This article focuses on a lost cultural practice – entering a city – and on the experiential aspects of entering a walled city via a gate in the pre-modern period. City walls and gates have intrigued researchers over the years, especially historians and architectural historians. Yet existing studies are predominantly concerned with their military function, with their architectural features and design, or with the symbolic significance of the structures. By contrast, we know relatively little about the everyday practices that were associated with them. To my knowledge, there has been no study to date that systematically describes what it meant, in pre-modern times, to pass through a city gate and to enter a city. What might the visitor see? And what formal difficulties might s/he encounter? These are some of the questions taken up in this article, and they are discussed with as pan-European a scope as possible.
Walls and gates of early modern Europe: contexts and precedents
Scholars often state that city walls are among the most striking features of the pre-modern city,Footnote 1 and this is especially true for the early modern period. As Christopher Friedrichs notes, ‘not every city had a wall, and not every walled community was a city. But the correlation was remarkably high.’Footnote 2 Churches and marketplaces could be found in villages, but walls, by contrast, were exclusive to cities.Footnote 3 As early as the Middle Ages, city walls were already the symbol of civitas as a distinct area of security, order and law, for city dwellers at that time enjoyed coveted rights and privileges.Footnote 4 Tellingly, in medieval France the term bonnes villes – good cities – became synonymous with the idea of walled cities in general.Footnote 5 In the Netherlands, civil liberties and city gates had long been semantically entwined: in Dutch, a burgher is a poorter, someone who has the right – according to popular etymological derivation – to live inside the gates (pl. poorten) of a city.Footnote 6
Outside of Europe, city walls and gates had similar functions and significance regarding the constitution of the city; in fact in the pre-modern world, city walls were a universal phenomenon.Footnote 7 And yet, it is justifiable to single out the early modern period from the city walls’ thousands of years of global history as worthy of special attention, at least in part because of their architectural design. Indeed, the early modern period saw substantial advances in fortification techniques, and some historians have even suggested that the arrival of bastioned fortification – which was far more effective in withstanding heavy artillery than medieval city walls had been – brought about a ‘military revolution’.Footnote 8 In any event, these advances in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to a decision, in many cities, to replace medieval walls with a more modern ring of fortification.Footnote 9 Some fortresses that were built from scratch according to the improved methods were even considered invulnerable.
The construction or renovation of walls during this period resulted in the erection of more gates than ever before, in order to cope with the new challenges of the day. The Italian architect Sebastiano Serlio (1475–1554), who wrote his own treatise about gates and doors,Footnote 10 observed aptly: ‘If ever there was a time for inventing new styles of city and fortress gates, that time is now, given that the foremost leaders of Christians, who ought to be trying to keep peace amongst themselves, are in fact the very men who are continually causing and inciting new wars.’Footnote 11
Furthermore, it was during the early modern period that the already extensive practice of building city walls and gates entered theoretical consciousness and became a topic of discussion in itself. Renaissance authors started taking an interest in the varied history and ancient traditions of these structures, and sought to learn from them. By contrast, medieval authors had mostly approached them from an eschatological rather than ‘archaeological’ perspective. For them, the Revelation of St John served as a particular point of reference, especially its vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem, ‘whose gates shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there’.Footnote 12 This passage exerted a powerful influence on the medieval imagination, as well as on the construction of cities.Footnote 13 As a result, a city with 12 gates like St John's was considered the ideal, even though it could only be realized in the largest and most prosperous cities, such as Cologne and Bologna.
This eschatological outlook continued, of course, into the early modern era, but beginning in the Renaissance, a pronounced historical interest in the phenomenon of the wall gained currency alongside it. A clearly archaeological view of ancient walls and their ruins can be seen in Renaissance paintings by artists such as Mantegna.Footnote 14 Humanists too displayed a keen interest not only in the city walls of Greco-Roman antiquity but also in those of ancient Babylon,Footnote 15 and all available information on city walls in ancient writings was directly relevant to Renaissance architects. Builders even turned to scholars of antiquity to ascertain whether the walls’ new ground fortifications should be built by soldiers or by special fieldworkers.Footnote 16 They considered it impossible to build a perfect wall without recourse to antiquity, and a perfect wall was seen as the prerequisite for the creation of an ideal city and society, which was likewise expected to conform to ancient standards and principles.
It is thus no coincidence that the major utopias of the early modern age were located either on almost inaccessible islands (Morus, Bacon) or in artfully walled cities (Filarete, Campanella).Footnote 17 It was also not by chance that Lucantonio degli Uberti, in his monumental woodcut from 1500, framed his depiction of the city of Florence with a chain and an iron lock (see Figure 1).Footnote 18 The walls of Florence, which are clearly visible in this image, guarantee the safety and prosperity of a city that is depicted as ideal, a city that – as the frame suggests – can literally be ‘locked up’. Granted, there is here a certain exaggeration of the walls, and even Alberti warned not to put all one's hopes in the structure of walls.Footnote 19 In reality, city fortifications could only be as strong as the will to maintain them, and, in times of crisis, defend them. Conversely, to contemporaries a wall-less city looked helpless, or even, in Alberti's words, ‘naked’.Footnote 20 Nor was Alberti's expression a rhetorical cliché: people in the early modern age considered a city without walls to be ‘naked’ in the truest sense, as can be gleaned from an engraving by the Italian artist Giovanni Battista Braccelli from the early seventeenth century. The engraving depicts a city without walls as a defenceless woman, who – lying on her back with legs spread – is constantly at risk of ‘penetration’ (a term that can be understood quite literally in this case) (see Figure 2). By and large, reality justified these notions, because in medieval and early modern Europe there were very few large, wall-less cities that were not conquered at some point. The most famous example is Venice, but Venice's saving grace was of course its unusual position in a lagoon as well as – to a lesser extent – a great deal of luck in times of crisis.
