entire castle complexes, like the Bastille, are known. When prisoners were incarcerated in the often claustrophobic, poorly ventilated and dimly lit or even completely dark basements, it was not just imprisonment, but corporal punishment, a severe psychological and physical mistreatment of prisoners. Status symbol Just as the former tower houses of the nobility and other types of tower, the bergfried assumed a significant representational function. Some castle researchers emphasize its role as a status symbol, although it cannot be proved from medieval sources that symbolism was actually intended or indeed perceived by those living at the time. The symbolism of a tower has many meanings, not all of them positive, for example, the Tower of Babel represented man's pride and self-indulgence. Because, from the Middle Ages, secular rulers and especially the knight (who considered himself as a 'militia christiana') often had a Christian faith, researchers have suggested that the bergfried may have a Christian connotation as a symbol of Mary. Mary was referred to in the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary as an "ivory tower" and "Tower of David". But in the case of castle towers, this symbolism has not been sufficiently established by the sources. In contemporary descriptions of a castle, the main tower is often cited as the first; as a pictorial abbreviation or visual shortcut it is often seen on coats of arms and seals, where it symbolizes the castle as a whole. The bergfried in its status symbolism is perhaps comparable to medieval family towers in some northern Italian and German cities, whose sometimes bizarre heights cannot be explained in military terms. In addition, there were, for example, in Regensburg, no armed conflicts between the urban patrician families, so that here the status function was dominant from the beginning. A possible example of the use of these towers as a status symbol, are the so-called butter-churn towers whereby a small tower or turret was built on top of the original tower, bringing no additional military benefit, but increasing its height for better observation. During the transition from the late Middle Ages to modern times when, as a result of the development of firearms, a revolution in military technology took place, the bergfried gradually lost its military function, as any high buildings were particularly vulnerable to cannon fire and explosives. In response to these developments, castles were converted into fortresses of a new type, the bergfried