Early conquest

The empires of Byzantium and Persia had been fighting over the territory between them since about 570. By 630, many of cities on the front had suffered destruction of walls and crops, and many of the men of fighting age had been drafted for one of the armies or otherwise killed. The area of the front was generally called Syria, covering some of what we now call Iraq, as well as Jordan and Palestine.

It was under Byzantine control when Caliph Umar set out to attack. Between 634 and 636, the Arab army conquered Damascus and won some pitched battles that left all of Syria in their control. At the same time, another army headed into Persia and conquered its capital, Ctesiphon.

The Byzantine bishop of Jerusalem, Patriarch Sophronius, surrendered after a long siege, in 637. Arabs conquered Gaza, and while negotiating a one year cease-fire with Byzantium, incidentally took Antioch. Damascus, Antioch and Jerusalem were the chief cities of Syria, and were the original centers of Christianity. As soon as the truce expired, they finished occupying all of the Holy Land, Mesopotamia, and much of Egypt. Alexandria fell in 642, and the Byzantine Empire was pretty much over.

Umar was the second Caliph, and he died in 644. He had led his armies in all this conquest, but he hadn’t directly participated in the fighting. His focus was on political structure. He kept it minimal, setting up a taxation system and appointing a governor, but otherwise leaving each locality to do things its own ways. His first priority for tax money was to give the other Companions of Mohammed a pension so that they could focus on organizing the Koran and hadiths. His death ended the political unity of Islam, though. More on that later. Conquest continued, under various generals.

Byzantium had controlled North Africa, which was now open for rapid conquest. It was only loosely governed to begin with, and the inhabitants had never felt much allegiance to Constantinople. This was a problem everywhere; Byzantine taxes had been high, and the Byzantine Orthodox church had suppressed local religious sects, Jew and Christian. It wasn’t immediately obvious that new masters would be worse, and they may have been better at first. Muslim histories record the Christian and Jewish residents coming to them freely and swearing allegiance, promising to help dislodge Byzantine rule.

Once Byzantine troops in Tripoli and Carthage were disposed of, the residents didn’t resist conquest at all. In North Africa, the Berber tribes welcomed Islam and joined their armies.

Sicily was invaded in 652; Crete and Cyprus were Arab by 653. Muslims now held much of the former breadbasket of Byzantium, resulting in food shortages there.

By the time the Companions of Mohammed were splitting into factions, they were receiving tribute and taxes from most of the ancient world: Syria, Palestine, Persia, Egypt, Arabia, and North Africa. A lot of money and power was at stake. The Companions agreed that they’d keep power within their own tribe, the Quraysh. But they couldn’t agree on which individual: Ali, Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law, or Uthman, another influential man. And from this dispute the world has never quite recovered.

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Mohammed

Mohammed, assuming he really lived (which I believe but a few renegade scholars challenge), can be placed in the early 600s. He was a merchant living in Mecca, where the dominant religion was pagan. The Kaaba already existed and was probably a shrine for idols. Its presence had already made Mecca a center of trade. Mohammed was a young man married to an older, wealthier, widow. On marrying Khadija, he took over the merchant business her first husband had left.

Around 610, he began to have visions. Khadija believed and encouraged him. Mohammed told people about the visions, but he never wrote them down; he may have been illiterate. (Arabia may have been mostly pre-literate until 600.) The message of his visions was to adopt something much like the Judaism that also flourished on the Arabian peninsula, to embrace charity for the poor and to reject idolatry. Mecca rejected this message and he left in 622.

In Medina, the extended-family tribes were locked in a dispute they could not settle. Like the later medieval Italian cities that only permitted a genetic outsider to be the mayor to prevent feuds, Medina welcomed Mohammed and asked him to settle the dispute. He and his family settled happily in Medina, where there was a strong Jewish presence. Many of Islam’s similarities to Judaism come from this period, when it wasn’t yet clear that he was going to differentiate “his” religion so sharply from theirs.

The turning point came when the pagan population of Medina accepted Mohammed’s new doctrine, but the Jews saw no reason to make any changes. Mohammed, now the leader of a small city, carried out Jewish pogroms. One tribe was massacred, the other exiled with only what they could carry (a big theme for medieval European Jews, too, as well as modern exiled Jews: always being stripped down to the clothes on your back and an overnight bag).

Mohammed used the resources of Medina to lead a war band on Mecca, where he got revenge for their earlier rejection. The Kaaba became a shrine to Allah. (Muslims believe that this had been its original purpose, that the idolatry period had been a corruption.) Then Mohammed led a successful war to unite the Arabian peninsula under Islam; this was accomplished by the time of his death.

