How big are your cities?

[Xeriar]

I've been wondering about the Historic 'How' of large cities as in 'How did they get started' and 'How do they maintain themselves'

It's interesting to note that Paris and London occasionaly suffered severe famines in the middle of their hinterland's most abundant harvests, because the price of food dropped so low that no one would sell it there.

Venice (and other cities) stopped this problem before it started by giving tax credits to those who sold food in the city, thus giving real incentives to do such. A city can pull in resources for hundreds of miles around, easily, even in medieval times, the trick is convincing the people that it's worth it.

So, people say medieval London didn't get over 60,000 in population... During the same period Venice broke 200,000. The quality and foresight of the people in charge is the ultimate limiter of just how massive a city can get.

 

[kenjib]

I voted for "I have a few cities with tens of thousands", but that's not really accurate as I'm kind of in between this and the next option.

There is only one city with 185,000 people. This is by far the largest city in the world. No other city quite reaches 100,000, but cities in the tens of thousands are not at all uncommon so "a few" is not really accurate. Smaller towns and villages are, of course, sprawled all over the place.

My breakdown is actually fairly similar to Seasong's.

 

[CCamfield]

For Urbis, with its vastly larger cities, I've redifined city sizes and gp limits. You can find the table here.

A "small metropolis" in Urbis starts at 500,000 people - and there are three size categories above it...

Interesting. I'm not sure I'd use yours either, but it inspires me to try to make my own city table!

 

[fusangite]

If you want to understand the rise of cities in pre-modern times, I recommend you look at Alexandria, Constantinople and Tenochtitlan, all of which exceeded a quarter million prior to 1500.

There basically needs to be a combination of factors:
- acting as the centre for a large (1 million +) imperial state
- a densely populated, intensively farmed agricultural belt surrounding it (although one could argue that Constantinople did not fully exhibit this feature); the incredible fertility of the Mexico and Nile Valleys meant that an agricultural population considerably exceeding that of the city was a very short distance away -- in other words, farmers were backed in at the density So-Cal suburbanites are today

I have to say, I've been following this thread because I'm blown away by the way that the relative percentages in the poll have hardly changed since the first responses.

 

[willpax]

I have only a few cities above 50,00 because of a design decision tha there are no large domesticated animals in this world. Without horses and oxen (or their equivalents), transport of bulk materials in much more costly and usually limited to waterways. This would mean that most cities would be limited by the local growing area for their food supply, limiting their size. The only exceptions would be cities with good access to water trade routes.

This lack of easy land transport would also tend to make settled areas denser, and also limit "civilization" to the waterways and good agricultural areas. Move a day's journey away from settled land, and you are truly in the wilderness.

 

[Emiricol]

I usually use The Domesday Book to automatically determine city sizes and demographics and stuff. It is based on the Medieval Demographics Made Easy guide, and is basically a web-based generator.

I will often add 100,000 people to the second largest city (making it the largest by far). This makes a single Great City.

 

[Chimera]

Jurgen;

I meant Time Reference in respect to *my* world, which is not Earth, nor is it based in any way on Earth History as a model.

People seem to have real problems separating the concept of Earth (and all attendant baggage) from an invented D&D Campaign World, which is not necessarily anything *close* to Earth. Why is that?

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Jurgen;

I meant Time Reference in respect to *my* world, which is not Earth, nor is it based in any way on Earth History as a model.

People seem to have real problems separating the concept of Earth (and all attendant baggage) from an invented D&D Campaign World, which is not necessarily anything *close* to Earth. Why is that?

Because the "default" model for D&D is a "pseudo-medieval society". Thus, taking a look at real-world history is always useful for developing one's own world - if only to get a clear picture on how you want your world differ from it...

Creating a fictional world without any similarities to real-world history is effectively impossible.

Oh, and it wasn't all that clear from your post which times you were referring to...

 

[Xeriar]

Jurgen;

I meant Time Reference in respect to *my* world, which is not Earth, nor is it based in any way on Earth History as a model.

People seem to have real problems separating the concept of Earth (and all attendant baggage) from an invented D&D Campaign World, which is not necessarily anything *close* to Earth. Why is that?

We know quite a bit about Earth. There are millions of books, covering thousands of years of history across thousands of cultures and hundreds of landscapes. It really is quite excruciatingly detailed, almost as if it were the real thing

We don't have much else to go on, Earth being our own honest to goodness example of a living planet, after all.

 

[Kilmore]

Since I created the thread, I think I'll share some tidbits about my own setting.

The chief government that I run adventures in is the Empire of Trynser, which is a sprawling empire encompassing nine kingdoms and other major dominions, and numerous smaller dominions. The empire is sprawls across a part of two continents, something like ancient Rome.

Trynser City: Capital of the Empire. One and a quarter million permanent. Between a quarter million to three quarter million transient.

Rastibaltaer: Around a million permenant and transient residents. Capital of Askordia, the leading kingdom of the southern continent.

Suledaria: A little under a million residents. The Viceroyal capital of the Empire for the southern continent.

Delternas: 350,000. Trynser City's coastal neighbor to the northwest, responsible for shipping much of the food in from around the Empire to TC.

Lydaelia: 200k. Island city in the middle of the sea dividing the Empire. Home of the crown prince of the Empire.

8 or 9 other cities exist within the Empire with populations of over 100,000, mostly clustered near Trynser City or are the capitals of their own regions.

The Oriental nation of Sung Xuo is similarly populated, but aside from those two nations, less than a handfull of cities exist with hundreds of thousands inhabitants.

Maps can be seen at http://homepages.apci.net/~kilmore/gallery.html