City Walls in Late Antiquity

An empire-wide perspective

Emanuele Intagliata, Simon J. Barker, Christopher Courault, Emanuele Intagliata, Simon J. Barker, Christopher Courault

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781789253658
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: Social Sciences

The construction of urban defences was one of the hallmarks of the late Roman and late-antique periods (300–600 AD) throughout the western and eastern empire. City walls were the most significant construction projects of their time and they redefined the urban landscape. Their appearance and monumental scale, as well as the cost of labour and material, are easily comparable to projects from the High Empire; however, urban circuits provided late-antique towns with a new means of self-representation. While their final appearance and construction techniques varied greatly, the cost involved and the dramatic impact that such projects had on the urban topography of late-antique cities mark city walls as one of the most important urban initiatives of the period. To-date, research on city walls in the two halves of the empire has highlighted chronological and regional variations, enabling scholars to rethink how and why urban circuits were built and functioned in Late Antiquity. Although these developments have made a significant contribution to the understanding of late-antique city walls, studies are often concerned with one single monument/small group of monuments or a particular region, and the issues raised do not usually lead to a broader perspective, creating an artificial divide between east and west. It is this broader understanding that this book seeks to provide. The volume and its contributions arise from a conference held at the British School at Rome and the Swedish Institute of Classical Studies in Rome on June 20-21, 2018. It includes articles from world-leading experts in late-antique history and archaeology and is based around important themes that emerged at the conference, such as construction, spolia-use, late-antique architecture, culture and urbanism, empire-wide changes in Late Antiquity, and the perception of this practice by local inhabitants.

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Approaching late antique city walls with an empire-wide perspective

Emanuele E. Intagliata, Christopher Courault, and Simon J. Barker

Introduction

The construction of urban defences was one of the hallmarks of the late Roman and late antique periods (AD 300–600) throughout the Western and Eastern Empire. While a number of cities already had existing urban defences, most urban centres seem to have been entirely unfortified prior to late antiquity; however, between the third and sixth centuries AD, the situation changed drastically, with walled circuits of varying types and designs being erected in many cities throughout the Roman world (Sarantis 2013a, 256). This included not only the imperial and provincial capitals but also smaller cities and towns. In Gaul, for example, some 85% of the 125 largely undefended towns were provided with walls through the third, fourth, and into the fifth centuries (Bachrach 2010, 38 with bibliography). That city walls were the most significant construction projects of their time and that they redefined the urban landscape cannot therefore be understated. In both the West and the East of the Empire, many cities followed a reduced course, excluding large sections of the existing imperial city (e.g. Bordeaux, Pergamon, Sagalassos, and Hierapolis). Moreover, their appearance and monumental scale (varied as they may be), as well as the cost of labour and material, are easily comparable to projects from the High Empire; however, urban circuits provided late antique towns with new means of self-representation and represent one of the most important urban initiatives of the period.

To-date, research on city walls has highlighted chronological and regional variations, enabling scholars to rethink how and why urban circuits were built and how they functioned in late antiquity. Scholarship also has sought to question traditional historical narratives of barbarian invasions and instead shown that benefaction, civic pride, availability of military labour, or a combination of these, alongside defence, acted as powerful motivations for the construction of city walls (see Laurence et al. 2011, 141–169, for arguments about urban status; Dey 2011, 112–121, for a discussion of the motivation for the Aurelian Wall in Rome and the various factors involved in its construction, including defence, prestige, and the undertaking of a large-scale public work to aid in the stability of Aurelian’s regime in the capital). Although these developments have made a significant contribution to the understanding of late antique city walls, studies are often concerned with one single monument, small groups of monuments, or a particular region. As a result, broader perspectives, especially those that consider walls from both the Western and Eastern parts of the Empire, are still lacking and therefore create an artificial divide between East and West.

This divide appears to have been well established already in the 1980s, when fortifications experienced a surge of interest in scholarly literature. In this respect, the summary works of Johnson (1983) and Lander (1984), which cover up to the fourth century AD, can be considered as indicative of this. While the former is mostly concerned with case studies from the West, Lander focuses his attentiun to the East. That this tendency still persists is reflected by the (excellent) bibliographic reviews (on ‘West’, ‘East’, and ‘Africa’) written by Sarantis and Christie (Sarantis and Christie 2013, Sarantis 2013a, 2013b) in the volume edited by the same scholars on ‘War and Warfare in Late Antiquity’.

