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This book has focused on the human and social aspects of castle-building in England, France, and Ireland during the medieval period, to reconcile the civilized with the violent aspects of medieval society, as they are perceived today. Writing about the glories of late-medieval architecture, Wim Swaan saw the problem as summed up by Johan Huizinga's remark that medieval life ‘bore the mixed smell of blood and roses’. Perhaps the main contribution to knowledge to be made by studying castles and fortresses in proper breadth is to shed some light on the aspirations and adversities of noblemen and ladies, ecclesiastics, townspeople, and of the great rural majority, and on their civilized achievements, institutional as well as architectural, in the western European middle ages.

The provinces of Epirus and Macedonia, although divided into distinct regions by their mountains, were important for the Roman Empire, particularly because they were crossed by the via Egnatia which snaked its way eastwards, serving as the vital link between Rome and Constantinople at a time when insecurity was increasing along the Danubian frontier. From the middle of the third century, cities in this part of the Empire were under threat and their fortifications were reinforced in the fifth (Thessalonika) and sixth centuries (Byllis under Justininian). There was prosperity in the fourth century and beginning of the fifth. During the fifth century, the houses of Philippi were partly transformed into workshops. The sixth century was difficult and the second half was especially bleak. However, contacts between east and west were still maintained, along with local production. From 540–550, however, barbarian invasions and plague worsened the general situation. Graves appeared inside the city walls. Archaeology (Slav pottery and fibulae) and texts (Miracula Sancti Demetrii) all demonstrate how hard times were from the 580s to the 630s.

Caričin Grad (Justiniana Prima) is an ideal site for studying urbanism in the early Byzantine period. Amongst the numerous early Byzantine sites in the central Balkans, Caričin Grad is one of the very few that was a city and was founded in the sixth century. Its fortifications include three separate walled areas (the Acropolis, the Upper City, and the Lower City). Contrary to the traditional view, this chapter argues that the walls of the Acropolis were not part of the original plan and that the Upper and Lower Cities were established at the same time. The Church and the army occupied more than two-thirds of the Upper City and the Lower Town contained mainly public buildings. The only known intramural residential area lies in the south-west corner of the Lower City. Houses here were built of stone bonded with clay at ground-floor level, and the upper floor was constructed with a timber frame and cob walls and had tile roofs. It is also very likely that there was an extramural population, protected by a ditch and palisades.

Fortifications are now recognized as a defining feature of the late antique city and in a time of insecurity they were a positive factor for the maintenance of urban life as well as making an important contribution towards imperial defence. But in place of the fora, aqueducts and curiales of the high Roman Empire, the new foundations of the fourth century display new urban typologies derived, in part at least, from patterns of military organization rather than urban organization. This chapter compares the two frontier cities of Amida in Roman Mesopotamia and Tropaeum Traiani in Scythia as examples of new urban foundations in the early fourth century. Detailed structural evidence from the walls of Amida indicates two main phases of construction, one under Valens and a second under Anastasius following the major siege of 502. On the lower Danube the city of Tropaeum Traiani reveals similar features of major defences and urban layout with a range of internal structures including granaries and churches distinct from the typical attributes of the classic Graeco-Roman city.

During the early Byzantine period (395–610), a large number of non-urban sites, recorded in ancient sources, are known to have existed in the dioceses of Thrace and Dacia. Contemporary sources suggest that they all possessed fortifications. Amongst the fortified settlements of the early Byzantine period, there were two main groups which can be identified. The first group includes the quasi-urban centres with an intramural area of more than one hectare and the second includes fortified villages, with an intramural area of less than one hectare. This chapter describes the different kinds of fortresses which existed in the dioceses of Thrace and Dacia from AD 395 to 610. It examines the character of the fortresses and internal structures and identifies different types. Finally, it addresses the functions of these sites, especially their role in the defensive system which protected the eastern Balkans during the early Byzantine period.