Lucantonio degli Uberti (attr.), View of Florence (so called Kettenplan), c. 1500/10. Courtesy of the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inventar-Nr. 899-100.
Giovanni Battista Braccelli, Untitled, from Bizzarie di varie figure (Livorno 1624). Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington DC, LC-USZ62-60194.
Certainly, on the ground not every early modern city wall was complete. Many walls were constructed in phases over long periods of time, and some remained perpetually unfinished.Footnote 21 Contemporaries were also aware that, even in a perfect wall, there would always have to be holes: namely, the gates.
The functions of the city gate in the early modern era
Early modern discourse on the topic of gates was thus marked by a fundamental tension. On the one hand, they were weak points in the wall, and the advances in military technology and warfare aggravated this problem further.Footnote 22 On the other hand, the gates to a city held considerable symbolic as well as practical significance, which also found expression in ornamental features and imposing exteriors.Footnote 23
The combination of military needs with the requirements of symbolic representation ensured that gates were often far more lavish from an architectural point of view than the rest of the city wall.Footnote 24 They protruded considerably from the wall itself, and were often decked with flags.Footnote 25 In many places in Europe, one can also see cannonballs embedded in the outer side of the gate. These were rarely relics of a past battle; rather, they were intentionally embedded in the stonework to testify to the sturdiness of the gate as well as for their apotropaic power.Footnote 26
In many places, approaching parties also faced the challenge of crossing ditches and bridges in order to reach the city gate, which was almost always manned by armed sentinels, whose presence transformed the gate into the ‘city's eyes’, as Shakespeare put it.Footnote 27 We can also infer how unusual the sight of an unguarded gate was from the travelogues of early modern Europeans to the Orient, where they found different customs.Footnote 28 European gates were sometimes subdivided into several smaller gate systems and underpasses.Footnote 29 However, the fact that many functioned as bulwarks says relatively little about their actual military significance, and although these gates grandly proclaimed their ‘defensive features’, they were not always ‘defensible’.Footnote 30 In short, despite advances in structural design from the Middle Ages on, city gates – as unavoidable openings in the wall – generally remained the weakest links in city security. In order to minimize this problem, it would have been necessary to convert the gate itself into a continuously guarded mini-fortress. This was exactly what the German architect Joseph Furttenbach (1591–1667) suggested in a now scarcely remembered treatise,Footnote 31 but his plans were never realized. In addition to the high cost of staffing, the disadvantage of such a military facility for everyday travel and commerce must also have spoken against it. This follows a pattern which we find elsewhere in the early modern period. As Simon Pepper notes, ‘in a surprising number of cases, security was compromised by the design of magnificent formal gateways prominently placed in ways that owed much more to urban design than to the practical exigencies of fortification’.Footnote 32
One more feature should be noted: when viewed from inside the city, gates were generally less imposing – as well as less visible – than they were from the outside. It thus makes sense to speak separately of the two sides: the country side (Feldseite) and the city side (Stadtseite). The function of the city side, whose view was often obstructed by dense rows of houses, was more to give the inhabitants a sense of security, while the country side was designed to proclaim the identity of the city or town to the world and to project both wall and gates as ‘icon[s] of power and permanence’.Footnote 33
On another level, the city wall also constituted a boundary in a fiscal as well as a social context and, not least, in the sphere of religion. The following sections devote attention to each of these functions and their impact on those who wished – for whatever reason – to enter a city.
