T. E. Lawrence’s Undergraduate Dissertation – Page 82

enceinte, often only half the thickness of the curtain, and are hollow to the ground level. There is hardly a Byzantine tower that could not be smashed in with a few blows of a ram. Their square fronts made attack easy, and mangonel stones found a fair target : also the square shape gave very little flanking fire, ( P... '?. ) and was less defensible from the walls. Before an earthquake it was most liable to collapse. The only point in its favour was its readiness of construction; that they valued more the round tower, or the polygonal was shown by their placing these at important points. For the rest they seem to have trusted to the weakness in siegecraft of the enemies they had to ward against : the Arabs were till Saladin's time contemptible engineers : and the Greeks found that a plain wall without towers was often sufficient to check them. Curtain towers were only seldom (as at Antioch) connect- ed both with the chemin de ronde and the interior of the fortress. More often the towers are isolated from the curtain; sometimes there was no entrance from the interior : when there is there is usually no communication with the upper floor : and the entrance was always inconveniently narrow, sometimes less than two feet wide, in a passage of ten feet. They were always stone-vaulted : probably simply from lack of wood. We hear of one other part of a castle, the ϕουρα or πυργοκαϲτελλα of Procopius. It took the place of the Western