#star forts

[victusinveritas]

Like lingering ornaments, some medieval star-shaped cities in Christmas colors, seen from space.

Bourtange (Netherlands), Palmanova (Italy), Almeida (Portugal), Neuf-Brisach (France).

[frasohei]

[jurakan]

Fun Facts that could be mine, you say? I'm demanding a refund if it isn't as fun as the advertisement seemed to make it...

No pressure, huh?

Alright, then, go big or go home, I guess. Today You Learned about an architectural conspiracy theory.

Star forts!

Or bastion forts, as Wikipedia calls them.

So if you've looked at fortresses throughout history, you may notice that there came a point in which Europeans started building fortresses like this, instead of like standard castles with rectangular or circular walls. The change was the advent of gunpowder, or rather, the wide usage of gunpowder on the battlefield and in sieges. See, if you're defending a fort, and someone comes with cannons... well, they can blow the wall apart quite easily. You can also try planting explosives at the base of the walls.

Walls like this, which were thicker and lower, allowed you to have less of a target, a more difficult wall to blast through, and gave your defenders a chance to fire down at people who walked up to the wall in a way that you can't do if you don't have a good angle on them.

Or something. I don't know, I'm not a tactician. Anyway there a butt-ton of these around the world. They fell out of favor as gunpowder weapons evolved, so they became obsolete. That's not the wild part. The absolutely wild part is that there are people who have conspiracy theories about these things.

So as pointed out in this article, there's a website called starforts.org, which claims that these fortresses are not, as they appear to be, structures built for gunpowder warfare, but are actually the remains of a long-lost civilization that spanned the globe before recorded history.

I promise that I am not making this up.

The claims are things that are obviously nonsense--that these somehow harness electricity somehow to make them ancient power generators that we've somehow forgotten how to turn on, or that they're used to transport people around the globe. These whackjobs insist that Europeans didn't build these--they found them out there in the wild, or something, and built over them to disguise how old they really are. There's one assertion that they're actually grown like living organisms rather than built like... buildings.

[Ohmygoshweareadoomedspecies]

Obviously, no, this is bunk. No, it's more than bunk, it's remarkably stupid. We have records of these forts being built. You can look up why they were built the way they were! Heck, you can visit them and see their foundations and walls and see that they're clearly not organic, or ancient, or power generators, or whatever!

They look really cool, though.

[nocternalrandomness]

Fort Ticonderoga in New York overlooking Lake Champlain

[sweettntmag]

Tartaria: The lost empire the global elite doesn’t want you to know about

For centuries, maps, books, and travellers’ tales spoke of a vast land known as Tartaria. Once stretching across Siberia, Central Asia, Mongolia, and beyond, this mysterious region has today almost vanished from history. Mainstream historians dismiss Tartaria as nothing more than a geographic label used by Europeans who poorly understood the lands of the Mongols, Tatars, and other nomadic…

Tartaria: The lost empire the global elite doesn’t want you to know about

[bantarleton]

Star forts from all around the world. These fortifications became the norm after the large-scale introduction of gunpowder weaponry like cannons made castles obsolete. The fort’s design is low to the ground, minimizing it as a target, with walls consisting of stone-clad dirt slopes able to withstand cannon shot. The sharp angles of the structure also partly deflected impacts and helped break up and confound enemy attacks. 

From top to bottoms:

Fort George, Scotland.

Bourtange, the Netherlands.

Manjarabad Fort, India.

Fort of Santa Cruz de Itamaracá, Brazil .

Forte Stella Fortress, Italy.

Jaca Citadel, Spain.

Fort of San Diego, Mexico .

Krzyżtopór, Poland.

Älvsborg fortress, Sweden.

Fort Malborough, Indonesia.

[1five1two]

Palmova, Italy. The town is encircled by massive Venetian Defensive Systems that are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

[racefortheironthrone]

At what point in time did European monarchs stop building castles and fortresses for defence purposes in favor of palaces purely as displays of wealth (since castles also doubled as displays of wealth as well as means of defence)? My guess would be around the 17th century with Louis XIV of France, would that be accurate?

Well...it’s important to separate castles from fortresses. 

As cannons were introduced in the 15th century, you saw less and less castles being built as fortifications, since cannons could rather quickly knock big holes in their vertical walls. 

Instead, you saw a new kind of fortification called the bastion fort or trace italienne - as the Italian city-states were constantly at war with one another throughout the Renaissance, they showed the same innovation in military technology that they showed in art, architecture, science, etc. - which replaced the vertical castle wall with an angled wall that (together with the use of earthern embankments to dissipate force) could reflect cannon fire.

Bastion forts - which evolved into “star forts” - also incorporated a number of other advances:

By switching from rounded towers in favor of diamond-shaped towers, they eliminated dead zones that had sheltered attackers from being shot at from around the curve of the tower, and made sure that attackers would be completely exposed (which made it much harder to cause a breach by under-mining or planting explosives under the wall). 

The star shape of the bastion towers meant that attackers trying to rush any one tower would leave their flanks and rear exposed to at least one and possibly two other towers. This “enfilade” fire could wreak terrible damage, both physically and psychologically, and got even worse in those places where the guns’ field of fire overlapped.

Building on these insights, military engineers started to get really elaborate with defense-in-depth, building star-forts on top of star-forts. If an attack looked likely to breach the first line, guns and defenders would be withdrawn to the next layer, which was higher in elevation than the first. Thus, the poor bastards who’d already run the gauntlet of fire and clambered up the walls would have to do it over again, but this time facing a more concentrated defense.

While all of this was happening, monarchs and nobles realized that they didn’t have to make their personal residences defensible and could do things like replace narrow arrow-slits with nice big windows, or spend the money that previously would have gone into keeping the defenses strong into displays of ostentatious wealth that make Liberace look like an ascetic monk. (A lot of monarchs encouraged this by hard and soft power alike, because it made aristocratic rebellions a lot harder to pull off.)

So it’s not that people stopped building fortresses - they were still building them well into WWII, after all - but that they started specializing their buildings. Castles had to do double-duty, but forts and palaces only had to do the one thing.