In the modern world, a
city with over a million people in it is nothing special. There are
Chinese cities with more people than the whole of Portugal.
But in the medieval
world, or a fantasy with a vaguely realistic approach to
demographics, things were very different.
For a start, the rural
population was much larger than the urban population.
Villages could be
spread over a significant distance, or be a very simple small settlement
which would basically have a few houses, a single street and a parish
church. Around 150 people or fewer would probably live in a village,
but obviously that varied. It would not be unusual for everyone to
know everyone in a village.
A town was a bigger
deal, and had one key attribute: the market. The market meant that
traders (even if just occasional traders, such as subsistence farmers
selling the surplus from a bumper crop) would travel to the town and
do their business. This was advantageous all round. Traders got to
earn cash, the local lords got to charge tolls to use the roads,
bridges and trade within the town. Towns were the beating heart of
the economy, but weren’t necessarily all that large. Several
hundred people, perhaps, but that would include craftsmen that would
not be found in villages. Towns could be home to thousands rather
than hundreds of people (although you could argue at that point the
difference between a town and city was almost academic).
Cities, in England at
least, were defined as having a cathedral (and, therefore, a bishop).
Economies of scale meant that cities would be richer, man-for-man,
than other, smaller settlements. However, so many people crammed
together almost made hygiene and crime more troublesome. Not to
mention that fire could absolute devastate a city. A city might only
have a couple of thousand people. Over ten thousand would be very
significant in, say, the 14th century. Only a few were
ever larger (Byzantium was enormous during its height, as Rome had
been earlier). A city of one hundred thousand could well be the seat
of a continental empire. According to Ian Mortimer’s The Time
Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England (which I heartily recommend and review here),
London had a population of just over 40,000 around this period.
I used to have links to
a number of fantastic medieval demographic calculators, but sadly
they seem to have become defunct.
It’s also worth
pointing out that populations were more vulnerable at this point in
history than today, and compared to the past (I’d rather fall sick
in ancient Rome than medieval England). Disease was generally not
handled well, with cures often useless at best and harmful at worst.
Infection was not well understood, and in the middle of the 14th
century the Black Death swept through England, killing a very
significant proportion of the population (so much so that the price
of things like swords declined, because so many sword-owners dropped
dead, and food rose, because there were fewer peasants to work the
land).
Fires, as mentioned
above, could rip through medieval settlements, which often had wooden
houses packed very close together. Not to mention the perpetual state
of warfare that existed during the 14th century.
Nowadays the
population, globally, only goes one way, but back then populations
rose and fall as prosperity and advances in farm and mill equipment
were balanced out by disease and war.
Thaddeus
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