City Castle By The Sea

Castle is sometimes used as a catch-all term for all kinds of fortifications, and as a result has been misapplied in the technical sense. An example of this is Maiden Castle which, despite the name, is an Iron Age hill fort, which had a very different origin and purpose. Although "castle" has not become, like chateau in French and schloss in German, a generic term for an English country house, many of these use the word in their name while having few if any of the architectural characteristics, usually as their owners liked to maintain a link to the past and felt the castle was a masculine expression of their power. In scholarship the castle, is generally accepted as a coherent concept, originating in Europe and later spreading to parts of the Middle East, where they were introduced by European Crusaders. This coherent group shared a common origin, dealt with a particular mode of warfare, and exchanged influences.
In other areas of the world, analogous structures shared features of fortification and other defining characteristics associated with the concept of a castle, though they originated in different periods and circumstances and experienced differing evolutions and influences. For example shiro in Japan, described as castles by historian Stephen Turnbull, underwent "a completely different developmental history, were built in a completely different way and were designed to withstand attacks of a completely different nature". While European castles built from the late 12th and early 13th century onwards were generally stone, shiro were predominantly of timber construction into the 16th century. By the time Japanese and European cultures met in the late 16th century, fortification in Europe had moved beyond castles and relied on innovations such as the Italian trace italienne and star forts. Forts in India present a similar case; when they were encountered by the British in the 17th century castles in Europe had generally fallen out of use militarily. The fortifications the British encountered were dubbed forts, and the terminology is widely used today. Like shiro, the Indian forts, durga or durg in Sanskrit, shared features with castles in Europe such as acting as a domicile for a lord as well as being fortifications. They too had a different development from the structures known as castles that had their origins in Europe.