Mohammed died in 632; but Khadija had died some time earlier, leaving him free to remarry not just one but eight wives, mostly widows of the Arabian-unification war. But the best-known wife was Aysha, famously married to the old man when she was only a child. Aisha may have been the prettiest, as well as the youngest. She was also the smartest. Still young when Mohammed died, she used her influence to help shape the Koran. Aysha and the supporters who had been with him from the beginning began to assemble Mohammed’s teachings in written form.

The collected sayings of Mohammed reflect several shifts in his thinking, often without attempting to resolve them. Some of the writings are openly admiring of Jews, while others call curses on them. Some writings command them to keep Jewish law, while others carefully shift the Sabbath to one day before or slightly alter the kosher laws. Some of the writings praise women and others curse them.

Some are harsh on adultery, while others—particularly one rooted in a story about Aisha—dictate moderation. The story: Aysha got lost on a long journey once, turning up a day late with a young man who guided her home. She said she got lost while looking for her dropped necklace, so it’s known as the “Affair of the Necklace.” Many of the Muslims accused her of adultery. Mohammed’s previous dictates were for stoning, but he really didn’t want to lose her. At this time, he had a new revelation: four witnesses are required to establish adultery. This makes it nearly impossible to carry out a draconian sentence of death, which moderates an otherwise harsh ruling.

Mohammed had been the civil ruler as well as the religious authority. With all of his wives, he had no surviving sons, only one daughter, Fatima. Some of his closest supporters (likeĀ  Aysha’s father) had married their daughters to him to increase their influence. Now, they used it. Almost immediately, there was a power struggle between one of Mohammed’s closest friends and his cousin/son in law. It’s complicated, but here’s the basic outline:

The Caliph was the “successor” to the Prophet. Within just a few years, there were competing Caliphs. Over several generations, competitors assassinated Caliphs and their families. The Shi’ite branch of Islam believed that only the genetic kin of Mohammed could lead the faithful, while the Sunn’i majority was willing to follow any strong, orthodox leader. So Islam was fractured at its heart very quickly.

The first four Caliphs were Mohammed’s companion: Abu Bakr (Aysha’s father), Umar, Uthman, and Ali (Mohammed’s son in law and ward). Omar ruled the longest and began the program of conquest, setting out to conquer the two empires that had overshadowed Arabia for centuries.

 

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Mediterranean world in 600

Mohammed reported his first vision in the year 610. By 640, his followers had a small, growing empire. Before we trace this explosive growth, let’s look at the world that the Muslims challenged.

The map of Europe in 600 shows mostly scattered tribal homelands, with a few exceptions. If you look at the island of Britain, you can see that the Anglo-Saxons have begun to settle, but for the most part they’re only on the coast, in Kent (Cantware, they called it; here, Cantia). The Frisians, Saxons and Jutes are mostly still on the continent. The Picts, the original residents of Northern Europe, have already been pushed into the margins by the previous invasion of Celts. You can see the Picts only in the north of Scotland, while most of the two islands has Celtic labels. Over the next century, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes will push the Celts into the margins where they’ll merge with the dwindling Picts, but it hasn’t really happened yet.

The Celts in Britain are Christians, but by 600, the Roman Empire’s outposts are ruins. Hadrian’s Wall still runs across the north, marking where the Picts used to carry out raids a few centuries earlier. Some Roman roads are still in working condition, but the buildings at Bath and other settlements are lending building blocks to Celtic projects as they crumble.

The Celts themselves were pushed to the margins of the European continent by Franks. Frankia is one of the largest zones in 600; by this time, the Frankish kings have been ruling since Clovis united them by conquest in 481. In 600, the dynasty is still strong; Chlothar II began ruling as a young teenager. The Franks are officially Christians, converted by Latin missionaries.

Spain is dominated by Visigoths, a related tribe. King Reccared I converted to Catholic Christian (the Visigoths had been previously converted by Arian Christians) as the original Gothic language was dying out. After this time, Catholic bishops held much of the political power, including the right to select a king, whose capital was at Toledo.