Symbolic significance
The symbolic significance of the city gate can be traced back to very ancient times. As far back as antiquity and the Middle Ages, the gate stands as a pars pro toto for the entire cityFootnote 34 – as illustrated on coins, coats of arms and seals. This does not mean that all the gates of a given city were identical. Quite the contrary: gates were highly individualized. They were ‘faces of the city’, and often bore individual names indicating their specific function: the name of the city's patron saint, of the adjacent quarter in the city, or of a larger city to which the gate's outbound road would lead.Footnote 35 Europeans in early modern times had a strong sense for the variations among city gates, and they often devoted extensive space in their travelogues and accounts of cities to the description of specific gates.Footnote 36
In some places, such as in medieval England, the city gate was not only an emblem of municipal identity but also a locus of daily politics. In these cases, special chambers above the gate served as a meeting place for the municipal authorities.Footnote 37 In most of Europe, however, the city gate's most important ceremonial function probably lay in the entrance and welcome of important dignitaries, especially – if the city was not independent – of its overlord. These events were organized in detail and at great expense; sometimes an existing gate would even be heightened or expanded for the purpose.Footnote 38 Occasionally, imposing pillars or additional honour gates (so-called Ehrenpforten) were installed in or in front of the city. When the dignitary was the ruler of the city or region, the gate was not only where he officially entered the city, but also the place where his status was acknowledged. In Siena, for example, on the occasion of Emperor Charles V's visit in 1536, not only were new gates erected, but in addition, ‘the gates of the Porta Camollia were taken off their hinges and laid on the ground as the supreme civic compliment’.Footnote 39 Such ostentatious displays of respect can also be seen in other cities at the time. Most common was the handing over of the keys to the city in a solemn ceremony; the ruler would usually accept them, and then return them with equal ceremony to the city officials.Footnote 40 In fact, these lavish, ceremonial displays concealed the riskiness of this practice, for the city leaders literally handed over their most important privilege: the right to determine who could enter and leave the city.Footnote 41
Given the enormous significance of city walls and gates for the self-image and ‘honour’ of a city, their destruction was not only a military disaster, but also a traumatic and humiliating event.Footnote 42 It was literally a blow to the ‘face of the city’. Shakespeare himself used anthropomorphic metaphors of this sort and spoke of the need, in wartime, ‘to save unscratched your city's threatened cheeks’.Footnote 43 The same idea, from the perspective of the attacker, is expressed in the famous biblical story of the collapse of the walls of Jericho, as well as in Samson's attack on the city gates of Gaza. In both cases, the biblical protagonists were carrying out God's will against their enemies (and their enemies’ fortifications).Footnote 44 In the early modern age, of course, neither divine intervention nor trumpets – as in the story of Joshua – were needed to crush the walls of conquered cities: large amounts of gunpowder sufficed. However, this aspect of conquest pre-dates the age of gunpowder: razing walls was common already in the Middle Ages, and even then its purpose was not purely military. Indeed, all it took to condemn a city to military insignificance was to demolish its walls, yet as a rule the gates were also not spared, suggesting that ‘these acts were intended as gestures of civic humiliation’.Footnote 45 This becomes still more obvious when one considers that at times the gates were the sole locus of destruction, clearly as a form of punishment. In the fourteenth century, for example, certain cities in the Margraviate of Brandenburg endorsed a false pretender to the throne, the ‘False Waldemar’. When the reigning Wittelsbachs regained the sceptre of sovereignty, all the gates through which Waldemar had ridden were walled up and replaced by new ones. Some of the sealed-up Waldemartore, intended to impose eternal shame on the cities, were not reopened until the nineteenth century.Footnote 46 In the medieval and early modern Low Countries, too, there were numerous cases ‘when seeking to punish rebellious city corporations . . ., the reigning Counts would make a point of demolishing those city gates that were customarily used for princely entries’.Footnote 47
Social filter
Among the roles of the city gate that can hardly be overvalued is its function as a social filter.Footnote 48 Control over the gates was a crucial tool for the city's leadership to exert influence over the social life and demographic composition of the city. Most notably, beginning in the fifteenth century, city gates were ‘increasingly used . . . not so much to admit, but to prevent people from coming to town, especially those whom they had expelled previously’.Footnote 49 It was not unusual to display the heads of executed criminals on or against city gates – in the assumption that this would deter potential emulators.Footnote 50 Apart from those who had been expelled or banned from the city, there were also two other groups of people who frequently sought entrance and were vigorously repelled by most cities: vagabonds and beggars.Footnote 51 Entrance was also often barred to members of religious minorities – particularly Jews.
Similar strict regulations applied to the sick, although there were finer distinctions in these cases. Someone who came to town for a conventional doctor's visit or procedure could count on being permitted, but those who suffered from infectious diseases or gave the impression of being contagious were usually turned away, especially during epidemics of the plague. Then, gatekeepers (along with clergy and physicians) were among the important officials who were given special instructions.Footnote 52 Particularly strict stipulations were enforced in this regard in Italian cities, to which, beginning in the late Middle Ages, one usually could not gain entrance ‘without showing a health certificate from one's previous place of residence’.Footnote 53 From the sixteenth century onward, the practice of requiring a certificate of health became more common also north of the Alps.Footnote 54
Fiscal boundaries
Merchandise passing through a city gate on a daily basis was another important reason for inspection, as excise taxes or customs duties were levied on many goods and wares. At the gates of Berlin in the eighteenth century, for example, these taxes applied to almost 40 different wares, which were enumerated in an Akzise-Buch (‘excise book’) that filled a total of 107 pages.Footnote 55 In Brussels, every gate had its own small office with the city's coat of arms, in which the list of taxable goods was kept ready for use.Footnote 56 Payment of the necessary sum was handled in various ways: in some cities it was made directly at the gate, while in others (such as Berlin), payment of the tax took place after presenting a document from the gate to an authority located in the city centre.Footnote 57 In other cases, certain goods – such as cattle for slaughter – underwent a simpler inspection and were brought in only through a specific gate designated for this purpose.Footnote 58
In Renaissance Florence, the tolls (gabelle), collected at no fewer than 11 gates, were one of the city's most important sources of income.Footnote 59 Even in cities that were part of a larger territory and had to give a portion of their income to their overlord, there still remained considerable sums to line the city's own coffers. To get a sense of the size of the income generated by these tolls, one need only consider that even in a large territorial state like Brandenburg-Prussia, income from border taxes and gate customs constituted half of the state's total tax revenue well into the eighteenth century.Footnote 60 In Brussels, too, excise tax was a major source of the city's income.Footnote 61 Therefore, relinquishing control over a city's gates would rob the city of one of its most important sources of revenue.Footnote 62
Gates and walls as religious spaces
The religious significance of city gates and walls has been little discussed in research to date. A comprehensive history of this topic would require in-depth treatment spanning many periods, since pre-Christian influences intermingle with Christian traditions.Footnote 63 Already in biblical times, city gates were often sites of religious culture and law.Footnote 64 In ancient Greece, the sacred dimensions of the city walls served ‘as an extension of the sacredness of the polis itself’.Footnote 65 In Roman culture, too, city walls were fundamentally res sacrae.Footnote 66 The Romans even gave the boundary stone its own god, Terminus, while dual-faced Janus was revered for his protection of sites of passage such as gates.
