The forgotten medieval CITY OF CASTLES 

Hey Shad! read your book and loved it! i need more ASAP!

1000 years from now, Archeologists will dig up the ruins of the Shadlands and believe it was used as a safe haven for the Australian Monarchy.

Shad: *learns about castle city* Shad: “pack your things we’re leaving”

Imagine trying to conquer a city like that... even after breaching the wall there are plenty of strongholds firing at you from different angles and heights and they have to be conquered one by one.

How has this city flown under the radar this hard? Even if it is just generally referred to as a city of towers, this thing is a medieval city with a proper, modern day skyline. How is that not something to write home about? Even after watching this whole 40 minute video, this place still feels super surreal. It's as you said, like this whole castle city was just taken straight out of a fantasy book. Absolutely incredible.

It's insane to imagine how people in the 12th century built those 100-meter tall narrow towers. I will definitely use this city as inspiration for my D&D campaigns.

Hi Shad, Italian here! Most Italian cities, small and big, had towers dotting the historical centers even towns that didn't really made the news. Most of the towers where distroyed in the late XIX century because they coulnd't repair them properly, it was sad but at the time they lost the knowledge and most of the families that made the towers didn't exist anymore so most of them went into disrepair.

Here in Italy many cities have the nickname of "city of a hundred towers", even my city Pavia. I'll list them for you, just because the wikipedia page is exclusively in Italian, if I remember correctly: Alba, Albenga, Ascoli Piceno, Asti, Bologna (obviously), Chieri, Lucca, Pavia (as I said above), San Gimignano, Viterbo and Tarquinia . In all these cities you can see towers still intact.

I like the image that HelloFresh tried to deliver the food to Shad but the guards just didn't let them it, causing HelloFresh to deploy ALL their troops to lay siege to the castle. "WE WILL DELIVER IN TIME!! WHAT EVER IT TAKES!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!"

I live in Pavia and it's sometimes called 'la città delle cento torri'(the city of one hundred towers) most of them have fallen unfortunately. But it also was full of towers up to 80 meters tall.

How brave of the delivery man to go through a battlefield, where he would've stopped, just so he can get to the Lord on time to send him a gift. Mad respect.

I usually skip the "message from our sponsor" bits in videos, especially if they're for a product I already know about, but I gotta tell you, when Shad shills a product, he makes it worth watching him do so.

I'm embarrassed by the fact that I lived two years in Italy and have made Italian language and culture into my hobby and livelihood and only ever heard about Bologna's architecture because of the university there. Learning about the reasons behind these towers was amazing and I'm happy I watched!

I’m actually happy to see solo Shad. Knights Watch is fun, but solo Shad rocks.

Reject the modern skyscrapers, embrace the medieval towers. Also love from Italy.

36:42: The towers on that engraving are supposed to have letters next to them telling what type of tower they are. The key is at left: T. = torre = tower, C.T. = casa torre = tower house, TS. = torresotto = tower base, T.C. = torre campanaria = bell tower.

I'm from Bologna, and I'm beyond grateful to you for covering my beloved city!!

As far as I know they called them towers. There are a few contemporary descriptions of the city, and the most used term is "torre" (tower). Most of the surviving buildings still bear the original names, or names they were known by at the time... and almost all of them contain the word "torre". Also, despite Bologna being the foremost example of this phenomenon , it wasn't the only city where nobles would build fortified towers to live in, inside the city walls: every somewhat independent italian city-state (of wich there were MANY) has a number of this buildings, from Lucca to Rovigo. Cheers from Bologna.

Not just you Shad, I'll be 70 this year and never heard of it until now. Thanks for this. The idea fits perfectly in a story I'm writing.

Two Towers fighting would be the land equivalent of a broadside brawl between 2 age of sail battleships.

I really thought at the start, that this was a fantasy setting. If I'd have lived in medieval times, this would have been a must-see spot. I would have walked 500 miles and 500 more, just to see those towers.