The remnants of the Roman Empire are scattered around the eastern rim of the Mediterranean. Since the Goths came to Rome, much of Italy has been settled by Goths or Huns (Attila the Hun fought against Goths). Roman roads are definitely still functioning, as are Roman baths and aqueducts. Many of the towns continue to rule themselves by Roman customs, too. The invading Goths had a weaker culture than the Romans, so apart from names, most Gothic words are no longer used. (The exact opposite happened with the invading Anglo-Saxons in Britain.) Rome is “ruled,” to the extent that it is, from Constantinople. The rule becomes much more effective as you get closer to the city itself, and merchants would tell you the taxes are quite real and very heavy. Constantinople is opulent, crowded, and deep in its “Byzantine” period of kings poisoning each other. Craftsmanship is very fine: silver, gold, jewels, embroidery, painting and sculpture.

To the east of the Byzantine-controlled lands, there is a vast Persian empire. The inhabitants call their Sassanid-ruled land Eran; they are Zoroastrians who worship fire (more or less—let’s not get into theology). Persia is also a place of fine crafts and learning, like Constantinople. In particular, around this time they developed the art of making soft rugs covered with flowers. Persia gets its silk from trading with China, but has a rich vein of minerals to mine.

The first wave of Huns were absorbed into the Goths, and their related tribe, the Avars, have settled at the margins of the map. The large white areas of Eastern Europe are No Man’s Land, occupied by migrants and ruled by no central power.

And far to the south, Arabia is populated by pagan Arabs, with some Byzantine Christians and a strong presence of Jews.

 

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Three 15th century castles

Raglan Castle

Raglan Castle was built in Wales, but long after Edward I’s pragmatic purpose-built castles like Harlech and Conwy. Raglan had no military purpose when it was built in the 15th century. It took two hundred years for its military potential to be realized.

A knight, Sir William ap Thomas, bought the estate in 1432 and began to build the castle. It began with the Great Tower, a hexagon of five stories. the Great Tower was connected to the Gatehouse by a drawbridge over the moat. The construction decisions copied the serious choices of the 12th century, putting no windows in the lower stories. The Gatehouse, built in 1462, had not one but two portcullises!

Sir William Herbert, who married William ap Thomas’s granddaughter, completed the rest of the castle’s design, with two courts, one for the practical daily-life buildings like the kitchen, and one (the Fountain Court) for the fashionable luxurious life. In Tudor times, they added a magnificent stained glass Oriel Window, “water gardens,” and a bowling lawn.

And then….war came to England. The Earl of Worcester was loyal to King Charles I and in 1646, the Parliamentarian Army laid siege to the castle. The siege lasted three months! No central government is going to tolerate a private home that can resist its power as long as that. When the castle fell, the Roundhead army “slighted” the castle: they deliberately made it unlivable. Burning some of the furnishings, they chose walls to dynamite and pull down so that it could never again be used in resistance.

Chateau de Langeais

This castle (chateau) was built first much longer ago than the 15th century. It still has, on a hill nearby, the ruin of the keep built around 990 by Fulk of Anjou. The keep was enlarged and fortified by later owners including Richard the Lion-Hearted, but it was destroyed during the Hundred Years’ War (1300s).

What we see now was rebuilt in the 15th century, starting in 1465. Louis XI’s son, Charles VIII, married the heiress of Brittany there in 1491. Anne was contractually obliged to marry the successor in the case that she and Charles had no children, and so it was, so she became the wife of Louis XII. But this romantic story all began here in the chateau. There’s a life-size diorama of the marriage set up, since the chateau is now just a museum.

It’s been more than 500 years since the castle’s gatehouse and residence were completed, so by 1886, the mansion was in need of repair. A careful 19th century restoration project was carried out; as you can see from the video, the interior still looks pretty authentic.

Is it a castle or a house? Like other 15th century projects, it’s still both. The castle has a drawbridge that once would have crossed a moat, with water brought in from the Loire. The gatehouse is on a serious military plan, with murder holes and machicolations. But once we get past those things at the front, the back opens up to terrace and gardens, like a house. Of course it used to have a wall all around it, leading up to the old 10th century keep.

But even so, the interior buildings were clearly not built with real warfare in mind. Look at those windows going right down to the ground. As contemporary Chaucer might have put it, “…the chambres and the stables weren wyde…” Lots of room for a family and staff to spread out, no need for anyone to bunk down on the hall floor.

Eltz Castle

This entry created 12/12/2024.

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15th century castles and chateaux

If you do an internet search of “castles for sale,” you’ll always find an array of beautiful stone houses, mostly in France. Most of them are “chateaux,” that is, the word “castle” updated into modern French. As the word changed, so did the building. A chateau is usually made of stone, but otherwise it’s just a large mansion.

