how tall are the walls around the vatican?
Trump Calls Wall ‘Moral’ Because Vatican Has One. So What’s Its History?
By Laura Geggel January 03, 2019 on LiveScience.com
In the ninth century, Pope Leo IV announced that Vatican City needed walls to protect it from the Saracen pirates who were pillaging southern Italy. (Saracen is a term from the Middle Ages that refers to Arabs and Muslims.) After the Saracens attacked Rome and the basilicas of Old St Peter’s and Saint Paul Outside the Walls in A.D. 846, Pope Leo IV ordered the construction of a 39-foot-tall (nearly 12 meters) wall around part of Vatican City, an independent city-state where the pope lives.
In medieval times, walls were commonplace. Most major cities — including London, Paris and Jerusalem — had them.
“The walls are a fortification, there is no question, but they were a fortification built at a time when armed invasions by barbarians and other forces were happening,” Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, a Catholic studies professor at Georgetown University, told The New York Times. “And that is not the same thing we are talking about with a wall between the U.S. and Mexico.”
But the imposing wall soon opened up, according to historians.
“Gradually, the Muslim threat receded and many gates were opened in the walls,” Thomas Noble, a papal history expert at Notre Dame University, told the news website Best Life.
Other popes expanded the wall during the 1400s and 1500s, but these stretches were less about defense and more about making “a political and cultural statement” about the pope’s power, Gerard Mannion, a Catholic studies professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., told The New York Times.