Several chicanes, bastions and posterns defended the access to the lower courtyard which was reached through an arched gateway, now destroyed.
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The larger island has batteries for cannons on four levels, with stairs connecting the levels. Posterns gave access to the foot of the walls. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the fort was disarmed. In 1835, the first footbridge connecting the island to the mainland was built.
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On hillside castles the Zwinger wall was a supporting wall and often very high to provide static stability of the whole site. Frequently, small, hidden sally ports or posterns enabled direct combat with an enemy in the moat area. The actual Zwinger area was also often accessible through sally ports.
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Fifteen large gates opened onto the roads leading to France's main cities. At first, they were identical: an ogival gate closed with two wooden panels set into two 15-metre high and eight-metre diameter towers. Inside the gates two portcullis completed the construction. Simple posterns – piercing the wall – were added to improve traffic flow.
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21 Originally, the fort may have had about 14 towers. A single main gate survives towards the east, as well as several posterns. Its shape may have been an irregular pentagon, which covered an area of ca. 3.4 ha; but this shape would be unusual for Roman forts, especially in the Saxon Shore system.
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The complex's floor plan was similar to that of a square. Close by to the complex there was a number of warehouses - whose function remains uncertain. The whole complex and warehouses were surrounded by a thick defensive wall - whose thickness passed 1,5 metres. The three parts of the complex (east, west and south) all had posterns with battery artillery.
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Known posterns are the Yedikule Kapısı, a small postern after the Yedikule Fort (between towers 11 and 12), and the gates between towers 30/31, already walled up in Byzantine times, and 42/43, just north of the "Sigma". On the Yedikule Kapısı, opinions vary as to its origin: some scholars consider it to date already to Byzantine times, while others consider it an Ottoman addition.
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While a concentric castle has double walls and towers on all sides, the defences need not be uniform in all directions. There can still be a concentration of defences at a vulnerable point. At Krak des Chevaliers, this is the case at the southern side, where the terrain permits an attacker to deploy siege engines. In addition, the gate and posterns are typically strengthened using a bent entrance or flanking towers.
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Bompiani 1974. with seven main gates (Porta Ticinese, Porta Vercellina, Porta Giovia, Porta Comasina, Porta Romana, Porta Nuova and Porta Orientale) and about ten "pusterle" or posterns (including Pusterla dei Fabbri, Pusterla di Sant'Ambrogio, Pusterla delle Azze, Pusterla di San Marco, Pusterla Monforte, Pusterla Tosa, Pusterla di Sant'Eufemia, Pusterla della Chiusa). Most of the medieval walls were demolished between the 16th and 19th Century. The moats remained and were used as canals.
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Details of the Mérian map (Paris) in 1615, showing the Tour de Nesle, the wall, the Porte de Buci and the Abbaye de Saint-Germain-des-Prés. At the time of its construction, eleven main gates were laid out. Four other main gates, as well as numerous posterns, were added to reflect the city's growth. The main gates were flanked with towers, and either vaulted or left open to the sky, with gabled roofs and portcullis.
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A fourteen level tower is located in the north-east wing of the castle. The lower part of the tower, built in a square structure has posterns - while the upper part of the tower is octagonal. The other four corners of the castle have small square decorational towers, whose design changed throughout the centuries. The castle courtyard is made up of two levels - both with cloisters; these are the only historical cloisters in Poland which have not architecturally changed.
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Alatri has well-preserved fortifications constructed of tetrahedral and polygonal blocks of local limestone well jointed. It is almost entirely an embanking wall, as is the rule in the cities of this part of Italy, with a maximum height, probably, of about . Two of the gates (of the perhaps five once existing) are still to some extent preserved, and three posterns are to be found. In the centre of the city rises a hill which was adopted as the citadel.
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Stronger towers were situated at the corners of the wall in the south-east and in the north-east at the St Vitus' Hill brook, as well as at the north end by the Vltava. The wall was breached only by four gates and a few small posterns. The wall was further protected by a ditch, where water mostly flowed in former stream beds, but it was dry in some places because of the differences in height. Evidently there was no outer wall (outside the ditch).
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The main gate of the fort is further fortified with two posterns or sally ports on its northern and southern flanks. The ramparts of the fort are narrow parapets of stone with loop holes; these are well protected with revetments. In the interior part of the fort, at the higher end, there is a new temple dedicated to Hanuman, and below this temple a beacon light has been installed. Within the fort stands a smaller fort, square in shape, fortified with corner towers or bastions.
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The lower floor could also be accessed from the peribolos by small posterns. Generally speaking, most of the surviving towers of the main wall have been rebuilt either in Byzantine or in Ottoman times, and only the foundations of some are of original Theodosian construction. Furthermore, while until the Komnenian period the reconstructions largely remained true to the original model, later modifications ignored the windows and embrasures on the upper store and focused on the tower terrace as the sole fighting platform. Photo of the peribolos, the space between the inner and outer walls.
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The outer wall was 2 m thick at its base, and featured arched chambers on the level of the peribolos, crowned with a battlemented walkway, reaching a height of 8.5–9 m. Access to the outer wall from the city was provided either through the main gates or through small posterns on the base of the inner wall's towers. The outer wall likewise had towers, situated approximately midway between the inner wall's towers, and acting in supporting role to them. They are spaced at 48–78 m, with an average distance of 50–66 m.
