11. town and Fortress Walls, Projectiles, and Cannon

Abstract

In the Middle Ages as in many earlier periods, walls were a badge of rank and prestige to a city, providing necessary security as well. Town walls become “storehouses” for antiquities, probably with no hint of deliberate display, as with re-use in the mediaeval walls of Avila, built by Alfonso VI. One of several parallels to the preservation of antiquities in town walls is their incorporation into fortresses, in those many cases where the contemporary population could neither maintain or defend old walls because they were too few. If walls were frequently built of antiquities, then it is at least symmetrical that other antiquities were often cut to use as projectiles to batter them down. Strange and counter-intuitive as it might at first seem, one activity which consumed enormous quantities of classical antiquities, principally column-shafts and entablature blocks, both marble and granite, was the cutting of projectiles. Keywords:antiquity; fortress; projectiles; town walls