What Medieval Walls (Castles) really represents post Medieval Era?

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

What Medieval Walls (Castles) really represents post Medieval Era?
1. In the 'Old World', Preexisting castles (And similiarly built 'Advanced Medieval City Walls' which could also be counted as, and an origin to the in-game name of this building, while code-name is 'Castle') were common city defenses, were actually made obsolete with big guns by 1400s. If such preexisting structures are to be used (at least until upgrades to 'Renaissance Walls' (Bastion in Humankind) in defensive manner, it became 'Blockhouse' with the advent of gunpowder.
2. What about in Colonies? are these 'Castles' also represent palisade walls and frontier forts protecting European Settlements in Continental Americas as well as things like Blockhouses and American Wild West Forts? Did Frontier 'forts' actually comparable to Euro castles? and did Old Mormon Fort in Vegas actually a type of 'American-built Castle' ?

https://theluckythirtykate.com/port...w-vegas-real-world-location/#jp-carousel-6807

3. When did these 'Medieval Walls' actually appear? Before (Especially Romans City Walls and Chesters which saw uses by 'Barbarian invaders' and successor states after the Fall of Roma) or during Medieval Era?

 

[Victoria]

Did Frontier 'forts' actually comparable to Euro castles?

Saw no-one has replied tso thought I would give it a go. I feel very cautuious with the likes of @Boris Gudenuf on the forum
As I understand it , the whole terminology is debatable so you can take your choice but according to wiki, the majority of academics deem a castle to be a private fortified residence.
So in the picture above, it is all a question of who is living there as to whether it is a fort or castle.
As for what is represented, I would have thought any fort or castle with substantive walls that were not backfilled with soil.
What a fort/castle represented post 1400 I would have thought was still a place that was not easy to take and that was a political and status symbol of power.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

"Castle" is one of those slippery words that mean different things in different times and places. The classic Medieval Castle was, as @Victoria points out, first of all a residence for a feudal retainer, his family and own retainers from which he controlled his fief and protected it. As fortifications they mostly started as wooden palisades around wooden buildings and only after about 1000 CE on the continent and 1066 CE in Britain did they start becoming the stone structures we associate with 'castles'.

But the term has also been used for almost any kind of fortified residence, including noble/aristocratic estates in China and Persia far removed in time and space from Medieval Europe. Given that the early Chinese Dynasties and Achaemenid Persian Empire both maintained a feudal-like system (in the Zhou, Qin and Han dynasties nobles held land from the Emperor/government and in Persia the King of Kings technically owned everything and 'granted' land to his followers, very similar in practice to the Medieval European feudal system) this would seem to make 'castle' a particularly feudal element of military architecture.

In a larger sense, though, Fortifications and Forts of various kinds date back to Pre-Start of Game IRL.

The stone 'curtain walls' as illustrated are found at Jericho, 8350 BCE - a city wall of stone 10 feet thick at the base and at least 13 feet tall (estimated, only the foundations remain today), with a stone 'keep' or tower inside the walls at least 28 feet high.
From 7000 BCE several archeological sites in northern China show evidence of a defensive moat or ditch around settlements/proto-cities but are in relatively treeless regions (just south of Mongolia) so a timber palisade is not likely. By 3500 BCE the Yangshao culture definitely has rammed earth walls behind a ditch, and this technology may have been employed thousands of years earlier.
Mud Bricks (unfired clay) were in use in the Middle East and Indus Valley by 7000 BCE, and a bas-relief from Egypt (5th Dynasty - about 2400 BCE) shows a mud-brick wall being attacked by men with picks in the earliest depiction of a 'siege' type attack on a walled city. The walls, incidentally, are shown with semi-circular towers infilading the main curtain wall to provide defensive fire against the attackers.
There are evidences of timber palisades around settlements in northern Germany before 4700 BCE.

That means that at least City Walls with various materials were in use in various parts of the world centuries before 4000 BCE.

In Europe dry stone walls of massive size date back to at least 1600 BCE (The Mycenean 'Cyclopean' citadels) which were used to fortify palaces/residences of local rulers and the settlements supporting them, so there is a direct parallel with the Medieval European 'castles' and city defenses in both physical construction and purpose going back 2500 years before the Medieval examples - or any Classical power like Rome.

