how exactly do castles hinder the movement of enemy troops?
let's say I am marching through an enemy territory with my army, why not just go around the enemy castle and carry on towards our destination?
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They really don't. It's only if you're dealing with a relatively small force that can't scale the walls.
A hundred people scaling a ladder is hard to stop, because they have the same problems you do, and castles sort of lose usefulness at a larger scale.
Because they can just ride out, frick up your supply lines, and haul ass back to the castle. It's a position that they can harass you from, without being able to respond to them in kind.
if they frick up my supply lines I will torch all the villages we pass through unless they hand over their food
Doesn't matter, the castle has years of supplies stocked away. Go ahead and burn the countryside. See if they care.
I dont want the castle though I have passed it, now I am heading to lay siege to the capital
Tough shit, your soldiers are starving due to a lack of supplies, tired due to being constantly on watch for another raid, and frankly now they have to deal with harassment from the capital's defenders as well as watching their rear.
I have captured the city within a week
your women are being raped
surrender at once
The city has walls, dumbass.
yes and my spies penetrated it months ago
the bakers guild were bribed and they opened the gates to my men
Not only have i captured and raped your spies, i have also hypnotized 2 of them to counter spy you and a third one to frick your mum
Best post itt
Loving it
Damn this guy is good
/thread
OP utterly BTFO by castles and reduced to ridiculous fantasy scenarios to counter them
>get the capital
>immediately get besieged and slaughtered
You do realize life isn't a video game right? Just because you take the capital doesn't mean everybody just surrenders.
also in medieval warfare the State wasn't an institution, the State was a natural person.
So you will go to the middle of enemy territory, get surrounded and starve as soon as the forage runs out?
With your supply lines cut off and your army harassed from all sides?
a siege is not a short affair assuming the place is properly fortified
additionaly in a feudal system you are not the supreme absolute commander, the nobles bellow you will have their own thoughts about the matter and probably wont like risking getting raided into starvation because they're behind enemy lines
>Invade enemy nation with no supply lines
>Besiege capital
>Army constantly harassed while laying siege
>You finally capture the city after months
>Sorry our king is in another castle
>Have to march home with no supply lines and all the lands you marched through having been torched and depopulated
>Get harried all the way home
>Before you can get home find an army of well fed and rested soldiers standing opposite your fatigued and hungry army
People wage war the way they do for a reason. Medieval warfare was primarily built around sieges and harassment of undefended villages because it was the most efficient and successful way to wage war, If you have the resources you methodically capture everything you can, if you lack the resources just burn shit and go home when campaigning season is coming to a close.
There is no capital you dipshit. There may be some mayor citys, but there isnt one thats particularly important to rule the land. Back to /tg/ for your ebic medival fantasy.
This is fun in paradox games because the capitol gives a high enough warscore to win, but it's not realistic.
>He thinks that because he took the King's house the war is over when he has done nothing but hurt the income and pride of every noble between him and his country and will need to either go back or get sieged in the same city he took.
And so what ? They have food for siege anyway. Or they can go to your undefended lands and do the same to you
what food? you are probably gonna attack during summer when your men are not busy tending fields and this is when thr villages have the least stored food, before harvest season.
That being said, as long as you keep moving and ignoring castles they will keep ruining your supplies. you will starve before the castlemen will
Villages have already been taxed for years and have supplied every castle with months, and more frequently years, of provisions with which to survive sieges. You won't outlast the nation you're invading without functioning supply lines from wherever you're coming from.
supply lines. Castles can become a staging point for the enemy army to cut off your supply lines and reinforcement
or the enemy will torch the villages they have first. Scorched earth tactics is like a 1000 years old by medieval times.
>medieval warfare relied on long supply lines coming from a home territory to the campaigning army
like 300 years too early lmao
This may have happened a few times, but realistically it would be more like ferrying all the cows, chickens, grains, etc into the castle if it had room. For one thing, it's additional resources to rely on in a siege. For the other, the noble generally doesn't benefit from purposefully destroying his revenue. Scorched earth tactics are not generally employed on your own territory, especially in the context of wars within christendom. Why would you? Noble whoever if they aren't killed in the field won't be killed as a prisoner (usually) so you need something to pay for your ransom or the ransom of your relatives. People itt don't seem to understand medieval warfare as well as they think.
maybe youre right, maybe medieval warfare doesnt really depend on supply lines as much, and maybe scorched earth tactics arent that common, because youre right they arent.
but you brought up an interesting point.: Nobles
its not what you can do with the castles, but whats in the castles: professional soldiers, engineers, noblemen.
if you go straight to the capital, those same nobles can rally an army to relieve the siege or to face you in a pitched battle.
Losing a pitched battle for the defenders doesnt mean as much since they can retreat to the same castles and cities mentioned and regroup. losing a pitched battle as an invader when you havent taken any castles to use as a staging point means that you have to march all the way back to your territory, and chances are youre probably going to get wiped out. This is one reason why hannibal was considered such a good general: because he did the things he did without besieging cities (not that he could or wanted to anyways) in a conventional invasion manner.
>supply lines
Not as prominent in medieval warfare as it would be later, but they remain of supreme importance, especially for high-intensity warfare. You need a way for men, horses, arrows, and other supplies you can't just loot to get to you, be it from your home territory or from conquered land. You also need to have safe lines of communication back to your territory, or else your military AND political enemies can do whatever the hell they want.
