Why were ancient cities protected by walls?
score:12
In the case of Conway (and most other places on borders) - it's more a castle than a town.
There is no point in having a well fortified castle, if around it you have an undefended town to give your attackers a base to live in while they attack you. The walled part of the city is really just the first line of castle defence for a siege.
Conway s part of the English king Edward's attempt to subdue the Welsh and was regularly, and occasionally successfully, attacked.
Other walled towns in France and Italy are there because there wasn't a strong central government and each town was either constantly at war with the others, or was at risk from wandering bands of mercenary armies.
At the first sign of a serious attack you round up all the animals and food into the town (and the farmers if you are feeling generous) burn all the fields and farms and wait for the attacking army to die of exposure,starvation and dysentry.
Upvote:2
City walls were for more than defense from attackers. Walls would help a city control immigration and trade, keeping out undesirables would be vital to a city remaining healthy especially preventing epidemics that could devastate a city. Walls Can also help with fighting crime to a degree by making entry/escape more challenging for criminals.
Upvote:4
It's a simple (or not) optimization problem.
Is the cost of the wall to protect the surrounding farms + cost of defending that wall (marginal cost compared to just the wall around the city) more or less than the cost of losing and rebuilding the farms (land improvements, buildings, stocks that can't be moved to the city and possibly farmers)?
Judging by the fact that most cities follow the "only protect the city" approach, it's clear that the answer is "protecting farms is more expensive than not", otherwise those nations/cities that chose to do that would dominate and thrive at the expense of those that did not.
Upvote:7
To answer your first question, yes attacks were frequent.
This is what prompted many of the earliest 'settlements' to build a surrounding and protective wall in the first place, to stop constant raids from stronger 'warrior' nomadic tribes killing, enslaving people and stealing food.
To answer your second question, the farmers and dry grain/food supplies would have been brought inside the walled city and stockpiled in the event of a lengthy siege or the threat of starvation by blockading the walled city.
Many of the earliest walled settlements that were most resilient to this kind of 'siege' or blockade were deliberately cited close to water, usually a river so that in the event of land blockade, supplies could still be brought in by water.
It needs to be remembered I think, that walled fortresses are much easier to defend by smaller armed forces against much larger attacking forces. In other words, smaller cities or villages that don't possess many 'warrior' class would still be able to defend a city or village against a much stronger and larger attacking force by simply possessing a strong defensive wall.
The author Sam Barone in his Akkad series of books detailing the rise of the worlds first walled cities of Akkad and Sumeria in Mesopotamia (which many historians cite as the worlds first empires) talks about this very subject.
The fact they became empires is very much down to the fact that they were the earliest civilisations to utilise the 'walled' city philosophy as a defence against attack.
I highly recommend Sam Barone's books as not only an entertaining read but a very useful historical one.
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