So why do cannons render castles useless? You could put cannons on the castles and shoot down the enemy cannons before they shoot at you.
So why do cannons render castles useless...
Logan Robinson
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Levi Hill
Hunter Garcia
Go ask the castles still standing how that worked out for them.
William Watson
they didnt render castles obsolete
they simply caused them to update the design to reflect changing times
they updated them to the star shaped fortress, with low wide walls to absorb cannon balls without breaking, while also giving a lot of space to fire back at the attackers
the star shape made perpendicular angles harder to find, and reduced blind spots in the walls, to prevent people from clambering over
their political function also changed from heavily fortified residence to purely military installation
these forts didnt become obsolete until high explosives made their complex geometry useless
at which point they turned from a single large building, to a compound made of many small defensive positions
Parker Martin
Fallacy. They weren't. If by Castle, you mean generically walled city, they were still in play during the Peninsula War in the early 1800's, if not later - if you include heavily walled cities, i.e Badajoz
Political Geography changed the land, rendering castles no longer protecting important land.
What was the point in Hadrians Wall if you controlled the land north of Hadrian's Wall? Super Expensive to build a new one.
Plus the damage dealt to locations during a siege made it expensive and time intensive to fix and repair, and you had to often move to keep up with enemy field armies.
Castles are also pretty shit against maneuverable armies; they can simply be avoided; RE Mongols. Guys in castles are protected, but those outside aren't. Guys in castles need to come out to save them, but get gibbed by more sizeable ground armies.
Most sieges were fought by Starvation rather than outright combat. Even if a breach was made, the ammunition to prevent the new glacis from being reinforced and potentially mined (re Badajoz) required such a fortune in expending ammunition that was often having to be shipped in over dangerous, long roads, and required guarding it wasn't worth it.
Sit, wait for enemy to get plagued/malnutritioned/sick of seeing their populace slaughtered outside of the walls.
Leo Reyes
This desu. Forts and Castles were important during both the American Revolution and the American Civil war. Hell, you could argue fixed fortification was still a thing until WW2, at which point our ability to maneuver and destroy outstripped our ability to entrench (RIP France)
Jacob Taylor
I would like to add that castles were also traditionally the residence of a noble family. As state armies developed and the internal politics of nations became less... volatile.. noble residences were increasingly moved away from fortifications.
Kayden Price
Because siege warfare, on both offense and defense, started requiring progressively more organization and resources to be effective on either side of the walls. Remember, a "Castle" isn't just a fortified strongpoint, it's a residence of a family. What made castles work is that an individual nobleman could afford a decent enough fortification that taking him out was often more trouble than it was worth, giving him de facto control over an area of countryside.
But you develop cannons, and consequentially the sorts of walls that can resist cannon fire, and you've upped the stakes a big chunk, such that a private family can't really afford that sort of shit anymore, and you often need the resources of an entire nation to make effective use of it. The nobles, especially the smaller nobility, tend to get squeezed out of the power equation.
Daniel Evans
They don't render them useless. Many cities got upgraded walls after the initial shock of the 15th century and remained solid bastions of defense afterward. Purpose-built fortifications were even worse and could last for months or years under sustained bombardment. What cannons do is render small ones uneconomical. There's a certain scale at which they'll be most useful in a pitched battle. Even then, in places where cannon are rare or difficult to maneuver you'll still see effective use of fortifications despite the use of gunpowder and lighter artillery like in the French and Indian war.
Nicholas Diaz
Then the tall, vertical wall you stuck the cannons on crumbles from all the shots it took because it's got a big area where you can land a square-on shot.
Maybe if you made the walls more angular so that the shots had a much harder time landing dead-on, you'd be able to give them a good fight.
Blake Phillips
The misconception here is that there was stuff that was really effective against castle walls pre-cannon.
Before the cannon not a single siege engine could take on a wall by itself. Sinew-powered launchers, catapults, trebuchets, etc, could tear the crenalations off the top of a wall and take out people on the other side, and definitely weaken the top as ladder prep and tower prep. Cannons were able to actually punch through them and create much more exploitable openings. But that didn't mean the entire structure was fucking useless. Otherwise they wouldn't bother taking it. Rebuilding is a bitch, but if you only have to rebuild one big breach because you blasted the shit out of it, that's a whole rest of the castle you don't have to focus on.
Dominic Parker
Honestly, that's a bit of a disservice to the Maginot line. It was politics that fucked it up, rather than efficiency (They didn't want to cause political tension with another nation so it didn't extend as far as it should have). If Germany had actually been forced to engage it rather than the political situation fucking up it's implementation, WW2 would have ended a lot faster.
