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Comment by fbdab103 | Hacker News Reader

Admittedly only skimmed some of the parts, but this one stood out to me:

  And large castles were incredibly difficult to take. In fact, up until the appearance and widespread adoption of (relatively) modern gunpowder artillery (late 15th / early 16th century) it was more common for a castle to surrender because it ran out of food. And that could take months or even years, a period during which besieging army would suffer from disease, possibly food shortage, and was vulnerable to relief forces.

How was it possible for medieval technology to feed a population for years? Sea access to enable fishing seems the only option, but that seems like a prime target for the attackers to do their best to blockade the port and harass the fishermen.

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Castle garrisons were small. Even a large-ish castle probably didn't have garrison larger than 25 - 30.

And food doesn't take that much space either. Consider how Age of Sail ships would spend months at sea without resupply, and how a castle has much more space available for storage. And even with medieval technology, you can make food that keeps long: salted, smoked or dried meat; dried fruit; marmelade; hardtack; and so on.

Also, fodder for animals + live animals themselves. Fresh meat provided the defenders with nutrients, plus especially pigs are great "cleaners", they eat just about everything.

A castle doesn't necessarily have many people in it. If you have access to water, you can store quite a bit of food for a small number of people.

The issue is that an army MUST forage. An army will burn up all the food in an area very quickly--at which point it must move.

Now that you are moving, your back flank is vulnerable to the attackers which were in the castle. And you have a bunch of pissed off locals who hate you for eating all their food.

There was a reason why "quartering of troops" was explicitly written into the US Constitution.

Not only that, an important thing to consider as the besieging force was to have at least triple the numbers of the garrison defending the castle.[1]

So if a castle was garrisoned by a defending force of 2,000, you wanted at least 6,000 men as the besieging force to even stand a chance of winning the siege whether through killing or attrition.

And this quickly grows exponentially for the besiegers as the defending force becomes bigger: If the defenders numbered 5,000 men, you wanted 15,000 men as the besiegers.

So not only did the besiegers have a harder time fighting compared to the defenders, the logistical requirements and demands for the besiegers was significantly larger than anything the defenders had to deal with.

[1]: https://www.quora.com/How-large-of-an-army-unit-in-medieval-...

Nitpick: you mean that it grows linearly, not exponentially.

You don't put the population in the castle, just a fighting force, and you could have enough food (taken from the surrounding country in normal times) stored there to supply them for a year or more.

Castles weren't there to protect the peasants/farmers. They were there to house small military force and the nobility commanding them. Plus relatively tiny amount of workers.

Vast majority of population were working farms. And they were taxed heavily enough that those owning the land had the year or two food stored.

Umm yeah that's what I said?

Castles were terribly expensive and time consuming to build. Yet they dot the landscape. The only way that could happen is if they were effective.

They also have survivorship bias. Wooden palisades are effective but tend not to survive time.

That argument only works in one direction: if castles had been ineffective, they wouldn't have been built so much. Yet every castle surviving is a castle that has been built. There are no castle at present that have never been built.

There are castles that have never played a role in a war, though. One of the most interesting castles in France, Bonaguil, is an almost perfectly designed castle with brilliantly designed defensive systems, but it was built in an area that never saw any major military campaigns. A theory is that the builder built it as a demonstration of his own skill in castle design.

It'd be a bit late to build the castle after the major military campaign, so the lack of campaigns doesn't mean the castles wouldn't get built in case of the future eventuality.

It might go so far that perhaps the reason the area never saw major military campaigns is because of the defensibility of it's castles?

I think most castles are still in the areas that saw the most fighting, although I don't have any good data on that. I know the Dordogne saw a lot of fighting, and it has a lot of castles that got upgraded regularly.

Castles line both banks of the river Rhein. They were built to extract tolls from the river traffic.

Egyptians built pyramids in order that their kings would live forever. The pyramids were not effective at allowing their kings to live forever so why did they build so many?

Stone Age people painted the animals they were going to hunt on rocks so that the pictures would entrap the animals' spirit and they would be easier to catch. This method of ensuring a good hunt was not effective so why did they do so many paintings?

The Egyptians believed their pyramids were effective. The nature of that belief made it difficult to challenge (who is to say those Pharaohs aren't still alive in their afterlife?)

Military technology has to prove itself in this life, not the next. That's a more stringent test.

The Great Wall of China is military technology, would you consider that its effectiveness is proven?

It was primarily built to create a geographical barrier where otherwise there was none. Even though all such barriers can in principle be crossed or bypassed, they can still cause considerable tactical and logistical issues for any attacker.

Without the wall, raiding bands of any size could just slip through and cause havoc. Only large and well-organized forces had siege equipment to break through wherever they wanted. Similarly, traffic and migration of peoples could be controlled and tolls and customs could be enforced. It also acted as an infrastructure for fast transmission of messages. In those ways, like the Roman Limes and the European castle networks, it was mostly an infrastructure for peaceful times.

