February 26, 2007

Conference

Navarre's castles: rise and decline

Mr. Juan José Martinena Ruiz.
file Royal and General of Navarra

The speaker, who was introduced by Prof. Ricardo Fernández Gracia, began his presentation at exhibition with a brief historical overview, starting from the earliest known archaeological and documentary evidence; he referred to the system of honors and tenures in the 10th to 13th centuries, and explained the evolutionary process that took place in that period, from the first free-standing towers, conceived more for surveillance than for defense, to the castle itself, whose period of splendor and boom took place in the 14th and 15th centuries. He then spoke of the wars of the second half of the 15th century and how, as a result of them, a late neo-feudal process accelerated, the beginnings of which appear at the end of the 14th century, by virtue of which numerous castles - among them some of the most important of the kingdom - were alienated from the Crown and passed to the domain of the nobles who had most distinguished themselves for their services to John II or to the Prince of Viana. He also referred to those that were destroyed in the wars with Castile in 1378 and 1460 and to those that passed to the domain of the latter Spanish. As a finale to this diachronic vision, he explained the demolitions decreed after the conquest of Navarre by Ferdinand the Catholic, which were executed in 1512, 1516 and 1521, and the long period of withdrawal that followed these demolitions, in which the stone of the chipped fortresses was used by both municipalities and private individuals. This dispossession was carried out at first in a legal manner, by means of grants awarded by the kings of the House of Austria, generally for religious or public utility works, and later, especially after 1836, in an uncontrolled manner for private houses and works. Not even the royal palaces of Olite and Tafalla were spared, the second of which was vandalically destroyed, to the shame of Navarre. He then went on to refer to the different types of castles: royal and seigniorial, in fief, urban and rural, frontier, major and residential, also including the so-called caves, of Muslim tradition, fortified palaces, fortified houses and towers of lineage, and also the fortress-churches, of such deep-rooted historical tradition in our land.
 

Javier's castle
 

In the second part of his lecture, supported by more than one hundred digital images, most of them photographs taken by him in the last twenty years, the speaker explained in detail the different parts of the structure of the castles. He began by describing the defensive elements: moats, bridges, gates, walls, barbicans, towers, scaffolding, machicolations and sentry boxes, showing drawings of ideal reconstructions, taken from de Viollet-le-Duc and comparing them with current photographs of medieval castles, walled enclosures, fortress-churches and fortified palaces. Following the same method of showing drawings and photographs, he went on to describe the rest of the residential and service elements, such as palaces, halls or chambers, chapels, kitchens, cellars, storerooms, stables, prisons and cisterns. As a necessary complement to this part of his exhibition, he included an approach to a typological study, in which he analyzed the floor plan of a varied sampling of fortresses, from the simplest and most primitive to the most developed and complex.
 

Torreón del Cerco de Artajona Tower
 

To conclude, he gave a brief overview of medieval weapons of war, from the crossbow to the bombard, and the devices or machines of war that constituted the so-called neuroballistic artillery. The lecture was followed by a lively colloquium, in which several of the listeners asked the speaker different questions and issues related to the topic of the exhibition.
 

Façade of Marcilla Castle