How many buildings in a medieval city?

ephemeron

Explorer
There aren't as many historical maps of cities online as I'd like, but the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection contains, among other things, scans of a 1911 historical atlas that includes plans of London c. 1300 (upper-right corner of a large JPG) and Rome c. 1200, plus a generic "Medieval Manor" and other fun stuff.

These aren't at small enough scale to show individual buildings except landmarks (not to mention that the specific locations of individual houses and shops are largely going to be uncertain anyway), but I've kind of been looking for an excuse to link to them in this forum. :)
 

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gamerprinter

Mapper/Publisher
Yeah, I figured though some buildings were homes only, the majority were homes upstairs and some kind of shop downstairs. I did include warehouses along the riverside. The larger structures include temples/shrines, castle/fortress, rice grain stores, theaters and brothels, most everything else are shop/homes. As I was drawing the buildings, although I didn't keep an exact count, when I reached an estimated 100 buildings I would stop and also include a temple or shrine, a market square lot, and a cemetery. Because I did the map, I also wrote large chunks of the city of Kasai gazetteer - so as well as a cartographer, I'm a published author for Paizo Publishing (which I think is pretty cool since I never planned on being a freelance author - I'm listed as a contributing author on the credits page for Jade Regent #6, The Empty Throne.)

And... though I didn't do the finished (colored) version of the map, that was done by Paizo's inhouse cartographer (to maintain consistency with the other maps), but this is one of three maps as part of the Dragon Empires Map Folio, which won an Ennie for Cartography at last year's Gencon. So though it wasn't me, per se, I kind of feel I earned that Ennie, myself. Also nothing was added nor removed from the map I did, so the final looks exactly like my outline version just with color.
 
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Celebrim

Legend
By your estimation, his map would better fit a city of 80-100,000.

Based on my exposure to maps of medieval/early modern cities, my guess is that 80-100,000 is a much better estimate of the population of gamerprinter's (amazing) map than 40,000. In fact, it might be a bit on the low side depending on the scale he indicates on the map.

Keep in mind Venice peaks out at something like 180,000 persons, and Venice is tiny. Depending on the scale of gameprinters map, 160,000 people isn't completely out of line since a large scale would allow those domiciles to be multi-family insulas with 40 or more persons per building. Some of Rome's larger insulas housed hundreds of residents, much like large modern apartment buildings.

Another thing to consider is the structure of grand buildings. Most wealthy homes and certainly palaces were constructed something like a modern condominium with a shared common area. Each section of the home was an apartment with a salon, antechamber, chamber, and wardrobe (in the case of the best apartments) that collectively functioned as a sort of private home for the resident (roughly a living room, den, bedroom, and bath in modern terms). Only the greatest would sleep one to a bed, and they would probably have servants that slept in the outer less private portions of the apartment and/or lesser servants sleeping in the hall at the doorway. Most bedchambers would have a married couple, or several close family members (2-3 sisters, or several cousins, for example). So the bigger wealthier houses, much like the houses of the poor, are also multi-family dwellings with large extended families plus their live in servants and retainers. Living without your extended family around you is a recent development, and even having your own room probably involved more wealth than was common even for the wealthy until the relatively modern era. Ancient, medieval and early modern cities would approach New York density without having nearly as much vertical space.

As long as I'm critiquing Magical Medieval Europe's numbers, and keeping in mind its been years since I read them, their figures for urbanization are too highly dependent on Northern Europe. In areas with more moderate climates, long distance trade, and strong organization, urbanization could rise rather higher than the figures that they tend to give. Roman Italy for example was about 40% urbanized. I wouldn't be surprised to find similar numbers for Southern China. Given the 'magic' in the magical medieval Europe, I tend to prefer a higher degree of urbanization than the 20% or less they tend to suggest. It's also a bit easier for me to manage since I don't need quite so many dots on the map (to say nothing of names).
 

