Quini Lopez

The castles of Europe are some of the most amazing things we’ve inherited from history Between 75,000 and 100,000 castles were built in Western Europe during the medieval period, with around 1,700 in England and Wales alone, and roughly 14,000 in German-speaking areas... Most of them rose between the 9th and 15th centuries after the collapse of centralized Roman authority and the rise of fragmented feudal power. As attacking armies grew more sophisticated, so did the walls meant to stop them. The cost was staggering: from 1179 to 1188, King Henry II of England spent over £6,500 on Dover Castle alone — an enormous sum given that his entire annual revenue was around £10,000. That figure was more than three times what he spent on any other building project in his reign, and more than four times what went into grand royal residences like Windsor. And then there is Malbork... Built by the Teutonic Knights in what is now Poland, Malbork is the largest castle in the world measured by land area. It covers 52 acres and once housed approximately 3,000 knights. A medieval visitor reportedly noted it seemed "more a city enclosed by walls than a single castle." In 950, Provence was home to just 12 castles. By 1000, the number had risen to 30. By 1030, it was over 100. The pace was not driven by a single empire with a plan, but by thousands of individual decisions made by lords, bishops, and kings who each decided, in their own time and place, that stone was the only reliable answer to an uncertain world... The word castle is derived from the Latin word castellum, which is a diminutive of the word castrum, meaning "fortified place". Between seventy-five thousand and a hundred thousand of these fortresses were built over six centuries as a reminder that every civilization eventually decides what it will leave behind. Europe decided on this. And the castles are still here.