Learning from Old Walls.
A few weeks ago I spent a night in a medieval walled city. It got me thinking about walls.
There is something in us that likes to sleep with good stone at our backs. I enjoyed an excellent night surrounded by the tall battlements, even though I was six time zones removed from my usual nighttime hours. The castle crowning the old walled city now serves as one of Portugal’s best hotels. It’s an eminently peaceful retreat. You can feel the protective weight of the walls and timbered ceiling while you lie in bed waiting for sleep to come.
I think this is why a wall is good politics, especially at a time when life is filled with so much uncertainty. There is no denying the symbolic value of a wall to those who’ve had enough of spending their nights kept awake by worry. But whether we like it or not, a wall isn’t as secure as we would have ourselves believe.
The stone ramparts that contributed so nicely to my sleep made sense when they were built back in the 11th century. But even then they couldn’t save the people that built them. That would be the Moors, to use the medieval term for the North African Berbers who moved into the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th century. Before that the town was held by the Visigoths, who had taken it from the Romans, who’d had it from some iron-age tribe of Celts.
Using the advantage of history we can see that each had good reason to be concerned about their borders. We tend to think of places like this in terms of the people whose story we identify with vs. some group of “others” arriving to displace them. Or, depending on the period, maybe it’s the invaders storming the walls that we identify with. The history of most ancient cities is one long series of people inside and outside the walls violently exchanging places.
I myself came through the walls as an “other.” Thanks to the magic of a plastic credit card I was soon a welcome guest, sipping espresso at a sunny table in the castle-turned-hotel.
Getting there did require a modicum of bravery. The way in is through a gate built to defend against invading armies, not admit the width of my rental car. Any driver who manages to make it through with side-view mirrors intact and then climb the spider web of narrow, impossibly steep cobblestone streets without abandoning the vehicle halfway up is rewarded with a sticker at the hotel desk.
In 1148 the way in would have been considerably less inviting to the crusading army come down from Burgundy and camped around the city walls. It is still possible to walk the entire length of the battlements that spread out from the castle. That is, if you don’t mind the uneven stones and lack of anything resembling a guardrail. Looking down at the vineyards and farm fields far below you can imagine the difficulty of forcing an entry.
Then you come to the small wooden plaque describing the Door of Betrayal. As the story goes, the invading army spent a couple of hard months assaulting the walls without result. Then one moonless night a mysterious young woman from the city snuck into their camp and said she’d been told in a dream to let an advance party of the invaders through a secret doorway at the back of the castle. The crusaders accounted it a miracle. I imagine the town’s murdered inhabitants did not.
That’s the thing about a wall. It’s our divided selves we have most to fear, not some notion of “other” that we’re hoping to wall out. That’s why for all its appeal to politicians, a wall remains a sentimental folly. A yearning for a time we won’t get back, and probably wouldn’t want if we could. After all, they do refer to the time of my walled city as The Dark Ages.
The Portuguese learned that early on, and put The Dark Ages behind them. They ventured outside their walls and pioneered trade routes far into the Atlantic, around Africa and into the Indian Ocean. They were early globalists. It made them rich.
Getting beyond the romantic notion of borders and walls takes a different sort of courage than the politicians are currently pedaling. More Winston Churchill than Donald Trump. But it’s only by knowing ourselves and getting out into the world to engage with others that we can truly be prosperous and secure. That’s what I learned from my visit to an old walled city.
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