The Technology That Brought Down Medieval Castles and Changed the Middle Ages

Civ­i­liza­tion moved past the use of cas­tles long ago, but their imagery endures in pop­u­lar cul­ture. Even young chil­dren here in the twen­ty-twen­ties have an idea of what cas­tles look like. But why do they look like that? Admit­ted­ly, that’s a bit of a trick ques­tion: the pop­u­lar con­cept of cas­tles tends to be inspired by medieval exam­ples, but in his­tor­i­cal fact, the design of cas­tles changed sub­stan­tial­ly over time, albeit slow­ly at first. You can hear that process explained in the Get to the Point video above, which tells the sto­ry of “star forts,” the built response to the “tech­nol­o­gy that end­ed the Mid­dle Ages.”

You may be famil­iar with the con­cept of “motte and bai­ley,” now most wide­ly under­stood as a metaphor for a cer­tain debate tac­tic irri­tat­ing­ly preva­lent on the inter­net. But it actu­al­ly refers to a style of cas­tle con­struct­ed in Europe between the tenth and the thir­teenth cen­turies, con­sist­ing of a for­ti­fied hill­top keep, or “motte,” with a less defen­si­ble walled court­yard, or “bai­ley,” below. In case of an attack, the bat­tle could pri­mar­i­ly take place down in the bai­ley, with retreats to the motte occur­ring when strate­gi­cal­ly nec­es­sary. The motte-and-bai­ley cas­tle is a “great idea,” says the video’s nar­ra­tor, pro­vid­ed “you don’t have can­nons shoot­ing at you.”

Cas­tles, he explains, “were a reflec­tion of armies at the time: build a big wall, keep the bar­bar­ians out.” But once the can­non came on the scene, those once-prac­ti­cal­ly imper­vi­ous stone walls became a seri­ous lia­bil­i­ty. That was defin­i­tive­ly proven in 1453, when “the Ottomans famous­ly bat­tered down the great walls of Con­stan­tino­ple with their can­nons. That brought an end not only to the 1500-year-old Roman Empire, but also to the Mid­dle Ages as an era entire­ly.” In response, cas­tle archi­tects added dirt slopes, or glacis, at the edges, as well as cir­cu­lar bas­tions to deflect can­non fire at the cor­ners — which, incon­ve­nient­ly, cre­at­ed “dead zones” in which ene­my sol­diers could hide, pro­tect­ed from any defens­es launched from with­in the cas­tle.

The solu­tion was to make the bas­tions tri­an­gu­lar instead, and then to add fur­ther tri­an­gu­lar struc­tures between them. Seen from the side, cas­tles became much low­er and wider; from above, they grew ever pointier and more com­plex in shape. Sébastien Le Pre­stre, Mar­quis of Vauban, an army offi­cer under Louis XIV, became the acknowl­edged mas­ter of this form, the trace ital­i­enne. You may not know his name, but his designs made France “lit­er­al­ly impos­si­ble to invade.” For sheer beau­ty, how­ev­er, it would be hard to top the plans for star forts to defend Flo­rence in the fif­teen-twen­ties by a mul­ti-tal­ent­ed artist named Michelan­ge­lo. Per­haps you’ve heard of him?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sim­ple, Inge­nious Design of the Ancient Roman Javelin: How the Romans Engi­neered a Remark­ably Effec­tive Weapon

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

How to Build a 13th-Cen­tu­ry Cas­tle, Using Only Authen­tic Medieval Tools & Tech­niques

A For­got­ten 16th-Cen­tu­ry Man­u­script Reveals the First Designs for Mod­ern Rock­ets

Behold a 21st-Cen­tu­ry Medieval Cas­tle Being Built with Only Tools & Mate­ri­als from the Mid­dle Ages

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.