One of the big things to remember about the Maginot line is that for what you got, it was REALLY cheap. It had overlapping fields of fire to fallback positions and fortification after fortification that needed to be broken but economically speaking it wasn't really much of an investment compared to a lot of military projects because so much of it didn't have heavy upkeep costs and France after WWI had some really fantastic building companies who'd gotten very used to doing a lot with not a heap.
Robert Thompson
Cannons small target
Castle big target
Cannons inaccurate
Castle immobile
Logan Hall
Cannons didn't render castles useless. Cannons changed fortification designs and defenses.
Changes in how militaries were organized is what killed castles.
Yeah, the problem with the Maginot Line was Belgium not the French line itself. Belgium's desire for neutrality led to defensive deficiencies in Belgium's border with Germany and the French border with Belgium.
Austin Hughes
What fortifications were Belgium using? I could have sworn they still had concrete fortresses.
Tyler Johnson
Here. A lot of info on it, really
> goo gl/P41YU8
Matthew Myers
Lucas Johnson
I'm surprised that someone here knows about Badajoz. Certainly a decent fortification, and in the case of this particular city, the old "castle" stands besides the newer star forts.
Pretty much what everyone else said, OP. They didn't rendered them useless, just made them evolve to counter the new styles of warfare. Also this Old guns are inaccurate as fuck, you can't really perform counter battery actions with them. You just shoot at big masses that are difficult to miss even with horrible accuracy, like infantry formations and castles.
Landon Bennett
Depends on how you define "castle", the fortified residence of a feudal aristocratic family?
Nope, centralization did that.
Fortified military installations?
Nope, they just got updated against this new weapon.
The classical medieval structure with tall, comparatively thin, walls?
Yes, cannons did make those more obsolete then not.
Jayden Cox
Not having a lot of space on your wall-tops or in your towers for your cannons to recoil tends to limit the size, and therefore range, of the defenders' weapons. The redesigning of gun platforms to allow weapn parity, as much as reducing the damage from incoming fire, was part of the reason for the change in design philosophy.
Easton Richardson
they don't, castles just become thicker. Castles didn't become useless until the start of the 20th
Liam Perez
I would say mid 20th century. Fortified gun batteries didn't really go out of style until the introduction of nuclear weapons.
Jacob Ramirez
You can still find extensive fortifications in use right now. The DMZ in Korea, the Western Sahara Wall in Morocco, Israel's colonial lands and the US fortified Baghdad city core, to name a couple.
Matthew Russell
Pretty fucking well actually. If you're in America there's literally no reason no to know this based on our own fortification patterns.
Nolan James
>Yeah, the problem with the Maginot Line was Belgium not the French line itself. Belgium's desire for neutrality led to defensive deficiencies in Belgium's border with Germany and the French border with Belgium.
Yeah, the Maginot Line did exactly what it was supposed to do (Stop invasions from the fronts it covered.). The Italian and German attempts to push through it were dismal failures because people seem to seriously underestimate just how crazy a fortification it was. The issue was that it wasn't expanded far enough to cover the weakness Belgium provided.
Hunter Evans
What is a Star Fort?
Kevin Reyes
Make castle walls out of cannons.
You're welcome.
Leo Young
So, it was Belgium's fault that Frence had an epic fail and got the reputation of surrendering easily?
Charles Brown
There is a few reasons but the whole 'just go around' is related to Belgium, yeah. They were so devoted to neutrality that they didn't even want France building defences along the french/Belgium border because it might look like Belgium would be part of the next war. Then Germany didn't give a shit about what Belgium wanted.
Another major part is that few countries were as ravaged by WWI as France was, an entire generation of young men gone and much more destructive to the country itself than say, England needed to deal with. As a result, France was very hesitant to make the first hostile move and invested heavily in defensive tools with the goal of 'Keep France safe' rather than 'Win wars'. France had the issue of being burned by the last world war and thus being understandably hesitant to reach into the fire again . In retrospect, some decisions would have really helped change things for the better for them but from the point of view of France at the time, it made sense.
Ryder King
Not a castle.
Jace Robinson
while not the exact definition of a castle, in that it was not a place of residence
it still fits the general pop culture idea of a castle
walls defending a central compound
and it was designed to resist cannon fire, while facilitating the use of cannons and fire arms within
as points out
they even had supplies to withstand an old fashioned siege like a castle would
Noah Peterson
One should also note that France's surrender in WW2 was at least as much influenced by really, really not wanting another WW1 as it was by the German military successes. They were far from completely militarily beaten by the time they surrendered.