Tunnels of medieval castles

Contrary to popular misconceptions, the average strength of the military garrison of an ordinary castle during active hostilities rarely exceeded 30 people. This was quite enough for defense, since the inhabitants of the fortress were in relative safety behind its walls and did not suffer such losses as the attackers.

To take the castle, it was necessary to isolate it – that is, to block all the ways of supplying food. That is why the attacking armies were much larger than the defending ones – about 150 people (this is true for the war of mediocre feudal lords).

The issue of provisions was the most painful. A person can live without water for several days, without food – about a month (in this case, one should take into account his low combat capability during a hunger strike). Therefore, the owners of the castle, preparing for the siege, often went to extreme measures – they drove out of it all the common people who could not benefit the defense. As mentioned above, the garrison of the castles was small – it was impossible to feed the whole army under the siege.

The inhabitants of the castle infrequently launched counterattacks. This simply did not make sense – there were fewer of them than the attackers, and behind the walls they felt much calmer. Food outings are a special case. The latter were carried out, as a rule, at night, in small groups that walked along poorly guarded paths to the nearest villages.

The attackers had no less problems.

The siege of castles sometimes dragged on for years (for example, the German Turant defended itself from 1245 to 1248), so the question of supplying the rear of an army of several hundred people was particularly acute.

In the case of the siege of Turant, the chroniclers claim that during all this time the soldiers of the attacking army drank 300 fouders of wine (a fuder is a huge barrel). This is about 2.8 million liters. Either the scribe made a mistake, or the constant number of besiegers was over 1,000.

The most preferable season for taking the castle by starvation was summer – it rains less than in spring or autumn (in winter, the inhabitants of the castle could get water by melting the snow), the harvest was not yet ripe, and the old stocks had already run out.

The attackers tried to deprive the castle of a source of water (for example, they built dams on the river). In the most extreme cases, “biological weapons” were used – corpses were thrown into the water, which could provoke outbreaks of epidemics throughout the district. Those inhabitants of the castle who were taken prisoner were mutilated by the attackers and released. Those returned back, and became unwitting freeloaders. They might not have been accepted in the castle, but if they were the wives or children of the besieged, then the voice of the heart outweighed considerations of tactical expediency.

No less brutally treated the inhabitants of the surrounding villages, who tried to deliver supplies to the castle. In 1161, during the siege of Milan, Frederick Barbarossa ordered the hands of 25 citizens of Piacenza, who were trying to supply the enemy with provisions, to be cut off.

The besiegers set up a permanent camp near the castle. It also had some simple fortifications (palisades, earth ramparts) in case of a sudden sortie by the defenders of the fortress. For protracted sieges, a so-called “counter-castle” was erected next to the castle. Usually it was located higher than the besieged one, which made it possible to conduct effective observation of the besieged from its walls and, if the distance allowed, to fire at them from throwing guns.

The war against castles had its own specifics.

After all, any more or less high stone fortification was a serious obstacle for conventional armies. Direct infantry attacks on the fortress could well have been successful, which, however, came at the cost of heavy casualties.

That is why a whole range of military measures was necessary for the successful capture of the castle (it was already mentioned above about the siege and starvation). Undermining was one of the most time-consuming, but at the same time extremely successful ways to overcome the protection of the castle.

Undermining was done with two goals – to provide troops with direct access to the courtyard of the castle, or to destroy a section of its wall.

So, during the siege of Altwindstein Castle in Northern Alsace in 1332, a sapper brigade of 80 (!) People took advantage of the distracting maneuvers of their troops (periodic short attacks on the castle) and for 10 weeks made a long passage in solid rock to the southeastern part of the fortress .

If the castle wall was not too large and had an unreliable foundation, then a tunnel broke through under its foundation, the walls of which were reinforced with wooden struts. Next, the spacers were set on fire – just under the wall. The tunnel collapsed, the base of the foundation sagged, and the wall above this place crumbled into pieces.