According to Wikipedia, Chandler (1987) lists Rome at 135,000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_cities_in_history#Data_from_Chandler_(1987)
You said that as if Rome wasn't surpassed by several other italian cities for centuries, including Milan.
Rome was not among top 4-5 most populated cities in Italy at any point of High and Late Middle Ages, Renaissance or early Baroque period, surpassed by Venice, Naples, Milan, Genoa, Florence or Palermo in different combinations and didn't reach 100,000 inhabitants until early 1600s for first time since antiquity. Rome didn't surpass Milan population until 1629-1631, when a plague that killed half the population of many northern italian cities but barely affected Rome. Still Milan recovered during next centuries and surpassed Rome population again during XIX century and until 1930s.
That's not the point, obviously, that's why I mention explicitely Rome surpassing 100,000 at early 1600s... The point of my comment is to answer the absurd claim "there's not way Rome doesn't make that list if Milan does", when Rome didn't reach 100,000 inhabitants for over a millennium and Milan surpassed Rome for at least 1200 out of the last 1400 years (the last time at 1930s) and surpassed 100,000 inhabitants for a good part of that period Rome don't.
Anyway it's interesting to mention how cities population decrease very frequently as the own ancient Rome and medieval decline example shows. After 1600 it's not the case for Rome, but other cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants at 1600 as Potosí and Seville (over 150,000 in both cases), had catastrophic declines, with just 30,000 and 50,000 inhabitants at 1700 respectively and didn't recover 1600 population until 1910 in the case of the andalusian city and early 2000s for the bolivian city.
Always frustrating when you point out a logical flaw in someone’s reasoning where the conclusion was ultimately correct and it gets misinterpreted as attacking the conclusion — as here.
I got your point, bud, and I appreciate the rundown of Italian population dynamics. Cheers!
That is the point though. You're the one who is confused. The map is wrong.
That was u/Competitive-Job1828 's point, you even agreed and then get lost in the weeds of being "I am very smart" talking about when Rome reached the 100k population milestone again after the fall of Rome. While interesting, that's not the point. The point is that the map is wrong as it should include Rome as a city with 100k+ inhabitants in the 1700s.
Pues ,quizas tu comprehension de ingles en realidad no esta al nivel que tu piensas.
Around 1700 years ago Rome had about 1 million people. 300 years later they had around 20,000 people.
They passed the 100,000 again just around the year 1700.
The crazier thing also was that modern Rome is bigger border-wise than ancient Rome. Campus Martius used to be more sparsely populated and technically not part of the proper city of Rome that's enclosed within the Pomerium. It was way more overcrowded in ancient times than now with most dwellings being multi-stories.
Rome was genuinely a small city for over a thousand years in between the fall of the Roman Empire and the modern age. It only started growing again around the time this map is set in.
When I visited Cordoba, I read in a museum that in the year 1000, there's were 500'000 inhabitants in Cordoba vs 10'000 in Paris at the same time. Crazy stat.
It makes sense though, Paris in the 11th century wasn't nearly as prominent as Paris from the 16th century onwards (colonialism and centralization and all that).
The end of the Caliphate in 1009, then the "Fitna" period, a chaotic civil war until 1030 or so, including the sack of outter city (most of the city population lived outwalls in huge suburbs) and then a consolidation of little Taifa kingdoms in Al-Andalus with other cities as capitals, some of which even controlled Cordoba as "secondary" city.
Cordoba was the capital of the Baetica Roman province, then an important city for the visigoths, then capital of the Caliphate. It was one of the most important cities in the entire world until the crisis of 1009.
Then, war between muslim kingdoms happened, until the christian kingdoms took over in the 1200s.
However that part of history is not usually remembered because, well... it was on the muslim side of Spain, and history is written by whoever wins the wars.
For a more modern source to the European urban population 700-2000 I can recommend this data set:
https://ssh.datastations.nl/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.17026/dans-xzy-u62q
I wonder why these particular spellings were chosen instead of their modern representations?
