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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5950395" data-attributes="member: 82106">Some basic numbers for medieval level agriculture... Each 100 agricultural workers produces about enough to feed 103 people. This is really the key number when it comes to population structure. Not all of those 100 people are peasant farmers, some are craftspeople (millers, smiths, potters, carpenters, etc). The upshot is though that at least 80% of your population ARE literal dirt farmers. The entirety of the rest of the society is that last less than 3%. Historically in Europe around 2% of the population belonged to the upper classes (and most of those were still living at a fairly basic level, your average knight probably has a reasonably nice basic manor house, but even medieval kings were obliged to cart their own furniture around from residence to residence and owned maybe a few changes of clothing). Wealth is more bounded by availability of labor to produce luxury goods than anything else, since artisans, traders, etc are all still coming out of that less than 3%. Of course the peasants could labor for the state/landlord as well, but they were unskilled and again anything they did was incredibly labor intensive given the total lack of anything but muscle power and (expensive!) animal power.Population growth was slow. Average mortality was VERY high. Most people didn't make it past age 25 and most of that was child mortality. In these kinds of societies (look at the least developed areas today and it is still true) you easily had 50% of your population under age. Cities and towns were particularly stuck here as disease was so rampant in these areas that they actually had negative population growth (it was made up for by inflow from the countryside in better times). 5% urbanization would be considered high in these societies. So if you have a population of 2 million you might have a grand total of 5% or 100,000 actual urban dwellers. You'd have some agricultural people perhaps living in the cities (farming nearby) and some of the basic crafts might be concentrated there too, then you'd have the majority of your less than 3% others presumably. This jibes pretty well with say medieval England, which had a population estimated in the 2 million range around the 12th Century. London, York, Bristol, those were about the only 'cities' and the largest was under 50k population. Towns were pretty much just market centers, the populations were still basically all farmers with a smattering of trades. Exactly what a city state can control is hard to say. Athens controlled vast holdings scattered all around the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts, plus various islands, some dependent cities and towns in Greece proper, and its own local region. Presumably the 300k population must have depended on easily 5+ million rural dwellers in these areas. From what I can see from maps each Greek city state controlled a region directly around it that might be at most 30-50 miles. IMHO if this island is fairly insular then the city states are going to have something like 100k people divided between them. Now, consider a 30x30 mile city state, it has 900 sq miles of territory, and if 25% of that is arable (it could vary from 10-50% though the higher numbers would represent a very rich area) then you've got 225 sq miles of farmland. 1 sq mile is 640 acres = 144,000 acres. Another 25% might be used for pasture and other 'agricultural uses'. Note that a cultivated acre will feed just about one person at a basic level for a year (500 liters of barley accounting for some going to the lord etc). Clearly a 30x30 mile area city state would have a population that might vary from 150k to possibly 300k in a really rich area of dense population, of which maybe 15-20k people would be living in the actual city. Larger cities like Athens or the famous medieval Italian city states clearly must have controlled larger areas in some way. Athens had lots of colonies and imported vast amounts of grain from the Black Sea region. So.... with a total 2 million population, you could have 7 city states, each controlling around 30 miles in all directions, having populations in the low 10's of thousands. That would be my guess as to about what you'd get.As for the actual economics in terms of money, well, that's kind of whatever you want it to be. If you assume a day's worth of food is worth a couple silver pieces at most you get close to the kind of numbers in most D&D books for equipment and such. A peasant will produce maybe something like 100gp in a year, but he'll also eat about 97gp worth of that. The rest of his labor might be worth another 50gp or something, so perhaps in theory a state might have 100k people and 5 million gp in 'taxes', but 95% of that would be in the form of labor obligations, military service, etc. and mostly rendered to local land holders. The actual budgets of city states in terms of discretionary spending would be much lower, but it is hard to say exactly by how much. I'd just observe that the largest building projects in medieval times were things like castles, which often required several years to build (up to 10 for really big ones) and might require 100's or even upwards of 1000 workers.</blockquote>

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