Whatever scene they happen upon, they'll find a detailed look at a siege that occurred in 1339 when England's King Edward III led an unsuccessful attack against the castle and its owner, Enguerrand de Coucy.

The exhibit is a historically accurate representation researched and built by the Society for Medieval Castle Science (SMCS) of Aachen, Germany. It took the SMCS two years to build the model—the same period of time it took to build the actual castle itself (construction took place during 1226-1228).

The model is not meant to depict a snapshot moment in time but rather serves as a raw, sometimes brutal, depiction of the events that may have occurred during the siege.

The Full-Size Castle of Coucy

The Castle of Coucy was a powerful, unassailable stronghold that withstood the test of time and battle until World War I, when the French castle was bombed to the ground by Germany.

Coucy was famous for having the largest donjon, or keep (massive inner tower), ever built in Europe. The donjon was 180 feet (55 meters) tall and 100 feet (30 meters) in diameter.

Hans Garbe of the SMCS said the personal ambition of Engeurrand de Coucy allowed the immense structure to be built with great efficiency. De Coucy was in competition with the French king at that time and set out to build a castle that would overshadow anything the French king could build. Putting all of his money and manpower into the project, he built a castle with the biggest tower in Europe.

A Medieval Miniature

The model is the brainchild of Bernhard Seipen, a German architect with a fascination for medieval castles. Garbe said over 130 castles were researched before the SCMS decided to recreate Coucy.

After ten years of research, and with Seipen's passion for history as the prime motivating force, the SMCS began the process of building a model 1/25th the size of the original castle. Without sponsorship and using his own resources, Seipen created the 4.5-ton exhibit that has toured Europe for the past four years.

The 20-foot by 20-foot (6-meter by 6-meter) model has been shown at several prominent locations including the lobby of the European Parliament building in Strasbourg, Belgium. This is its first appearance in North America.

The model arrived at National Geographic headquarters after being shipped from Antwerp, Belgium, to Baltimore, Maryland. Then began the time-consuming, four-day process to unpack and lay down the pieces. While many of the 2,500 hand-painted figurines arrived already glued into different scenarios, it still required hours of setup and construction to successfully convert the exhibition space into a medieval battleground.

In this age of Global Positioning Satellite technology, heat-seeking missiles and armchair wars watched on TV news, a medieval siege that took months of labor and preparation is hard to imagine.

As Rich McWalters of Explorers Hall pointed out, the English had to build an entire infrastructure, complete with hundreds of livestock to feed the soldiers, to support their siege of the Castle of Coucy.

"The model shows the amount of manpower and time that went into this siege," Rich said. "It's just mind-blowing!"