People continued to built real castles, but their concerns had changed. Once battles were fought in the field, defending the house itself mattered much less again. And when a battle was fought for the house, fire was a chief concern. The 13th century fighting machines generally had wooden roof structures and sometimes wooden shingles. Many interior parts were made of wood, especially the interior subflooring. When the timbers caught fire, the stones heated and cracked. Some stone held up better to fire, some worse; if the stone block had a pocket of some mineral impurity, it might heat more rapidly and burst the stone.

So if you wanted a fire-proof castle, brick was the way to go. Bricks cost much less, being locally produced. You didn’t have to ship big blocks of stone down a river or drag them from a quarry. You could set up a brickworks very near the site and have your own clay kilned as it was dug from the foundation. Bricks took a long time to make properly, but once cooled, they were impervious to fire. So were roof tiles, made by the same brickworks. A chateau made of brick, with a tile roof and glass windows, was probably a better bet for artillery defense.

Some of the new castles were still made with round towers and moats. They certainly still focused on thick, strong doors. But the old death trap gatehouses were pointless unless they were part of a dedicated military structure. By contrast, some castles ceased to be residences and turned into true forts. Mont Orgeuil, on Jersey Island, was reinforced by extra layers of stone during Tudor times. The stone now had to absorb artillery fire. The castle’s towers were topped with artillery, too. Arrow slits became gun slits, rebuilt to fit the new round barrels.

In the castle houses, the chateaux, round and square corner towers began to have bedrooms as well as staircases. Parapets on top of the towers gave over to tiled roofs. You can still see the castle-like outline in a chateau, but the peaked towers standing higher than the rest of the house no longer have any defensive function. The round towers are for style, not to see around corners. Thick walls are for insulation, not for defense; window seats are for comfort, not for archers.

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Two 14th Century Castles

Schloss Berlepsch, Germany

    In the 13th and 14th centuries, as the Holy Land Crusades became intermittent exercises in futility, the Crusading spirit moved to the north. Instead of taking back the Holy Land, they could take new pagan lands. The Teutonic Knights created a new Crusader front facing Prussia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.

    Berlepsch Castle is right along this line, on the modern border of Poland. It was built in 1368 by the Berlepsch family independently of both the government and the Teutonic Knights. In fact, by 1392, the Landgrave of Hesse sent his army against the castle and ruined it, so that it had to be rebuilt in 1400. In 1461, a knight loyal to the Landgrave further strengthened it, and it became a key stronghold during the Thirty Years’ War (1600s, post-medieval). There was a final set of changes in the late 1800s. The castle was closed to the public until about 2010.

    It’s hard to point to the castle’s features and say “this is definitively 14th century.” In general, we see that it’s a mix of stone and brick. There are glass windows and the upper story of the main building is not done in a super-secure military way, rather it’s timber-and-wattle like civilian houses. We can be sure that inside, the house had house-like features. video

    Chateau de Pierrefonds, northern France

    The first castle at this location was built in the 12th century, so it would have been a standard keep with concentric walls. A massive rebuilding was undertaken in 1393, when it became the seat of the Duke of Orleans, brother of the king. Defenses were updated; the gatehouse still had all of the machinery of war such as murder holes and a portcullis. But inside, more attention was paid to carved stone and comfortable rooms. Here is a map of the castle.

    But in 1617, the castle’s owner joined the side of a prince who opposed the new King Louis XIII, and the result is that Cardinal Richelieu’s army destroyed parts of it so that it could not be used as a rebel stronghold. The castle remained a ruin until Emperor Napoleon III allocated government money to its rebuilding. The architect Eugene Viollet-Le-Duc rebuilt and restored it. The interior was over-restored; it’s even fancier than the 14th century project had made it. The castle has been chosen as the site for filming a number of movies. video of its history

    This entry created 12/12/2024.

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    Gunpowder and castles

    I’ve made some references to the changing nature of warfare in the 14th and 15th centuries, which it’s worth spelling out in more detail. Gunpowder changed the nature of war by changing siege strategy; whole cities could be besieged and blockaded, but houses alone were now too small.

    Simple exploding powder was known in the late 1200s, but nobody began to develop it until the 1300s. Even then, it was used to set fire to buildings inside a siege, or to blow up castle walls. Its use as a directed propellant didn’t begin until the 15th century.

    Early gunpowder was made from charcoal, sulfur and saltpeter. “Saltpeter” was a “salt” that grew on the “petros,” that is, stone walls. Its best growing conditions were the stone walls of an outhouse or stable, where there was a lot of urine evaporating. Later, Germans learned to use dung, urine and rock to grow it on purpose; hence its first commercial manufacture. Sulfur and charcoal were common ingredients, but gunpowder needed very fine charcoal, probably made from willow or grapevines.

