Historical population question

[RangerWickett]

Well, I've realized that in my game in the past few months has skewed normal numbers. I think I'm basically plunging my world into the dark ages. Huge wars between different groups trying to sieze power or simply sack cities while everyone's distracted. Just in describing to my players how many battles are going on, I know the majority of high-level folks have probably been knocking each other off.

Anyone know casualty rates in great wars, crusades, etc.?

 

[S'mon]

Anyone know casualty rates in great wars, crusades, etc.?

Casualty rates could often approach 100% - but usually from disease, not in battle. A losing army in battle could suffer around 30% casualties in a frontal defeat & rout (eg Persians at Marathon) - higher rates were rare but could happen where an army was encircled, especially by more mobile forces, and subsequently routed - eg Romans at Carrhae, pretty much wiped out by Parthian cavalry.
Victorious armies usually* suffered relatively very few losses in battle, and mostly wounds rather than deaths - most of the slaughter would occur during the rout, as winning cavalry & light infantry hunted down fleeing infantry.

*bar the occasional Pyrrhic victory.

 

[RangerWickett]

Okay. We're talking grand fantasy battles here, though. I imagine eventually tactics would develop to minimize horrendous casualties, but what with summoned demons, fireballs, and other big nasty spells, I imagine there'd be a lot more deaths and fewer injuries. With the fear that some healing spells might bring a near-dead foe back to being a danger, I imagine a lot of warriors would work to kill off helpless foes mid-combat.

Um, lost my train of thought, but whatever, lots of people dead in my game because we just had our first world war. Teleportation really speeds things up.

 

[DrZombie]

Okay. We're talking grand fantasy battles here, though. I imagine eventually tactics would develop to minimize horrendous casualties, but what with summoned demons, fireballs, and other big nasty spells, I imagine there'd be a lot more deaths and fewer injuries. With the fear that some healing spells might bring a near-dead foe back to being a danger, I imagine a lot of warriors would work to kill off helpless foes mid-combat.

Um, lost my train of thought, but whatever, lots of people dead in my game because we just had our first world war. Teleportation really speeds things up.

You're forgetting the major death count here, not the armies, but the civilians. Can you say starvation? Can you say disease? Good boy.

The civilian death toll was horrendous. If you have an army of 30.000 soldiers nearby, all the food in the area will be eaten, gone. The enemy will pillage and burn, eating all the grain, leaving none to plant for next year. The men will be drafted or killed. Perhaps worse are the peasent levies that get wounded : they are unable to support themselves and further drain resources from basicly poor peasant families. Combine this with roving bands of fleeing soldiers, dead corpses spread allover, an increase in rats and other vermin wherever the army is camped, and you have the perfect receipe for disease.

War is not funny for your average peasant.

 

[Hand of Evil]

I don't think there is a clear answer, in a fantasy game you have gnomes, halflings, gaints and such, at what point do you say a gaint is about the same as 20 people, so you then have to take your gaint kingdom and divide by 20 or start minusing out 20 for every gaint you have?

It is a detail that gives you headaches the more you look at it.

 

[Buttercup]

I imagine eventually tactics would develop to minimize horrendous casualties,

I think it would depend on the winner's goals. An army bent on land acquisition might prefer to kill as many of the able bodied inhabitants as possible, so they could move right in and help themselves to the resources.

 

[Hand of Evil]

As far as spread of population I also use the 20/80 rule, 20% located in urban areas and 80% in rural. It fits with the predator/prey setup (80% prey) and I like to keep things constant.

As for armies, most armies were formed from people the country could spare and were small. It was a fine balance, war goes on too long or too much manpower taken to support it and production goes down.

 

[d4]

There was definitely no city with more than 80,000 inhabitants!
The whole area had two cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants: Paris in France and Gent in Belgium.
There were 19 cities with 20,000 to 50,000 inhabitants: London in England; Avignon, Montpellier, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Rouen, Tournai, Metz and Strasbourg in France; Bruges, Brussels and Antwerpen in Belgium; Cologne, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Magdeburg and Lübeck in Germany; Prague in the Czech Republic; Gdansk in Poland. That's it .

where are you getting these figures from? they don't match anything i've read about the time period.

for example, just using one of the links Joe B. gives above, in 1483 (pretty close to 1500), Florence, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Paris, and Venice are all listed in the 50,000 to 125,000 category. in the 23,000 to 49,000 category, it lists Antwerp, Barcelona, Bologna, Brescia, Bruges, Brussels, Cologne, Cordoba, Cremona, Ferrara, Ghent, Lille, Lisbon, London, Lubeck, Mantua, Moscow, Nuremburg, Padua, Palermo, Rome, Rouen, Seville, Toulouse, Valencia, and Verona.

and here's another site here which gives Paris' population in 1500 as 185,000. i also read somewhere else recently (but can't find the link again) that Florence's population in the mid 1300s was already up to 100,000.

 

[green slime]

Not that I have any figures to contribute, but I would like to point out that the population figures for Europe took a nose dive when the Black Death rose its ugly head, sometime during the 1300's. This caused some distress in England, where laws where passed to suppress inflation. Because of the lack of manpower (with so many dying of the plague), workers could request higher wages or work elsewhere. This was a great distress to nobles.

Also, in 1556, an earthquake killed 830,000 people in Shinsi, in China.

1138 AD: 230,000 people were killed in Aleppo, Syria
893 AD: 150,000 people were killed in Ardabil in Iran

(from usgs web site)

As they are local phenomena, these numbers must represent large concentrations of people in these areas

 

[Ottergame]

An army interested in land would KEEP as many of the able bodied workers around as they could. Land does no good if there's no one there to work it.

Rome had a population well over 100,000 before the Christens came to town. And many towns up through the middle ages had over 100,000 people as well.