[HN Gopher] The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars
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The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars
Author : wallflower
Score : 108 points
Date : 2025-03-23 12:58 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.exurbe.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.exurbe.com)
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >Wealthy families built these as mini-fortresses within the city,
| where they could defend against riots, enemy families
|
| They needed some mini-fortresses, but why build them in the form
| of a tower? They could have built a secure, easy to defend
| structure less tall.
|
| Maybe they've built them for showing off, the taller the
| building, the higher the prestige? At least, that is the reason
| we have skyscrapers.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Gotta be taller than the tallest ladder would be my guess.
| Tower forts are common. You can find them in places like
| Ireland also.
| trhway wrote:
| in a dense city you also have to take into account the height
| of the neighboring towers too - you don't want to be showered
| with arrows and later musket balls from a higher tower near
| by - thus race to the top :)
| achenet wrote:
| yep. From reading Bret Devereaux's Acoup.blog, I've learned
| that especially with arrows, height is an advantage - if
| you're firing down on someone from a position above them,
| you can aim easier, and your arrow is accelerated by
| gravity. Conversely, if you're firing up at someone from a
| position below them, gravity is working against you, and
| it's harder to aim.
|
| This is why they build seige towers back in the day - to
| give the attackers a position higher than the beseiged
| city's walls from which to fire down on the defenders.
| dmbche wrote:
| "Signs of wealth and prestige, these all-stone buildings were
| also fireproof, leading to a terrible but effective tactic:
| take your family, treasures & goods up into your tower then set
| fire to enemies' homes and let the city burn around you while
| you sit safe above. This was VERY BAD for cities."
|
| I'd want to stay as far away as possible from the fire I guess.
|
| Also, it seems to be quite a busy city - presumably they
| weren't necessarily able to acquire more land to make an actual
| fortification and are stuck with a fixed perimeter, the only
| place to go is up.
| toyg wrote:
| Although an element of prestige was obviously there, they went
| high also for the usual reason: cost. Italian cities like
| Firenze and Bologna, at the time, were among the richest in the
| world, and real-estate costs were sky-high. Buying land to
| erect some wall or other fortification, in the middle of the
| city, would have been a huge waste of money.
|
| Even roman popes, when they decided they wanted a fortified
| structure, just reused the roman-era mausoleum of Hadrian -
| building from scratch would have been prohibitively costly.
| DrSiemer wrote:
| Is there any historical data to support the height of the towers
| in the first image? It looks like at least some of that is
| leaning on an artistic license.
| toyg wrote:
| There are documents from the time and even paintings from later
| times, supporting these projections. You can see a partial list
| of the towers that have since disappeared here :
| https://www.torridibologna.it/torri-scomparse/ . There were
| probably more that we just don't have documents for.
|
| Dante famously described Bologna as _selva turrita_ , a forest
| of towers. It really was as crowded as that.
| gg80 wrote:
| Looking at this picture [1] of Bologna's skyline from the
| sixties it seems it could be pretty realistic. The skyline has
| changed drastically and now you have many more tall buildings
| that make the remaining tower seems shorter. Also, I think the
| strangeness of the picture is due to the number of towers, but
| afaik there were around 100 towers in the city in the 13th
| century.
|
| [1]
| https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torri_di_Bologna#/media/File...
| IlPeach wrote:
| Someone did look into exactly that. There is no supporting
| document regarding the actual height. And it does look like it
| is exaggerated for impact purposes. So they did have towers,
| they were clearly higher than the rest of the other
| buildings... Might have been this tall? Maybe. Or maybe not.
| timcobb wrote:
| What are you referring to? Who looked into it? Are you citing
| something?
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| I think they might be referring to this video?
| https://youtu.be/ikg3-GQLg3g They traveled to the city and
| spoke to an actual historian on the matter. The "more
| accurate" model appears in the last 20s of the video if you
| are just curious about what our best guess of the actual
| appearance of the city is.
| epolanski wrote:
| I don't know how tall are those in the first image, but
| consider that several towers reach beyond 300 feet (90 meters
| today), and documents point out that few reached beyond 330 in
| middle ages.
| damnitbuilds wrote:
| [edit]
|
| This, existing, tower appear to approximate the height of those
| in that image:
|
| https://static.bolognawelcome.com/immagini/bb/ec/bd/1b/20220...
| trhway wrote:
| reminds Yemen tower houses
|
| https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20211004-yemens-ancient-s...
|
| Also Georgian tower houses
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svan_towers
| zby wrote:
| :) I was just to add these.