Fortifications in the Americas depended entirely on who they were defending against. There is plenty of archeological evidence now that the organized native states in central America built extensive stone fortifications, walls, citadels, detached forts, etc against each other, and North American smaller states and groups as removed as the Calusa in Florida and the Susquehanna in Pennsylvania built timber palisades around their villages/towns.
Europeans in America when defending against natives didn't usually bother with anything more elaborate than block houses or timber palisades (or adobe walls in timberless regions of the west and southwest) but against their European competitors they built stone/earth bastioned fortifications exactly like Europe's: like Morro 'Castle' in Havana or Ticonderoga/Carrilion on the 'border' between French and English colonies in upper New York.

 

[Victoria]

So…. for cities we have words like fort, fortress, citadel, walled city and so on.

it became 'Blockhouse' with the advent of gunpowder.

Having read up on them, blockhouses are covered, houses in effect. You can have a blockhouse as part of a fort, built into the wall. But to call later castles blockhouses seem a stretch.

 

[Boris Gudenuf]

So…. for cities we have words like fort, fortress, citadel, walled city and so on.
Having read up on them, blockhouses are covered, houses in effect. You can have a blockhouse as part of a fort, built into the wall. But to call later castles blockhouses seem a stretch.

Blockhouses come in two varieties. Most common is the definition of a 'single fortified building' which describes most of the stone or timber blockhouses built in the Americas, either with or without a surrounding palisade of any kind. This also describes, by the way, such structures as the 'Peel Towers' in Scotland - single fortified stone buildings dating from the Early Modern period (16th century).
The other type of 'blockhouse' is a thick-walled stone building inside a large fortress used to shelter troops and especially gun crews against enemy bombardment or store ammunition so that enemy fire doesn't set it off. These have been used since roughly the mid-15th century when gunpowder artillery started to be used against fortifications in Europe.

A Castle is generally much larger than any Blockhouse. Castles (in Europe, at least) became virtually obsolete as fortifications as soon as the Bombards appeared, because a Bombard could smash the towers and curtain walls that defined the castle's fortifications. Consequently castles were abandoned as fortified places, and either became abandoned ruins, many of which were 'rediscovered' in the early 19th century by the mavens of the Romantic Movement and turned into Tourist attractions - the Rhine valley between Koblenz and Wiesbaden is absolutely overrun with these, probably the greatest concentration of them anywhere.
Castles that were not abandoned were turned into 'Stately homes' - Manor Houses in Britain, Chateaus in France, Rezidenzen in Germany. During the English Civil War many Manor Houses were 'refortified' with earthen ramparts or walls, which only worked if the enemy didn't have any heavy artillery: the Manor House itself remained pretty vulnerable to Heavy Objects at high velocity.

I'll repeat here my earlier argument: Castles should be Improvements on the landscape, related to having adopted Feudalism as a Civic choice and providing 'free' Knights when you go to war - at the cost of removing, at all times, any resources from the tile the Castle sits on, so that if you have too many Castles the central government (you, da gamer) gets nothing from your tiles and your cities degenerate fast. As soon as you get the Tech to build Bombards (Gunpowder - Bombards were over 100 years before the earliest Arquebus that would give you Musketmen) all Castles lose their fortified status and can be turned into Manor Houses or Chateaus depending on your Civ and Civic/Social Policies, or become 'picturesque' Ruins which generate Tourism once you have Steam Power (which, among many other things, makes it relatively cheap and easy to travel for pleasure - the USA and/or Canada might get Railroad Grand Hotels or resorts that generate Tourism in much the same way)

 

[9gkj548hkm20vk79dj689bnj4]

I think the English civilization in Humankind has it right in making their castles (called "strongholds") both a defensive structure outside a city AND one which generates food.

But the Civilization games usually put castles within cities. But those aren't technically castles but "citadels", a more heavily-armed barracks typically for policing the population instead of defending it (although it could still do that).

