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I don't think of myself as being Frisian (or even Dutch); I think of myself as being American. Still, the majority of my ethnic heritage is from that small part of the Netherlands, including my surname (which I'm told was chosen by my patrilineal ancestor in 1811). The page has a nice history of the Friesian peoples up until they sort of vanish by absorption in the middle ages, and it mentions the main historical cities. One it mentions is Dokkum. I've been there, on my only trip to Europe. I am, as regular readers will know, a student of military history. When we were planning our vacation, I demanded the right to choose a few of our destinations. (Otherwise my girl friend would have planned every minute, that being the kind of person I loved her for being.) I had mentioned that I wanted to get into Friesland at least a little while, and while we were looking over the mountain of tourist booklets she'd ordered through the mail, there was one about Dokkum which described it as a "walled city". Well! That was enough for me; I was ready to go. Images of curtain walls with crenelations, and knights on horseback filled my mind. I was psyched. The reality was not at all what I expected. It was indeed a walled city (the old city, now long since surrounded by a huge suburb) but it was 16th century technology. No curtain walls or crenelations to be seen. It was, rather, a star-fortress. That was perhaps even more fascinating. We spent an afternoon walking the entire circumference of the old city as I described in detail the reasons for everything to my girl friend (who probably got tired of it). So now I'm going to tell all of you more than you want to know about walled cities. The curtain wall was the end result of a long sequence of development of fixed fortifications whose purpose was to defend against pre-gunpowder armies. A well designed walled city and castle could only be taken by siege. One castle in modern Lebanon was built by the Crusaders and was held for years by a force of about fifty men against a siege by the Infidel (ahem). The weapon of choice for the defenders was the bow or crossbow, and the walls were nearly vertical and very smooth for maximum strength and minimum climbability. Also, a vertical wall made it easy to drop things on the attackers (like molten lead or boiling oil or stones). The 3-8 meter thick walls were two stone faces with the space between filled with rubble and soil, which made them invulnerable to battering rams. Crenelation describes the tooth shape of the fence along the top of the wall; its purpose was to give the defenders places to hide (the high parts) and to shoot through (the low parts) without having to duck, so as to minimize the effectiveness of attacker's bowmen. Castle technology developed over the course of nearly fifteen hundred years, beginning with the primitive "motte and bailey" (little more than a wooden palisade built next to a hill) and ending up with the castles of Wales, which were the ultimate form of the technology. And then gunpowder appeared in Europe and a primitive form of cannon called a "bombard" was invented, and the game was over for the curtain wall. It turned out to be the ideal target for cannons, and where a pre-cannon siege might take years as you waited for the survivors to run out of food, bombards could knock a hole in a castle wall in days or weeks at most. It was evident that a new form of defense was needed. The result was the star fortress. The main defensive structure of a star fortress was the moat. While many castles had moats, they were mainly intended to make it difficult for attackers to get to the primary defense of the curtain wall. But in a star fortress, everything is there to defend the moat. The star fortress gets its name from its ramparts, which are like the points of a star. You could use any number but six was common. (That's how many Dokkum has.) Obviously it would be dangerous if the moat could be drained, so you make it so that the moat is part of a river (which is the case at Dokkum) which makes it impossible to drain. The ramparts are low (barely fifteen feet high, if that) with gradual sloping walls made of brick backed by soft soil. You could quite easily walk up one, except that you weren't going to ever get that close if you were an attacker. The primary defensive weapon was the cannon (backed by muskets). Cannons were placed inside the rampart, and they had the ability to hit the ground outside the moat in about 220 degree field of fire, plus the ability to shoot along the wall towards each neighboring rampart. Every piece of land on the far side of the moat was within cannon fire of at least two ramparts (and sometimes three). Anyone trying to cross the moat on boats would get the crap blasted out of them, and anyone trying to attack the rampart with their own cannon were at a distinct disadvantage because the defenders already had their weapons registered, and the attackers had no physical defenses for their guns. The 
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