    The first artillery use of gunpowder may have been around 1327; “pots de fer” may have been iron pots that controlled the explosion to force a missile in just one direction. By 1346, at the Battle of Crecy, the English had three simple cannons on the hill. These early guns were small; they were iron tubes fixed to a wooden frame. But cannon use was too compelling for it not to develop quickly; we have Chaucer referring to guns and pellets in 1384.

    The first obvious use for cannons was breaking a siege by pounding the castle wall more effectively than a battering ram. Metalsmiths had to figure out how to strengthen iron or copper tubes to where they could withstand an internal explosion without shattering. Iron bars, heated and twisted around the tubes, helped. But early “bombards” were always dangerous, since they could burst at any time and kill those standing nearby. They were also heavy, requiring teams of 12 and more horses to pull them into place in the field.

    By the 15th century, breaking sieges was just a matter of casting a large enough cannon. Constantinople fell to a huge cannon, the biggest of its time. Walls that used to require six months to batter now fell in two weeks. So people stopped relying on walls. Fighting men needed to meet an invading army in the field and stop it from dragging its artillery up to the city or castle walls. As before, in the pre-castle days, battles were fought in a day, on a field, by men with hand-held weapons. Artillery could be used in the field, too. Armor mattered less, and lifetime training ceased to be a protection. A year’s apprenticeship to a gunpowder maker was a better life preparation than ten years of tilting and jousting. The entire structure of chivalry, including its residential strongholds, became pointless.

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    15th century castle kitchens

    By the 1400s, castles were more and more residential and less and less military. When the government needed a real fortress, the king now built a compact stone fort with very thick walls and artillery stations. The castle residences could splash out more on conveniences.

    A late castle kitchen approached a modern kitchen’s conveniences. First, it was designed. Someone sat down in advance and planned out where the fireplaces, doorways, drains, and lights would be. This level of attention had never been paid to room design in Northern Europe.

    A really good castle kitchen had tiled floors. It even had a floor drain: a pipe built into the earth under the tiles, carrying away whatever splashed down it. The floor could be washed after a heavy cooking session, showing a new degree of attention to clean appearances.

    Light was the really critical point of design; the kitchen was generally on the ground level and wasn’t supposed to have windows. But in late castle designs, they began to put glazed windows into ground-floor rooms. If the kitchen happened to be an attached outbuilding without any rooms directly over it, it could even have a skylight. Cooks spent a lot of time in dark hours, too, so a good kitchen had hooks for hanging oil lamps as well as stable places to set candles.

    Monasteries were the pioneers for water engineering, but castle designers were now borrowing their ideas. A really good kitchen at this time had pipes leading water down from stored source. There were even simple designs for washstands: pipes carrying off the waste water, while taps set in the wall just above the basin carried in fresh water. Castle kitchens had a lot of white linen towels, perhaps sometimes as roller-towels.

    Most of the utensils in a castle kitchen were made of copper or brass, though the heaviest kettles were probably iron. There was a wide array of pans and utensils by now: strainers, tongs, long forks, knives, slotted spoons, spatulas, skillets, sauce pans, warming pans. Wooden buckets and tubs were used for water, milk and butter, as well as for washing up. Glazed and unglazed pottery provided for pitchers, mugs and pie dishes, as today, but sometimes they also used tall pottery jars for cooking on a fire. The tall jar stood in the middle of the a fire, wood piled around it.

    The late medieval castle kitchen may have turned a boar on a spit, especially at Christmas. But the rest of the time, cooks were making wine-based roux in a sauce pan, brewing meatless white soups, baking spiced pies and frying rissoles. Broad tables in the center of the tiled room displayed several different projects going on at the same time: plucking geese, chopping meat very fine, and preparing fruit for baking. Cooks had clean hands and were professionally trained. By the end of the 15th century, they may have consulted printed cookbooks by an oil lamp’s light or under an octagonal-tower skylight.

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    Bodiam Castle

    Near the end of the Hundred Years War, England was losing badly. We know from the modern map that England lost all of its continental possessions except for the Channel Islands. Calais was part of the British Empire until 1558, and then recaptured by France, the last toehold of the British removed from the map of France. But during the 14th and 15th centuries, it wasn’t clear whether the swing of power might go even farther. France might invade England and begin taking Kent, Essex and Sussex as French provinces.