I'm from Bologna and I have been to the top of one of the surviving towers. The Pianura Padana is so flat that you can easily see the surrounding cities with even just modest elevation.

San Gimignano in Italy also used to have a lot of urban towers. It still has a few of the towers. It's a more compact city, on a hilltop. Some of the turrets that Weta Workshop designed for Minas Tirith seem to be imitations of an extant tower in San Gimignano.

It really does evoke the saying "truth is stranger than fiction."

5:27 I am glad to see as shad still struggles with accents, nostalgia from his cogent game with "da boys" of the hema community hits hard!

I live in Bologna. I'm so pleased to hear some international youtuber speaking about my city.

The ability of hello fresh workers to get through walls is excellent for supplying the defenders, but I can't help but think of how amazing this could be for the attacker

I know Age of Empires 2 castle spams can be so silly. But to see that it was a historical reality? Thank you for making my day, Shad :).

Hello Shad! I'm a long time viewer that has never left a comment before but this topic is close to my heart! I'm fascinated by this kind of tower-castle-city architecture. And so, I wondered if you had ever heard of the Vainakh peoples? Their nickname is "The People of the Towers" or the "Tower Builders". Also, the Svan people built cities made of nothing but castles. Extremely interesting stuff! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vainakh_tower_architecture en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushguli

"It looks like a fantasy city" that's because truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to be limited to what's possible, truth has no such obligation

In the northern Caucasus in regions around the Terek, Assa, and Sunzha rivers in modern day Ossetia, and Inigushetia, have one of the densest concentrations fortified towers. These regions were, up to the 20th century, ruled by family clans. From time to time these clans would feud, and these towers were a family refuge. In fact, individual farms were built as fortresses.

Hi shad! :) Thank you for making a video on my city! I'm very glad it's getting some recognition. I feel like telling you some things about it that probably you cannot find in English but are nonetheless intresting. At 15:00 you talk about foundation issues, which are true, but many fell because the tower base walls' were made thinner to make more space for the people who lived there and also (unrelated to the video, but I think you will like to know this fact) The bases made in medieval times were used as a trap, if someone was to enter the tower without the owner's consent he'd fall in a sorta dungeon, this was also one of the defence mechanism of the tower. About how towers were called (I cannot remember the timestamp) , we call them simply Torre (tower) or Casa-torre (tower house). On the matter of the language, the bolognese people spoke their dialect called bolognese, it's an Italo-gallic language so it's similar to French. Bolognese is referenced in one of Dantes book called de volgari eloquentia. At around 30:00 you talk about a possible war between towers-houses, which I don't know anything about but I know about the fall of the Caccianemici family who became enemies of the ruling family, the Bentivoglio, the Caccianemicis had a fortified house in which they lived in and when their enemies came to kill them a part of the family hid in their tower. And lastly I want to say that many towers still exist but they were incorporated inside another building and they were made smaller, many times if you walk around Bologna you will see houses with some kind of little tower top poking out of the roof, they're called altane.

Loved that you mentioned the war of the Lombard League. It is an almost mythological moment in italian history. My city (como) although in Lombardy, actually fought alongside Emperor Barbarossa, and to thank it for its service, the emperor had new walls raised to it, which are still standing to this day! I had the luck to walk by them everyday as they were next to my high-school!

BUT WHAT ABOUT DRAGONS- Honestly, I think a city like this would be very resistant to dragons both because of the risk of colliding with a stone tower and being shot at from multiple angles.

I've been in bologna, and i've also been on top of the biggest surviving tower, it was very Impressive. the 5 Euros I payed to visit it where clearly worth it...

I find this City of Castles so fascinating, not only is this incredible for any fantasy worldbuilding, but also just the idea of an army looking over at this heavily fortified city and thinking: "Do we REALLY want to lay siege to THAT!". I would imagine that trying to take over such a heavily fortified city would be a nightmare! Also, how practical are several layers of hoardings? you can drop stuff from the first one, but not from the other ones, but I guess you could use those to fire arrows from.