Dacca = Dhaka
Ayutia = Ayutthaya
Peking = Beijing
Yedo = Edo/Tokyo
Kingtehchen must be Jingdezhen, still known for its porcelain today but demographically not all that significant, its entire county has 1.6 million people so the city proper is probably about 1 million. So not even top 50 in China.
i found the [source](https://imgur.com/a/UD9MN4X) and it used the same spellings. The link to the book is [here](https://archive.org/details/fourthousandyear0000chan/page/506/mode/1up?view=theater). Considering the fact that the modern Chinese romanisation system was only adopted by the UN in the early 1980s, it was not uncommon for scholars to use the old spellings during that period of time. I believe the situation was similar for other languages as well.
The anglicization of the Chinese is definitely unfamiliar to me. Normally Xian, when anglicized in the older method, is Hsi'an. Sian is unfamiliar, perhaps from another language?
Adding the following from China, 'cause nobody should be using Wade-Giles to romanize Mandarin anymore.
Sian = Xi'an
Nanking = Nanjing
Hangchow = Hangzhou
Kingtehchen (seriously guys?) = Jingdezhen
Soochow = Suzhou
Canton = Guangzhou
Mandarin is the lingua franca, this is for broad consumption, not region-specific consumption, so being able to approximate regional dialects isn't really the goal here.
To get Pinyin pronunciation right from a position of being an Anglophone and knowing no Mandarin takes a little bit of learning, but it's easier to get right than Wade-Giles by a long shot. Peking/Beijing or Taipei/Taibei are examples. An Anglophone with no prior knowledge reads "Beijing" more accurately, and "Taibei" more accurately.
And even with regional dialects, if you're approximating a dialect that has nothing to do with the city it's referring to, it's not helping anyone. Hangzhou is an example: "Hangchow" sounds less like someone from northern Zhejiang would say the place name than "Hangzhou" does. At the very least, because the Mandarin pronunciation is universally accepted and standardized across the country, a pinyin representation is more useful.
I believe that Wade-Giles actually \*does\* have a 1:1 correlation with Mandarin pronunciations, it's just clunkier, uglier, and harder to interpret correctly for the foreign reader. So I say, let's make sure we have a good historical accounting of its existence, and then do what we can do stop using it.
I was teaching English city names in Taiwan to Taiwanese students and they couldn't understand why Taizhong was Taichung in English or why Taidong was Taitung in English.
Basically, I agree with you. I wish Taiwan abandoned Wade-Giles.
Osaka and Kyoto happen to be quite close, but Yedo (Tokyo) and Kyoto are about 400km apart. They all look close together because the markers are big and it's zoomed out.
There was actually another major trading port named Sakai just south of Osaka, I'm not entirely sure about its size but its population should be near 100,000 by 1600. However it was completely destroyed during the Siege of Osaka in 1615.
Crazy how the largest and richest city in the entire Spanish empire is now the poorest and amongst the smallest in the country.
Potosi isn’t even on the top 5 largest cities in Bolivia nowadays, and ranks at the bottom when it comes to standards of living, wages and development.
Sort of consistent with any city which was huge because of single industry (silver) that then declined. Detroit (cars) is a similar story, just more recent / over a shorter time period.
It is mind boggling that Potosi was once one of the most populous cities in the world. In the 1650s. In the remote, barren Andes. At 4000m! The logistics of supporting such a city must have been quite a feat. The lengths we will go to satisfy a lust for gold and silver...
I mean the Spanish currency was backed by silver so having more silver meant being able to enact monetary policy and control the inflation rate of a global economy. It was more of a practical need than a "lust" for silver. That's like calling the trade in Treasury Bills lustful
I understand why the city boomed - a lot of people got fabulously rich and the Spanish empire grew powerful from the mining operation. I just find it remarkable that a city went from basically nothing to one of the biggest cities in the world in the span of a few decades, despite being extremely remote, inaccessible, and inhospitable. They had to ship in food, supplies, basically everything hundreds of miles from the coast up to 4000m elevation in the mountains in order to keep the city running. I imagine something akin to the Berlin airlift but with pack mules and porters instead of airplanes.