Despite the fact that single-site and regional approaches have generally dominated the literature, the recent work of the research group Fokus Fortifikation has done much towards a more comprehensive geographical (and chronological) approach to the topic. In a first volume (Müth et al. 2016), the group has proposed a fundamental compendium of theory and practice using case studies (mostly, but not solely) from the late antique East. A second volume (Frederiksen et al. 2016) has collected contributions on examples from the origin of city walls to late antiquity.

City walls from late antiquity are distributed widely across the Roman world, both geographically and chronologically. Of course, the study of city walls from an empire-wide perspective is not without problems. For instance, urban defences in Britain and central and northern Gaul seem to date to the third and fourth centuries (Esmonde Cleary 2007). By contrast, in southern Gaul and Spain, many cities did not have defensive walls until the late fourth or early fifth centuries, if at all (Esmonde Cleary 2007). The wide geographical distribution of this monument type means that building techniques differed greatly from region to region. As such, building techniques do not easily lend themselves to far-reaching geographical research approaches. Opus emplectum, for example, which was the norm for constructing city walls in late have been antiquity and beyond both in the East and the West, is not particularly useful per se when it comes to exploring knowledge transfer across the Empire, given its long-established tradition and wide distribution. The structural peculiarities of a wall built with this technique that make it diverge from the standardised canon, however, such as the use of decorative elements in certain positions, can still provide crucial insights into its nature, chronology, and function, even if their study generally contributes little to a broader, empire-wide approach. This is due to the fact that their origins are often shaped by factors rooted in regional and local contexts, such as the ready availability of a certain material or the existence of a localised aesthetic trend (Brasse and Müth 2016, 92–93; Müth and Ruppe 2016). Occasionally, wide historical and political factors are seen in modern literature as instrumental for the adoption of a particular building technique or the use of a specific architectural detail. For example, the flamboyant polychrome city walls of late third-century west-central Gaul were more than just defensive structures; they were a means to legitimise Roman imperial authority in this area after the collapse of the Imperium Galliarum. And yet, even this case remains, admittedly, a ‘regional response to a regional problem’ (Dey 2010, 28).

The study of the distribution of specific architectural models, such as towers or gates, is also challenging for a number of reasons, perhaps most importantly the chronological uncertainty of many sites. Moreover, a particular defensive solution could have been used for centuries if considered effective against an enemy and/or if it was easy to build. Large U-shaped towers in the opus emplectum noted above, to cite one example, are known to have developed and peaked at the time of Diocletian (Gregory 1995, 166) both in the East and the West; however, they are not a chronological marker for dating Tetrarchic fortifications, as they continued to be constructed throughout late antiquity and beyond. The early Islamic aristocratic palaces in Syria and Jordan are proof that this model remained alive well after the Romans left the region (Genequand 2006). Such problems help account for the push of modern scholarship towards the study of urban fortifications through a local or regional lens, which is arguably more straightforward.

Although less visible in modern literature, there are of course numerous exceptions to these locally-/regionally-driven research trends. To cite one, Christiane Brasse has identified a structural peculiarity in the walls of Antioch on the Orontes (‘joggled joints’ of blocks in flat arches) that, although being of eastern Mediterranean origin, was clearly adopted in a number of significant buildings in the West. A second constructive detail, the horizontal layers of stone blocks in opus emplectum that imitated brick banding, seems to have had a more limited diffusion (Brasse 2017). Similarly, the use of brick banding was an alien building technique in Lazica (western Georgia) until the Romans brought it in late antiquity. This technique can be found in major public and religious buildings, but it is also relatively frequent in city walls, where it is often associated with typical defensive expedients stemming from Byzantine military architecture, such as proteichismata (Intagliata et al., 2019).

Towards a wider perspective

While certain aspects of city walls do not easily lend themselves to wider or empire-wide syntheses, an empire-wide perspective is certainly possible. In this regard, themes to be explored include the adoption of particular building techniques, as seen above, the use of recycled materials, the post-late antique history of city walls, the civilian or military nature of urban defences, the siting of fortifications, and their relationship with the existing urban fabric. With regard to the latter relationship, we might start to examine, for example, the different approaches taken and choices made by cities installing city walls into existing urban landscapes. In general, there seems to have been two approaches: urban fortifications incorporating the whole city within their circuits or walls significantly reducing the urban centre, leaving areas of the existing city outside the defended area. Both scenarios can be seen throughout the West and the East. The former is evident in Roman Britain, where timber or earthen defences were rebuilt in stone (Esmonde Cleary 2003, 79–84) and new defences were built (i.e. Canterbury). These enclosed urban areas were often much larger than their continental counterparts (Esmonde Cleary 2007) but can be paralleled in the third- and fourth-century defences in Spain at Astorga, Lugo, and Gijón (cf. Johnson 1983, 124–134) and in Gaul at Reims (Balmelle et al. 2019), Metz, Sens, and Tongres (Vanderhoeven 2017), where the defences enclosed the centre of the existing city and some or all of its principal monuments. In contrast, late Roman city walls in northern Gaul and the Rhineland, for example, often enclosed a much smaller portion of the original early-Roman town, requiring the demolition of urban areas (cf. Johnson 1983a, 82–114; Esmonde Cleary 2003, 84; 2007; Witschel 2013). Equally, in the East, we can see both approaches being adopted. At Antioch, the late Roman wall surrounded the entire Roman town (Mitchell 1998), while the late Roman wall of Sagalassos included only a small proportion of the city (Loots et al. 2000). It is important to understand why these choices were made in these different regions and how they compare across an empire-wide context: were these changes and/or differences related, for example, to city status, reduced population, the role of the military, etc.?

