Some days, you need a castle
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You always did want a turret.
Yeah, a big tower, maybe just off the bedroom. One that allows you to avoid being sacked while you oversee your neighborhood kingdom from on high. You could do the Rapunzel bit. You could fortify it! Yeah, a turret, that would be great. As in the new book, "Castles" by Dan Jones, all the cooler rulers want one.
Chances are, you know a castle when you see one but, over time, some have seen the need to define them more specifically. In the 11th century, the cleric Anselm said a castle was "any tower with a wall around it." The scholar R. Allen Brown said in 1954 that "the castle is the fortified residence of a lord …" However they're identified, Jones says he's been interested in castles for most of his life.
Though humans have been fortifying villages to protect people and supplies since the Stone Age, Jones starts his narrative in ancient Troy, with the kidnapping of a beautiful woman, a siege, and a big wooden horse. The story of the Trojan War that we know came from Homer in about the late eighth century B.C.E. and by then, it had been passed down orally for about four centuries and was likely quite exaggerated. Even so, the city of Troy did exist -- several times, actually, and one of the iterations became the obsession of a con man.
Ancient Britannia was covered with hillforts, which were not the sophisticated fortification that invading Roman soldiers were used to but, says Jones, hillforts worked for centuries. The Chinese built walls; so did the people of Constantinople -- two of them, in fact, and Umayyad Caliph Sulayman was determined to knock them down to defeat the Romans. The Vikings built ring fortresses, the Normans constructed "a rash" of castles across Europe, castles played a big part in the American Civil War, and even Count Dracula had a nice castle of his own.
Some days, you honestly need a castle, a great big stone edifice to keep out the riffraff, for real. Other days, a great big moat with alligators just might suffice.
For sure, you need to read "Castles."
Long on fascinating history but, alas, short on photographs, this is the kind of book that speaks to the heart of the reader who loves to know about ancient battles, warriors, and the edifices they hoped to capture or destroy. Author Dan Jones then adds real (but not gratuitously violent) adventure, learned conjecture, and excitement to the tales of each chaptered castle and their builders and conquerers, buckling swashes every which way. Readers who are fascinated with history, archaeological and modern, will be thrilled with what's here, and the narrative is so easily understandable that it may garner new fans.
The Prince or Princess inside you will devour this book, as will ancient weaponry enthusiasts, strategic thinkers, and anyone who's visited a castle or dreams of having one someday. If you're up for a comprehensive book on the subject, "Castle" towers over all.
Terri Schlichenmeyer lives in Wisconsin with her two dogs and a collection of almost 20,000 books.