The Age of the Great Castles

Whether in sports or in warfare, any idea that improves the situation of the offense almost at once stimulates the defense to think up ways of meeting the new threat. When the T-formation in football was first introduced, the offense-the team with the ball-had a great advantage, and the defense found it very difficult to stop its opponent from scoring. Immediately, coaches and players began thinking and experimenting, and soon came up with ways of meeting the new system of attack.

The same thing has happened many times in warfare and perhaps no more dramatically than in the problem of attacking and defending a castle. In this case, the defenders managed to keep the advantage for nearly 400 years. As a result, some of the most impressive amd magnificent structures ever erected by man are the castles of the Middle Ages. The fact that many hundreds of them still exist, even though partly in ruins, is the best testimony to their success.

When the first castles were built, about 1,000 years ago, most of them were rather simple constructions of earth and wood, although some used stone if such material was readily available. Very soon, the nobles and soldiers found that the wooden walls could be set on fire quite easily. The ditches and the earthen walls neither very deep nor very high, and a concerted rush by resolute attackers could sweep over them and capture the castle and its defenders. Also, men began devising better weapons for attacking castles-instruments for firing large stones and ways of hurling fire at the walls. They also developed new methods for protecting themselves when they advanced against the arrows of the defenders.

The builders of castles were thus stimulated to make them more difficult to capture. First of all, they began to use stone instead of wood and earth. They made the ditches wider and deeper and filled them with water. They built the walls higher; they built towers at the corners; and they built two walls, an outer and an inner"curtain". They began to make even better use of topography, that is, the lay of the land. They erected the castles on high points, where they overlooked a large area of the countryside and where steep cliffs made it difficult, if not impossible, for attackers to get at the castle from one or more sides. Often, too, this high point commanded a narrow pass through hills or mountains, or stood just above a river so that no one could go up and down it in boats unless the noble who owned the castle allowed them to do so.

Perhaps the greatest influence on castle building in Western Europe and the stimulus that resulted in the great and powerful medieval castles was the Crusades. The Crusades were a series of wars undertaken by European Christians to reconquer the Holy Land in the Near East from the Moslem people who had come to rule that region. Although the warfare between the Crusaders and the Moslem world went on more or less continually for about 200 years, the main efforts were divided into nine Crusades. The first began in 1095 and lasted until 1099.

The Crusaders were surprised at what they found. They discovered that in some ways the Moslems were ahead of them-in scientific knowledge, in some of the comforts of life, and in their skill at building military fortifications. The ancestors of the Crusaders had brought about the fall of the Roman Empire in Western Europe, but they had been so intent on doing so, and so behind in technology and education, that they did not appreciate the achievements of the Romans. Consequently, they did not copy or try to learn from the Romans, one of whose greatest skills had been that of building fortresses. So they had to start all over again, as they had done with wood and earth castles and with almost no knowledge of machines and methods that would help them build bigger and stronger buildings.

But the Crusaders found that the Moslem rulers had wisely studied the Roman buildings and fortifications which had been built in the Near East. The Moslems had not been so anxious to destroy everything the Romans had done, but had copied the buildings and building methods. In fact, as early as the eighth century, Moslem rulers had erected palaces which resembled the purely military forts of the Romans on the outside but were, for those times, luxurious palaces inside.

The Crusaders did two things. They began to build enormously strong stone castles in those parts of the Holy Land which they were able to capture, and they took back to Europe the knowledge of how to erect such structures. One of the most famous castles of all time is that of Krak des Chevaliers, or Castle of the Knights, which the Crusaders built in what is now Syria. The Knights Hospitalars began the castle in 1131, and it still stands today in an excellent state of preservation as one of the masterpieces of medieval military architecture. It rises on a lonely vantage point, among bare mountains, and by its position dominates both the north-south and the east-west routes of that part of Syria.

This castle was as strong in its day as it looks even now. It has a double line of walls around it, with great round towers, underground passages, and even a somberly beautiful chapel. The steep banks leading up to its walls were enough to discourage any attacker. One of the important points about castles of this type is that they are concentric, that is, all the defenses have a common center so that the castle is equally able to withstand an attack from any direction. This is in contrast to the early motte-and-bailey castle with its less heavily defended baileys.

