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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1985 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 11, 2026

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The homily at mass this morning began with a metaphor to the crac des chevalier, a crusader era fortress which successfully repelled assaults by artillery and aircraft having forces in the Syrian civil war. This got me thinking- what’s the longest continuous use of a not-uprgraded/remodeled fortress in active military service(to rule out things like the kremlin and Tower of London which are old fortresses used today for non-combat purposes)? I’m doubting the crac des chevalier is it.

I suspect that the caves in Afghanistan have been used for repelling invaders going back to at least Alexander the Great. Those are natural fortresses, do they count?

i think there were some castles in WWII - like one case where Wehrmacht allied with pows against SS, but since many of the castles in Germany were relatively modern it is hard to tell.

I don't know when the relevant portion of the wall was built, but the Great Wall of China was used as a defensive fortification as recently as 1933.

The relevant portions of the Great Wall such as Shanhaiguan and Gubeikou which were involved in the war were constructed during the Ming dynasty, built in the 15th and 16th centuries along a path that was somewhat reminiscent of the route past walls traced, but which were effectively entirely new fortifications. Really the entire brick portion of the Great Wall that people picture is the product of this very Ming wall-building project.

The earlier Qin and Han Great Walls tracing back to the 2nd century BCE were earthen fortifications that had pretty much eroded away over more than a millennium of disuse by the time the Ming took power; you can still see remnants of the original Han dynasty earthen wall in rural Gansu province which are more or less useless as fortifications due to how degraded they are. After the Sui, there was a really large gap in wall-building, which appears to be due to the fact that wall-building was seen as an admission of policy failure from the Tang onwards; a dynasty with successful foreign policy maintained engagement consistently with steppe-dwellers and was seen to have no need for such costly and manpower-heavy infrastructure projects.

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