 

[Laurana Kanan]

Moderator Action: Just a reminder that this is a Civ 6 General Discussion forum. Historical & other topics not directly related to the Civ game are better discussed in our Off-Topic or World History forums.

 

[Lonecat Nekophrodite]

Blockhouses come in two varieties. Most common is the definition of a 'single fortified building' which describes most of the stone or timber blockhouses built in the Americas, either with or without a surrounding palisade of any kind. This also describes, by the way, such structures as the 'Peel Towers' in Scotland - single fortified stone buildings dating from the Early Modern period (16th century).
The other type of 'blockhouse' is a thick-walled stone building inside a large fortress used to shelter troops and especially gun crews against enemy bombardment or store ammunition so that enemy fire doesn't set it off. These have been used since roughly the mid-15th century when gunpowder artillery started to be used against fortifications in Europe.

A Castle is generally much larger than any Blockhouse. Castles (in Europe, at least) became virtually obsolete as fortifications as soon as the Bombards appeared, because a Bombard could smash the towers and curtain walls that defined the castle's fortifications. Consequently castles were abandoned as fortified places, and either became abandoned ruins, many of which were 'rediscovered' in the early 19th century by the mavens of the Romantic Movement and turned into Tourist attractions - the Rhine valley between Koblenz and Wiesbaden is absolutely overrun with these, probably the greatest concentration of them anywhere.
Castles that were not abandoned were turned into 'Stately homes' - Manor Houses in Britain, Chateaus in France, Rezidenzen in Germany. During the English Civil War many Manor Houses were 'refortified' with earthen ramparts or walls, which only worked if the enemy didn't have any heavy artillery: the Manor House itself remained pretty vulnerable to Heavy Objects at high velocity.

I'll repeat here my earlier argument: Castles should be Improvements on the landscape, related to having adopted Feudalism as a Civic choice and providing 'free' Knights when you go to war - at the cost of removing, at all times, any resources from the tile the Castle sits on, so that if you have too many Castles the central government (you, da gamer) gets nothing from your tiles and your cities degenerate fast. As soon as you get the Tech to build Bombards (Gunpowder - Bombards were over 100 years before the earliest Arquebus that would give you Musketmen) all Castles lose their fortified status and can be turned into Manor Houses or Chateaus depending on your Civ and Civic/Social Policies, or become 'picturesque' Ruins which generate Tourism once you have Steam Power (which, among many other things, makes it relatively cheap and easy to travel for pleasure - the USA and/or Canada might get Railroad Grand Hotels or resorts that generate Tourism in much the same way)

There also underlying civics of High Medievals and 'Gunpowder Era' particularly in Western Europe. Castles were heavily associated with Feudalism as aforemented, the weaponizations of gunpowder (Bombard being the first true Gunpowder weapon that should appear in the Late Medieval instead of Trebuchets) did a significant changes to the siege as Castles were no longer safe, attackers could only spend days or few weeks attacking castles and medieval walled cities with Bombards (while it took months or long years to subdue besieged castles and cities defended with such walls even with trebuchets) had in large parts shifted locus of control between Kings and local overlords, I'm not sure if this is the only or biggest contributions towards Centralization trends in the Late Medieval - Renaissance Era where Overlords can no longer have 'divided loyalty' (and defy his King at whim). And particularly in case of France in the Late Hundread Years War. King Charles VII (can't remember his number actually but he's a person that benefited from Joan of Arc's "rebellion movements") after experiences the lacklusters of both Feudal Knights and unruly mercenaries, had found a solution. the Ordonnances Army which was the first Standing Army (and laws that monopolizes the reserves the rights to raise and maintain armed forces to the Central Government--i.e. the King himself). His standing army contributed no less to French victory in the Hundread Years War (but Joan took too much credit). I'm not sure if such centralizations were associated to Bombards and gunpowder weaponizations of the 100 years war or not really associated (or more with Black Death and series of Crusades that compelled some overlords to go to the Holy Land? but sure there were one or two phenomenons that eroded unruly Overlords in favor of Centralized Kings). But should Centralization be a civic of the Late Middle Ages / Early Renaissance ? if so what should it do?