Yeah, Walls Work

By Rich Lowry

Saturday, June 03, 2023

 

Five hundred and seventy years ago this week, the walls of Constantinople were finally breached and the city fell to the Ottomans.

 

Thus ended an 800-year period when the eastern half of the Roman Empire survived after the fall of the West, courtesy of an enormous, multi-layered system of walls that repeatedly repelled besiegers.

 

Among others, the Arabs, the Russians, the Bulgarians, and the Ottomans (the first couple of times) tried and failed to overcome the defensive structure. The forces of the Fourth Crusade got into the city, with frightful results, but only because a door was left open.

 

The Cambridge Ancient History deems Constantinople’s barriers “perhaps the most successful and influential town walls ever built — they allowed the city and its emperors to survive and thrive for more than a millennium, against all strategic logic, on the edge of the extremely unstable and dangerous world of the post-Roman Balkans.”

 

It’s worth recalling the success of the so-called Theodosian Walls since a border wall is once again going to be a focus of the GOP nomination battle. This time, it won’t be because Trump is making a big, memorable boast about building a wall that sets him apart from the rest of the field, but because he didn’t build a wall as president, and Ron DeSantis and others are going to try to hold him to account and make the case they can do better.

 

“Walls work,” DeSantis said at a speech at the 50th anniversary of the Heritage Foundation.

 

About this, he is emphatically correct. We shouldn’t exaggerate how easy it is to build a wall on the southern border, given issues with eminent domain and the need for ranchers to be able to pass through fencing. And even if we could instantly build much more fencing, as long as people can get on U.S. territory, even on the wrong side of a fence, the machinery of asylum is going to kick in. (For this reason, fences work best where they can be built almost up to the line of the border in New Mexico, Arizona, and California and are less effective on the river in Texas, where they have to be set back from the floodplain.)

 

All that said, a wall is part of the solution, and such barriers have been an element of sovereignty and self-defense from time immemorial. Proverbs 25:28: “A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.”

 

In his book Walls a few years ago, David Frye made the case that walls are a foundation of civilization itself:

 

How important have walls been in the history of civilization? Few civilized people have ever lived outside them. As early as the tenth millennium BC, the builders of Jericho, encircled their city, the world’s first, with a rampart. Over time, urbanism and agriculture spread from Jericho and the Levant into new territories: Anatolia, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Balkans, and beyond. Walls inevitably followed. Everywhere farmers settled, they fortified their villages.

 

Walls created the relatively peaceful, orderly spaces where human ingenuity and thought could thrive in the great ancient civilizations. “Without walls,” Frye continues, “there could never have been an Ovid, and the same could be said for Chinese scholars, Babylonian, mathematicians, or Greek philosophers.”

 

And there clearly wouldn’t have been a Constantinople — not for long.

 

Trump would have been justified by any standard in calling the city’s defensive system “a big, beautiful wall,” especially the Golden Gate, a formidable marble structure notable for its splendor, including gilded doors and a sculpture of four elephants on top.

 

The walls get their name from Theodosius II, who ordered the construction of one of the best infrastructure investments of all time. The triple fortification, including an outer ditch that could become a moat, stretched about four miles.

 

The walls frustrated attackers for centuries. In 717, a massive Arab force of tens of thousands — the exact number is impossible to know — with a formidable fleet besieged the city for a year. No dice.

 

In the end, it was Ottoman cannons that defeated the walls in 1453. Even then, it was no easy task. The Ottomans bombarded the walls for weeks, and, at night, the defenders would patch them back again. After a desperate two-month struggle, the city fell, and with it, what remained of the Roman Empire.

 

The era of the artillery barrage was just beginning. Today, nobody is building castles anymore, but walls are still showing their efficacy in Israel and elsewhere.

 

We live in an era of constant flux and technological change, yet part of the answer at the southern border is one of the oldest technologies known to man.