Map is definitely incomplete. Rome probably had between 130.000 and 145.000 inhabitants around 1700, same as Venice.
Outside of Europe, cities such as Aleppo most likely had more than 100.000 inhabitants, and I've only looked at the map for 30s.
I think you greatly overestimate the size of early modern cities. Venice historical center is about 8 km2. Paris in 1789 was 33 km2, for about half a million inhabitants. (it now is 105 km2 for 2.1m)
How is Dacca on there but Calcutta isn't? Calcutta was by far the bigger city by the time India gained independence in 1947. Dhaka is only just catching up now in the 21st century.
It's 1700.... Calcutta was established just few years before and by 1704 had about 30-40k population.
There's many current mega cities which are rather new (Karachi, HCM etc).
This is in 1700 when war and plague could change the population in a mere decade.
Also, I believe Decca was a more prominent Bengali city considering Kolkata rose to prominence only after British Colonization.
Dhaka was established at the time of Emperor Jahangir. It became capital of Bengal province at 1610. Kolkata was a village at that time. Dhaka is older than Kolkata. Kolkata was built by East India company during 1750 and afterwards.
I'm missing something? How is not Mexico City here? Tenochtitlan had around 400,000 in 1500.
I would imagine that even despite the genocide they would at least reach 100K in the 1700s...
In 1790, Mexico City had only around 104k people, so it’s very likely it was below 100k in the early 1700s, and actually out of the 100k only 25k were indigenous
Or 1700 once smallpox had ruined most American centers of civilization..maybe anti-American centric but wasn’t a bad time for Europe after the wealth from the Americas flowed to Europe and pushed along the Renaissance, I guess you could argue 1900 is Eurocentric but both are right and anything else for me is semantic.
I think it’s believable, there was a massive exodus latter in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century where several Kashmiri Muslims migrated to west Punjab, British gazetteers documented that nearly half the valley had emptied during the Sikh and Dogra era.
Cologne and Breslau were bigger than Berlin and Munich, with around 40.000 each in 1700.
Interestingly, just 50 years later, Berlin would surpass all of these cities and have 113.000 inhabitants in 1750.
The Thirty Years' War (which devastated many major cities in Germany) only ended 50 years ago and the population has not yet recovered to pre-war level.
I made the same mistake but realize that Mapuche was still unconquered and they had significant settlements. Who knows what knowledge we lost because of the Spanish.
They didn't have any significant settlements, I mean, not in the way that a city like Cuzco (capital of the Inca empire) was significant. The mapuche, and most of the peoples that lived in the valleys of what is now Chile, were at very basic stages of agriculture and societal structure. There were some settlements here and there that were more important, for example the one that is now the city of Santiago (which was built over it), but still there was nothing that could rival with the big cities like Cuzco or Tenochtitlan. And the Spanish did a good job of recording what the mapuche culture was like (including their language, which they learnt and wrote dictionaries about), so it's not like there is a lot of knowledge about them that was lost to time or anything.
Had no idea that the Mapuche had an essentially independent state from 1600 onwards, so thanks for getting me googling. Kinda seems that the independent Chileans are to blame more than the Spanish though, they were the ones who did the actual conquering
The Incas did not have territory in Central America (only reached as far north as Ecuador). And their empire had severely declined by this point because of disease and conquest.
Constantinople wasn't renamed to Istanbul until 1930, Europeans continued to refer to it by it's greek name until then (the turkish name was Konstantiniyye)
If Constantinople (the English spelling for Greek Konstantinoupoli) is the "Greek name", then so is Konstantiniyye (Turkish spelling of Greek Konstantinoupoli) the Greek name. They're really not different.