But even in war, it was preferred to bypass it or to capture a gateway fortress, otherwise these forces could cause enormous problems for the attackers. For example, only allying with the Ming garrison at Liaoning made it possible for the Manchus to crush the short-lived Shun dynasty and establish the Qing dynasty.

It must have yeah? It is not exactly the ice wall in Westeros. But it must have acted as a major speed bump for any invading army.

Getting across animals and heavy equipment is not easy.

Cause enough delay to send some more soldiers to deter them some more?

> Egyptians built pyramids in order that their kings would live forever

Pyramids were built for the after-life. Not as a way to extend their life on Earth. Nobody could verify if it actually worked, so it's mostly a question of faith.

> Stone Age people painted the animals they were going to hunt on rocks so that the pictures would entrap the animals' spirit

That's just speculation from historians. It may be that they are right, but there are also other theories. One other theory could be that it is a way of giving thanks to the animals, and a way to honor their loss. Personally I don't think there is a single reason why they painted animals. People have always had different motivations

Right so by analogy, it's possible that medieval castles were built a) for a reason that we don't understand or b) for a reason we do understand, but where the justification for why castles fulfil that requirement is dubious.

I simply replied to a statement that was false. We have a good understanding of why pyramids were built, and it does not match your statement.

You made the following statements:

1. Pyramids were built so kings could live forever

2. The Egyptians saw that this did not work, but continued to build pyramids.

The first statement is not true. The pyramids were built for the after-life. This invalidates the premise for your second statement, as the Egyptians could not verify that it worked in the after-life (or that there even is an after-life).

Now that you see my reply in a different context, your castle analogy is also not relevant.

> Stone Age people painted the animals they were going to hunt on rocks so that the pictures would entrap the animals' spirit and they would be easier to catch.

This is pure speculation. The track record of speculations by archaeologists isn't very good.

Probably the silliest speculation ever was when two gourds connected by a string were hypothesized to be an ancient telephone.

> The only way that could happen is if they were effective.

I think most castles were built mainly as status symbols, and not the result of a regional or national defense strategy. Castles are imposing buildings in places that dominate the landscape, built by local leaders to project their power and influence. You see a few castles being built in the US in non-feudal times for similar reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_castles_in_the_United_...

Afterwards the defensive purpose of these structures started to gave way to the more opulent side. Some manor houses featured defensive structures mainly for show, although they served the same purpose.

You're contradicting yourself. Building them to protect local leader's power and influence and national defense are very much the same thing in feudal societies.

> You're contradicting yourself. Building them to protect local leader's power and influence and national defense are very much the same thing in feudal societies.

I said "project", not "protect". Meaning, one is a kin to peacocking, while the other is literally building moats and draw bridges to keep the enemy at bay.

Project vs. protect actually doesn't make a difference here. It's a fortified base from where sorties can be sent out into the surrounding area, projecting the noble's power.

To stop that from happening, one has to capture the castle or be friendly with the garrison. This creates problems for anyone passing through, be they farmers, merchants, unfriendly neighbors of the noble, or an army passing through.

Peacocking might have happened, but castles would be a useful form of peacocking. Be as that may, they were still mostly uncomfy money drains, barely earning back their running costs via tolls, and usually funded by major nobles who then sent their underlings to actually man the place. If at all possible, one would rather build two castle in useful locations than a single redundant one.

This is an amusing argument because I feel like you're both right. Castles sort of gradually transformed into beautiful manor houses when they weren't useful for defense any longer that certainly were just to project outward wealth and prestige. But earlier castles were often hideous utilitarian structures which I doubt anyone particularly liked living in.

You could of course argue the newer structures weren't castles at all of course, even if they were called that.

Of course, later "castles" like Schloss Neuschwanstein were dedicated showpieces. I think the argument is about whether nobles built such purely representational castles already in the, let's call it Castle Age. But I'd argue that such usage only became common when nobles started to centralize their power to turn their fiefs into proper states.

I'd love to live in Neuschwanstein.

"I think most castles were built mainly as status symbols, and not the result of a regional or national defense strategy."

I think you are mixing up more than 1000 years of architectural history in a few lines.

Medieval castles were very much defensive installations, which is clear from their a) layout, b) locations, c) the fact that medieval history of warfare is chock-full of castle sieges, while pitched battles like Crécy or Grunwald were spectacular, but rare.

Fancy 19th century castles (re-)built in opulent style were mostly conspicuous consumption, as you say. But by that time, nobility preferred chateaus/palaces anyway. Much more comfortable to live in.

It's also clear if one toured an older castle. It's obvious they meant business. For example, lack of windows through the walls. For another, the thickness of the walls.

Status castles have windows in the walls, and thin walls.

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