Battle Castles: 500 Years of Knights and Siege Warfare
Dan Snow
Language: English
Pages: 336
ISBN: 0007455585
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Join TV’s Dan Snow as the fully illustrated ‘Battle Castles’ brings to thrilling life a cavalcade of medieval fortifications and the clashes that turned empires to dust and mortals into legends.
Castles and their ruins still dominate the landscape and are a constant reminder to us of a time when violence, or the threat of it, was the norm.
Dan Snow explores the world’s greatest medieval castles: from Dover Castle to Château Gaillard, Richard I’s fortress in Normandy, and Castillo de Gibalfaro, the last vanguard of Moorish rule in Spain, to Krak des Chevaliers in Syria – an astounding feat of engineering by the Crusaders.
Each castle’s story is dramatically recounted: the building techniques, the weapons used and daily life within the walls. Spanning the globe, and using the latest CGI reconstructions, Dan Snow gets to the very heart of the bloodshed and battles of the greatest fortresses of the Middle Ages.
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Probably added later, but anyone using the ramp was nevertheless overlooked by high walls, from which the garrison could shoot at anyone attempting to force their way through. (Such complex entrances were a favoured design of the Crusader castles of the period: at Margat, right-angle bends and alternative routes overlooked by outer walls constitute a similarly forbidding introduction to the castle.) A large oblong building to the east of the ramp was used for stabling and as a barracks and may.
The barbican, and from there to spray the southern front of the castle – especially the battlements – with arrows and bolts. The aim was to force the defenders posted on top to retreat behind the walls where they could return fire only at a much lower rate. So anxious was Baybars to maximise the advantage he had gained, that he grabbed a bow himself and joined his archers in this intensive shooting. Meanwhile his trebuchets kept up their relentless bombardment of Krak’s eastern front. The view.
Strategy by a commander who was entirely new in military operations. After this devastating defeat for its large army, and the deaths of its grand master and numerous other leading Knights, the capture and destruction of the Order’s headquarters at Malbork Castle seemed inevitable. THE SIEGE OF MALBORK The invaders had set out with an ambitious goal: they sought not merely to inflict a decisive defeat on the Teutonic Knights in battle, but to capture their great castle. If they achieved this,.
Ammunition and gunpowder. Though forged iron cannonballs were now available, gunners were forced at times to fall back on old-fashioned stone ammunition and King Ferdinand resorted to ordering that old, discarded stone cannonballs be collected and brought from Algeciras, to the west, where they had been left scattered after the capture of the town by Alfonso XI of Castile nearly a century and a half earlier. While cannonballs might also be returned by the defender’s guns, powder was not and the.
The Queen of Naples, as well as thirty to the Queen of Portugal, and there were other gifts of captives as well. Most of the Muslims had forfeited all rights by conquest, but Ali Durdush did duly receive his safe-conduct, and the small Jewish community in the city, which had endured the privations of the siege along with the Muslim majority, were allowed to be ransomed by Jews elsewhere in Spain. The surrender document specified that every single Muslim was to be ransomed, ‘male and female, old.