Mercurius

Legend
[MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION], not only magic but monsters! Tribes of orcs and gnolls, as well as all kinds of unearthly beasties lairing and wandering about would likely increase urbanization, with probably more fortified towns and cities, with guard towers and barracks interspersed throughout farm land and villages.

As far as population goes, I'm also thinking that we'd see greater density the larger the city. Perhaps 2-5 people per structure in a village makes sense, but then it goes up from there. While of course this doesn't really matter in the game session, I do care about such things in terms of world building. I'm thinking about these general guidelines, with "buildings" not including out-houses, chicken-shacks etc, but would include shanties and shacks that people live in:

Village (<500): 2-4 / building
Small town (500-2,000): 4-6 / building
Large town (2-5,000): 6-8 / building
Small city (5-10,000): 8-10 / building
Large city and above (10,000+): 10+ / building

Or something like that.
 

Hussar

Legend
Just a question about buildings:

I know you said that towns wouldn't have warehouses, but, what about granaries and stables? Surely they would be big enough to be counted wouldn't they? Although, as I write this, maybe there wouldn't be that many buildings overall anyway. It's not like every house would have a stable like a modern house would have a garage.
 

Hand of Evil

Hero
Epic
This is hard, you really just make up a number and use it for each ward and district of your city.

What are you counting?
  • Heads - is exact count
  • Families - average count two adults and 2.5 kids, the problem with this is that poor have more kids and other family members living with them, so you will have high density of people in some areas.
  • Tax Payers - those that you get money from but may not count kids and the poor.


Now for crazy stuff:
  • Equality - are all counted the same or does it take four gnomes & Halfling to equal one human? Then monsters, are they even counted?
  • Immigrant population - what is the traffic of people entering the city and staying.
 

Celebrim

Legend
Families - average count two adults and 2.5 kids, the problem with this is that poor have more kids and other family members living with them, so you will have high density of people in some areas.

Prior to the modern era, this is what census takers actually tried to count. But you have tons of anachronisms in that.

First, families and taxpayers were basically the same thing. You counted families to count taxpayers. The head of family may have owed the tax, but the whole family was effectively liable for it. There was no such thing as a youth or poverty exemption. If you weren't a family, and weren't a taxpayer, you were a legal criminal - a bandit, beggar, vagrant or the like to be put lashed, pilloried, imprisoned and put in the work houses. If you were lucky, a monastery might take you in and put you to work, but that was about the whole of the social safety net that existed. As a largely subsistence economy, that's all they could afford. Attempting to feed you if you couldn't be made productive would have meant someone else was starving. There was barely enough left over food in the good years to feed your widowed grandmother or aunt, or your orphaned nephew.

On average, women would give 7-8 live births. Eventually, this would kill most of them. But the life expectancy on men or children was hardly better. Of the 7-8 live births, maybe 3 or 4 would survive to adulthood. And even so, a third of children would see one or both parents die before they reached it. Those Grimm fairy tales filled with ache and horror and broken homes and dreams of some sort of rescue - that was the reality of daily life. You'd lose your parents, and you'd quite probably enter a world of complete social and economic insecurity, abuse and exploitation. Childhood as you understand the concept was invented by the Victorians as enough wealth arrived to support it. Prior to that, by age 10 you were working in some capacity - field hand, maid, apprentice, etc. - not just because your family needed the income, but because you needed to get independent and get some economic value attached to you as soon as possible in case you lost your family. Poverty was indigenous to subsistence pre-industrial agrarian economies in a way you can't imagine.

All this meant that a household looks nothing like a modern American urban family. A typical household might be a grandfather or grandmother, 2 adult children and their spouses (which might be a second spouse, the first having died in childbirth), 1 unmarried adult child, plus 3-8 living grandchildren the oldest of which might be approaching marriageable age. Taxes were owed on account of the family land, whether freeholders, cottagers or serfs. The main differences were your legal rights, because all people weren't born equal in the eyes of the law.