This chapter discusses wartime spending and the rise of the fiscal-military state. The need to borrow was intimately related to the cost of war. After 1500, a “military revolution” transformed warfare in Europe. The invention of gunpowder meant that old medieval city walls no longer offered protection. The increasing use of cannon therefore required an entirely new set of protective walls. These new fortifications meant that wars became longer, with many sieges lasting more than a year. Then, the rise of firearms translated into a need to train soldiers. All these changes—the arms used, the rise of permanent, large armies and navies, new fortifications, and high frequency and great length of conflict—made wars vastly more expensive. Success in war therefore depended in the early modern period on financial resources. Eventually, states run by a successful military-fiscal complex dominated the map of Europe.

This chapter discusses the result of research on the Gobekly-depe fortifications at the north-western edge of the Merv Oasis conducted by the South Turkmenistan Archaeological Multi-Disciplinary Expedition (YuTAKE) in the late 1940s. The findings suggest that the fortress served as a residence for the state dignitary in charge of the fortress and as a warehouse to which specific commodities were sent from Merv and from which they were then distributed further. The plan of the fortifications involved towers in all four corners and an entrance in the middle of the south wall, and the walls were built with alternate layers of mud bricks and pakhsa.

This chapter describes the fortifications of the ancient city of Gyaur Kala in the Merv Oasis based on the result of archaeological excavations. It summarizes the phases of construction and rebuilding and provides preliminary evidence for dating individual phases. Overall, the excavations strongly suggest that broader trends in military architecture influenced the development of the city walls of Gyaur Kala.

This chapter examines the condition of roads, armies, and the organization of space in European states during the period from the 13th to the 18th centuries. During this period, the state was the instigator, instrument, and servant of the sciences of distance. It supplied the finances and materials, and directed research as servant-master. This chapter explores the improvements in communication, fortification and frontiers, and the control of the state interior.

This chapter examines the direct contributions made by towns to their princes' wars. Town councils had constantly to manoeuvre between the sometimes exorbitant demands of their princes, the reluctance of the townsfolk to meet the costs of war, and the necessity to keep the town safe from attack. They raised companies of troops for field service, especially in England, as well as defending themselves with their own militias or shooting guilds. Some towns, such as York and 's-Hertogenbosch, were more militarized than others. Some supplied ships or encouraged privateers. Most developed their holdings of artillery and maintained arsenals, and nearly all paid some attention to their fortifications, though those on the coast or military frontiers did so more urgently. The costly bastions of the new trace italienne style appeared with increasing frequency in the Netherlands but not — except perhaps as temporary earthworks — in England.

This chapter examines the resources deployed by the nobility in their participation in warfare. In England, their recruitment of troops became less important over time as retinues raised from their estate tenants and household servants were superseded by drafts from the county militias. In the Netherlands, great nobles led bandes d'ordonnance, permanently waged by the prince but staffed by the captain's clients and other contingents animated by their local influence. Generals there also cultivated entrepreneurs able to raise mercenaries beyond the borders of the Netherlands. Noblemen's private arsenals were better stocked with artillery in the Netherlands than in England, and their private fortifications better maintained and modernized. The English, however, were more likely to own ships that could be turned to war or privateering.

This chapter investigates the effects of war on identities. The English were more secure in their military reputation than were the peoples of the Netherlands, some of whom had a stronger martial identity than others. Service abroad and the presence of unpopular German and Spanish troops in the Netherlands sharpened national identity, while new fortifications marked the landscape with complex identities, commemorating princes but also breeding resentment against repressive urban citadels. Religious change — sometimes accelerated by war — consolidated English identity, but splintered loyalties in the Netherlands. In both polities, identities were strengthened by the message that war was the fault of the French and by orders to confiscate enemy property and arrest aliens in wartime. Local, provincial, dynastic, and national identities co-existed in both polities, but the mix was more complex in the Netherlands. Rebellions divided subjects from princes and loyalists from rebels, and their after-life might be long.