Some of the sacred rituals connected to gates in Christendom were related to the gate itself: in light of the military, legal and political significance of city walls and gates described above, it is not surprising that divine assistance was also invoked for their safety. The custom of painting images of the Virgin Mary on gates for this purpose can be seen in Constantinople as well as in late medieval Italy.Footnote 67 In Italy, it was not unusual to decorate gates with depictions – usually sculptures or frescoes – of the city's patron saint, as well as of St Peter (who famously holds the keys to the kingdom of heaven) and the Archangel Michael (who according to Christianity guards the gate to Paradise).Footnote 68 These images were thought to have an apotropaic effect, and, particularly, to ward off the devil and other evil spirits, whose pernicious influence might weaken the security of the city. When such suspicions arose, it was occasionally thought necessary – in Renaissance Florence and Siena, for example – for the walls to be ritually purified by priests.Footnote 69 Another common custom throughout Europe was to build chapels above city gates (as well as atop castle and monastery gates). This was believed to guarantee special protection for the gate and give it an even more dignified appearance, as well as to inspire donations from travellers grateful to have arrived at their destination.Footnote 70
In addition to rituals that centred around the gates, there were many other religious and superstitious traditions for the benefit of the people travelling through them. In the case of Florence, Richard Trexler has shown that ‘processions touched the gates as part of the via sacra, military forces had to pass under them at propitious times, and visiting dignitaries could not traverse them without solemn preparations and ceremonies’.Footnote 71
In the age of confessionalization, city gates also became a religious demarcation line in a different sense. This development was specific to the early modern age and rose to prominence in the aftermath of the Reformation. It is well known that the Peace of Augsburg (1555) codified the religious status of many places, or, where applicable, gave the ruler the right to determine the religion of his territory (thus also of his cities). City dwellers with other religious beliefs were therefore ordered to hold their religious services and ceremonies outside the city walls, since in surrounding regions – at the manors of country aristocrats, for example – different regulations might be in place. This is clearly seen in the Low Countries, but it is also true for cities like Paris, where, in the early seventeenth century, ‘a Catholic crowd attacked the Huguenots as they returned to town through St Anthony's Gate. Not coincidentally, the violence occurred precisely where Huguenots penetrated the inner sanctum of the city.’Footnote 72
Entering an early modern city
We now come to the question posed at the outset, namely what it was like to enter an early modern walled city under normal circumstances – for this, just like exiting the city, was always a ‘deliberate experience’.Footnote 73 My examples focus on two of the largest cities in early modern Europe: Brussels and Antwerp. There are several reasons for this choice: both cities were admired throughout Europe for their lavish walls and fortifications;Footnote 74 in both, ‘the linking of certain city gates with civic political prowess’ was a deeply rooted tradition stretching back centuries, as can be seen from their elaborate processions.Footnote 75 Above all, both were major centres of commerce; few other cities would have seen so many or varied travellers and merchandise pass through their gates on a daily basis.Footnote 76 This does not mean that the practices associated with the gates of Brussels and Antwerp were unusual in comparison to other European cities – the only essential difference (and my reason for drawing on them) lies in the great amount of extant materials in both cases, due to their large volume of commerce and transit.Footnote 77 But we will examine other examples as well, and consider a series of other European cities in order to apply the insights gleaned from Brussels and Antwerp. These insights will also help us to lay a firmer foundation for the broader context of the discussion.
When a foreigner wished to enter a walled city in early modern Europe, he usually had to undergo inspection.Footnote 78 The only variable at play was how intensively the inspection was carried out. In many places, inhabitants of the city had the right to leave and enter at will – but they had to prove their citizenship.Footnote 79 The exact manner in which this was carried out remains unclear.Footnote 80 Most citizens used the same gate every time – the one intended for their part of the city. We can presume that, especially in smaller towns, the gatekeepers recognized most of the citizens coming and going by their appearance. As a result, and as long as they had no goods to declare, most citizens could avoid inspection, although in theory it was still ‘officially’ required. A telling record of informal flexibility can be found in Goethe's Werther: ‘[Werther] came to the city gate. The watchmen, who knew him, let him go out without a word.’Footnote 81
The situation regarding unknown and foreign persons was far more complicated. Let us consider Brussels, which can serve as a typical example. There, so-called commissaires at the gate were required to ask foreigners at least eight questions, apparently in the following order: (1) place of birth, (2) most recent place or territory in which the individual had lived, (3) when he left it and why, (4) the location of his most recent stop on his journey, (5) surname and given name, (6) occupation or other distinguishing trait (qualité), (7) duration and reason for his stay in this city, (8) the location of his accommodation in the city.Footnote 82 Answering these questions, however, did not guarantee automatic entrance to the city. The commissaires had strict instructions not to let in any foreign beggars or vagabonds. Furthermore, anyone who gave the impression of being ill had to produce a certificate of health (certificat de santé). The decision was also problematic if the person could not name any planned accommodation in the city. In this case, the commissaire had to call the gate guards, who would then lead him or her to a city official – or, in other cities, directly to the mayorFootnote 83 – where the case would be further scrutinized.
