Castles are strange buildings that bring together a lot of contradictory ideas. They are military, built to withstand siege and enable violence. They are romantic, sparkling across the marquees of children’s movies and chivalric tales of love and princesses. And perhaps above all, they are symbols of power and money, because moving that many rocks requires paying (or exploiting) a lot of people. We haven’t built castles out of stone for some time now, but their heyday wasn’t as far back as many people might think, depending on the meaning of the word castle. Novelist and historian Dan Jones offers a capacious definition in his new book, Castles: A Fortified History of the World, which takes in Viking ring forts and Islamic qasrs, Great Walls and chateaus, all in equal measure. But even when citadels crumble, their memory lingers in the stories we tell, or even in whatever we build atop their ruins—and sometimes these castles were only ever in the air.
Dan Jones is the author of Powers and Thrones, among several other nonfiction ooks, as well as the fictional Essex Dogs trilogy. He is the host of the podcast This is History: A Dynasty to Die For and has produced, written, and presented dozens of TV shows, including the popular Netflix series Secrets of Great British Castles.
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