Powder and stone, or, why medieval rulers loved castles

57 pointsposted 2 months ago
by areoform
(1517.substack.com)

25 Comments

iammjm

2 months ago

Interesting read. Digging in and fortifying positions is very much still a crucial part of war. For example, in the current Russo-Ukrainian war, structures such as trenches, bunkers, basements, towers, buildings etc. are crucial for holding onto terrain. Also obstacle-like structures such as concertina wire, anti-tank ditches, dragon's teeth, minefields, czech-hedgehogs, etc. are all over the place. Wherever soldiers appear, they basically dig in and start fortifying, constructing structures both for their own protection as well as for obstructing enemy movement. An interesting recent development are kilometers-long anti-drone tunnels along key logistical routes, meant mostly for stopping rotary FPV drones that are trying to intercept logistics

01HNNWZ0MV43FF

2 months ago

> kilometers-long anti-drone tunnels along key logistical routes, meant mostly for stopping rotary FPV drones that are trying to intercept logistics

Where they put nets over the road for camoflage or physically catching the drones, right?

I couldn't find a good picture and for a second I thought you meant an earthen tunnel.

Animats

2 months ago

> Where they put nets over the road for camouflage or physically catching the drones, right?

Yes. But it didn't work for long. The Russians have an answer to that.[1]

[1] https://www.thesun.ie/news/16173281/russian-dragon-drone-str...

araes

2 months ago

Probably need to move over to fire resistant cloth mesh relatively soon if the thermite drones become a common battlefield sight.

_carbyau_

2 months ago

Thermite temperatures are over 2000 degrees celsius. It is literally burning iron and aluminium.

Material science can do amazing things but a capable "fire resistant cloth mesh", cheap enough to use in the quantities required, will be a good trick.

araes

2 months ago

It does not need to survive the direct impact of the thermite, it just needs to self extinguish and not light large areas of the mesh on fire. A couple foot size holes don't matter much in miles of mesh.

user

2 months ago

[deleted]

user

2 months ago

[deleted]

kakacik

2 months ago

This doctrine is changing fast in that conflict. Any enemy structure sticking out is a prime target for drones, and there around 10,000 drones used daily and this number keeps rising continuously, often one-way FPV kamikaze drones. Anything that sticks out is bombarded into oblivion, the tactic now is more akin to hiding or blending with surroundings.

Once they figure out cheap way for semi-autonomous swarms (as in 1 guy piloting say 50 drones, mix of bombers, kamikadze ones and possibly ones carrying some AA rockets) skies will be full of little deadly plastic birds and fortified positions on the battle line will be fully thing of the past.

psunavy03

2 months ago

Always great to see someone who has probably never served pontificating on military affairs with such an air of authority.

Sort of like listening to a lawyer hold court on the future of software development.

filterfish

2 months ago

> I am (alas) an entirely carbon-based user of the em dash.

What a lovely sentence.

morshu9001

2 months ago

Happy to see "de bello Gallico" mentioned. The finale, the siege of Alesia, was all about building.

jcalx

2 months ago

Also see A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry's series of fortifications [0] regarding castles and their strategic importance, especially on how they were essential to local control of the area as opposed to "just" FOBs for military campaigns. (Incidentally the term "tyranny of the wagon equation" linked in the article also eventually leads to a different ACOUP series.)

[0] https://acoup.blog/2021/12/10/collections-fortification-part...

nish__

2 months ago

I think America needs more castles. They're very cool.

mmooss

2 months ago

IME, it's not popular to say it on HN, but it's essential to know your author - information is never divorced from a person (sometimes it's a programmer). You're not smart enough to evaluate knowledge unless you have expertise yourself, and even then it's essential to know who wrote it - note that is the lead piece of information in scholarly cites. Here I see no description beyond,

> I try to learn all the time. I make stuff sometimes. And dream about space the rest of the time. Proud Neptune-stan. Ask me about Neptune.

And here is their process:

> the synthesis of parts from several books + papers and discussions with friends

Also know the institution, in this case the 1517 Fund. From their About page,

> In 2010, our team cofounded the Thiel Fellowship with Peter Thiel to prove out a simple belief: great founders don’t need university degrees. That was a $100k grant program – and it gave birth to projects like Ethereum, companies like Figma, OYO Rooms, and Luminar, and funds like the Longevity Fund. We started 1517 to scale that further and expand the support and community that the Thiel Fellowship started.

Just-a-guy-on-the-Internet, and in an org with an agenda, is the source of all sorts of nonsense.

areoform

2 months ago

I'm replying to your central thesis,

    information is never divorced from a person (sometimes it's a programmer). You're not smart enough to evaluate knowledge unless you have expertise yourself
A few loosely connected points,

  – outsourcing your thinking to "experts" is just as bad as outsourcing your thinking to LLMs. In both cases, you are placing the onus of thinking on an outside source, and depriving yourself of the richness of life in the long run.

  – I quote the literature for a reason. *I don't want you to take my word for it.* You can read Caesar's and Robert McNamara's thoughts; you can get context directly from historians; and then see the story told via tapestry to draw your own conclusion.

  – I also do my best to link to specific pages of the sources so that you can read the quotes in context. It takes a lot of effort to do this. As things aren't always publicly available, and it's a PITA to keep track of everything.

  – you're harkening to the idea that there "adults" in the room. There are no adults in the room. Never have been. Not for anything of consequence; definitely not for something at the cutting edge of technology. It feels like that because we write hagiographies after the fact.
A piece I'm working on right now examines Apollo and ARPANET in context — both programs were despised by the experts of their day. If they'd failed, we'd be quoting those critics. But they succeeded and so their names are forgotten. Science advances one funeral at a time.

