First City Wall of Serdica
About
Costoboci raiders sacked Serdica around 170 CE during the Marcomannic Wars, and Marcus Aurelius's engineers answered by raising the town's first stone circuit, four gates and all, finishing by 180 CE. This first fortification predated the far larger Constantinian-era wall tourists walk today, but it still rose six decades after Trajan's death in 117 CE.
What happened here
A town wall is a claim as much as a defence. It is faced in stone, cored with rubble and concrete, and pierced by gates that are more decorated than the rest of it put together. Towers project so that anyone at the base can be shot from the side. In most of the empire in this century the walls are old, unmanned, and half built over — shops lean against them and houses are cut into them — because the frontier is a long way off and the danger is not here. On the frontier itself a wall is something else entirely: a continuous barrier with ditches, gates at intervals, patrol tracks and manned turrets, built to control movement rather than to stop an army.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →