The end of the long wall came early to Western Europe. As one region after another succumbed to Christianity and the civilizing process, fewer and fewer warrior nations remained to wall out. The last Western barbarians were found on Europe’s Celtic fringe, in Scotland and Ireland, where stubborn clans carried on in their ancient ways well into the eighteenth century. Samuel Johnson’s nostalgic musings on the Highlanders, written shortly after the harsh repression of their culture when they had to surrender their swords and tartan plaid to the English crown, still recognized the ancient distinction between waller and warrior: “It affords a generous and manly pleasure,” he wrote, “to conceive a little nation gathering its fruits and tending its herds with fearless confidence, though it lies open on every side to invasion, where, in contempt of walls and trenches, every man sleeps securely with his sword beside him.” The barbarians had only just gone, and already the wall builders had started to miss them.
Ireland had never been Romanized, and the primitive manners of the Irish were a continual astonishment to foreigners even a thousand years after the fall of Rome. In an oft-quoted passage from his Topography of Ireland, Gerald of Wales (1146–1223) described the rough upbringing of Irish children, their meager diet, insufficient clothing, and infrequent, cold-water baths. This was a nurturing to do a Spartan mother proud, and to Gerald, the Irish are indeed the barbarians the Spartans once aspired to be: they live entirely off their cattle, hold farming in contempt, and have an aversion to town life. “They learn nothing, and practice nothing but the barbarism in which they are born and bred, and which sticks to them like second nature.” What’s worse, Gerard tells us, the Irish go about perpetually armed, battle-ax in hand, ever prepared to commit mayhem. Such appraisals weren’t uncommon.
During the later Middle Ages, landowners across Ireland, despairing the lack of security, constructed stone towers for residences. When a roving war band came near, they retreated into their towers like turtles into their shells. In the late fifteenth century, the English Parliament adopted the same plan. Parliament listened to reports that English control of Ireland had effectively dwindled to little more than a small strip of land around Dublin and reacted as civilized states had for nearly four thousand years—by ordering the construction of a wall to keep the barbarians out. The resulting double-ditch barrier was topped with a palisade, giving rise to a new term for the small pocket of English control, the Pale (from Latin palus, “stake”) and a new phrase, beyond the pale, for any uncivilized outsiders or their actions.
The Pale was an anachronism in the West, a final undistinguished testimony to the insecurity that had once motivated the construction of thousands of miles of walls across much of four continents. In truth, it was less of a border wall than a temporary admission that the English state was distracted with other things and couldn’t then be bothered with the conquest of some stubborn hell-raisers. It had hardly been erected before another set of barriers, on the farthest fringe of the European world, eliminated the world beyond the pale forever.
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In their homes north of the steppe, inhabiting a land that was in many ways the mirror opposite of the great southern civilizations, the Russians always resisted classification. They were in equal parts peasant and Cossack, builder and barbarian, Slav and Norseman. For every step they occasionally took toward the West, they took an equal and opposite step East. When modernity arrived in their harsh country, it had to share a seat with a resistant medievalism.
The wonder is that the Russian state survived. When Mother Russia first squatted and gave birth to her dark and hardy brood, she did so in a land that lacked any natural defenses. The early Rus might well have been swept away and very nearly were. The choices might have seemed binary: survival required either the creation of great walls or the development of a society so warlike it could drive off any threats. The Russians found instead a middle road. They formed a state that encompassed both wallers and warriors, the two halves working together to create a spectacle unique in world history: vast walls seemingly in motion, sweeping across the map, bulldozing peoples, and bringing an end to the long reign of the horsemen of the steppe.
In Ukraine (a term that originally meant “borderland” or “frontier”), the first Russian state conceived of the border walls that would eventually reverse the long cycle of warfare on the steppe. In the early Middle Ages, Russian settlers—cousins to the Slavic warrior peoples who had all but annihilated Byzantine Greece—raised the earliest of the so-called Dragon Walls in Ukraine. Dragon Walls are found in numerous locations around Ukraine, and their origins remain a mystery. However, the majority were built on the orders of the Kievan state, a late arrival to the fraternity of Eurasian wall builders.
Grandfather to the Russian Empire, the Kievan state rose to power in the late ninth and tenth centuries and immediately directed its energies toward establishing a physical barrier against the steppe. As usual, the name of a despot is attached to the great wall. Vladimir the Great (r. 980–1015) gets rather better press than most builders, but this is primarily due to his conversion to Christianity. He also mulled over conversion to Islam, but the religion’s prohibition on alcohol gave him pause. We’re Russians, he observed, alcohol is the only pleasure we have. This wasn’t technically true, as Vladimir surely took at least some pleasure from his seven wives and eight hundred concubines. Either way, we can take those numbers as sure indication that Vladimir viewed everything in the state—and most especially every woman—as his to use, an attitude that would make possible the subsequent expansion of the Dragon Walls.
Under Vladimir and his successors, the Dragon Walls were extended over six hundred miles across the Ukrainian countryside. The earthworks alone stood over twenty feet high. At their base, they spanned some eighty-two feet in width, and a towering oak palisade brought the full height to a majestic thirty to forty feet. In the words of a visiting missionary, Vladimir’s kingdom had been “enclosed on all sides with the longest and most solid of fences because of the roving enemy.” The Grand Prince and his successors were well on their way to becoming czars. In the meanwhile, the Dragon Walls don’t seem to have done much to improve the mood of the people. In folklore, Vladimir’s greatest warrior is said to have been given a choice of three roads: one leading to riches, another to a wife, and a third to death. He chose death—a reasonable decision in the eyes of the average peasant, but hardly the strongest endorsement of life in the Kievan regime.
The Kievan state broke apart in the twelfth century, which put the Dragon Walls on that dubious roll of great walls rendered useless by the collapse of the empires that were supposed to be defending them. Consequently, the Mongols found little initial impediment when their campaigns turned west. In the 1240 sack of Kiev, virtually the entire population was slaughtered. A year later, in late December 1241, the frozen Danube—once the bane of Ovid’s fearful existence—allowed the Mongols to cross in force, and Central Europe received a brief taste of Asia’s agony. The heavy cavalry and infantry that dominated European warfare proved ineffective against the steppe men, and the Mongols hunted Hungary’s king all the way to the coast of the Adriatic, while Hungary itself suffered terribly. According to contemporary descriptions, the invaders assembled the citizens of captured cities, stripped them nude, and massacred them. Only those possessing special skills were permitted to survive. In at least one town, where no skilled people were found, the Mongols slaughtered the townspeople until there was “nobody to piss against a wall.” If, as is alleged, the Mongols turned the Danube red with blood, it merely added to growing roster of rivers so polluted by them. Roger of Varad visited the town of Gyula Fehérvár after its sacking and saw only bones and decapitated heads. Peasants were afraid to venture outside to work the land, and many villages and towns simply dried up due to the resulting famine. After the invaders had finally cleared out, a traumatized generation of Hungarians forever dated every event as having fallen either before or after the horrors of 1241 and 1242. Poland suffered equally savage attacks.
Beyond Poland and Hungary, where the forests were less hospitable to the Mongol herds, lay countless castles and town walls that may possibly have slowed the advance of the steppe men. However, there would be no final showdown at the walls. The fearsome Mongol armies began at last to dissolve on their own, defeated in no small part by the limitations of their own economy. The great hordes could only exist as ephemera. They had been willed into existence by charismatic khans and formed out of elements that could only briefly combine before the forces of repulsion—too many animals concentrated on too little pasture—forced them to fragment. Genghis had once commanded over one hundred thousand Mongol troops, and that figure excludes the Turks, Chinese, and others his horde had sucked into its great belly. Such numbers of men, sheep, and horses coexisted uneasily for a while, poking at the edges of forested regions, until they inevitably succumbed to centrifugal forces. By the end of the fourteenth century, the Mongol threat had dissipated. The great hordes spun out smaller fragments, such as the Crimean Tartars, who subsequently plagued Russia from the south.
For the Russians, whose northern land alternated between mud and ice, there would be no great walls of tamped earth or brick to arrest the raids of the Tartars. Russia was a world of wood, hacked out of the northern forests, sawed into lumber, and reassembled into towns where muck and marvel coexisted. Russian woodsmen—artists as much as laborers—carved their timber into exquisite onion domes but also laid their wood as planks across streets that turned so muddy after rain they might otherwise swallow a leg. As early as the twelfth century, the foresters of medieval Russia had begun felling trees across any open routes from the steppe. As the raids intensified, those local defenses coalesced into a single cooperative system, the Great Abatis Line, whose impassable barricades were often hundreds of yards deep.
By the late 1500s, the Great Abatis Line extended over six hundred miles from the Bryansk region, two hundred miles southwest of Moscow, to the edge of the deep forests that steppe horsemen found impenetrable. By then the ditches, earthworks, fortresses, log piles, and palisades were defended by rifle and artillery, but even gunpowder weapons hadn’t yet sufficiently advanced to turn the tide against the armies of the steppe. Horsemen still terrorized peasants on either side of the Volga. The Tartars sacked Moscow in 1571 and attacked the city again in 1591. A year after Ivan the Terrible died in 1584, a Russian force employing cannons and firearms was defeated by traditional Tartar cavalry. Tartar raids became especially severe in the seventeenth century, when slave-raiding hordes could still penetrate Russian defenses and devastate settlements in the outskirts of Moscow.
In the face of these latter-day barbarians, spiritual descendants of those who’d brought down both Rome and Han China, Russia developed its own belated and northern version of an ancient empire. The country became a walled autocracy ruled by Caesars (corrupted in Slavic languages to czars).
The mid-1600s, an age of scientific revolution in the West, saw the Russians constructing hundreds of miles of seemingly anachronistic walls to safeguard their cities against raiders. While the Ming Chinese were building the Great Wall and Western Europeans were perfecting the artillery that was making walls militarily obsolete, Russians heaped up wood and earth for the thousand-kilometer Belgorod Line. That formidable barrier, composed of moats, mounds, wooden ramparts, forts, and fortified towns, subsequently begat the Simbirsk Line, the Trans-Kama Line, and the Izyum Line, to say nothing of its even more obscure offspring to the northeast.
The effort of corralling thousands of free Russian peasants into the labor forces required to construct so many border walls taxed even the czars. New laws were implemented that stripped peasants of their freedom. What good, after all, were workers who could say no? The emperors of China had never permitted peasants to opt out of the corvées, and neither would the czars. The beginning of many miseries was at hand. The seventeenth-century reforms that made it possible for nobles to organize peasants into gangs of wall builders transformed Russia. Peasants became serfs.
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The serfdom that originated in Russia’s belated era of wall building was among the most tenacious in the world. Not until the mid-nineteenth century, when freedom was in the air across the world, did the serfs finally receive their freedom. The czars liberated their peasant labor force in 1861—just two years before the emancipation of slaves in the United States. Prior to that, however, there had always been those peasants who wriggled and squirmed to freedom, even when it meant setting up camp in the deadly no-man’s-land beyond the walls. For several centuries, peasants fleeing the enserfing efforts of Russia’s czars and Poland’s emperors (who were simultaneously establishing their own long walls in Silesia) found a home on the fringes of the Russian Empire. There they adopted a new identity and with it a new name: Cossack. The term derives, ironically, from a Turkish word, although the Turks were the sworn enemies of the Cossacks. Its original meaning was “free man,” because freedom—from lords and czars—was the Cossacks’ singular, defiant goal. Forever portrayed in art (and eventually photography) clutching their swords, muskets, or rifles, the Cossacks had broken the shackles of serfdom, given up farming, and taken up a life of hunting, fishing, and raiding. They tarnished their natural anarchy with only the most rudimentary of organizations, compelled by the threat of the Tartars to develop some large war bands that maintained permanent camps along the Dnieper River and later farther east along the Don. Few inhabited the Cossack camps except between campaigns, and in this fiercely masculine society, women were strictly forbidden.
For four hundred years, the Cossacks occupied the deadly no-man’s-land between the Russian lines and the nations of the steppe. In that most ancient battleground, they became as barbaric and militarized as their barbarian oppressors. So thorough was the transformation of escaped serfs into Cossacks that by the early 1600s, they’d surpassed even the Tartars at raiding. In time, the Cossacks would inspire the literary imagination. Byron, the consummate Romantic, wrote a narrative poem about a Cossack despite never having visited Russia. Inside the Empire, where Cossacks were viewed as cowboys of sorts, the attraction was even stronger. Tolstoy once wrote that all Russians wished to be Cossacks, and this may well have been true, even if they were only trying to escape an assigned reading of War and Peace.
It took no less a figure than Peter the Great to finally bring the Cossacks to heel and put them to proper use clearing the steppe of the nomadic hordes that had forced so many cities and empires to construct walls. The hulking czar had an unusually intimate understanding of both workers and warriors. As a boy, he practiced woodworking and masonry with enthusiasm, and his fascination for the manual arts never faded, even as he reserved his greatest zeal for war games. Grown into a teenager, he organized his friends into regiments three hundred strong, which he supplied with balls, powder, and cannon. In these games, the future czar always played the common soldier, frequently taking up a shovel to help dig earthworks. In 1685, he and his playmates constructed an earth-and-timber fort only to watch it blasted by artillery.