I greatly appreciate the research Shad puts into his videos.

Also, thanks for the piece on Italian History. It's not very well known abroad, but the Lombard League did in fact revolt and kick the HRE out of its newly formed territories twice. Imagine that, single cities that hated eachother (and they vehemntly did so, trust me) banded together the first time to expell an emperor that they felt was a foreigner to them and a tyrant, and the second time to prevent him from trying to take them back WITH A FULL ON IMPERIAL ARMY. The funny part is that right after defeating him, the newly independent city-states started fighting each other, right after sweraing that if some other nation tried again to subdue them, they would band together again. And it did work for a while, to be completely honest, but then the Countries like France and Spain became far too strong to be repelled. I'm from one of the independent cities that took part in the League, Brescia, and we still remember the battles our ancestors fought for their freedom. Later on, they became allies with The Most Serene Republic of Venice and became their most loyal servants (they ended up donating to our city one of their famous St. Mark Lions, and gave it the city motto "Brixia Fidelis" - "Brescia the Loyal" and also called her "the Lioness", "the worthy bride of the Lion" (which was Venice))

I remember that scene in the gargoyles cartoon when they make it clear that castles are not around because the biggest threat to a kingdom is within the walls

My father loved visiting Bolonga very much, he had some of his long time friends there. He actually told me about the earlier days of the city. It has been such a long time that I had forgotten about it and I have never seen a very good representation of what the city looked like in this period. Thank you so much for making this video Shad it was a wonderful reminder of great memories I have of my dad. It is coming up on five years since his passing to very unforeseen cancer, I miss him very much and wish he could have seen this he would have loved it to no end. Thank you Shad, Best Regards and God's Blessings on you and your's. Z

26:28 I remember visiting a cathedral tower in Seville that had inclines instead of stairs, supposedly because the priest would ride a donkey up to go ring the bells. It was still a long way to go but I wonder if any of Bologna’s towers did that

The other videos are great and all, but it's these Castle videos that butter my buns. Hail to the Shadmeister.

I was born and currently live in Bologna, I LOVE MY CITY, thank you very much Shad for making a video about my city !!!!

This is the content that keeps me coming back and makes this channel great.

I once used the concept of a 'City of Towers' in a D&D setting, part of the wider story was that different factions within the city take sides in the kingdom's wider civil conflict leading to an entrenched war within the city itself. Historically there are cases of nobles launching rocks at each other with catapults from these private fortresses during the medieval Italian wars.

Ehy! I'm from Bologna! This video is really well done! All of the info in this video are correct! Now the 2 towers left are called "Garisenda" and "Torre degli asinelli" (technically there is a third one but you can't really visit that one anymore cuz as you mentioned they are collapsing), and they are *tight* inside, only one people at the time can crawl up/down inside the very steep steps. Another fascinating thing about Bologna are the "Portici" which run through all of the city centre and they are amazing. Edit: fact checks

That city today would indeed be a wonder to behold. Especially if it was original and still standing. The drawings you showed made it look like the mid-evil New York City or maybe even Dubai or Singapore. Interesting to see that there was an interest to build up rather than out even in those times.

Passed this video by the first time (mostly due to length). That was a big mistake. It's been a while since I've seen something this awesome and your video has convinced be to add Bologna to my travel itinerary if I ever visit Italy.

I've been replaying AC2 and you spend some time in San Gimignano which has a very similar skyline, and from what I've read in the database entries a lot of the towers were built in that same era, so that would be another place to look for these castle-towers

This is incredible, Shad. City of Castles looks epic AF. But on a serious note, in Poland where I live in small city called Ząbkowice Śląskie (medieval name of the city was Frankenstein and was founded in 1280 AD) there is a castle tower named Crooked Tower (you can look up the city and tower on Wiki). Although it's a bell tower, its design clearly reflects Bologna's. Not much is known about the tower itself (sparse records survived), but it was rumoured that at one point it could have been an asylum for mentally ill and prison of inquisition (for a brief time).

