“They say a wall is medieval, well so is a wheel. A wheel is older than a wall...The wheel is older than the wall, you know that? There are some things that work. You know what? A wheel works and a wall works. Nothing like a wall.” Donald Trump, January 10, 2019
In 324 CE, the Emperor Constantine decided that Rome was too far from the borders and armies of the Roman Empire and began the process of moving his capital to Byzantium. The new city, later called Constantinople, was easy to defend: there were bodies of water along two sides, the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn, and to make it even stronger Constantine built a wall around it.
While other cities were overrun by conquering armies, while the western capital of Rome fell, Constantinople survived. They were attacked by Bulgars, by Persian Sassanids, by the principality of Kiev, by many others, but none of them could breach the walls. Would-be conquerors failed even when chaos reigned within Constantinople itself: people dying of the plague, for example, or rivals fighting for the throne, or factions rioting over Christian doctrine.
In 1203, nearly nine hundred years after its founding, Constantinople fell, not to its traditional enemies but to fellow Christians from the Fourth Crusade. The Crusaders had commissioned ships from the Venetians, but when they met up in Venice they discovered they didn’t have the money to pay for them. While they tried to figure out what to do, the Byzantine prince Alexios Angelos approached the leaders with an offer: if they attacked Constantinople and restored his father, Isaac II Angelos, to the throne, the two men could pay them out of the city’s treasury. Isaac II was more popular than the current emperor, Alexios assured them; if they delivered the city to him they would be greeted as liberators.
The Crusaders did manage to take the city, in part by sailing the Venetian ships close to the walls and sliding ladders over the top. Needless to say, they weren’t received as liberators. Conditions were so confused inside the city that the Crusaders themselves took over and created a new Latin Empire. Forty years later, troops from the Byzantine Empire slipped through an unguarded spot in the walls and retook the city.
Constantinople continued much as it had for another 200 years. The wall had made the city impregnable, people thought, and there was no reason to think it couldn’t go on forever. That trick with the ships and ladders had been clever, but those ships had been phenomenally expensive, and probably no one would try the same thing again.
On April 6, 1453, the Turks besieged the city. They brought with them an enormous cannon, said to be 27 feet long, and other smaller cannons. Constantinople fell 53 days later. Much later, the Turks changed the city’s name to Istanbul.
If you put aside trump’s very weird claims — walls aren’t medieval, neither are wheels, walls are older than wheels — about the only thing left is that walls and wheels both start with “w.” Yes, walls used to be very successful. They could defend a city even when conditions had deteriorated inside, and they could keep out those people the city didn’t want. Since Constantinople fell, though, there have been a few upgrades: dynamite, airplanes, digging equipment. (Jorge Ramos, the Univision anchor, says that 40% of undocumented immigrants come by plane.) And trump’s wall, unlike Constantine’s, wouldn’t go all the way around the country or have towers at regular intervals, making it vulnerable to even medieval technology. People could sail around it, or just throw ladders up against it.
The idea that a wall would keep us safe is just so stupid it’s almost impossible to know where to start. In staking out this tiny piece of history I was trying to keep it simple, to find one small example to counter trump’s vast sea of ignorance. No, walls don’t work. They haven’t worked since the fifteenth century.