This kills the mongols

1) Harvest happens once a year
2) There's a great chance a disease outbreak will happen and the people inside will open the gates or die
3) You can storm the castle using siege engines, siege towers but chances are against you.
4) You can just move on to another castle/land if the current one is "impregnable"

you're right I remember skyrim had the farms of whiterun outside of the walls my mistake

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Wut?

Most castles nor walled towns had enough room for farming. As well as that, farming was seasonal so the defenders would have to produce enough for food until the next harvest.

Also, as other anons have already stated, the besiegers would harass the defends. Nobody would stay in a besieged castle/city for such an amount of time.

There were few ways.
1.) show of force
2.) paying someone inside to open gates
3.) encircle then wait out defenders

Most of siege`s were resulted as 1,2. As it was difficult for both sides. Siegers had to scavenge food for 6 months or more depending on situation. Also soldiers wanted to end military expedition quickly so they can get loot and go back home. If the castle has sea access then you would need boats too. It was near impossible to conquer one unless you close every entrance.

I think I saw a thread here that claimed some mountain castles in China were self-sustainable even during years of siege. They were built on mountains with water springs and had enough space for a decent amount of terrace farming.

Can't remember what the sources were though.

I could definitely see them being more sustainable, however, no castle is impregnable. Disease and complete isolation from the rest of the world would slowly wear them down. Not to mention the siege weapons firing flaming boulders into their fields.

>this kills the european kingdoms/empires/countries/whatsoever

>oh no a fortified island

Whats up white boys, how you doing ITT?

So how did they manage to beat the many castle-fortresses of Iran and Assassins?

> stone > mudbricks

Billion dollar vs 100 dollars

Older fortresses could still be taken by way of prolonged siege but this left you extremely vulnerable to sallies and attacks from forces located nearby in other fortresses if word could get out. Most of these positions could be held with minimal men and they had huge stores of supplies. Taking them by bribery was something that worked only if the enemy was seen as amenable.

Euros might surrender more willingly to other Euros, but if Mongols came along they would just bunker down and wait them out. This is a massive undertaking for any army.

Then with the advent of star fortresses, it was fucking game over for traditional sieges. You needed intense cannon fire to even consider cracking one of those fuckers.

>Then with the advent of star fortresses, it was fucking game over for traditional sieges. You needed intense cannon fire to even consider cracking one of those fuckers.

You have cause and effect backwards there, star fortresses were designed because cannons (which could easily destroy traditional fortresses) were introduced.

They weren't any more resistant to starvation.

What? I may have written my post wrong but that's more or less what I said. Star fortresses were specifically designed to stop any attempts at raiding the walls and to deflect cannon fire. That's why I said you'd need a fuckload to even make the taking of one a remote possibility.

I love the god damn things, one of the few reasons to visit France.

My girlfriend is chinese and I'm slavic, sometimes when it's a full moon and its cold outside I can see those Mongol eyes wishing to conquer my land for the golden horde.

>horse archers internally

Certainly not for the French

Which one of the 5 remaining French natives?

this fucking board

It's completely wrong. Star forts made protracted sieges MORE prevalent (for a good three centuries), not less prevalent.

Back to /pol/

Not even /pol/ my friend but I'd go full /pol/ if I lived anywhere in France.

i live in france and it is black central. i hate it here.

>laughing water.jpg

This beats the mongol

The Persians tried this method and got annihilated as it meant the mongols size disadvantage wasnt an issue

Can someone link that guys paper about Mongols and western style fortifications? I remember it was linked on Veeky Forums in the past

Khan living unhealthy kills the mongol.

Fixed that for you.

theses.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/11023/232/2/ucalgary_2012_pow_lindsey.pdf

Constantinople was large enough to have farms inside the walls. Of course, the length of any siege is going to be dependent on the amount of supplies you have built up, and I believe the farms weren't able to produce all of the food the city needed, because one of the key events which stopped the Arab sieges was the resupply of the city by sea.

Though I agree with the part about disease, how is an invader suppose to bring up siege weapons and shoot up at them? Keep in mind these bastions were often built on top of mountains with narrow paths leading to them. I can't imagine the logistics of this making this approach worthwhile. Also, even if their ability to weather attrition is finite, these castles were designed so it would probably take years for cracks to appear in the defense.