This chapter presents the evidence of Athens' economic exploitation of its Aegean empire in the fifth century bc, particularly the colonization of overseas territories and the division of land into an allotment system (cleruchies) in some cases clearly designed to produce grain surpluses for shipment to Athens. Special attention is given to Euboea and its role as Athens' chief fifth‐century granary, protected by a system of fortifications largely disregarded by previous scholarship. The Peloponnesian War and the political crisis of 411 bc which led to the loss of most of the island are examined in detail. The Athenian method of obtaining grain in the form of taxes is studied in the light of a new interpretation of the recently published Grain‐Tax Law of Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros of the year 374/3 bc.

In the forty years between 1520 and 1559, the Habsburg and Valois dynasties were at war for twenty years. This struggle for hegemony in Europe entailed not just recurring warfare along the Franco‐Netherlandish frontier, but also a leapfrogging competition in military technology (artillery, and fortresses built to withstand bombardment) and military organization (building mercenary armies from specialized units recruited in different nations). In the 1540s and especially the 1550s, French attacks came by sea as well as by land, forcing the Netherlands government, for the first time, to think about how to control the North Sea. At sea and on land, commanders who acquired up‐to‐date military skills by fighting for the Habsburgs in the 1550s would in the 1570s fight one another.

Rulers who wanted to keep themselves in power needed access to force and this meant recruiting and maintaining sufficient quantities of men with the requisite skills and equipment. The primary constraints on recruitment were economic and financial, rather than demographic, and included the costs necessarily incurred by removing men from the productive labour force. The immediate costs of military activities can be categorised as ‘troop costs,’ which are the costs of raising, training, and equipping soldiers and maintaining them in an adequate condition, ‘operational costs,’ which are the further costs of fielding a force given that it has been raised and equipped, and ‘capital costs,’ which are the additional costs of establishing and maintaining ‘military capital’ like fortifications and warships.

Military equipment of any kind represents a certain commitment of capital, but fortifications and warships stand out from other categories because they were potentially much more expensive and required specialised skills to construct and maintain. Fortifications were static and ships were mobile by their very nature, but both siege and naval operations were tightly constrained by logistical considerations and the capacities of both forms of military capital were restricted by the limitations of muscle-powered military technology. The operation of mobile forces was supported or obstructed by fortifications, and manoeuvre warfare was complemented by siege and assault. Naval and land warfare differed in their strategic and operational principles, but the pursuit of both was constrained by the restricted availability of energy. Fighting at sea was a very different matter and its tactical imperatives meant that warship design diverged from that of merchant vessels both before and after the gunpowder revolution.

However coloured by medieval (chiefly ecclesiastical) polemic, and by constitutionalists of a statist cast of mind misapplying the concepts of the modern nation, fortresses (castles in the original comprehensive usage) were not so much private force embodied in stone (or earthwork and timber, latterly brick) as, rather, the most conspicuous contemporary and still surviving manifestation of the socially diffusive medieval ruling class. This art, along with the ‘religious’ architecture to which it is so closely related as to be indistinguishable, was among the most noble achievements of medieval culture. Since fortifying, like the ‘arms-ban’, operated as a noble perquisite, the restraining hand of the ‘public interest’ must be pursued also in other directions than ‘military activities’. Political as well as social motives were involved. This chapter looks at castles, fortresses, and fortifications as means of peacekeeping and pacification in England and France during the medieval period.

Considering that they were personal and family residences, the degree of subordination of castles to public priorities in England and France during the medieval period is remarkable. Fortresses were not above the law, and more importantly they were not outside it. This chapter examines some sharper consequences of fortresses' dual personality — in what circumstances it was acceptable for them to be seized or even demolished (though still not erased from the map). If being attacked was normally unlikely, interference in the public interest represented by the castellan's superior (senyor, seigneur, or lord) was a contingent liability of the fortress. The chapter looks at some notable instances of urban hostility and class conflict involving ‘private’ castles. Rendability, in all the guises of conditional fortress-tenure, epitomized the public utility of private castles; while conversely the class antagonisms, which have been illustrated in south-west France, focused on fortification and displayed the practical limits of social consensus.