    So the kings of the time fortified the land the cheap way; in our time, the government passes an unfunded mandate; in theirs, an unfunded license. Permission to build a castle, defined as a dwelling with “crenelations.” The builder got to pay for it himself, but then he and his descendants also got to live in it. If there was an invasion, his house would be one of the defensible structures in the region, with crenelations for archers or gunners to hide behind. In the meantime, let’s say there isn’t an invasion. Anyone want to build a really cool house?

    Bodiam Castle, in Sussex, is a good example. From the outside, it looks like a serious 13th century castle. It has towers, parapets, and a moat. In its time, the moat completely surrounded the house, with two drawbridges. One of them was indirectly connected to the house; instead it went first to a little “outwork” fortification on an island.

    Video about Bodiam.

    But Bodiam was only involved in one wartime act, when it was captured from the Lancastrians without damaging the building. Bodiam was really mainly a house. Its focus was on the residential layout. It had a Great Hall with a modern kitchen and nearby pantry, buttery and bakery. There were servants’ quarters and rooms for men at arms; nobody had to sleep in the Hall. If an enemy got inside, there was no way to defend any of the buildings.

    Bodiam Castle was hard to rob; it was clearly harder to attack than an ordinary house would be, although this standard is quite low. It’s possible that in 1390, it was still plausibly fortified. But it wasn’t anything like Rhuddlan, Caerphilly or Tancarville. Its site was not chosen for strategic reasons; the design was not shaped around the site to make the site do half the defense. The design was human-centered, instead. The family wanted a nice courtyard and a convenient buttery.

    There were a few more generations in which these castles were still plausibly called castles, and it’s from this time that we see the greatest refinement in design of kitchen, fireplaces, windows, wells, and other comforts. These castles were also much less likely to be destroyed for military reasons, since they were not very militant. They were more likely to be kept up and not left as ruins, so from the 14th century, we begin to see some castles that are still habitable.

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    14th century castles

    Wales was conquered; the Crusades had effectively closed even if they didn’t want to admit it. The Hundred Years’ War between England and France continued to rage all through the 14th century, off and on, taking turns with the plague for destructiveness. But during this century, central governments became stronger, in general. Europe’s castles had always been primarily outposts of strength that balanced regional against national power. (cf. Gilbert de Clare’s Caerphilly Castle, begun during a time of disloyalty to his monarch). Increasingly, that’s what they stood for. Their builders wanted strongholds to live in, so that they could survive in a time of uprising or civil war.

    Most of the castle’s engineering was identical to the real working castles built in the 13th century. However, a few things changed.

    Residential comfort mattered more. The 14th century was the era of tapestry and tiled floors. The Spanish princess who married England’s Edward I had brought along thick tapestry-like fabrics that her servants spread on the floor of the castle room appointed for her. The English were amazed that anyone would walk on something that took so much work to make, but it wasn’t long before Northern Europe’s wealthiest nobles were ordering carpets. The weavers of Flanders began cranking out wall tapestries by the hundreds, although it took about a year to make one. Dedicated bath-rooms had wooden tubs lined with linen, tiled floors, heat right in the room, and sometimes piped-in running water.

    At the same time, the feudal system was breaking down. Lords were more likely to have paid men at arms, and sometimes they were foreign mercenaries. After a period in the 13th century in which the well-guarded Keep was less a priority, masons began to design defensive Keeps again. Why? In case the mercenaries turned against the family and its most loyal retainers. Nobody had ever considered that a castle might need to be held from inside, but the new luxurious keeps were built that way.

    You can’t have everything in a castle without Kanye West’s budget, so they skimped on some of the grimmer defensive structures, like murder-holes. It mattered more to design latrines that actually carried the sewage smell away from the residential windows. So they still designed the castle around the site’s defensive features (cliffs, rivers), and they still dug moats, but walls were slightly less massive. Effort went into fine stonecarving instead of a second portcullis. Shipping stone blocks from a quarry was sometimes too costly, given the likelihood of a real siege. In such cases, castles were built of local stone or even brick. Brick actually had an advantage: if set on fire, brick walls were less damaged than stone ones, since they had already been baked in a kiln.

    All castle windows required glass by now; nobody wanted simple wooden shutters to block out winter. Rooms intended for grand use, like the lord’s bedchamber, the hall, and the chapel, needed Gothic arches and tracery to support smaller panes of clear glass. This is one clear marker for later-built castles. Another is that rooms are divided into smaller units with more partitions. Expectations were changing; more people expected semi-private bedrooms. It’s possible that knights no longer accepted bunking down on the hall floor.

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