Centuries ago, if you were a ruler, you needed to protect yourself in your realm.

You obviously needed an army and soldiers, but you also needed some sort of defensive

fortification to protect yourself from attack.

The solution of this problem in the Middle Ages was the development of massive

structures which could resist direct attack and often served as a seat of administration for a region.

Over the centuries, the thought and engineering that went into these structures became one of the highlights of the era.

Learn more about medieval castles and fortifications, and how and why they were built,

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. The For a moment let's suppose that you are a medieval lord queen, or some member of the upper nobility.

You have a realm that you have to protect.

You have knights and peasants and a whole bunch of land which is under your protection.

You also have rivals who have their own lands and have made some sort of claim against your land.

You need to both protect yourself and hopefully deter any attack from ever happening.

You don't want to appear weak.

To that end, you decide to build a castle.

A castle is really just a residence and a defensive fortification all in one.

A fortification might not have a residence and something like a palace would not have a defensive

fortification. For the rest of this episode I'm just going to be referring to all the defensive

fortifications I'll be talking about as castles. So you want to build a castle. The first

and most important thing you have to consider is geography. You don't want to just plop a castle

anywhere. You ideally want to build one where there's terrain and landscape that will do much of the defensive work for you.

Most castles will be built on hilltops.

This allows the castle to have a better view of the surrounding landscape and advance warning of possible attacks.

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