Somebody looked at a geometric fortress on a map, decided star-shaped forts were extremely cool, and then spent years trying to catalog them around the world. This is an entirely acceptable reason for a website to exist.
The site explains the basic problem that produced the star fort. Medieval walls worked badly once artillery became powerful enough to batter them and attackers could hide near the base of rounded fortifications. Bastions projecting from the walls let defenders cover approaches with overlapping fire and reduce those protected “dead zones.”
The result was military architecture that looks almost decorative from above: triangles, diamonds, ravelins, ditches, covered ways, and increasingly elaborate geometry wrapped around cities.
The list is the fun part
Starforts.com began with the ambition of listing every star fort in the world. The author eventually admits that this is probably impossible because there are simply too many of them, including forts that were destroyed, buried under cities, radically altered, or only survive as traces in modern street plans.
That failure is more interesting than a finished checklist.
Individual pages combine maps, satellite views, photographs, historical notes, construction dates, sieges, modifications, and the author’s running commentary. The tone is not museum-wall formal. The site is openly enthusiastic about pointy fortifications and happily uses the word “starfortesque.”
There is real historical value underneath the enthusiasm. The archive documents how one engineering response to artillery spread across Europe and into colonial fortification, then evolved again as artillery improved and the classic bastioned system became obsolete.
For a modern webmaster, the useful lesson is almost embarrassingly simple: choose a subject narrow enough that ordinary people think you are slightly nuts, then document it better than everybody else.
This site is one stop from CacheRat’s larger Ancient Web research list.
Explore the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list
If you have ever zoomed into an old European city on a map and wondered why the parks and roads suddenly form suspicious triangles, Starforts.com is where the afternoon goes.