  — learning how to screen ideas for yourself on a self-developed baloney scale is one of the most important skills an educated adult can inculcate. It's sad that we've shied away from its explicit cultivation.

  – "smart"-ness is partly inculcated. A tool (or a mind) grows rusty with disuse.

  – why someone is saying something is tied to them, but information itself can be neutral. Its *presentation* can be biased. What's told / left out can be an issue. But the fact that the moon exists or William the Conqueror used castles for his invasion has nothing to do with me. Those facts will be true no matter who I am as a person.

  – yes, the way I have presented the information / the facts is tied to me. It's tied to my quirks of personality and my thought process as well as my personal biases (of which there are many). Which is why I make the effort of quoting primary / secondary sources.

  – I write these things because I want to learn from people who are more knowledgeable / smarter than me. And I want to be surrounded by people who are smarter than me.

  – you don't have to read it. it's just like a blogpost man, on the internet. doesn't really matter in the long run.

protocolture

2 months ago

>outsourcing your thinking to "experts" is just as bad as outsourcing your thinking to LLMs. In both cases, you are placing the onus of thinking on an outside source, and depriving yourself of the richness of life in the long run.

Right but thinking doesnt occur in a vacuum. Thinking is a garbage in/garbage out process. Stopping and looking at a source to determine whether it is suitable to be processed is a worthy task.

To be clear, I dont think the parent comments criticism of the blog is worthwhile, but this element of your criticism of his criticism is also pretty useless.

mmooss

2 months ago

(I made some edits to the following ...)

I guess from your name and response that you are the author. I certainly don't want to disrespect anyone personally, and beyond a doubt you know more than I do about castles. I do my own research on the same level; I love your intellectual curiosity.

I disagree on the theoretical claims in your comment here:

> – outsourcing your thinking to "experts" is just as bad as outsourcing your thinking to LLMs. In both cases, you are placing the onus of thinking on an outside source, and depriving yourself of the richness of life in the long run.

Therefore it's better to outsource thinking to amateurs? You might say, 'I'm not saying to outsource thinking to me' and I agree - nobody said anything about outsourcing.

I'm suggesting the opposite: Think more critically, more seriously, and without restraint, and that starts with understanding there's a person behind the information, with perspective, expertise, uneven knowledge and experience, biases and objectivity, etc.

You're depriving yourself of much of the richness of life by not taking critical thinking more seriously. Truth is a very hard, precious thing; knowledge and wisdom even harder; care about them more deeply.

To learn about software development (if that's your profession, as an educated guess), do you read a medieval historian who read a few papers and books and talked to historian friends? For this article, did you read papers and books by experts or by people on your level?

I'd be interested in talking to you about the topic, but I wouldn't take it as a piece of research. I talk to people all the time - most of the time! - who aren't promulgating their words as research. Who would have anything to say?

> — learning how to screen ideas for yourself on a self-developed baloney scale is one of the most important skills an educated adult can inculcate

The research shows that people don't do that accurately, and more educated people perform even worse. Without prior knowledge, how can you prevent people from midleading you? People have been misleading people forever; 'used car salesperson' is an old cliche. Even harder, how do you prevent people from misleading you about things they misunderstand themselves - they will sound even more sincere? Telling people they can figure it out is like telling them they can dodge bullets.

Or another way to look at it is to use the baloney scale developed by science and scholarship for centuries, to great effect: Post-positivism. Emprical knowledge, scholarship, and understanding humans minds always are behind it.

The idea that expertise has no value is hard to defend. Do you not seek out doctors and lawyers? Software developers?

Like I said, I do my own research on the same level. There's nothing wrong with that, but people should know what their reading.

I don't think I'd publish my similar research because there is so much professional research available, and certainly without talking to someone who knows the subject deeply and can point out what I've missed. It would be an interesting hypothesis to bring up to historians of the period. How about Bret Devereaux, a military historian of medieval and ancient Europe, who publishes a popularish blog and might be open to it? Why not, if you care deeply about critical thinking and truth?

protocolture

2 months ago

I dont like Thiel, despite his amazing understanding of the Anti Christ.

But I have no explicit hate for Ethereum or Figma. IIRC Vitalik and friends shopped themselves out to a few other places before Thiel Fellowship.

mmooss

2 months ago

I didn't say anything about dis/liking Thiel. My question is, is this valuable and accurate information about medieval castles?

thatcat

2 months ago

The primary argument that castle "created the modern state" suggests we've regressed into feudal times. I don't think this is accurate.

euroderf

2 months ago

When you think about it, the goal of fortifications (and the like) has been to protect from explosives and shrapnel. But now with drones, explosives and the attendant shrapnel can basically be shuttled anywhere and with great precision.

NedF

2 months ago

> Why Medieval Rulers Loved Castles.

Why do men love paper money?

Castles is a thing because it's a thing. Like Rai stones or Bitcoins hashes. They are hard to make.

Once you have a castle everyone rally's around it, they know it will be there in 200 years. When you are old you know your investment will still have the same value to give to your children.

What China is doing in the South China Sea is very cool, making islands. I'd be nice to be in a world humans did it without the power grab as an excuse, but I guess that's the value add governments need when the world is full of sad nihilists on the mainstream media train against building great things, only destruction.

baud147258

2 months ago

I don't think castles, especially the moat and bailey types discussed in the article. Even those built of stone required maintenance to last longer than decades, especially if you want something usable and not a ruin (and at the time, any construction that's not in use would likely be dismantled, with the construction materials to be re used).

But I agree that money played a part: castles were the place from where the local lord was controlling his estate, extracting taxes from the local farms and controlling the military force that would prevent other from trying to pillage/forage on his lands.