4 ms·
They also have survivorship bias. Wooden palisades are effective but tend not to survive time.
by consp 3y ago
They also have survivorship bias. Wooden palisades are effective but tend not to survive time.
- Tomte 3y agoThat argument only works in one direction: if castles had been ineffective, they wouldn't have been built so much. Yet every castle surviving is a castle that has been built. There are no castle at present that have never been built.
- mcv 3y agoThere are castles that have never played a role in a war, though. One of the most interesting castles in France, Bonaguil, is an almost perfectly designed castle with brilliantly designed defensive systems, but it was built in an area that never saw any major military campaigns. A theory is that the builder built it as a demonstration of his own skill in castle design.
- willvarfar 3y agoIt'd be a bit late to build the castle after the major military campaign, so the lack of campaigns doesn't mean the castles wouldn't get built in case of the future eventuality. It might go so far that perhaps the reason the area never saw major military campaigns is because of the defensibility of it's castles?
- mcv 3y agoI think most castles are still in the areas that saw the most fighting, although I don't have any good data on that. I know the Dordogne saw a lot of fighting, and it has a lot of castles that got upgraded regularly.
- WalterBright 3y agoCastles line both banks of the river Rhein. They were built to extract tolls from the river traffic.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- neilkk 3y agoEgyptians built pyramids in order that their kings would live forever. The pyramids were not effective at allowing their kings to live forever so why did they build so many? Stone Age people painted the animals they were going to hunt on rocks so that the pictures would entrap the animals' spirit and they would be easier to catch. This method of ensuring a good hunt was not effective so why did they do so many paintings?
- lupusreal 3y agoThe Egyptians believed their pyramids were effective. The nature of that belief made it difficult to challenge (who is to say those Pharaohs aren't still alive in their afterlife?) Military technology has to prove itself in this life, not the next. That's a more stringent test.
- neilkk 3y agoThe Great Wall of China is military technology, would you consider that its effectiveness is proven?
- samus 3y agoIt was primarily built to create a geographical barrier where otherwise there was none. Even though all such barriers can in principle be crossed or bypassed, they can still cause considerable tactical and logistical issues for any attacker. Without the wall, raiding bands of any size could just slip through and cause havoc. Only large and well-organized forces had siege equipment to break through wherever they wanted. Similarly, traffic and migration of peoples could be controlled and tolls and customs could be enforced. It also acted as an infrastructure for fast transmission of messages. In those ways, like the Roman Limes and the European castle networks, it was mostly an infrastructure for peaceful times. But even in war, it was preferred to bypass it or to capture a gateway fortress, otherwise these forces could cause enormous problems for the attackers. For example, only allying with the Ming garrison at Liaoning made it possible for the Manchus to crush the short-lived Shun dynasty and establish the Qing dynasty.
- 3y ago