City Size

[Jaxilon]

Here is an ancient city that was well known for it's incredible size:

Nineveh

There is a light map of the city walls btw on that wiki.

"an "exceeding great city of three days' journey", q.e., probably in circuit. This would give a circumference of about 100 kilometres (62 mi). It is also possible that it took three days to cover all its neighborhoods by walking..."

One scholar estimated about 174,000 people lived there and this was one of the BIG cities back then.

According to what they have found digging it up, it's like 4 settlements that comprised a spread out 60 mile area circumference.

It was called by one name much as our modern cities include all the suburbs etc. (eg. Los Angeles or Phoenix) The litereal city proper is not technically that big but we still call it by a single name. Take the original London compared to what is today considered "Greater London" for another example.

What's been said before is true. The feeding people and maintaining some kind of healthy environment limits the size. Our metropolises today are only able to exist because of massive trucking and transportation to move food stuffs into these urban areas. If trucking stopped, we'd be out of food on the shelves in a matter of days. Then things would get ugly.

[JoeyD473]

Definitely interesting, thanks Jax

[Talroth]

Our metropolises today are only able to exist because of massive trucking and transportation to move food stuffs into these urban areas. If trucking stopped, we'd be out of food on the shelves in a matter of days. Then things would get ugly.

Which is actually only partly true. If you don't want 20 types of sugar coated cereal, and are happy with a choice of 1, and basically cut down eating to the very basics of what you really need to live (no thousands of pounds of chocolate bars and such) and don't rely on tinned food, or individually packaged food stuffs, you can still ship a whole lot of food in hand carts.

By far the bigger reasons for major cities to exist is that we have more methods to employ people in large centers to produce items that people on the farms would actually want to buy. (Added in that a single farmer can now produce what would have taken 100 farmers to do 500 years ago.)

And if cities kept eating a high level of beef, well,... Then we could strap sacks of other foodstuffs onto the back of the cattle, and set up slaughter houses in the cities!

Look Mom! Here comes dinner!

[Jaxilon]

Well I can see that may be true in areas that have a lot of farms and such. I live in the middle of a desert so I'm pretty sure there isn't enough food from the land hereabouts to feed the over 5 million people.

Still, imagine what would happen as soon as shelves started showing empty spots. People would buy up as much as they could just because supplies were running low. The hoarding would be terrible and then people who didn't have anything would come looking for the hoarders which would probably end violently.

I don't think folks hiking beef or anything into the cities would make it more than a mile or so in before they were jumped and the animals slaughtered on the spot.

As an example take a look at what happens when there is a perceived gasoline shortage...people run out and fill up every container they own. I would expect much worse if it was a food.

You are right that we COULD make it work, but I lack faith in mankind.

This discussion seems to backup how there is a limit to how big a mid-evil city could get before anarchy destroyed it. I think the technologies of today have enabled us to have these colossal Metropolises. Maybe if constant herds came in and were slaughtered around the clock you could build up a big city. Of course, food is only one of the problems faced. Sanitation & health also put a crimp on population parameters and just killing that many animals in one place is bound to cause problems. Heck I have to take out the trash every time my wife cuts up a chicken.

[Talroth]

Well, yes. If the trucks just stopped one day all together then things would go badly. But if it was we slowly scaled back the trucks and started using other options, then we wouldn't get the "Change panic" set in. It is like the slow switch away from gas and personal cars. It isn't happening over night, some say it might not even be happening, but either way it is a long way off.

Clean water supplies and waste water management are really the two biggest issues to deal with for huge cities.

[Jaxilon]

I agree with you there.

[Juggernaut1981]

Actually it probably comes to an even more simple equation: How much filth is around before pestilence kills half the town? The faster the population can reach that "pestilence threshhold" the more frequent pestilence will be and the population will be unable to really breach that "limit".

For places in the desert it is simple: they probably wouldn't exist.

Slaughterhouses and other industries like that were nearly always on the outskirts of large population-areas. You can't easily transport fresh meat (without refrigeration) and most people don't want cured or salted meat for their entire meat intake. Consequently, herds of cattle being led to the slaughterhouse was common. Yes, you needed to protect your stock but most people wouldn't bother killing a farmer to get hold of the 20 cattle he's taking into town on foot (profit vs risk is too high on the risk side).

The main things that have facilitated the metropolis are: mass transit (trains), engineering (sewers, multi-storey buildings) and electricity (pressurised water without needing massive dams, refrigeration). If you removed one of those three from the modern city, and the sizes of cities would decrease rapidly.

[Meridius]

Constantinople (Istanbul) is said to have had around 500.000 souls living in it around the year 500.

The plague however made over half the population die. However, if you envision a fantasy city which has early sewage, and reasonably good sanitation, fertile surroundings and a large country around it to attract new people, yes, a city may grow to enormous sizes even in pre-modern settings.

Remember, tough, as others have said before, while cities could become quite crowded, this doesn't necessarily mean it's ground space is very low. Lot's of medieval maps I have seen actually have quite a lot of open space in them. Don't think squares... but in a lot of cities houses where usually built around a single large field.

This wikilink gives a nice picture of the spread of late medieval Constantinople (about 1600 I believe, which is technically no longer middle ages, but close enough). Around that time the population should be around 600.000 souls. Yet, the area this map shows is about 9 by 9 miles (eye-balling not measuring), it doesn't nearly fill the entire map, and it was positively gigantic (about 20 times the population number you gave as a minimum). So yes, your city might indeed be a little too big (or too small in terms of population).

North-Western European cities where quite a lot smaller... Think 50.000 (extremely big) to 5000 (middle sized city). However, nothing stops you to improve sanitation and sewage among other things, and make your average city much bigger.

[Ghostwaryr]

I often use a book called "A Magical Medieval City Guide" in addition to several resources others have listed earlier to determine size/population/etc. If you're making a fantasy era map I highly recommend it, and you can use for free at the link below.

A little FYI for ya is that for a metropolis, ie 25k+ population density should be between 150-200 persons per acre. With 640 acres per square mile that equals 96,000-128,000 per square mile...for a baseline. If you we're to say that the city is a bit more spread out and had many single dwelling homes and the average building was 2-3 stories you could probably drop that down to 50,000-70,000 per sq mile.

Another question to ask yourself is if the city is walled or not. In the early-mid medieval times living within the walls was pretty darn important..later not-so-much. If it walled, the city leaders are going to build as small a wall as possible, because they don't have the money for bigger and everyone will build within these walls if at all possible.

http://media.dandwiki.com/w/images/1/15/XRP1001.pdf

[Ghostman]

If it walled, the city leaders are going to build as small a wall as possible, because they don't have the money for bigger and everyone will build within these walls if at all possible.

Size (more correctly the length of the wall; you want it to be as tall as available masonry techniques and materials/funds allow, and thick enough to withstand bombardment from common siege engines) can be minimized only if the city is on flat land. Where significant geographic elevations are present, these will have major influence on the construction of fortifications.

Generally, you'll want your walls to be on an uphill slope (when approached from the outside) when ever feasible, and never on a downhill slope. One of the primary functions of a wall, after all, is to give it's defenders a major advantage of elevated position. If there is a tall hill right outside the walls, this advantage will be lost. Another important reason is that you want to make it as difficult as possible to move heavy and complex engines, such as siege towers, to the walls.

Other natural features such as rivers and shores can also dictate how the walls will and won't be built.