When the commissaires found no reason to forbid entrance and all necessary tolls had been paid, the traveller received a pass to the city and entered the gate. He would then have to produce this pass in order to get accommodation in any hostelry, and also to leave the city at the end of his stay,Footnote 84 so it was crucial to take good care of it. But the gatekeepers’ duties did not end with issuing the pass: at the end of every workday – after closing the gate – they had to submit a list to the municipal authorities (in Brussels, the trésorerie), which documented the full name as well as the intended accommodation of all foreign persons who had been admitted. Compiling these lists was the responsibility of the gate clerks, who worked from the time the gate opened until it was closed.Footnote 85 In Antwerp, these gate clerks also had to keep a record of any moments of suspicion and irregularities of any sort.Footnote 86 Lists of foreign entrants were common in many European cities, but comparatively few have been preserved in the archives,Footnote 87 and while they may seem monotonous now, for their contemporaries they were a prized source of news and novelty. Indeed, in pre-modern times, the arrival of foreign visitors was always an interesting piece of news. In Berlin, for example, even in the eighteenth century, the list of those who had entered the gate was brought every evening to the king himself. In Augsburg, which was not a royal seat, oversight of the list remained the responsibility of the mayor.Footnote 88 In the nineteenth century, although city gates were beginning to disappear, it became common to publish the names of foreigners staying in hostels and hotels in the local papers,Footnote 89 and it was not until the beginning of mass tourism that this practice came to an end.
Entering a city gate was thus a complex and often multi-staged process. The various inspections to be undergone by foreign travellers as well as by entrants with taxable wares were described in specific gate ordinances in great detail.Footnote 90 In some Italian cities, foreigners also had to relinquish any weapons at the gate.Footnote 91
However, it was often easier to announce these rules, orally or in writing,Footnote 92 than to enforce them in practice, for not every traveller knew the different rules in place in each city, and not every gate commissary or guard adhered firmly to them. This was partly due to the gatekeepers’ working conditions: they were poorly paid and in certain cities they were known to juggle multiple jobs in order to improve their income; from time to time they also eased the inspection regulations in exchange for ‘gifts’.Footnote 93 However, even when these officials carried out their duties properly, they received little sympathy. Boccaccio, for example, lets one of his protagonists in the Decameron lament: ‘You know how those custom officers always make a nuisance of themselves and want to see everything.’Footnote 94
Despite detailed ordinances, activities at the city gate were also punctuated by frequent misunderstandings and breakdowns in communication. In the first place, not every traveller who arrived at a city gate had a sufficient command of the local language, and this made the inspection and answering of questions far more complicated. But this was one of the minor problems. A far heavier burden was that city gates were frequently the setting for arguments and brawls because of the customs inspection. Quite a few travellers felt that they were being unjustly taxed and protested vociferously – at times brawls that began at the gates even led to protests or riots that spread to the entire city.Footnote 95 In addition, there was always a certain number of travellers who tried to smuggle their wares past the authorities or to falsify their declarations.Footnote 96 If the gatekeeper noticed it, tension could escalate quickly: in Antwerp in 1696, a miller attacked an inspector with a knife because the latter wanted to search the miller's wagonload.Footnote 97
Disputes of honour constituted a further problem, because the gate – perhaps more than any other public urban space – was a great leveller: every person had to pass through it, and very few foreigners (such as high dignitaries with special privileges and letters of safe conduct) were spared inspection. Being inspected by low-ranking officials was a thorn in the side for many aristocrats and upper-class travellers. This was the experience of a gatekeeper in Brussels in 1755: when he tried to inspect the passengers of a stagecoach arriving from Ghent, a nobleman emerged, furiously refused the inspection, struck the guard three times and even pulled out his dagger. It was only with the help of a courageous passer-by and other sentinels called in to help that the aggressive traveller was subdued and arrested.Footnote 98
Soldiers were another group whose arrival at a city gate often led to violence: not only were they armed, but they also tended to travel in large groups – two factors that could easily ignite a dangerous situation. While not solving the problem, the authorities in Antwerp tried at least to contain it by allowing soldiers to enter at only two of the city's gates.Footnote 99 On the other hand, their services were sometimes needed at the gates: as was argued in Brussels, they could come to the aid of the guards in cases of dispute.Footnote 100 However, it was expensive for the city (or overlord) to employ soldiers from a standing army, and in places where this was the case the financial burden was often passed on to the citizens in the form of a special ‘guard tax’.Footnote 101
Finally, one other factor could lead to conflict: the crowds that gathered at the gate. This was caused mainly by the constant traffic of people, wagons and animals on their way in or out of the city. In the eighteenth century, Kassel experienced repeated misfortunes in this regard: a woman was speared by an ox, and an officer was trampled to death by a herd of cows.Footnote 102 Aggravating the situation in many places was that bystanders, beggars and children tended to congregate directly behind the gates, not least because the adjacent residential areas usually contained the living quarters of the social underclasses. As the architect Sebastiano Serlio lamented: ‘The habitations of the poorest men in cities are far from the piazzas and the noble places and are near the gate. These men are the humblest sort of craftsman who work in various lowly trades.’Footnote 103 The area directly behind the gate was also a favourite place for travelling salesmen: it gave them first chance to sell their wares to visitors and travellers. City officials were continually issuing decrees banning assembly and the disturbance of traffic near the city gate; they also banned loitering near the gate and hawking wares.Footnote 104 But we can infer from the frequency of these decrees that fixing these problems was an elusive goal.