One of the Crusaders who brought back to Europe new knowledge about castle building was Richard I of England, also known as Richard Coeur de Lion, or Richard the Lion-Hearted. He was the perfect example of the king of the age of chivalry, and every reader of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe knows of his knightly exploits. Unfortunately for the people of England he was too busy with the Crusades and other adventures to give much thought to the government of his country, but his military career helps trace the development of castles in Europe in the late twelfth century.

Richard, with the two other great kings of Europe of the time-the German Emperor Frederick I and King Philip II of France-led the Third Crusade which began in1189. In the Holy Land he was easily the most dashing leader and fought against the forces of the Saracen ruler Saladin. Although Richard was leading the Christian forces against what the Crusaders called the infidels, he discovered that Saladin was a man much like himself, and the two came to respect each other as honorable men and soldiers, despite their bitter conflict. On his way home, Richard was captured and imprisoned in Durnstein Castle by Leopold II, Margrave of Austria, and was released only after the English people paid a huge ransom for thier king.

As Duke of Normandy as well as King of England, Richard came to conflict with the King of France, and in 1196 he used his knowledge and experience in the Hloy Land to build the most perfect fortress he could devise. He called it Chateau Galliard. or Saucy Castle, and once desrcibed it as "my beautiful one-year-old daughter". It stood above the Seine River at Les Andelys in northwestern France, guarding a gateway to Normandy. Richard personally supervised the building of the castle which included the most advanced ideas of the day. It was rather long and narrow, because of the way the land lay, and was guarded partly by steep slopes, partly by great walls and moats. This castle had not one but three baileys, with the keep in the inner and strongest bailey.

Richard thought it was the strongest castle in the world. Philip, King of France, said that "if its walls were iron I would take it". Richard, his bitter enemy by now, replied,"If they were of butter I would hold it". The test between the two men never came about because Richard was killed in1199, whan he was only 42 years old. He was besieging a small, weak castle when, riding too near the walls, he was struck by a bolt shot from a crossbow and died of the wound. Five years later King Philip made good his boast by capturing Chateau Gaillard, although he had to starve the defenders into submission rather than take the castle by assault. Almost 400 years later, when castles were much less important in warfare, Henry IV of France had Gaillard's defenses dismantled, but it is still an impressive and exciting sight, one of the great memorials of the age of castles.

The development of castles, from the simple motte-and-bailey type already descibed, to the great structures such as Chateau Gaillard and Harlech Castle, can be traced through two other styles of building. One of these is called the rectangular keep and the other the shell keep. Both of these developed out of the motte-and-bailey, a few of them at about the same time that the latter was being constructed in large numbers. In turn, the rectangular and shell keep type castles gave way to the concentric castle, with round towers and higher and stronger walls that resulted from knowledge gained in the Crusades and from the necessity of defending against increasingly powerful weapons.

The rectangular keeps, or towers, are still among the most imposing relics of the Middle Ages, especially in England. They were an improvement in stone of the wooden keeps erected on the mounds in early castle building. Usually, though, because of their weight they could not be built on the earlier earthen mound. To compensate for this, they were constructed with the only entrance at the second floor. Like the older wooden keeps, they were the last defense and were surrounded by a curtain wall. These rectangular keeps had their greatest development in Britain in the twelfth century during the reign of Henry II. Many castles had been built during the reign of his predecessor, King Stephen, and Henry destroyed them, building in their place these imposing great towers. He saw to it that they remained in his hands.

Although none of these towers was exactly alike, they were much the same. They were taller than they were wide or long. The ground floor was for storage, and living accommodations were above it. Access to the entrance was by a stairway, which often was enclosed in a smaller outer building. This building or the keep itself would have a chapel. The keep would have a well, and facilities for cooking, although usually there was not a real kitchen. On the whole, accommodations were rather crude. Such structures were built more for defense than for comfort, although as time went on they became more comfortable and luxurious.

In the shell keep type of castle, more emphasis was placed on the walls as defense, rather than centering the strength in the tower keep. The earlier wooden walls around the summit of the