I always thought the open spiral stair cases in the Kings Quest games were so silly. But it actually makes perfect sense in a castle. Just imagine how hard it would be for Graham or Rosella if they didn't only have to deal with the edge of the stairs, but also arrows raining down on them from above?

This is the most amazing and interesting thing I've ever seen period. It looks so out of place and does look like a fantasy city. Thanks Shad for showing us such wonders and astonishing places.

amazing reality is truly stranger than fiction

I wish I would’ve known about this as a kid, I would have been absolutely obsessed with the idea of a castle city!!

I was born there and it's so cool to see foreigners interested in my city and it's history

Wow! What an incredible setting for story. We talk about how geography and resources influences attitudes, but who needs a mountain when practically your whole city is a fortified trap for besiegers. You can just feel the giant “screw you” radiating outward. And of course there is the internal conflicts as mentioned. Got to wonder how it affected the city’s class structures.

I find Middle Age Bologna very impressive and beautiful. It’s looks like a modern day city with all those castles being built by the rich nobles. Plus imagine all the wars being fought in the city because one duke decided his 80 story tower was more powerful than a 65 story tower of a Prince.

I wish RU-vid wasn’t hiding you’re content is really good

One of the only instances of opposing castles a literal stonethrow removed from one another

I can't believe it ❤️ it's a dream, Shad talking about the city I live in and love ❤️

My mom teached us kids not to be picky by "OK, don't eat it then". And when the poor entitled-kid-to-be asked for something else, the answer was a strict "No". We all learned from that, pretty fast. I can recommend the same method to any fresh parent.

21:50 I've always liked that type of design/aesthetic in castles, but finally just learnt there's a particular name for it.

I have to admit, I had no idea how real and interesting this "city of castles" was until I watched the video. The video turned out to be much more interesting than I expected before watching it!

I love your Hello Fresh skits. They are one of the most favorite parts of your videos, so keep making them.

Huh. I actually knew about this city from Assassin's Creed 2. I sometimes would stop and marvel at it from the outskirts because the number of towers in the city were both an awesome and unusual site to behold. I actually assumed most Italian Renaissance cities looked like that because of it.

in german there is two words for castle one meaning schloss which is a castle thats less fortified and used as a residence for high nobility, often with restaurations to be more livable and then there is burg, a castle for military use closer to a fortress, typically with a knight or lesser noble as residents.

By far theee GREATEST Hello fresh advertisement I have ever seen in my entire life! Holly Molly dude! 🤣🤣🤣🤣😂😂😂☠☠☠

I like the fact that you said Bologna correctly 😃🇮🇹 However in this case I suggest to you the city of San Gimignano that still has some of his towers intact

Ayy! As someone who has studied the writings of Christine de Pizan, the towers of Bologna were fascinating! I've always wondered if they were still standing when Christine was born and if she saw them when she visited her father's lecture hall at the city college.

Interesting details I’ve noticed and discovered of the city: • The Castles are still leaning, even in the old illustrations. This suggests to me that they are considerably older than we might assume them to be. • There are other, tower-like Castles in the Emilia-Romagna administrative region of Italy which are of similar design; hundreds of years older than the assumed age of Balogna’s buildings. • Most, if not all of the Castles were built over Selenite crystal.

One of your best videos, amazing topic, all questions that came up in my head were answered, fun ad, a lot of energy, loved it!

Another "city of Castles" in Italy it's San Gimignano. Of it's 72 towers, only 13 remains but still Is an Amazing view

Another Italian here, most cities had tower castles within, including Genova, which is where I’m from. However, (can’t remember when) because of the intollerabile warfare, all but one tower got taken down

This is incredible i did not know about this. That a city like this existed does spur on ones imagination.

Nice to see Shad making more castle content. I really like his castle content.

Me: Truly fascinating. Also me: Man this would make for an awesome D&D setting.

A frontier city of the Holy Roman Empire... Yes, anyone who has played Medieval II Total War as the German emperor remembers what it was like trying to hold onto Bologna...

