Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 04.djvu/355

* CASTLE. 303 CASTLE. dangerous to the liberties of the people, and the nobles were forced to come to the cities to live, abaiiiloiiing their iiumnUiiii strongholds. This was the case first in the North and then in Tus- cany. Only when the age of tyrants set in. in the Fourteenth Century, with the Scalas, Vis- contis, Sforzas, Castracanis, did a new era of feudal castles besin in the north. Still, in the extreme north — in Piedmont. Savoy, and Upper Lombardy — there had been great feudal strong- holds from the Tenth Century as at Bard and Challant. The famous castle of Canossa where the Emperor Henry IV. made his submission to Gregory '1I. was one of these. Frederic II., largely through the Arab engineers he em- ployed, introduced the advanced Oriental methods before 12.i0. His castles at Lucera, Barletta, C'astel del Monte, and elsewhere wore worthy, in size and magnifuence, of their northern con- temporaries. His Freneli successors, the House of Anjou, added other features from beyond the Alps, and the south of Italy then saw the greatest development of military architecture in the penin- sula (Thirteenth and Fourteenth centuries). F^ar- ther north the new style was exemplified in such structures as the castle of Castraeane at Avenza (1322) In Oermanj- the architecture of the castle had remained during all this time in its infancy. It had retained the earthwork system up to the Twelfth CentUrVy and even the Thirteenth Cen- turv-. as at Alt-Sternberg in Westphalia and the Prussian castles of the Knights of the Cross. In the Twelfth Century, stonework was intro- duced in the more advanced regions. We ad- mire the picturesque ruins of the castles along the Rhine, such as the Drachenfels, Ockenfels, Ehrenbreitstein. Lahneck, Rheinfels, and many more. They did not embody any of the im- provements we have noticed. Even as late as the Thirteentli Century the German castles were un- provided with any flanking defenses for their outer fortifications and they kept to the anti- quated tv7>e of square donjon, rectilinear outer line of walls — in short, the simply passive sys- tem of the Eleventh Century — relying on the natural rocky situation. They were small, pirat- ical eyries, never once entering the same class as Ch.'iteau Ciaillard, or even Arques. Still. the elaborate network of these forts, their group- ing to protect the whole Rhine valley, its cities and towns, make them interesting as a social and political, if not as an engineering study. Even socially, however, they did not show the conces- -sions to comfort and magnificence in feudal life that we find in France, although it is stated th.at over .S.iO feudal castles were erected under the Hohenstiiufens. Typical examples are the two castles at Riidesheim. with three superposed ter- races but without wall-towers or advanced works — with .a typical niofa in stone — a mere trans- formation of the old earthworks. At Egisheim the keep or mota is a regular octagon inscribed in the centre of a larger regular octagonal wall- circuit — sj-mmetrical. but alisurdly inadequate in view of the advances made in contemporarv* modes of attack. A fuller develojiment of this scheme is at Steinsberg (Twelfth Century) with triple concentric lines of walls. There are. however, some interesting exceptions. Salzburg, near N'eu«tadt (Eleventh and Twelfth centuries), bears certain resemblances to Arques. with its ditch cut along the crest of the hill, its two outer baileys and an inner one with a small keep; the wall-towers, however, are square. Interesting, historically, is the', famous Wartburg Castle (Eleventh and Twelfth centuries), of the Land- graves of Thuringia, with its double bailey and its attempt to unite the great palatial residence with the fortress, a form in which the Germans anticipated the French of the Thirteenth Century. Here the palace hall was a long structure in the inner bailey quite distinct from the keep. The Frankenbtirg Castle in Alsace (Eleventh to Thirteenth Century) is interesting for its two keeps — i5ne of the primitive rectangular type, the otlu?r later and circular. At Laiideck, near Klingenmiinster (Twelfth and Thirteenth centu- ries), we see not only the peculiar German scheme of superposed retreating platforms or baileys, but the unusual presence — for Germany— ^f square and round towers in the outer circuit. These and others are in Alsace and the Bavarian Palatinate. The castle at iliinzenberg shows how in many cases of an extremely oblong plan there were two keeps in jilaoe of one, because as it became necessary to have a keep near the edge of the defenses, and often at the most vulnerable end. a second centre was required for the other end. Among the castles which, in the course of the advance made during the Twelfth and Thirteenth centuries, showed how even Germany had discarded all reminiscences of the Romano-Germanic tnota or central earth- mound, is Fleckenstein in Alsace. Trifels and Xeuscharifeneck further develop the combination of fortress with palatial halls, which was charac- teristic of the Wartburg, and no longer sacrifice (he architectural beauty of their buildings to safety. The castle of Nuremberg is a superb example of a feudal structure commanding a great city (Twelfth Century). Its narrow, rocky setting gives it not only a strong walled advanced work toward the town and a double encircling wall, but three successive baileys on ascending levels, divided by deep ditches. hea"T walls, and towered entrance-gates. Like .so many other German castles, the palace takes the place of the keep in the inner bailey. This tendency reaches its climax in such extensive castles as that of Friesach, in the Thirteenth Century, where the main palace is in the form of a quad- rangle in the centre of a long and fairly forti- fied enceinte and double outlying baileys and a central keep adjoining the palace. But far sur- passing all private and even all royal castles in Germany is the central fortress of the Teutonic knights, Schloss llarienburg. whence they ex- tended their political power and the Christian religion over Xorth Germany, and even flung down the gauntlet to Poland. It represents the highest efl'orts of German Gothic in the militaiy field, surpassing in mere beauty its prototypes in Palestine, of which we shall speak. Its great chapel, knights' hall, refectory, and other struc- tures of the inner bailey, superbly grouped, are works of art both without and within, the brunt of military defense being borne by the outer lines of fortification. In the South, the castle of Karl- stein (1347) in Bohemia is probably the most magnificent. Spain was undoubtedly the last of Western countries to abandon the purely military castle; this was due to the long conflict between the Christians and the Moors, lasting to the very close of the Fifteenth Centurj-. The Alhambra,