15thc perception on swallowtail merlons?

[Mark Knowles]

Torre-del-borgo-di-recanati

[Koen G]

It is easy to find buildings with swallowtail merlons, but hard to establish whether they had them before 1450. If we disregard the date, we might as well include the Kremlin walls, but doing so would muddy the waters and dramatically reduce the informative value of the map.

[Mark Knowles]

Is it worth listing buildings with swallowtail merlons that might pre-date 1450 in a separate category?

[Mark Knowles]

It should be possible to guess on the likelihood that a building was constructed before 1450 or not.

If it is Northern Italian and constructed before 1450 and has swallowtail merlons it is very likely it had swallowtail merlons before 1450.

If it has ties with the ghibelines before 1450 it is likely it had swallowtail merlons before then.

So for example a building with links to the Visconti with swallowtail merlons likely had swallowtail merlons at the time of the Visconti.

[Mark Knowles]

Visconti Castle, Castelbarco, Cislago, Varese(The current castle was built on the basis of a previous early medieval fortification. Owned by the Visconti family {Visconti branch of San Vito di Somma Lombard}, the structure was destroyed by the Swiss troops of Matteo Schiner in 1510 and subsequently rebuilt starting from 1620 by the Marquis Cesare II Visconti and his son Cesare III.)

Castello di San Colombano in Lambro(Visconti castle)(Looks very likely)

Castello di Galliate(post 1450 though built ontop of an earlier Visconti Castle)

Castle Vigoleno, Piacenza(it was destroyed and rebuilt several times.)

Torre Adro, Brescia(looks to be pre 1450)

Castello di Sorbello, Cortona(Allied to Emperor Sigismund)

Castello di Breno(Under Visconti control in pre 1450)

Castello Scaligero at Malcesine

Torre del Borgo di Recanati

Castello Dell'Imperatore in Prato

Castello Visconteo di Macconago, XIV sec

Portogruaro town hall, fourteenth-century

Soncino Castle

Castello di Thiene

Castello di Tabiano

Castello di Torcrescenza

[Mark Knowles]

Determining for certain whether something had ghibelline battlements in the early 15th century is hard. One could ask if it makes logical sense for them to have ghibelline battlements. Were they allied to the Holy Roman Emperor? Was it a ghibelline town?

[Mark Knowles]

As has been said changing battlements was relatively easy, so in theory this makes certain dating very difficult.

[Mark Knowles]

It is easy to find buildings with swallowtail merlons, but hard to establish whether they had them before 1450. If we disregard the date, we might as well include the Kremlin walls, but doing so would muddy the waters and dramatically reduce the informative value of the map.

Clearly we shouldn't disregard the date. But there is a difference between those that we know post date 1450 and those whose date we don't know.

[Mark Knowles]

I think it is useful to have a spreadsheet so as to add comments and more information as dating of the battlements becomes better known and more discovered.

[Koen G]

I've said so often in this thread that battlements were among the most common things to be changed/renovated on a building, so they should always be regarded with suspicion. If a building has swallowtail merlons now, it is absolutely not certain that it had those originally. This whole thread is full of people demonstrating that the merlons on buildings were pre-1450, so it can be done. But it requires some research. That is the added value of this collaborative project over a simple google search. If you would like to make an unresearched version of the map, that's fine by me, but I'm not interested in that.