Urban development also tended to flank the city walls directly – a problem that caused constant grievance to the authorities and their building regulations,Footnote 105 and intensified the chaos in these parts of the city. To make matters worse, the gatekeepers generally stood looking outward, to the city's surroundings. What happened inside the city, in the shadow of the wall, was beyond their field of vision and it is telling that in Italian cities, crucifixes were often painted on or affixed to the inside of the walls in order to dissuade the unruly or drunk from urinating on them.Footnote 106
A person who wished to pass through a city gate also had to be aware of logistical factors. The most important was probably the time when the gate opened, and this could vary significantly according to the time of year.Footnote 107 In Brussels, for example, the opening and closing times were adjusted every two weeks, so that each year had 18 different regulations for gate times. In the second half of April, for example, the gates were open from 4:00 in the morning until 8:00 in the evening. In December, however, the gates did not open until 6:30 and closed as early as 5:00 in the afternoon.Footnote 108 In many places, gate bells signalled the closing of the gate from inside the city (and later in the evening, they also sounded the curfew for hostels and taverns).Footnote 109
The gates’ opening times were often posted publicly, and one can assume that people in the surrounding boroughs were also aware of them, but closing times posed a constant problem and required ceaseless re-regulation on the part of the authorities.Footnote 110 For one thing, the gatekeepers were not always punctual. It was apparently not uncommon for them to arrive a bit late or to end their workday early, disregarding the inconvenience this caused to merchants and travellers. In Brussels, the magistrate deplored the fact that despite the regulations, ‘the city's gates were not opened and closed according to the appointed hours’.Footnote 111 Similar complaints can be found in other large European cities.Footnote 112 The situation was especially complex on Sundays and holidays, where it was customary in some places to close the city gates – or at least some of them – during the Holy Mass.Footnote 113 In Calais, much to the chagrin of travellers, the gates were sometimes closed even in the middle of workdays, especially at midday.Footnote 114
For those unfamiliar with the city, the situation was particularly difficult and confusing. In general, it was advisable for travellers to plan their journey so that they would be sure to arrive before sundown, and in the early modern age, this need impacted strongly on their timetable and choice of route, especially for those travelling long distances.Footnote 115 Arriving on time or early was thus more than just a virtue – it was a necessity. Locals and foreigners alike sought to avoid the dreaded situation of standing in front of a locked gate. The colloquial term ‘Torschlußpanik’ (literally, ‘panic of gate closure’), now used in German in a figurative sense, still resounds with the anxiety of pre-modern people faced with the prospect of not being allowed to enter the city.Footnote 116 A person approaching a city after closing time could only hope that at least one of the gates would be staffed with a night watchman. If so, the traveller would either have to pay a considerable sum of money (if the gate regulations provided for this circumstance), or else bribe the gatekeeper. Especially in smaller towns, however, the gatekeepers first needed to consult the mayor, as he was the one who kept the keys to the gates.Footnote 117 Travellers who could produce a special permit would have an advantage in this situation.Footnote 118 In some places, exceptions were also made for sick people who required medical help, as well as for doctors, surgeons, midwives, nurses and others who could provide emergency aid.Footnote 119 Even then, however, a lot was still left to chance, for the behaviour of night watchmen was notoriously unreliable: sometimes they got drunk during their shift, were engrossed in conversation (or gambling) with fellow guards, or simply fell asleep. Such instances were not unusual, as evidenced by the regulations. In Antwerp, for example, gatekeepers were expressly forbidden to drink beer or to provoke one another with ‘defamatory, scandalous words’.Footnote 120 Similar stipulations existed in numerous other places.Footnote 121
Anyone who arrived at the gate too late and was neither rich nor privileged had no choice but to spend the night outside the walls. At times, a person who was refused entrance would react with tantrums;Footnote 122 he might then be permitted to enter, but would generally be led directly to the city jail. Few travellers were as unconcerned at the prospect of spending the night outside the gates as the Quaker William Penn (1644–1718), who later became the founder and namesake of the American state of Pennsylvania. During his travels as a missionary through Holland and the Holy Roman Empire in 1677, he arrived one evening in Duisburg, where he found the gates already locked. Yet through his unwavering trust in God, Penn and his companions managed to see the light side of even this situation. He later reported:
And there being no Houses without the Walls, we laid down together in a Field, receiving both natural and spiritual Refreshment, blessed be the Lord. Three in the Morning we rose, sanctifying God in our Hearts that had kept us that Night . . . Soon after the Clock had struck Five, they opened the Gates of the City, and we had not long got to our Inn.Footnote 123
The question of night time entry remained a serious problem throughout the pre-modern period, for the authorities as well as for travellers. In terms of the authorities, entrance at night time was only permissible in exceptional cases, for the security of the city and its inhabitants were the priority. The magistrates also feared that a lax approach to night time entrance would encourage their enemies to action and aggravate two other problems: the intrusion of vagrants and beggars, and the avoidance of excise taxes.