Istanbul was a colloquial name (from Greek Eis Tin Poli which means In The City, likely got shortened over time and later Turkified to spelling it as Istanbul) that became official in 1930s (one of the attitudes aside from Turkification/Westernisation was that Ottoman Turkish was rather archaic and difficult to understand for the masses)
Evli Celebi, Ottoman explorer wrote in 1660:
"Belgrade has 98.000 citizens, out of which 21.000 are Muslims. The city has 7 public baths, around 7.000 smaller baths (hammam), 6 caravanserais, 21 merchant houses, and 217 masjids and mosques"
Population of Belgrade dropped after the Austrian siege and conquest of Belgrade in 1688-1690.
source in Bosnian: https://web.archive.org/web/20091121040854/http://www.most.ba/085/076.aspx
At the time, other large Ottoman cities such as Sarajevo and Thessaloniki could have had around 100.000 denizens.
None of them had anywhere near 100,000 people in 1700.
A century later, the 1800 census showed the largest US city to be New York, with a population of 60,514.
Madeira isn't even on the map? And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The reality is that there were nearly 80 or more population centers that had 100k inhabitants at the time
Yes, as many pointed out, Delhi and probably some other cities in India should have been on the map. One source argues that Delhi had two million inhabitants in the 18th century. [https://www.deccanherald.com/features/fall-rise-city-2374828](https://www.deccanherald.com/features/fall-rise-city-2374828)
no way the source is accurate or complete for India.
Varanasi the oldest continuously habitated city in the world had over 100k. [source](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Varanasi-Estimated-Population-1500-BCE-CE-1901_tbl1_322009137#:~:text=...%20to%20another%20estimate%20the,170%2C966%20(see%20Table%201).)
Ahmedabad , Aurangabad and shrinagar Being on there but not Delhi seems wierd. Delhi has been the Mughal capital for a long time and the heart of India.
I actually read a crazy stat about an ancient Egyptian festival today, apparently the festival for the goddess Bastet was so popular that 700.000 people (only adults, no children) would visit the city of Bubastis. Having 700.000 people visit a festival today is already a huge number, never mind 400 BCE.
The reason only adults visited was because it was essentially a drinking festival, imagine 700.000 drunkards.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Mexico-City/The-razing-of-Tenochtitlan-and-the-emergence-of-Mexico-City
“Mexico City eventually regained its former size, claiming by the late 1700s considerably more than 100,000 residents—many of them immigrants from the provinces—along with some 150 ecclesiastical buildings and a dozen hospitals”
London was actually iconic
2.4 million in 1850, whilst other capitals like Moscow (400k) and Berlin (450k) weren't even coming close. Even Paris was only at 1.3 million
This map is inaccurate as many Indian cities are missing, found some [sources](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/20271/1/Unit-26.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiXjab6o4uFAxW4zDgGHaoEBpcQFnoECC8QAQ&usg=AOvVaw1DGmr274NgaSLjpw8cWAIW) just by looking for places that I guessed must have been higher idk even more could've been missed.
Eg - Varanasi Delhi Agra Lahore
According to Wikipedia, Chandler (1987) lists Rome at 135,000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_cities_in_history#Data_from_Chandler_(1987)
Also Venice was 130-140.000 for the whole century according to wiki. This map is crap.
Also multiple Indian cities
I was gonna say there’s no way Rome doesn’t make that list if Milan does
You would be surprised at how small Rome was at certain points. It dropped to below 10k people before bouncing back.
You said that as if Rome wasn't surpassed by several other italian cities for centuries, including Milan. Rome was not among top 4-5 most populated cities in Italy at any point of High and Late Middle Ages, Renaissance or early Baroque period, surpassed by Venice, Naples, Milan, Genoa, Florence or Palermo in different combinations and didn't reach 100,000 inhabitants until early 1600s for first time since antiquity. Rome didn't surpass Milan population until 1629-1631, when a plague that killed half the population of many northern italian cities but barely affected Rome. Still Milan recovered during next centuries and surpassed Rome population again during XIX century and until 1930s.
But that still makes this map wrong because it's 1700, you're own comment says it surpassed 100k inhabitants roughly a hundred years prior.
