Core castle
The core castle (also called main castle , stronghold or inner castle ) describes the part of larger castles that is particularly strongly secured by a fore castle , kennel , trenches , a ring wall and other outer works and thus represents the core of a medieval fortification .
It includes the most important manorial residential and defense structures such. As the hall building , the palace , the residential tower and the dungeon . The castle well or the cistern is usually also located in this area , as water supplies were particularly important in the past in order to be able to offer sufficient resistance to the enemy during a siege .
The core castle is usually the oldest part of a castle complex, as it houses the buildings that were first erected during the construction of a castle. It often has flanking towers that were built to coat the sides of the curtain wall and to provide additional protection for the castle gate .
In complex castle complexes, the buildings of the main castle are often grouped in a ring around a castle courtyard, which served as a central storage area and - if it was large enough - also as a tournament area.
The name stronghold results from the fact that the core castle in hilltop castles and in the case of moated castles was usually higher than the outer castle . The Romanesque core of the Hohensalzburg Fortress is still called the Hoher Stock today .
literature
- Horst Wolfgang Böhme , Reinhard Friedrich, Barbara Schock-Werner (Hrsg.): Dictionary of castles, palaces and fortresses . Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-15-010547-1 , p. 169.