The Castle as Fortress

The Castle and Siege

Warfare

Warfare had become endemic in eleventh - and twelfth-century Europe. Castle building used up the resources of the land as every landholder from the king and great nobles to the small landholders fortified their dwellings. Constant skirmishing, brigandage, and open warfare at home and abroad meant that people poured vast resources into training and equipping warriors and building castles and siege machines. The motte and bailey castle with its great tower, as the keep or donjon is called in medieval documents, was admirably suited as a defense against local skirmishes. The castle was also a symbolic expression of its owner’s power and pride (Figure 11). During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as kings and nobles tried to form larger estates and nations, they built massive stone castles.

Cities and towns sought to define and defend their borders by building walls and fortified gates. Even churches and monasteries had defensive walls. At the city of Avila, Spain, the cathedral apse formed one of the most powerful towers in the encircling walls, and in northwest Spain, the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela had to withstand a siege. Even monasteries like the Abbey of St. Denis just north of Paris in France had crenellated walls. In the nineteenth century the French architect Viollet-le-Duc restored the walls and towers of Carcassonne. Today the old city gives us a romanticized idea of medieval fortifications (Figures 11, 12, and 13).

The emergence of Islam as an international religion and the success of Muslim armies also energized Christian forces and drew them into wars

Figure 11. Castle of the Counts, Carcassonne, France. Although the entrance into the Castle of the Counts is within the fortified city, it has independent defenses, including a ditch once crossed by a drawbridge and a pair of round defensive towers. At the top of the crenellated towers, holes for the ends of beams supporting wooden hoardings can be seen. Photograph: Karen Leider.

Figure 12. Wall and towers with hoardings, Carcassonne, France. As restored by Viollet-le-Duc, this section of the walls represents the city as it would have been seen when prepared for war. Hoardings were temporary wooden platforms and walls that doubled or tripled the space available for the defenders on the top of the walls. Photograph: Karen Leider.