Collections: Fortification, Part III: Castling | Hacker News Reader

Collections: Fortification, Part III: Castling

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9 pointsgostsamo7 comments

Fuck me the Maiginot Line worked.! I have never read anything from Devereux without learning something that altered my world view a little bit.

Surely he is like Salted Caramel Ice Cream - one day I will order a cone and ... it will just be an ice cream like all the others.

Stay Salted Professor !

A separate question is that if castles are a product of society sliding down the right hand side of the economic graph (from the peaks of Rome or Holy Roman (ie states) then whybwerent there castles on the way up that slope?

It seems that you get retinues of retinues if you fragment, but in order to consolidate one central power just builds up the whole thing? Is it states on the way up, feudalism on the way down?

If you read the first post of the series, he talks about palisades and pre-roman/assyrian fortifications. Basically, there were simple fortifications when you expect raiders like the indian tribes in America. Once you have big states with specialized armies, you start to build bigger and more complex defenses. When the western roman empire fell, western Europe went back to simpler fortifications. With the enrichment of that part of the continent, the fortifications became stronger and built of stone, but then gunpowder was introduced and it changed all the equations.

It was more the state / polity / Manor issue - during the "fall" states fragmented into smaller parts that essentially could not afford large standing armies that would have the labour / coordination ability to mount a large siege.

But if that's the fall, you would assume an equal and opposite situation on the way up. As, for example, Rome grew in power there would be a series of manoral lords who had their own castles and Rome would have to assimilate them. But from my sketchy Republic history Rome was one of many city states competing - the city state was the unit size not the manor / castle.

It's almost like during the fall we fell further - sort of below zero whereas starting from zero we never went up through the castle stage.

Actually, you had the castle stage before the roman empire and this was during the bronz age with the palace culture. The city states of Greece were more like an exception with their counterpart in western Europe being the nordic Hanseatic league and the merchant city states of Italy.

Of course, the technological level of the world was different and the collapse wasn't that bad to the south, so the developments of western Europe did not mirror the past, but you can find good enough similarities if you look carefully.

Thank you - the Bronze Age palace culture (of which I know embarrassingly little) is a perfect example - interesting that we not quite fragment into exact smae shapes we built up from.

You have different technologies for food production, construction, and going to war. Climate and available animals might also affect the solution to a given problem. There are so many factors that affect it and that interact with each other.

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