In the Eastern Empire, there were differences between walls in different types of cities. Provincial capitals seem to have had walls surrounding the entire urban area, whereas non-metropolitan cities, even large prosperous ones, seem to have followed a reduced course, excluding sections of the existing city (De Staebler 2008, 316–317). Esmonde Cleary, in Chapter 4 of this volume, notes in the case of Gaul that defensive circuits tended to occupy a more peripheral location in relation to the earlier urban fabric (cf. Angers, Beauvais, Évreux, Jublains, Le Mans, Paris, Périgueux, Poitiers, Rennes, Senlis, and Tours). He persuasively argues that the preservation of the urban layout of the High Empire was not a priority, but rather that walls were sited for military effectiveness and official considerations. Indeed, in many cases these reduced circuits present archaeological evidence for the late Roman period that suggest these urban centres had moved towards military centres or places with a strong military component (Esmonde Cleary 2013, 72 ff, and this volume). Here then, we see empire-wide patterns of drastic reduction and exclusion of the existing imperial cityscape but with differing causal factors.

Another theme of study is based on the fact that many urban defences employed the systematic re-use of earlier stonework for their construction (cf. Chapters 3–8). Here, then, we have a clear opportunity for an inter-regional, empire-wide perspective, considering similarities and differences in regard to how ancient builders approached re-used materials for the construction of city walls. Evidence for recycling is certainly not lacking in either the Western or Eastern regions of the Empire. Nine British towns are known to have incorporated re-used material from private housing, public buildings (fora, temples), and cemeteries in their urban defences (in their initial construction and/or during fourth-century modifications and additions), including London, Lincoln, Cirencester, Chichester, Canterbury, Caerwent, Godmanchester, Greater Casterton, and Kenchester (Barker et al. 2018). The walls at Bordeaux, Le Mans, Saintes, Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges (Gaul), Köln, Trier, Regensberg (Germania), Astorga, Barcelona, Lugo, and Gijón (Hispania) provide evidence for the similar and different ways in which urban defences re-used architectural and sculptural material. Similarly, we can cite numerous examples from North Africa, such as Lepcis Magna, or from Asia Minor, such as Aphrodisias or Hierapolis.

Even if the end results look different, we can recognise shared attitudes and approaches to the treatment of earlier materials incorporated in city walls. For example, recycled material was often carefully displayed for decorative effect, such as at Aphrodisias (De Staebler 2008), Sparta, and the late Roman fortress at Isthmia (Frey 2016, chs 4–5). Moreover, at Le Mans, stones of different colours were re-used in such a way as to create a patterned effect (Esmonde Cleary 2013, 124, fig. 3.5). The re-use in these walls was designed to look as if it was constructed with newly quarried stone, suggesting that in these instances the way in which the stone was re-used was an integral part of their conception. Consequently, although it is challenging, an empire-wide approach to the study of city walls can lead to results with implications well beyond the history of single sites. It can shed light on the agents behind the construction of monuments as well as the reasons for the monument’s erection. Such an approach can also contribute towards the understanding of knowledge transfer in the context of construction and ancient architecture, something that has found little space in works dedicated to urban fortifications.

The scope of this book

This book presents a collection of contributions devoted to late antique fortifications. It represents a timely addition to the most recent work on city walls and aims to both complement and expand upon several recent conferences and publications dealing with the subject (cf. Rodríguez Colmenero and Rodá de Llanze 2007, Frederiksen et al. 2016, and Much et al. 2016). Together, these volumes address important topics, such as the origins of fortifications, building techniques, and the role of function and semantics, but they prov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Approaching late antique city walls with an empire-wide perspective
• Section A. Regional trends
• Section B. City walls in old and new capitals
• Section C. Case studies: West and East
• Section D. The afterlife of city walls