>Scorched earth tactics
What is chevauchee? Admittedly, you're scorching the enemy's earth, not your own, but as seen in the Hundred Year's War occupied friendly territory is a completely valid target.
Because it leaves you open from behind. The garrison would sally out to attack you from behind, it gives the enemy a place to retreat to and a place to muster and attack you from all sides. By leaving a castle untouched whoever is commanding the castle is just going to sally out and harass you.
Most armies without lengthy supply trains were small and did not have the ability to siege or make serious damage to their enemy outside of raiding. The Roman army was exceptional in that they put the burden of supplies and such on the soldier instead of supply trains but even than larger armies needed them to effectively muster a large force, carry siege or have a long campaign.
It was already expected you would sack villages along the way. That's why villagers bought their livestock into fortifications and sometimes they even preemptively poisoned wells and burnt their own fields so the enemy couldn't use them.
This tbh castles were as offensive as defensive. Your position in an area will simply not be safe unless they are taken.
I think you're underestimating the dangers posed by castles and their garrisons. Walking around one is one thing but you need to realize campaigns often resulted in capturing dozens of them. You simply can't control a region without all of them.
Cool map.
This, I wonder if I can buy it anywhere
The only site I can find anything related is all in French
It LOOKS cool but it's like the opposite of reality.
?
The map I posted shows the actual locations of medieval castles and thus the most fortified areas of France. It's practically the opposite of OP's map, which puts an emphasize on impressive palatial chateaux and ignores smaller castles.
Why so many castles in Massif Central?
That map is bullshit, it implies no castles were built in the county of Nice and parts of Provence.
It’s generally not a good idea to leave a garrison of enemy troops behind you
starve the frickers out
>starve them out
>sit around for months doing nothing while thr enemy waits in their castle and the other armies across the land begin marching towards you to relieve the castle
Congrats. You get surrounded and die.
A fort is a base of operations for any army. They can safely rest in here, organize and train, storage supplies, and dominate the countryside.
>why not just go around the enemy castle and carry on towards our destination?
Medieval armies needed supply lines for troops, arrows, weapons, and food. You could have an army of 20,000 and march past a fortified castle with 100-300 fighting men on horse, but once they see you left and they start noticing convoys and wagons with food and herds of sheep being moved, they'll ride out and frick them up. Setting up heavily guarded convoys is expensive, inefficient, and bleeds men that would be better off doing other things.
Raiding the local farms for food is alright, but it would make the local population hate you and if you're trying to conquer the area or try to press your claim for the land you're invading, you've got a population that simply won't respect you and will probably rebel once you disband your army for the harvest or when the campaign is over. And if you're a Christian monarch, you'd be condemned by your enemies and probably the Pope for being an butthole. And they'd definitely shit on you if you massacre innocent Christians and massacres back then was physically demanding work. Your soldiers are better off conserving their calories for marches instead of hunting down villagers and swinging their swords to execute them.
Not to mention the crop yields are so meagre anyways that it probably won't sustain your army for more than a few days. It wouldn't be until Napoleon that the living off the land mantra was feasible.
castles are strategic structures. They are only useful if you place them in the right spots, they can store tons of rations for troops and defend those rations. If castle walls are big enough you can also have the nearby towns evacuate and enter and provide for many people, therefore the people feel safer and are more likely to pay taxes for safety.
>why not just go around the enemy castle and carry on towards our destination?
Because the castle IS your destination. Fortifications are built to protect things... supplies, cities, lords and their families, the things one has to capture or destroy to win a war. If you ignore these things, you usually can't win. That's why the fortifications are there to begin with. You can't enter a city and sack it without overcoming its walls. You can't hold the duke's son hostage if he's inside his keep. You can't flood France with armored forces if the Maginot Line is in the way... well, at some point in history this breaks down.
real life is not totalwar
Lmao at Belgians kangz in their mudhuts at the top right of the map
belgium has the highest number of castles by square mile in Europe and the world
Furthermore anon, to actually answer the question, because if you don't control the Castles, you don't control the land. If you are the invader, well then by not taking the Castles (which in most cases costs more time than men as the average castle is a small irrelevant noble or knight in a small fort that doubles as a house with his family and a dozen to a few dozen men to defend it) you are incapable of actually controlling the land you want to take, and no King is going to give up land that he still has loyal vassals and strong places in. If you're on the defensive side of the war, then by leaving the enemy's strong places on the border intact, you are risking everything on galavanting after a decisive battle, which could just be denied to you so that your army gets whittled down by disease and other typical causes so that when they launch their next invasion next year, using those same castles you left in tact, the amount of men you have to respond to them with is considerably less then the previous year.
at some point you gonna want to capture a city and castles are mostly near cities
Why is Lyon a frickhuge city and all of northern France/Flanders just empty wasteland?
It's not Lyon but the Palais des Papes of Avignon.
You can use them as a starting point for harassment raids.
>why not just go around the enemy castle and carry on towards our destination?
of course you can. BUT when you arrive tobthe destination, there will be also some castle
>all cattle in the castle
>all crops in the castle
>all animal fodder in the castle
>all other food in the castle
>all peasants
>all gold in the castle
>all other potential loot in the castle
ok, now what?