This would be even more true of the wealthier households who'd have more children and more family members living them, because children were a sign of wealth and not poverty (and likewise an indication of the families future economic success). It was poor families who had fewer children, fewer resources to support them, greater losses due to malnutrition and starvation and disease and ill-health resulting from short food supply. It was poor families that couldn't afford to stay together as a family unit and who more often lacked surviving family members to depend upon for protection. A farm with lots of children on it was one that was wealthy, not just because those children were farm hands or hand secondary incomes as maids or apprentices, but because it meant the parents were healthy (and often the children of healthy parents). Families would take great care who to marry, because marriages were primarily economic contracts between families. Join yourself to an economically poor partner might mean your children or yourself would have no support in the event of one or both partners death.

Equality - are all counted the same or does it take four gnomes & Halfling to equal one human?

Well, you don't have voters. You are taking a census to know how much tax each lord owes his lord. You aren't really counting persons, you are counting tax. If Halflings and gnomes are as economically productive as humans, then they pay tax accordingly. Otherwise, they still get counted, they just pay less or a least a different tax.

Then monsters, are they even counted?

Do they pay tax to the lord of the land? If so, yes. If they don't, then they get counted as the reason that the lord doesn't owe tax on a certain piece of property. For example, the census might record:

"Barony of Tibbleton...

And there is in the district of Beeby also a fine wood, amounting to 7000 acres, stretching from Beeby to Wallsburch. But from this wood there is no good forage for pigs and no wood can be cut, owing to the presence of a fearsome wyrm of great size and evil disposition, whose depredations are a scourge upon the wood and on the surrounding countryside."

Translation, the Baron owes his lord no taxes on account of the wood - which might otherwise be very economically profitable - because there is a dragon that renders the property values lower than an accounting of the extent of the forested area would indicate.

On the other hand, in a fantasy census we might have something like,

"And in the district of Vengard, there is a fairy wood, amounting to six hundred and three score acres. And in this wood there is a Sidhe Court, which by ancient tradition has all rights pertaining to the wood and holds it in fee complete to the King, and may not be disturbed on penalty of the King's Justice. But, in accordance to this tradition, the fief-holder of Barkindale renders tribute to the Sidhe Court twenty tuns of good wine annually, for which he is rendered a payment of 30 pound of good fine gold."

Translation, heck yeah, the Baron of Barkindale owes taxes on that wood! It's a freaking gold mine! The King better be getting part of the profits. Who cares how many fairies live in the wood, point is, they've got gold and share it!
 
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gamerprinter

Mapper/Publisher
[*]Families - average count two adults and 2.5 kids, the problem with this is that poor have more kids and other family members living with them, so you will have high density of people in some areas.
[/LIST]

Statistical data that applies to modern society have no correlation in pre-industrial society - the statistical parameters are apples and oranges.
 

Mercurius

Legend
I found this rather nifty generator, thought [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] and others might be interested. It also gives total buildings for different population sizes, which seems to follow the formula of roughly 5 people per building.

For instance, the settlement I'm designing has about 1,000 inhabitants, which the generator considers a small town. It would have 220 buildings, of which 3 are mansions, 2 are churches, 85 are businesses, 1 municipal, and 129 homes.

It also breaks down different business types. I'm honestly not sure how realistic it is, but it seems like a good starting point to build from and adjust.

As for my creation, I've decided to take a reverse approach from what I was originally doing. Rather than say, "I want a town of 1,000 and need to figure out how many buildings to draw," I'm going to draw the town and buildings to my liking, then extrapolate population from there.
 

gamerprinter

Mapper/Publisher
Indeed, when I design towns and cities for my own uses, I decide what factions and facilities I want in a given community, then build around that. Whatever the population might be is the result of organic development.

The only time I build a city for a specific population is when I'm asked to map a city to fit a given publisher's parameters, which usually includes the population as a part of that. Then choosing appropriate formulas and working by that to fit someone else's needs. For me, that is the only time population density matters.
 

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