This is so cool. I see an increase in cities of castles in fiction going forward.

At first I thought this was going to be one of the more boring videos, but then it got interesting later on, and I watched the entire video again, more closely. Nice vid Shad! oh, and I bought your book. I'm going to start reading it soon :)

We nearly had a citadel in my hometown: In the early renaissance a bishop from the nearby bigger city wanted a new home for himself and started to build the citadel, but he died before the completion. Because the people from the bigger city wanted the new bishop to reside again in their city, they came shortly after the old bishops death and brought nearly all stones from the citadel back to their city. So now there are only the two side walls of the main entrance still standing.

110-200 Castles in one city?!?! That's Bologna! Sorry had to make the dad joke.

I have been to Bologna, two of the tallest towers remain, and I have been up to the top of one of them, the Asinelli tower, from which it is claimed Galileo dropped two equally sized spheres of different mass to show they would fall at the same speed (Bologna is also the oldest university in the world, founded in 1088). Built in 1109-19, it is 97 metres tall, with 500 steps, and still dominates the city centre. They also have a cool model of the medieval city showing how it looked. Another great place is the the small city of San Gimignano in Tuscany - this had about 40 towers, and many still remain.

In medieval Italy tower-houses were pretty common, especially in free-cities/city-states. Bologna is just one of the most prominent examples. Firenze had many, as did Siena. San Gimignano (which is and was waaay smaller than all the others) at some point had 72, and 14 survive to this day. The reason you don't see many today is because most either fell, were demolished or lowered, modified and/or integrated in other buildings to the point of being unrecognisable as towers.

When I lived in Spain was when I learned just how many castles were little more than a single tower on top of a hill.

Check out San Gimignano with its many towers too! You can visit it in Assassins Creed 2 if you can't go there in person :)

4:58 that hello fresh segment cracks me up🤣

So good to have Shad back on castle topics. As for these towers vs a traditional castle, my concern would be that their ability to withstand a siege would be much more limited given the urban environment and space to stockpile supplies.

WOW, I love your castle videos. Thank you for making these!

Greeting Shad. Im very happy you discover italian free commons! Living near Viterbo, I'm very familiar with the tower of noble families in medieval cities. Hope you come to Italy some day: there are many reenactment medieval festival here.

The picture of Notre-Dame at about 8:30 let's you really see the influence on the ship from Event Horizon. They designed the big ship to look like Notre-Dame but with the cathedral towers tilted horizontally to be the engines. Kinda neat.

Seeing Shad in those Hello Fresh ads makes me think of a Master Chef style show but the kitchen utilizes medieval technology. Old fashion wood ovens, ingredients accurate to the period, etc.

New meaning to the phrase "tower defense"

My mind is blown. They built a city of towers, fortified ones at that!, almost 1000 years ago?! That's just incredible 😲😄

I first heard of this place when I played Assassin's Creed 2, where it was one of the featured locations. Although the game identified them as "Towers". But to be fair to the game, it took place from 1476 to 1492, and the city of castle's golden age had been over for 1 or 2 centuries by then. Due to both the Black Death, and the invention of the cannon.

Take that algorithm! You have our interaction and our swords, Shad!

Your historical knowledge is priceless. I enjoy your knowledge. Please keep sharing. Thanks for what you do.

Holy crap I had no idea this place used to exist! I'm only 5 minutes in and I'm already loving it! Great topic for a vid, Shad!

The food delivery through siege was the best ad I have seen in ages.

Hmm... this may be an interesting place to study for a fantasy setting/place. I might get some inspiration from this. If anyone wants an idea of a mega castle, well I guess you can call this place as so.

Lord Shad as the proud lover of castles as you are. It would seem that you have found the crown jewel of medieval castles and that was the legendary city of castles of Bologna. This city you could say was one of the melting pots of the old world where people of many trades could come there to see what the city had to offer. However as great as the city of castles is against certain armies, which can/were repelled. But what about dragons or giants?