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The wall contained nine main gates, which pierced both the inner and the outer walls, and a number of smaller posterns. The exact identification of several gates is debatable for a number of reasons. The Byzantine chroniclers provide more names than the number of the gates, the original Greek names fell mostly out of use during the Ottoman period, and literary and archaeological sources provide often contradictory information. Only three gates, the Golden Gate, the Gate of Rhegion and the Gate of Charisius, can be established directly from the literary evidence.
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Scheme of the Theodosian Walls The Theodosian Walls consist of the main inner wall (μέγα τεῖχος, mega teichos, "great wall"), separated from the lower outer wall (, exō teichos or μικρὸν τεῖχος, mikron teichos, "small wall") by a terrace, the peribolos (περίβολος). Between the outer wall and the moat (, souda) there stretched an outer terrace, the parateichion (), while a low breastwork crowned the moat's eastern escarpment. Access to both terraces was possible through posterns on the sides of the walls' towers.; The inner wall is a solid structure, 4.5–6 m thick and 12 m high.
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In addition to the main gate, postern gates could also feature a bent entrance, usually on a smaller scale. For instance, in the ruined crusader castle at Belvoir, posterns open into the moat at the angle between the outer wall and the corner towers. Bent entrances of such complexity as at Crac are less common in European castles, where even in strongly defended keep-gatehouses the entrance passage tends to be straight. See for example the long gate passage at Harlech Castle, which uses multiple doors and murder-holes, but no turns.
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Only 62 of the outer wall's towers survive. With few exceptions, they are square or crescent-shaped, 12–14 m tall and 4 m wide. They featured a room with windows on the level of the peribolos, crowned by a battlemented terrace, while their lower portions were either solid or featured small posterns, which allowed access to the outer terrace. The outer wall was a formidable defensive edifice in its own right: in the sieges of 1422 and 1453, the Byzantines and their allies, being too few to hold both lines of wall, concentrated on the defence of the outer wall.
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The wall was pierced by 17 gates (French: portes) for routes nationale or major roads, 23 secondary road crossings (French: barrières) for routes departementale, and 12 posterns for local access. The gates were closeable by barriers and acted as toll booths the collection of taxes and tariffs; some of the main portes were fitted with drawbridges. The wall was also pierced in five places by rivers and canals and later, eight railway crossing points were constructed. All these access ways made the wall harder to defend, but in peacetime, there were insufficient crossings for a major commercial centre which resulted in congestion.
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The castle is more than 390 metres long though only 10–40 metres wide, has 28 towers (originally at least 31), a main gate with a monumental horseshoe arch with remains of painted red and white voussoirs, two posterns, one of which with a small horseshoe arch, three mihrabs corresponding to a "musalla" or open air collective oratory, use of "spoliae" of the Roman period, and the remains of a water pool near the monumental gate mentioned before. It was repaired in the 14th century, from which time date the remains of two gates on the southern side.
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"Porta Ticinese", one of the remaining gates from the medieval walls of Milan "Pusterla di Sant'Ambrogio", one of the remaining medieval posterns The medieval walls of Milan were built in the 12th Century, mostly as a defense against Frederick I Barbarossa, who repeatedly raided Lombardy. The perimeter of the medieval walls essentially correspond to what is now known as the "Cerchia dei Navigli" ("Navigli Ring"), a ring of streets that enclose the historic centre of the city. The construction of the medieval defensive structure of Milan started in 1156. In the beginning, a deep moat was realized, filled up with water drawn from the Seveso and Nirone rivers.
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There was also a wall against the Humber, from Hessle Gate to the confluence of River Hull and Humber Estuary at South End; on this part of the wall a gate (Water Gate, or Mamhole Gate) gave access to the Humber, by a small piece of land known as the Mamhole, used as the town dump amongst other purposes. Except at the mamhole the south walls were built up to the banks of the Humber. There were no walls on the bank of the River Hull, and soft ground at Northgates near the river bank prevented the walls being contiguous up to the river bank, in 1585 the fortifications at this gap were improved; a mud wall was constructed, and in 1630 an earthen wall with brick facing and a palisade was built. In addition to the five main gates several posterns in the wall existed, only wide enough for a person, each surmounted by a manned tower.
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It was built as a single-arch gate between 270 and 273 AD by the emperor Aurelian. Its original right-hand semicircular tower (on quadrato foundations) is still to be seen, while its left-hand one incorporated a tomb, presumed to belong to Quintus Aterius, a famous orator at the court of Tiberius, called by Tacitus "an old man made rotten by flattery" (senex foedissimae adulationis) and mentioned by him as the first to get up to refute Tiberius's feigned refusal of the imperial crown. Marble from that tomb was used to cover the gate in restorations by Honorius in 403, who at the same time blocked the two nearby posterns in the direction of Castra Praetoria and restored the porta Salaria. Unlike the nearby Via Salaria, the via Nomentana, which led to Nomentum, the modern Mentana), was of minor importance. In the Medieval period, the gate was once known as the Gate of St Agnes because it led to the Basilica of Sant’Agnese.
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