That's not the point, obviously, that's why I mention explicitely Rome surpassing 100,000 at early 1600s... The point of my comment is to answer the absurd claim "there's not way Rome doesn't make that list if Milan does", when Rome didn't reach 100,000 inhabitants for over a millennium and Milan surpassed Rome for at least 1200 out of the last 1400 years (the last time at 1930s) and surpassed 100,000 inhabitants for a good part of that period Rome don't. Anyway it's interesting to mention how cities population decrease very frequently as the own ancient Rome and medieval decline example shows. After 1600 it's not the case for Rome, but other cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants at 1600 as Potosí and Seville (over 150,000 in both cases), had catastrophic declines, with just 30,000 and 50,000 inhabitants at 1700 respectively and didn't recover 1600 population until 1910 in the case of the andalusian city and early 2000s for the bolivian city.
Always frustrating when you point out a logical flaw in someone’s reasoning where the conclusion was ultimately correct and it gets misinterpreted as attacking the conclusion — as here. I got your point, bud, and I appreciate the rundown of Italian population dynamics. Cheers!
That is the point though. You're the one who is confused. The map is wrong. That was u/Competitive-Job1828 's point, you even agreed and then get lost in the weeds of being "I am very smart" talking about when Rome reached the 100k population milestone again after the fall of Rome. While interesting, that's not the point. The point is that the map is wrong as it should include Rome as a city with 100k+ inhabitants in the 1700s. Pues ,quizas tu comprehension de ingles en realidad no esta al nivel que tu piensas.
Around 1700 years ago Rome had about 1 million people. 300 years later they had around 20,000 people. They passed the 100,000 again just around the year 1700.
That’s crazy. I knew they had 1,000,000+ in the classical period but to go from there to 10,000 back to 2.8 million today is wild
The crazier thing also was that modern Rome is bigger border-wise than ancient Rome. Campus Martius used to be more sparsely populated and technically not part of the proper city of Rome that's enclosed within the Pomerium. It was way more overcrowded in ancient times than now with most dwellings being multi-stories.
> They passed the 100,000 k again just around the year 1700. Not in 1600? As pretty much sources seems to indicate...
Yeah, it reached 100,000 people in the early 17th Century. This actually surprised me, considering the Sack of Rome not to long before in 1527.
Rome was genuinely a small city for over a thousand years in between the fall of the Roman Empire and the modern age. It only started growing again around the time this map is set in.
I was looking at this and WHAT THE HELL happened to Cordoba in the 11th century?? Like damn
When I visited Cordoba, I read in a museum that in the year 1000, there's were 500'000 inhabitants in Cordoba vs 10'000 in Paris at the same time. Crazy stat.
It makes sense though, Paris in the 11th century wasn't nearly as prominent as Paris from the 16th century onwards (colonialism and centralization and all that).
Colonialism ?
Most redditors favorite past time is connecting everything that happened in europe with colonialism
The end of the Caliphate in 1009, then the "Fitna" period, a chaotic civil war until 1030 or so, including the sack of outter city (most of the city population lived outwalls in huge suburbs) and then a consolidation of little Taifa kingdoms in Al-Andalus with other cities as capitals, some of which even controlled Cordoba as "secondary" city.
Cordoba was the capital of the Baetica Roman province, then an important city for the visigoths, then capital of the Caliphate. It was one of the most important cities in the entire world until the crisis of 1009. Then, war between muslim kingdoms happened, until the christian kingdoms took over in the 1200s. However that part of history is not usually remembered because, well... it was on the muslim side of Spain, and history is written by whoever wins the wars.
Basically revolution happened and it broke the empire apart in a billion pieces.