In Peter, there was certainly no trace of xenophobia. Both privately and publicly, he disdained the customs of his native land, invariably preferring the companionship of those foreigners who largely composed his so-called Jolly Company, a hard-drinking, two-fisted entourage that added considerably to the general suspicion that the young czar might be the Antichrist. That the Company frequently mocked church ceremonies in its “All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters” did nothing to assuage that belief. The Company’s notoriety only grew after Peter dragged his band with him on a grand tour of Europe, where he pretended to be a ship worker (fooling no one) and saw sights that convinced him to remake Russia in a Western image. At home, Peter directed the efforts of his many laborers toward the construction of a new capital, St. Petersburg, a project he pursued with all the fervor of a despot building a great wall. Somewhere between twenty-five thousand and one hundred thousand workers died in the city’s construction. By contrast, Peter put comparatively little effort into walls. His Tsaritsyn Line weighs in at a paltry forty-two miles—a hell of a wall, by ordinary standards, but not much by those of his vast country. However, the lines themselves were only one part of his evolving strategy. True to his bipolar identification with both workers and warriors, Peter revolutionized warfare, linking the walls, in their waning days, to gunpowder-equipped offensive forces.
The key to Peter’s new strategy was the Cossacks, who, in combination with the extensive Russian lines, would sweep the raiders from the steppe. The unlikely pairing of wall, representing containment, and Cossack, the symbol of unfettered freedom, spelled the end for the steppe warriors. In the raids and counterraids of the seventeenth century, the Cossacks gave as good as they got. For the first time, the Tartars and other raiders found themselves in the unfamiliar position of being on the defensive. The czars repeatedly ordered the construction of massive walls that, bit by bit, with the help of the Cossacks who lived in front of them, blocked off the grasslands from raiders. The Belgorod Line repelled as many as two thousand attackers at a time, allowing large numbers of Russian peasants to settle behind it. In the meanwhile, the 150-mile-long Ukrainian Line curtailed the movement of the Crimean Tatars. Another series of fortified lines marked Russian progress in Siberia.
Russia had entered the game late, but soon its lines had far surpassed any efforts of the Romans and Persians and would rank second behind only the Chinese. The Trans-Kama Line, when elongated into the Orenburg Line, formed a defensive network totaling over sixteen hundred miles in length. Nowadays, only academic specialists remember the names of the various Russian barriers—the Irtysh Line, the Terek Line, the Mozdok Line, and so forth—but their geopolitical impact was tremendous. They were the last barriers that would ever need to be built against the steppe.
Horsemen and herds had rumbled across the steppe, stirring up drama and death for thousands of years. They were not accorded the honor of a climactic defeat. Threatened by the withering raids of the Cossacks, intimidated by the growing Russian lines, and lacking the leadership of a Genghis Khan, the raiders underwent changes of the sort that had previously spelled the end for the ancient Gauls. In the late 1600s, the Crimean Tartars became increasingly civilized, with leaders who wrote poetry and patronized arts and education. By 1689, these former nomads had adopted that most characteristic tactic of settled peoples and, in a rare reversal of the old formula, dug a long ditch to fend off the Russians. The Khazars, once described as “sons of Magog . . . wild men, fearsome of face, savage in character,” also began to settle. Before their downfall, they traded their roaming ways for massive fortress towns with stone towers and ditches. The barbarians were building walls, and with that, they ceased to be barbarians.
The steppe barbarian, who had inspired more walls than any other creature, died a largely unlamented death. Classical music lovers now hum the stirring Polovetsian Dances of the Russian composer Borodin without recognizing the Polovetsi as former steppe raiders or realizing that the lyrics translate, “Sing songs of praise to the Khan! . . . To his enemies the Khan is merciless. . . . Dance to entertain the Khan, slaves!” More distant Romantics, such as Lord Byron and Victor Hugo, tried their hand at memorializing the Mongols. But these few poems and songs paled beside the extravagant mourning of the Scottish Highlander, which itself paled compared to the lavish romanticizing of yet another set of unwalled warriors, long separated from Eurasia by ocean. Their discovery, largely concurrent with Russia’s conquest of the steppe, set in motion a profound change in attitudes toward walls and the peoples outside them.