The fortified town of Carcassonne and its offshoots, the castles overlooking the Black Mountain and Corbières foothills, form a superb heritage complex. The architecture rises as a spectacular vertical extension of the rock. This chain of fortresses is also an invitation to journey through history, to discover other fortification systems, through which sovereign powers sought to control, defend and monitor territories against enemies from within and without.

The 2021 Carcassonne colloquium aimed to bring together historians, architects and archaeologists from all over Europe to compare equivalent sovereign systems on the European continent in the 13th and 14th centuries. The present volume reflects the extraordinary breadth of these interactions. From daily life to living under siege, from stone cutting to the implementation of intricate building projects, from administration to project management, every facet of these fortified networks is evoked, in widely varied contexts. They showcase how much the Carcassonne ensemble is symbolic of a European, even global, movement of appropriation and spatial organisation by different societies.