by the fifteenth century gunpowder and advances in casting massive cannon meant that no castle could be built that was strong enough to withstand a protracted siege shelling with live artillery, rather than the mechanical siege engines. Whereas castles built in the thirteenth century were designed to withstand sieges for a year or more, in 1415 it took the English king Henry V just a month to smash the fortified defenses of the town of Harfleur to rubble with twelve great guns. With this revolution in battlefield technology, by the sixteenth century, fortress building was something of an
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