In short: no magistrate in the early modern age willingly relinquished control over the city gates because of their many functions and the various problems that arose daily in connection to them. There were, however, situations in which this control slipped – or threatened to slip – from the authorities’ hands. The most frequent cause was the capture of the city by enemies or its annexation to a territory governed by another ruler. Neither situation necessarily led to a politics of laissez-faire at the gates or even to their removal; however, the result was often that authority over the gates (and at least a portion of the income they generated) was transferred to powers outside the city. Other, lesser factors could also undermine a city's control over its gates. One constant threat was the creation of alternative ways of entering or leaving the city. While it is true that city walls often looked imposing, they were also expensive to maintain and required constant repair. Holes developed due to natural circumstances like inclement weatherFootnote 124 – or they might be intentionally created.Footnote 125 In any case, most walls were not insurmountable: under cover of darkness, there were often places where a person could climb over the walls or fortifications to get in or out of a city. Statistically, this was probably not a great danger: the majority of citizens and travellers still passed through the gates as prescribed. The problem was therefore more a qualitative one: holes in the city wall or the possibility of climbing over it tended to inspire those people whose entrance the city was most keen to prevent, namely vagabonds, beggars and smugglers. So it is no wonder that cities brought out the heavy artillery – of a rhetorical as well as physical nature – to deal with this problem. Almost everywhere in Europe, authorities issued bans against climbing the city walls after dark.Footnote 126 In Brussels, it was strictly forbidden to climb the walls by night or by day, or to avoid the gates by any other means (such as by damaging the fortifications). Violators of these laws faced punishments ranging from severe fines or jail sentences (with bread and water for up to six weeks) to banishment or even the death penalty. The guards were also permitted, after issuing a warning, to open fire on a transgressor caught trying to enter the city secretly at night,Footnote 127 and in some places in Europe, it was even forbidden to go near the walls at night time.Footnote 128
Nonetheless, problems and transgressions of this kind were not what ultimately led to the downfall of city walls and gates. Their disappearance – doubtless one of the most radical transformations in the long history of European cities – came about for other reasons.
The disappearance of city gates and the future of the city
The disappearance of city walls and gates opened a new chapter in the history of urban space. Recent research has shown that there were various reasons for the process of defortification, which intensified in the nineteenth century in many European cities.Footnote 129 In some places, its ideological roots can be traced to the early modern period. This is especially true of France, where the development of a strong central state in the seventeenth century led to a discourse that advocated the demolition of city walls and fortifications in the country's heartland in favour of building stronger fortifications at its outer borders.Footnote 130 On a symbolic level, this was intended to signal that the country was internally at peace. However, it should also be seen as a demonstration of the monarch's absolute power: in times of crisis, previously fortified cities could no longer achieve any noteworthy resistance or protest against him. Even in France, however, defortification proved long and arduous, and was not always the result of an official decision: ‘Few towns in the interior actually saw their walls completely razed. More often, the loss of the urban edge's military function was a piecemeal process of private appropriation or benign neglect.’Footnote 131 The acceleration of defortification throughout Europe did not begin until the nineteenth century. The swift growth of cities during industrialization was certainly an important factor: from the perspective of the authorities, city walls and gates began to be seen as a burden to urban expansion and a hindrance to rapidly increasing traffic. But these pragmatic considerations were not the only factors at work: attitudes toward the function and aesthetics of urban space were also undergoing radical change.Footnote 132 In the English press, for example, as early as the eighteenth century, city gates were characterized as a ‘monument of Gothic barbarism’.Footnote 133 This criticism was levelled explicitly at city gates and walls, although not at medieval architecture in general. In fact, in the nineteenth century many castles and fortresses were built in ‘neo-gothic’ style – but it is significant that this revival did not extend to walls and gates.Footnote 134
Today, the cultural practice and the experience of entering a city through a gate has become foreign to us, or even faded completely from memory.Footnote 135 In essence, we do not really enter cities anymore – in most cases, we do not even know where the city begins or ends. By and large, there are no longer any legal, fiscal or religious boundaries between cities and their environs. Granted, the categories of ‘city’ and ‘country’ continue to exist in our vocabulary, and they still refer both to different landscapes and to two distinct ways of life.Footnote 136 But the boundary between city and country is no longer concrete. Of course, even in pre-modern times, there were also some cities that spread into suburbsFootnote 137 and not every city had a wall. But on the whole it remains true that since the nineteenth century, throughout Europe, ‘urban space ha[s] become essentially defined by its very borderlessness’.Footnote 138 In fact, today the ‘open city’ has become the paradigm of our understanding of urban space.Footnote 139
In the pre-modern era, by contrast, the lay of the land was different. The differences in the urban experience are particularly apparent when we look at travel guides, which existed then as they do now. In early modern travel guides, gates played a very prominent role in the structure and perception of urban space. A fitting example is Francesco Bocchi's Le Bellezze della città di Fiorenza (1591), which is not merely a travel guide but also ‘one of the most remarkable of Renaissance writings on art’.Footnote 140 Each of the five tours described there begins at one of the city's gates, for these were not only where foreign travellers first entered the city, but also landmarks that merited attention in their own right. Similarly, Francis Bacon, in his Essays, explicitly advised travellers to devote special attention to the individual forms and characteristics of walls and fortifications when visiting a city.Footnote 141 In the same vein, we observe that pre-modern travellers – unlike those today – paid much less attention to the size of a city's population than to the scope of its perimeter, that is, of its walls.Footnote 142 The size of a city was not only expressed through the number of inhabitants, but, far more frequently, through the physical experience of the size of the wall and the gate.
