City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective

by Edited by James D. Tracy

• ISBN13: 9780521652216
• ISBN10: 0521652219
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-09-25
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The essays presented in this volume describe a phenomenon so widespread in human time and space that its importance is easily overlooked. City walls shaped the history of warfare; the mobilization of manpower and resources needed to build them favored some kinds of polities over others; and their massive strength, appropriately ornamented, created a visual language of authority. Chapters by historians and art historians explore how separate traditions throughout the world illustrate universal themes of defensive strategy and the symbolism of power, each time embedded in a distinctive local context.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	xi
Contributors	xvii
Acknowledgments	xix
Introduction	1	(18)
James D. Tracy
PART I TO WALL OR NOT TO WALL
Contained communities in tropical Africa	19	(27)
Graham Connah
Palisaded settlements in prehistoric eastern North America	46	(25)
George R. Milner
To wall or not to wall: Evidence from medieval Germany	71	(17)
James D. Tracy
Medieval walled space: Urban development vs. defense	88	(29)
Kathryn L. Reyerson
A world without walls: City and town in colonial Spanish America	117	(38)
Richard L. Kagan
PART II WALLS OF WAR
The fortifications of Epaminondas and the rise of the monumental Greek city	155	(37)
Frederick A. Cooper
Imperial walled cities in the West: An examination of their early medieval Nachleben	192	(27)
bernard S. Bachrach
Walled cities in Islamic North Africa and Egypt with particular reference to the Fatamids (909-1171)	219	(28)
Jonathan M. Bloom
Delhi walled: Changing boundaries	247	(35)
Catherine B. Asher
Ottoman military architecture in the early gunpowder era: A reassessment	282	(35)
Simon Pepper
Walled towns during the French wars of religion (1560-1630)	317	(32)
Michael Wolfe
Portuguese urban fortifications in Morocco: Borrowing, adaptation, and innovation along a military frontier	349	(37)
Martin M. Elbl
The artillery fortress as an engine of European overseas expansion, 1480-1750	386	(33)
Geoffrey Parker
PART III SIGNIFYING WALLS
Representations of Chinese walled cities in the pictorial and graphic arts	419	(42)
Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt
The hierarchy of Ming city walls	461	(27)
Edward L. Farmer
Decoration of city walls in the medieval Islamic world: The epigraphic message	488	(42)
Sheila S. Blair
Medieval French representations of city and other walls	530	(43)
Wolfgang G. van Emden
Siege law, siege ritual, and the symbolism of city walls in Renaissance Europe	573	(32)
Simon Pepper
Representations of the city in siege views of the seventeenth century: The war of military images and their production	605	(42)
Martha Pollak
Annotated bibliography of selected secondary works	647	(16)
Index	663