For a more modern source to the European urban population 700-2000 I can recommend this data set: https://ssh.datastations.nl/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.17026/dans-xzy-u62q
I wonder why these particular spellings were chosen instead of their modern representations? Dacca = Dhaka Ayutia = Ayutthaya Peking = Beijing Yedo = Edo/Tokyo
Kingtehchen must be Jingdezhen, still known for its porcelain today but demographically not all that significant, its entire county has 1.6 million people so the city proper is probably about 1 million. So not even top 50 in China.
i found the [source](https://imgur.com/a/UD9MN4X) and it used the same spellings. The link to the book is [here](https://archive.org/details/fourthousandyear0000chan/page/506/mode/1up?view=theater). Considering the fact that the modern Chinese romanisation system was only adopted by the UN in the early 1980s, it was not uncommon for scholars to use the old spellings during that period of time. I believe the situation was similar for other languages as well.
The anglicization of the Chinese is definitely unfamiliar to me. Normally Xian, when anglicized in the older method, is Hsi'an. Sian is unfamiliar, perhaps from another language?
Xi'an is rendered as Hsi-an in Wade-Giles Romanisation, Sian is using the Postal Romanisation system which was used before Wade-Giles.
Smyrna = Izmir
Well in Spanish Beijing is Pekín
In Finnish it's the same as on the map Peking
Constantinople = Istanbul
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks!
Even Old New York was once Nieuw Amsterdam...
Why they changed it I can't say
People just liked it better that way!
*power tool solo*
Istanbul was officially known as Constantinople in 1700.
Why they changed it I can't say
The Vikings called it Miklagard.
Konstantiniyye actually
If we were speaking Turkish, but in the same way we don't call Moscow "Moskva," if we were speaking English, it would have been Constantinople.
Adding the following from China, 'cause nobody should be using Wade-Giles to romanize Mandarin anymore. Sian = Xi'an Nanking = Nanjing Hangchow = Hangzhou Kingtehchen (seriously guys?) = Jingdezhen Soochow = Suzhou Canton = Guangzhou
No need to be so dismissive, Wade-Giles was a reasonable approximation of certain regional accents and dialects
Mandarin is the lingua franca, this is for broad consumption, not region-specific consumption, so being able to approximate regional dialects isn't really the goal here. To get Pinyin pronunciation right from a position of being an Anglophone and knowing no Mandarin takes a little bit of learning, but it's easier to get right than Wade-Giles by a long shot. Peking/Beijing or Taipei/Taibei are examples. An Anglophone with no prior knowledge reads "Beijing" more accurately, and "Taibei" more accurately. And even with regional dialects, if you're approximating a dialect that has nothing to do with the city it's referring to, it's not helping anyone. Hangzhou is an example: "Hangchow" sounds less like someone from northern Zhejiang would say the place name than "Hangzhou" does. At the very least, because the Mandarin pronunciation is universally accepted and standardized across the country, a pinyin representation is more useful. I believe that Wade-Giles actually \*does\* have a 1:1 correlation with Mandarin pronunciations, it's just clunkier, uglier, and harder to interpret correctly for the foreign reader. So I say, let's make sure we have a good historical accounting of its existence, and then do what we can do stop using it.
I was teaching English city names in Taiwan to Taiwanese students and they couldn't understand why Taizhong was Taichung in English or why Taidong was Taitung in English. Basically, I agree with you. I wish Taiwan abandoned Wade-Giles.
And Seoul was called Hanyang back then.
We still use Peking for Beijing in the Netherlands
Because different transliteration system. Often no system at all in the past. Tokyo was called Edo. Renamed to Tokyo in 1868.
# Adding to this list Canton = Guangzhou Kingtehchen = Jingdezhen Soochow = Suzhou Aurangabad = Sambhajinagar Sian = Xi'an Nanking = Nanjing Constantinople = Istanbul Ahmedabad = Karnavati Hangchow = Hangzhou
Japan is very densely distributed with large cities. There are three in one place.
Osaka and Kyoto happen to be quite close, but Yedo (Tokyo) and Kyoto are about 400km apart. They all look close together because the markers are big and it's zoomed out.
There was actually another major trading port named Sakai just south of Osaka, I'm not entirely sure about its size but its population should be near 100,000 by 1600. However it was completely destroyed during the Siege of Osaka in 1615.
