Joey Michilli

Arch 161

Khorsandi

The Castrum was designed to house and protect the soldiers, their equipment and supplies when they were not fighting or marching .Regulations required a major unit in the field to retire to a properly constructed camp every day. As soon as they have marched into an enemy's land, they do not begin to fight until they have walled their camp about.Their camp is also four-square by measure, and carpenters are ready, in great numbers, with their tools, to erect their buildings for them.To this end a marching column ported the equipment needed to build and stock the camp in a baggage train of wagons and on the backs of the soldiers.

Ancient Rome, at its height, stretched from the British Isles to the Near East, dominating through conquest and assimilation. To facilitate the administration of such a vast empire, a well-designed and efficient infrastructure was required. Roads and sea-routes provided lines of communication, while aqueducts and sewer systems managed water and waste. Dotted along these networks were the towns and cities that brought Roman rule to the far corners of the empire. Most settlements did not just grow naturally, they, like any “civilized” community, needed to be planned and built. However, it is unclear if Rome dictated a specific plan for her cities. Often existing towns, those conquered by the Roman war machine, were given temples, markets, baths and a forum; in essence the Romans gave them culture, at least as they saw it. Thus they converted these savage villages to be acceptable by Roman “standards”. Conversely, they would skip the process of Romanization altogether when whole populations were put to the sword and replaced with new Roman colonists. It is the settlements the Romans founded and built that have the greatest potential to provide information on Roman town planning practices. Debate over what influenced Roman city plans has permeated the scholarly community for decades. One hypothesis, with which I agree with is that it was the Roman castra, or military camps, that provided a source for the design of these towns. Whether the town plans were directly based on military camp layouts, or merely adapted some of their features, Roman legionary fortresses appears to have had significant influence on city planning and construction. Researching this topic is often made difficult by later building; in some cases centuries or even millennia of building have occurred on top of the original settlements. As a consequence, scholars have conducted little in-depth research on this subject. Therefore, for my analysis I will look at towns and cities abandoned before the advance of the modern age. Their layouts are therefore frozen in time within the archaeological record.

 The castrum was the heart of Roman military, the home of the legions. No Roman army would ever stop for the night without first erecting a castrum. This fort would be fully capable of supporting the entire army, including people and animals, along with all their food and supplies. So great was the need to establish a proper 3 fortification, that even if under direct assault from an enemy, men would be diverted to construct a castrum for the night. The Romans called these castra names like tertiis castris, septuagesmis castris, etc. for how many days the legionnaires constructed them to house the army for. Often in the early centuries of Rome’s rise to power, legionaries were given leave to stay within a neighboring town during the winter, as summer was campaign season; winter in most places of the world meant rest. 

Camps were the responsibility of engineering units to which specialists of many types belonged, officered by architecti, "chief engineers", who requisitioned manual labor from the soldiers at large as required. They could throw up a camp under enemy attack in as little as a few hours. More permanent camps were castra stativa, "standing camps". The least permanent of these were castra aestiva or aestivalia, "summer camps", in which the soldiers were housedsub pellibus or sub tentoriis, "under tents". Summer was the campaign season. For the winter the soldiers retired to castra hiberna containing barracks and other buildings of more solid materials, with timber construction gradually being replaced by stone. The camp allowed the Romans to keep a rested and supplied army in the field. Neither the Celtic nor Germanic armies had this capability: they found it necessary to disperse after only a few days.The largest castra were legionary fortresses built as bases for one or more whole legions.From the time of Augustus more permanent castra with wooden or stone buildings and walls were introduced as the distant and hard-won boundaries of the expanding empire required permanent garrisons to control local and external threats from war-like tribes. Previously, legions were raised for specific military campaigns and subsequently disbanded, requiring only temporary castra. From then on many castra of various sizes were established many of which became permanent settlements.

The ideal enforced a linear plan for a camp or fort: a square for camps to contain one legion or smaller unit, a rectangle for two legions, each legion being placed back-to-back with headquarters next to each other.The street plans of various present-day cities still retain traces of a Roman camp, for example Marsala in Sicily, the ancient Lilybaeum, where the name of the main street, the Cassaro, perpetuates the name "castrum".

Sources -(http://cac-scec.ca/concours_essais/01Bell.html)