposition of the regular fortress created an open ground, a bailey or bascourt, allowing rapid movement for the garrison and the placing of war machines for hurling projectiles over the walls. Ancillary buildings—residence or palace, chapel, huts for servants, quarters for soldiers, stables for domestic animals, storehouses
World History