I remember hearing none of these castles (mostly in Sichuan province) were taken by force, even by the Mongols.

The siege of tyre was alexanders autism at its fullest. I cant believe people praise it as a huge achievement

I guess you're right, it would be impossible to bring siege weapons up there. But goddamn, that castle looks comfy as fuck.

thx

it looks like a lookout or something, unless the castle is built into the rock?

It's actually a temple, not a castle. I'm not that experienced in this time period so I don't know where to find any actual pictures (though I've seen some in aforementioned thread).

The picture is to show how difficult taking such high places would be.

It's not just food, it's supplies. You can't have everything in your walled garden. Tools break. Weapons corrode, or chip, or break. Any settlement or community needs trade to survive, if only to provide resources that community doesn't have and can't access. You can't get any form of medicine herbal or otherwise without foraging the countryside. Your hogs or cattle or chickens will get slaughtered eventually, if only because they eat too much of your precious grain stocks themselves. You'll have one season of meat, one season of eating whatever you preserved from the slaughter, and then effective strict vegetarianism. Without modern supplements/enrichment or abundance of diet.

Living in a protracted siege is closest man can get to hell on Earth. It is rare exception that a siege in ancient times lasts longer than some months, either due to the guile of the conqueror or surrender or protracted isolation. Coastal fortresses, like Candia or pic related, could last much longer than the typical expected life of a fortress (provided the enemy power doesn't rule the waves), but we're still only talking about two decades max.

How feasible is vegetarianism in the long run for soldiers? Most of the time in pre-modern East Asia, peasants normally only ate meat during festivals; protein primarily came from soybeans and other plant sources. Wouldn't having no meat be nothing special for them?

nah
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_of_Expulsion
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhambra_Decree
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_VI_of_France
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_desecration#Medieval_accusations_against_Jews
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhineland_massacres

>muh k/d ratio
lmao mongolfags are just like wehraboos/americans in denial

Harvest isn't once a year you idiot.

Good plants (bushes mostly) will bear food all summer long if you live in a more northern area. Most all year in southern Europe.

Roots grow quick and easy.

It's not much but you can live off some tomatoes, cucumbers, most peppers carrots, horse radish turnips and beats.

It doesn't take sessions

I wish normies would actually do some fucking yard work. Prep your plants the day of first frost and by mid April your plants will be back in action, mid may you can start picking.

Same goes for roots

Peasants were vegetarian by poverty, and almost all of of them were ovo-lacto so they got SOME animal protein in if not a huge amount. If you had an animal, you never slaughtered it because you wanted more animals and you wanted animal products.

In a siege you can't do that. Especially considering the physical exertion on the part of the defenders. Living off of the medieval equivalent of hard tack can only sustain you for so long.

Also: salt. It seems silly today, but you need salt and you can't really mine for it in a fortress. Your men are going to suffer from electrolyte depletion and that will kill their fighting ability over time.

Salt in ancient times was as valuable as water to an army.

And what happens when that food runs out and people are starving while they wait for new food to grow? And what if they're besieged during the fall or winter?

>just like a couple of the most prosperous nationalities on the planet
>in denial
ok

>hurf durf

You're comparing modern gardening with medieval farming practices. They didn't have advanced fertilizers, PH testing kits telling you exactly which plot of land you should grow which crop, or mechanical tills or pesticides or even modern permaculture techniques/sophisticated crop rotation. They had the iron plough (the carruca). That's about it. Crop failure, bad weather conditions, bad soil conditions, blight - these were all omnipresent threats to your harvest. Any one of which were to strike and you'd be dead in your hole.

So while you're hiding behind the walls the Mongols just pillage the countryside/burn your food supply/build siege engines.

Not all castles are built the same, and some people are more prone to being fucking retarded than others.

Both of those groups tried ot appease the mongols, which was rarely a good idea.

Europeans rightly regarded them as pagan liars who would never negotiate in good faith. It's a lot harder to take a fortress when nobody inside iwll betray it, and the leaders won't agree to surrender and demolish their own defenses.

