The Garrison of the Castle: some castles kept a year’s supply of food or even more on hand. The relatively small size of the thirteenth-century garrison often meant that in a prolonged siege, the assailants rather than the besieged were confronted with a supply problem. A garrison of sixty men could hold out against an attacking force ten times its number, 60 vs. 6000, talk about the three hundred Spartans! Feeding sixty men from a well-stocked granary supplemented by cattle, pigs and chickens brought in at the enemy’s approach might be far easier than feeding 600 men from a war ravaged country side.

Now there have been battles where the garrison was an entire army (Jerusalem during the crusades, Troy during the war between Greece and Troy) Some cities were large enough to have farming inside the city walls to support an army of two thousand or so. Of course, the outer curtain was around the entire city, not just the castle.

Methods of attacking a castle: Sure you can be ruthless and continue to pummel them with your trebuchets all you want, but you might want to be ready to make camp for a couple of years. Sometimes artillery just won’t cut it.

When an army attacked a castle, they had to make sure what they could or could not do. Depending on how well the castle was defended, it would lead them to different ideas that would help them break through the walls. The first thing that could be done was to cut off their water supply to the castle. Everyone knows that a human could last only three days with out water, so doing this made the defenders try to find other means to have fluid. Either drinking their own urine or the blood of their horses… they usually didn’t last too long.

It was common for the besiegers to build a wall (circumvallation) around their objective to prevent sorties (Attack from the defenders) and a second wall (Contravallation) around their own army as a security measure against revealing forces.

A frequent structural weakness was the soil the castle was built upon. Attacking forces would sometimes tunnel under the wall, preferably under a corner or tower. The would support the mine with heavy timbers as they progressed and when they were directly under their target, they would set the tunnel on fire and that would cause the wall or tower to collapse. The castle defenders could only prevent this by building on stone or other hard surfaces, or to tunnel them selves to meet up with the attacking forces then fight under the ground to gain control of the tunnel.

If that was not a possibility or they lost control of the tunnel, they would revert back to siege weapons, in which I will explain the different kinds of siege weapons in the next section.

Sometimes tricks would be the best way to gain entrance to the castle. A popular trick was the nocturnal “Escalade” a silent scaling of the wall at an inadequately guarded point.

Another was a diversion to draw defenders away from a secondary gate or weak point that might then been suddenly overwhelmed. Thus causing chaos and confusion among the defenders and the castle was quickly taken.

Sometimes an army might start a siege and after a while act like they gave up and retreated until they were out of sight. Then, some of the attacking soldiers would disguise themselves as peasants or merchants. If they were lucky they could gain entrance tot the provision hungry castle and siege the Gatehouse and hold it till the army returned. Some of you might instantly think of the “Trojan horse” which is what it basically is.

Siege weapons: One of the well known and still used today (MUCH smaller of course) is the Battering ram. Contrary to popular belief, ramming the castles gates was rare, unless they were attacking a large castle. Rams would usually made by a heavy beam or tree trunk fronted with an iron or copper head either grasped directly by its crew or swung by leather thongs. Some literally had a ram head (Not the real ones of course.) they were also made out of copper or iron.

Before any form of direct assault, the moat defenses had to be dealt with first, usually by filling it with brush and earth. The attackers would then attack with a mobile assault tower (which would be built at the battle site.) to defend it from the castle’s archers who would flame their arrows to burn the assault towers, they would be plated with armor, so the arrows would bounce off. A gate on the top level of the tower would swing down and crush the merlons. Then foot soldiers would storm the wall.

If they didn’t want to make assault towers, they would revert to Catapults or Mangonels were created to hurl stones or boulders at the stone wall. They didn’t just throw stones, clay pots that held oil, which they would light before hurling it over the wall to burn their wooden buildings. They would also send any dead over the wall to spread disease.

The Trebuchet (Tray-bush-A) helped the attackers greatly due to superior accuracy and power over the original catapults. The Largest Trebuchet found was large enough to send a small Volkswagen flying, that’s at least a Ton! Because of this huge threat, castle walls became much thicker, up to twenty four feet thick!

Then to top that off, defenders would use this new thickness to set up their own trebuchets and use them for counter battery fire. This would increase their deadliness due to their advantage of height.


Course there are different styles of castles, the Asian castles looked more like a three or four story tower. But one thing is similar. Attacking and defending a castle was not easy, there was much planning on both sides. There were some castles that never fell, there were many that did. Any one of these examples above could have been the factor to one’s survival and another’s destruction.

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