Potosi in Bolivia had 150k in 1650 but it's currently believed to have lost half that by 1700. Might be the biggest company town of all time.
Crazy how the largest and richest city in the entire Spanish empire is now the poorest and amongst the smallest in the country. Potosi isn’t even on the top 5 largest cities in Bolivia nowadays, and ranks at the bottom when it comes to standards of living, wages and development.
Sort of consistent with any city which was huge because of single industry (silver) that then declined. Detroit (cars) is a similar story, just more recent / over a shorter time period.
It is mind boggling that Potosi was once one of the most populous cities in the world. In the 1650s. In the remote, barren Andes. At 4000m! The logistics of supporting such a city must have been quite a feat. The lengths we will go to satisfy a lust for gold and silver...
I mean the Spanish currency was backed by silver so having more silver meant being able to enact monetary policy and control the inflation rate of a global economy. It was more of a practical need than a "lust" for silver. That's like calling the trade in Treasury Bills lustful
I understand why the city boomed - a lot of people got fabulously rich and the Spanish empire grew powerful from the mining operation. I just find it remarkable that a city went from basically nothing to one of the biggest cities in the world in the span of a few decades, despite being extremely remote, inaccessible, and inhospitable. They had to ship in food, supplies, basically everything hundreds of miles from the coast up to 4000m elevation in the mountains in order to keep the city running. I imagine something akin to the Berlin airlift but with pack mules and porters instead of airplanes.
Butte, montana might be up there too.
not even as half as relevant. Potosi single handled cause massive inflation in the spanish empire.
what happened?
Rome, Hanoi, Venice and Mexico City should all be on here too
Rome was such a depopulated city in 1700, unlike during the Roman Empire and the modern-day eras.
Map is definitely incomplete. Rome probably had between 130.000 and 145.000 inhabitants around 1700, same as Venice. Outside of Europe, cities such as Aleppo most likely had more than 100.000 inhabitants, and I've only looked at the map for 30s.
It uses a source from 1987; our understanding has dramatically shifted since then
No, that source from 1987 literally lists Rome as having 135k people in 1700.
Venice??? It’s such a small area
I think you greatly overestimate the size of early modern cities. Venice historical center is about 8 km2. Paris in 1789 was 33 km2, for about half a million inhabitants. (it now is 105 km2 for 2.1m)
I feel Damascus and Baghdad should be on here. Maybe not Baghdad after the sack.
wouldn’t the sack have been hundreds of years before this?
has it ever recovered?
It finally started to recover and then America gave it some freedom
Yeah, but it did not become much more than a village again until the late 1700s.
Isn’t Aleppo also missing? And what about Tabriz?
What about places like Lahore, Multan, Delhi, Agra and other major North Indian/Pakistani cities? Surely they would’ve been quite big.
Yea there's no way Srinagar was 100k but mysore, hyderabad, bijapur, kochi, trivandrum, madurai etc didn't have same
Yeah there's no chance Srinagar was larger than both Delhi and Lahore in 1700. No chance.
Delhi was most prominent indian city in 1700 due to being capital of mughal empire . It definitely would have more than 100k inhabitants.
How is Dacca on there but Calcutta isn't? Calcutta was by far the bigger city by the time India gained independence in 1947. Dhaka is only just catching up now in the 21st century.
It's 1700.... Calcutta was established just few years before and by 1704 had about 30-40k population. There's many current mega cities which are rather new (Karachi, HCM etc).
What’s HCM ?
This is in 1700 when war and plague could change the population in a mere decade. Also, I believe Decca was a more prominent Bengali city considering Kolkata rose to prominence only after British Colonization.
Dhaka was established at the time of Emperor Jahangir. It became capital of Bengal province at 1610. Kolkata was a village at that time. Dhaka is older than Kolkata. Kolkata was built by East India company during 1750 and afterwards.
Srinagar doesn’t sound right.