Stop being retarded.

It's just as bad for a besieging army. Forage runs out fast, and you WILL have disease break out in your camp given time.

>pillage the countryside
People fled in advance of the mongols, and would bury/burn whatever valuables they couldn't carry. Building siege engines is pointless for them, because the west is actually more advanced in that regard than the Chinese they'll use for the job, and the franks have a distinct advantage in the kind of fighting that will ensue if they come over or through the walls.

The first mongol invasion into Hungary killed a lot of people, but managed jack shit for loot-farm animals-and suffered serious losses. This was against a country with few knights, few crossbowmen, and little in the way of armor or castles.

The second one found a country that had spared no expense or effort in fortifying the land, and got beat over and over again, failing to do anything more that burn a few villages before getting smashed in the field.

>CHINESE
>SIEGE
>ENGINEERS

Actually no.

I'm Hungarian, just kick her in the cunt really hard.

>people fled in advance
So these people move faster than Mongol armies could? Wow. Do they travel 200 miles a day or something?

Read. The. Fucking. Histories.

People hear army of mongols coming, people run away. This is literally what happened.

Run away means nothing if they all died.

> 200 miles
Mongols weren't mechanised

>arrow pierces chainmail on both sides, and then have still enough power to penetrate tree
kek

Europe has alot of inherent advantages against the mongols but not in the way most people think ((castles)).

Asia had tons of fortified settlements and mountainous redoubts. One city in China survived I think 10 years and had gunpowder weapons and river access to boot.

Europe's advantage was in being so fucking far from mongolia that supply chains would be stretched to its limits. China and central asia were conquered so easily because the mongols very quickly took over local populated settlements that could provide what was necessary to siege warfare. Which was supplies, cannon fooder and siege engineers.

Theres really little of that in Russia to establish a base of operations.

Their armies could do >100 miles a day, their spy/information systems even faster.

They are the fastest army until the start of mechanization..

The people on the border of the kingdom would prob be screwed no matter what. But the peoples of the interior would have at least a week head start, those furthest away could prob enjoy a month to prepare.

Post favorite castles

If they hear the news in time, if they have preparation, etc.

There's a reason why mongols dont waste their time on tiny castles full of maybe couple dozens to hundred people. They'd rather ransack the main course of the country by destroying their crops/animals/etc.

If they want to seige it, they'd seige a walled city with >10K people or > 100K people

Unlike the Babylonians you didn't manage to put them down for good, you only managed to kick them out and then invite them back later, a this also happened during the medieval times.

Look at your countries now, ruled by jews and full of non natives.

>tomatoes
>peppers
>in medieval Europe

>throw rotting corpses over the walls
>people inside get sick and die

Siege as always
+
Cut off supply

>cuck
Mongols who have superior siege methods and who destroy all citadels in China, Central Asia, Persia ( Even Assassins who successfully defend own castles from Crusaders has been exterminated by them) Middle East, Russian Precipitates, suddenly has been defeated by tiny European fortifications.

facepalm.jpg

Are we talking about those that could actually be used as strategic fortresses, or just any old proto-Disney vanity edifices?

>"It is believed that the devastatingpandemictheBlack Deathentered Europe for the first time via Kaffa in 1347, through the movements of the Golden Horde. After a protracted siege during which the Mongol army underJanibegwas reportedly withering from the disease, they catapulted the infected corpses over the city walls, infecting the inhabitants, in one of the first cases of biological warfare."
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feodosia

American tier taste in castles

In some cases just literally storming it under cover from crossbow/archery fire.

During the 100 years war they mention this, folks just waded through the moat and starting striking with base of the wall with pickaxes while archers gave covering fire.

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dig - break foundation - watch how mighty walls falls like sandcastle.

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>Schloss Lichtenstein

If Hipsters had castles

Le Mont Saint Michel

If it's autistic but it works then it isn't autistic.

>Le

You have to go back...

lmao

Hi r.e.d.d.i.t

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>Pickaxes

Wtf how much time would they need to go through castle stone walls with pickaxes?

Arva castle, northern Hungary

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>Built in 19th century.

Kek. Please don't confuse a glorified holiday home for a castle. This is a real castle.