|
| I visited the Georgian ones - they really look otherwordly -
| some towns are packed with them.
| toyg wrote:
| _> Bologna is famous for still having two intact towers_
|
| Famous fact but actually incorrect: there are many more, they're
| just a bit more difficult to spot than the two central ones.
|
| In total there are 22 towers still standing in some form, and
| (iirc) about 7 of them are still their original height.
|
| https://www.bolognawelcome.com/en/blog/not-just-the-two-towe...
| internet_points wrote:
| Oh I could spend ages on this blog.
|
| Interesting that the main reason they went away was coordinated
| effort to halt a race towards the bottom (or top, as the case may
| be). Medieval society was also able to work towards a common
| good.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| Makes you wonder what modern urban planning could learn from a
| bunch of 13th-century Italians with too many towers
| rsynnott wrote:
| > Medieval society was also able to work towards a common good.
|
| I'm not sure that they'd have thought of it quite in those
| terms, but yeah, restrictions on private ownership of castles,
| and destruction of said castles, is basically as old as
| castles, and these towers are, functionally, really just a
| special case of castles.
| toyg wrote:
| It's a bit more complicated than that.
|
| Firenze went through several waves of
|
| 1. being ruled by a certain noble family, usually with French
| or Papal connections
|
| 2. a rebellion happens; a new "communal" government sees other
| nobles and the merchant class rule together for a short period
|
| 3. one noble family rises to the top again, or the city gets
| reconquered by the old family
|
| 4. rinse and repeat
|
| The development of new towers was blocked during one of those
| briefs interreigns, more specifically a situations where _both_
| main factions from the nobility were absent from the city, busy
| fighting a war among themselves in the nearby regions.
|
| Later, when one of the factions had come back into the city and
| emerged as winner, they destroyed their enemies' towers. Such
| enemies inevitably came back stronger, retook the city, and
| destroyed the left-over towers. By that point, towers were
| clearly not enough to ensure safety (because conflicts now
| involved pretty large armies), so nobody tried to rebuild them.
|
| Meanwhile, nearby San Gimignano was remote enough to not be
| periodically invaded, so their towers survived largely
| unscathed.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| I had no idea just how many of those rough-stone "chunks"
| embedded in Italian city blocks were actually the stubs of
| medieval towers
| epolanski wrote:
| I'm from Rome area (now I live in Colonna, 40km from Rome
| center) and the number of places I lived or people I know live
| which is directly connected/built along/into over ancient roman
| stuff is quite huge.
|
| When I lived in Ostiense area, the basement of the building
| where we held bikes and stuff was an ancient roman storage
| facility from first century BC, the building was built over it.
| Same stones and everything!
|
| When I lived in Colli Albani area (out of the ancient city
| perimeter and 5 mile-ish from downtown) the building was built
| around an ancient, still functioning acqueduct.
|
| Where I live now, which is in the country side, my neighbor
| while building a new house found a Christian church from the
| 2nd century.
| regularfry wrote:
| Istanbul is similar.
| epolanski wrote:
| I don't have a hard time believing this, because you hardly
| find all that medieval/ancient stuff on the ground level
|
| That was probably the thing that disappointed me more
| visiting Istanbul, considering it's insane history I
| expected way more traces of it's ancient and medieval ages,
| but since the Ottoman rebuilt the city few times and people
| built house after house on top of ancient stuff I can't lie
| I was disappointed.
| lucidguppy wrote:
| I wonder if there's a D&D setting like this.
| gostsamo wrote:
| Want to mention the excellent care given to the alt text of the
| images.
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| Blog is by historian Ada Palmer, who also wrote some quite
| successful sci-fi that was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best
| Novel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Like_the_Lightning .
| How she finds the time while also teaching as a professor at
| Chicago I do not know.
| rvb wrote:
| One of my all-time favorite essays is by the same author: "The
| Shape of Rome" --
|
| https://www.exurbe.com/the-shape-of-rome/
| fanf2 wrote:
| Also very good is "The Scariest Library"
| https://www.exurbe.com/the-scariest-library/
| roughly wrote:
| Oh shit, I didn't catch the name - strongly recommend that
| whole series. It's one of the most wildly inventive sci-fi
| series I've read in a long time.
| henrebotha wrote:
| It's batshit insane and truly without equal. One of the best
| things I've ever read.
| intrasight wrote:
| Been to these places and never knew this history.
|
| I'll also add that the medieval city of Lucca has several great
| towers that you can climb.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| When your eyes buzz like flies it's a moire.
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