Today, where they still exist, city walls and gates are primarily viewed as historical points of interest, but they no longer have a practical or symbolic meaning. We should not, however, idealize their past, because this would overlook the ambivalence with which they were viewed in pre-modern times. On the one hand, they formed part of a city's promise of security and civic pride. On the other hand, the system of taxation and inspection that entrants had to undergo at the gate was a source of nuisance to most. When we view city gates as historical monuments, we do not see the difficulties and potential conflicts that were once associated with them. We also overlook the fact that inspection and identification, which we often classify as part of the modern ‘security state’, were already being tested and, indeed, were partly invented during the pre-modern era, especially at the city gate. These practices are still found everywhere today – although in different settings. As Lewis Mumford aptly noted half a century ago, the transition to modernity involved a radical shift of priorities: ‘The territorial state itself became the “City” that was to be defended.’Footnote 143 Granted, the shift was gradual and was not always the result of a governmental decision; rather – as case-studies have shown – it was the outcome of a ‘dialectic of local and national interests which produced the boundaries of national territory’.Footnote 144 For travellers today, the result is that the borders of countries have become the kind of barrier that they rarely were in the early modern age.Footnote 145 On a political and legal level, this development marks a deep and unmistakable caesura.Footnote 146 But on a day-to-day level, there is actually significant continuity between the gate inspections of that time and the practices at border crossings in ours.Footnote 147
Today, travellers entering a foreign country must first go through passport control. At American airports, for the past several years, foreigners encounter a sign with the words: ‘We Are the Face of the Nation’. While in the past the gates – each with its own name and individually crafted – constituted the ‘faces of the city’, nowadays the border official stationed in his glass cubicle, a place as uniform as it is sterile, has become the face of the nation. The city itself has become immaterial in modern border crossings. Although airports are often named after cities, in reality they are usually located far from urban centres, and even those travellers who land at an airport situated in a city do not really arrive ‘in the city’, but rather ‘in the state’. By contrast, those who arrive at a train station are immediately in the city and do not have to undergo any sort of inspection; yet even in this case, the actual transition is not when they enter the city, but when they disembark from the train. In short, for modern travellers, entering a city is no longer connected to any particular threshold. Richard Sennett aptly states that the urban space ‘has become a means to the end of pure motion – we now measure urban spaces in terms of how easy it is to drive through them and to get out of them’.Footnote 148 Sennett is certainly correct in observing that we recognize the feeling of leaving a city behind us – of ‘getting out’, but this experience is no longer connected to passing through a specific location. The city no longer ends at a wall; instead, the transition between city and country is stretched and fragmented in a thousand ways: it is the belt of ‘suburbs’ that now circumscribes the majority of our large cities. Yet it is precisely here in the suburbs – and not only in America, but also in South Africa, Asia and the Arab world – that we encounter the walls of today: the walls of the ‘gated communities’, behind which more than eight million people live in the USA alone.Footnote 149 One need not go as far as Lewis Mumford, who – with his nostalgia for antiquity and the Middle Ages – spoke of ‘Mass Suburbia as Anti-City’:Footnote 150 the clear demarcation lines of the pre-modern age cannot be brought back with such polemics, nor would anyone seriously contemplate building new city walls. However, we do not have to restore city walls and gates in order to draw some lessons from their long history. As Walter Benjamin once remarked in passing, gates were part of the character of a city.Footnote 151 In the transition to modernity, they have vanished just as irrevocably as the once clear borders of a city – but what we can learn from their history is the art of granting a city its character. The mega-cities of our modern age threaten to separate us from this legacy. Indeed, it is difficult to find a modern city's geographical and conceptual centre in which such a character could crystallize, since there is no longer a clear periphery to provide us with a sense of orientation. But it is not impossible.
‘God is in the midst of the city’, the Psalm tells us (46:5) – although we modern citizens will see very little at first glance in this ancient verse. This is not only because few of us seek the sacred in the modern city; it is mainly because the assurance with which pre-modern people spoke of the centre – and borders – of a city is now lost to us. Cities have remained with us, and are growing more quickly than ever before. But maintaining their special character, or defining it anew, has become no easier. Quite the opposite, in fact: this task has become more urgent than ever.
