Build huge-ass castle to defend region

And now the sorties from the castle take your food from your baggage train

>mongols unable to take Hungarian Castles with significantly superior numbers
Were Steppe Nomads just that dumb?

Hear routers of an invading force.
Send out scouts from the castle while all the bailiffs gather in everything that can be moved, crops, animals, grindstones plowes and such.
All men between fourteen and fifty armed with spears.
Scouts report back after two weeks, there is a force approaching.
Barron orders another sweep of the province to make sure that all the food has been gathered and things that can help the invaders are distroyed.

Invader arrive and find the castle locked up tight, no food anywere within two days ride and no people but what that can see standing on the parapet.

What do you do?
Besiege the castle with the force you have and what food you have.
Decide your force leaving some to picquet the castle while the rest move on.
Leave the castle alone and move in to somewhere you can get what you came for.

Besieging takes time.
assault takes blood.
Deviding your force is always a bad idea.
Leaving an I tack force behind you opens you up to stack from front and rear.

On average this happened every seventy years or so to a European castle.

Hear routers of an invading force.
Send out scouts from the castle while all the bailiffs gather in everything that can be moved, crops, animals, grindstones plowes and such.
All men between fourteen and fifty armed with spears.
Scouts report back after two weeks, there is a force approaching.
Barron orders another sweep of the province to make sure that all the food has been gathered and things that can help the invaders are distroyed.

Invader arrive and find the castle locked up tight, no food anywere within two days ride and no people but what that can see standing on the parapet.

What do you do?
Besiege the castle with the force you have and what food you have.
Decide your force leaving some to picquet the castle while the rest move on.
Leave the castle alone and move in to somewhere you can get what you came for.

Besieging takes time.
assault takes blood.
Deviding your force is always a bad idea.
Leaving an I tack force behind you opens you up to stack from front and rear.

On average this happened every seventy years or so to a European castle.

>trying to take castles with literally 60k horse split into two big and several small raiding parties
retard. If the Mongols went through with conquering Europe the tiny ass "Castles" of Europe would've been easy game compared to what they previously stormed in Khawarizm or the Levant.

Someone qualified please settle this debate without resorting to adolescent language

>he thinks the size of the individual castles is what matters and not that there's hundreds of them who can all support each other

Remember what Machiavelli said about building castles.

Except that if an enemy force came close people would take as much food as they could and belongings into the castle.
You would barely be able to loot shit.

Most Khwarizmi castles were rammed earth/mud walled cities with a citadel held by a small number of loyal troops but mostly filled newly conquered populace with very little loyalty to the shah. Even then the mongols took insane losses when they had to storm a city.

I think if the mongols of Genghis' and Ogadei's generation made a concerted effort to conquer Europe they would have but the later divided mongols had too many plates spinning.

actually I don't, all I remember is his meme quote about being feared. What did he say?

They worked for Alfred.

"Nothing is true; everything is permitted"

Are you retarded? You're just going to ignore the knife in your ribs pretending that lands yours? Dude you are just some kind of genius!!! Military, hire this man.

You're that same faggot who claims tanks make no sense, aren't you? Saged.

bump

How the fuck are you going to bring all that food back?

The people at the castle will just go out and attack you while your soldiers are scattered pillaging the farms, now you have zero food and no soldiers.

>Hannibal
You mean the guy who failed and lost specifically because he couldn’t take the fortified cities in the area?

Thats the point of castles, to not be attacked. Lords would live in them and feel safe.

what the actual fuck is up with the foremost tower in that picture
it's just a wall yet the windows are dark

I think it's triangular.

Castle were in fact _offensive_ weapons that allowed for control of the countryside and acted as a secure base from which to carry out offensive operations against the enemy, not simply a place to hide from your enemies as Hollywood insists.

Castles were mainly built to defend the lords against the surrounding countryside. Not protect it

>Take their food=now you have supplies

The food is in the castle.

...

You are assuming that it was easy for medieval armies to bypass medieval fortifcations like it's easy for modern armies to bypass static defenses/strong points. This is an erroneous assumption for obvious reasons.

Machiavelli thought that relying on walls for defense was a dumb idea. However, his reasoning is pretty bad; it's basically

>Well, a determined, organized, well supplied enough force can always take the fortress
>FORTRESSES ARE USELESS!

Some of that, I suspect, is his experience in the tiny city-state level Italian wars; often, there was no fallback position outside "Your city", and internal organizational factors (or lack thereof) often prevented more sophisticated siege measures like trying to raise more force or contact allies, that would happen elsewhere in Europe.

This, they were to protect the surrounding area and if need be you could army a garrison in one during times of war. And yes they did just go around it like OP said although if an army is garrisoned there while you do you will be flanked.

Can't till a field when it's 1630 and your German cause you're dead LOL!

...

this was a tactic the English tried during the early stages of the hundred years war, called Chevauchee, where they would basically go around burning down villages stealing food and burning whatever they couldn't carry. The general idea was that it would show to French peasants that their king was powerless to protect them so they would be better off under English rule. In reality it accomplished the opposite.

The purpose of Chevuchee was not to turn the local populace against the king (or nobility), the purpose was to force the French into what would hopefully be a decisive battle by all the raiding and pillaging, after which castles, knowing there was no relief on the offer, would usually surrender without full sieges.

While it was not 100% successful in that either, you are grossly mistaking the purpose of those mass raids.

>Thinking medieval warfare was anything like modern warfare.

Wasn't the quote something like, 'the greatest fortress isn't walls, but the hearts of the people'?

It's not exactly that. He said in one of his letters (I'll have to dig through my collection for which one), that the greatest threat to any fortress was a donkey loaded with gold, and that the only defense against it was in the loyalty of its people.

>>Just go around it
Go around it and do what you fucking dumbass? You don't think there's people in there ready to come out and flank you or shoot at you with some sort of artillery from the inside? These castles and the fortifications made to them were done hundreds of years ago, some of them even more than a millenia ago. This isn't 2017 where you can hop inside a fighter jet and raze the entire area, you had to mobilize an army and lead them past areas like this.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Europe

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Mongol_invasion_of_Hungary

Hungary in particular was extremely hard to conquer once stone fortifications sprang up. Sure, you can ride 20-60k men into a country, rape and burn everything you touch, and let your horses graze on anything green. But you have neither a country nor its goods to take home or make your own. They're all in a fucking castle, which you know dick about besieging because they're small, cramped, and impossible to assail with the artillery available to you. They're not like the fortifications your grandfather faced in Asia and Iran. They're basically a single block of stone filled with angry men waiting for you to let your guard down so they can mow you down with superior heavy cavalry.

TL;DR God luck, I'm behind seven feet of stone!

do you have any sources on the hundred years war that could expand upon that?

So Nobunaga shouldn't have built the palisade on the bank of the river?

Castles also cement the feudal hierarchy. Medieval ruling classes knew their authority came from being able to protect their indentured labour from foes while also being near invulnerable to local revolt. Stick wielding peasants can't get in if they get ideas above their station, lord waits it out until other elitist toffs send henchbastards to quash the rot and make examples. (Not infallible, a large enough peasant uprising across the country broke the whole system down once in England.)