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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 5950455" data-attributes="member: 27160">For the "economics" bit, there is an interesting breakdown <a href="http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/allen/unpublished/AllenE&W.pdf" target="_blank">here </a>(look in the tables at the end) that seems to be not far off for places as far apart as England and Wales (the actual area studied) and Byzantium (cf. Cambridge Economic History of europe, Vol.1):Roughly 50% of the output of the land goes to the labourers in the medieval period. If an agricultural labourer receives 2 sp per day, then their output is 4 sp per day. The exact method for the split varies enormously. In feudal lands, a serf works the lord's fields as "rent" for the land they hold and work for themselves; in Byzantine lands the peasants often hold land for crop share to a landlord; in Roman lands a landowner hires labourers or owns slaves to work the land and pays them in upkeep and/or wages.Roughly 10% of the output (4 cp per day) is spent keeping up the capital used to produce the output - buildings, fences, hedges, carts, draft animals, new domestic animal stock, tools and equipment like ploughs, etc.Roughly 10% of the output (4 cp per day) goes to the church as a religious offering. Note that the church is also, in medieval Europe, a big landowner, so their total share will be higher in this case.Roughly 7-10% of the output (3-4 cp per day) goes to the "state". This might include direct taxation by a governing body, but also might include part of the share taken by the lord/landowner that has to be, in turn, given to the state by them (e.g. the scutage and other payments rendered by feudal lords).The rest - around 20-23%, or 8-9 cp per day - goes to the landowner. Landowners in this era frequently owe a range of services to the "state", so the line is very blurred, here. Much of this also goes to pay the producers of craft goods in the towns for their produce.As a final note, analysis of monastic records suggest that a "discount rate of interest" effectively used by medieval investors was around 10-12%. What this means, as a rule of thumb, is that if an investment is expected to yield X amount per year indefinitely, then the medieval investor would consider it a good investment if the required investment was around 8-10 times X.Hope that helps!P.S./Edit: I would also note that a "city state" typically had a geographical "reach" of 20-30 miles mainly because that was ~1 day's travel. The city was, as well as it's governmental and military functions, a market for its hinterland (which is to say, the "city state" is city plus hinterland). Many laws and customs relate to trade and property - ergo the unit of "government" is the "market" - you find this even in non-city state areas, such as feudal France and England. This also means that a city state's shape may be determined by transport links - primarily rivers, in medieval milieux (the state will extend further up and down the river than out to either side of it, unless another city state's lands clash - in which case, it's a likely area of conflict).</blockquote>

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