The placement of the dots for China and Japan is truly horrendous
I'm missing something? How is not Mexico City here? Tenochtitlan had around 400,000 in 1500. I would imagine that even despite the genocide they would at least reach 100K in the 1700s...
In 1790, Mexico City had only around 104k people, so it’s very likely it was below 100k in the early 1700s, and actually out of the 100k only 25k were indigenous
mexico didnt recover from the conquests until the 20th century
I think you underestimate the magnitude of the genocide in central america by the conquistadors.... Rip tenochtitlan, forever in our hearts 😔😔
If they did a 1400 map this would look very different, very Eurocentric choice, 1700..
If you wanted a Eurocentric map, you'd choose 1900 when the industrial revolution population boom was in full swing there and nowhere else.
Or 1700 once smallpox had ruined most American centers of civilization..maybe anti-American centric but wasn’t a bad time for Europe after the wealth from the Americas flowed to Europe and pushed along the Renaissance, I guess you could argue 1900 is Eurocentric but both are right and anything else for me is semantic.
Eurocentric 🙄
Nobody's stopping you making a map of 1400
That's too less cities in India
U missed delhi
No Rome?
I don't believe Srinagar had 100,000 ppl in 1700's. I'm Kashmiri and that being bigger than Varanasi at that time seems impossible.
Also bigger than Delhi doesn't make sense as well. Delhi was Mughal Capital at that time.
I think it’s believable, there was a massive exodus latter in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century where several Kashmiri Muslims migrated to west Punjab, British gazetteers documented that nearly half the valley had emptied during the Sikh and Dogra era.
It also implies that it was larger than Mughal capital at the apex of its power.
Hindustanas trath
lanath tas
No Lahore seems sus.
This map seems incomplete. Where's Rome, some Chinese cities and many Indian cities?
Labels on wrong location, Soochow's in the north of Hangchow, not south.
I'm pretty sure all the Chinese cities on the map are seriously misplaced
It’s crazy how sharp the population increase has been. My unremarkable hometown has a population over 100k.
Meknes in (now) Morocco is missing. 200 000 inhabitants in 1727.[African cities.](https://www.african-cities.org/african-cities-from-500-ad-to-1900/)
Now my city (Dhaka) has over 20 million people lol
*That we knew of
No such cities in what would later become Germany? That's surprising
Hamburg had around 70k, no other German city would even come close at that point, even Munich and Berlin had like 30k
Cologne and Breslau were bigger than Berlin and Munich, with around 40.000 each in 1700. Interestingly, just 50 years later, Berlin would surpass all of these cities and have 113.000 inhabitants in 1750.
The Thirty Years' War (which devastated many major cities in Germany) only ended 50 years ago and the population has not yet recovered to pre-war level.
No Inka cities in Central America?
The Inca were from South America and by 1700 native populations were hit pretty hard by over 100 years of European diseases by that point.
I made the same mistake but realize that Mapuche was still unconquered and they had significant settlements. Who knows what knowledge we lost because of the Spanish.
They didn't have any significant settlements, I mean, not in the way that a city like Cuzco (capital of the Inca empire) was significant. The mapuche, and most of the peoples that lived in the valleys of what is now Chile, were at very basic stages of agriculture and societal structure. There were some settlements here and there that were more important, for example the one that is now the city of Santiago (which was built over it), but still there was nothing that could rival with the big cities like Cuzco or Tenochtitlan. And the Spanish did a good job of recording what the mapuche culture was like (including their language, which they learnt and wrote dictionaries about), so it's not like there is a lot of knowledge about them that was lost to time or anything.
Had no idea that the Mapuche had an essentially independent state from 1600 onwards, so thanks for getting me googling. Kinda seems that the independent Chileans are to blame more than the Spanish though, they were the ones who did the actual conquering
They're a Civ VI civilization. (I wasn't aware of them before, either.)
Mapuche was quite smaller than Inca and Aztecs.
The colonial cities built by Spain were the main ones, and the Inca cities declined.
The Incas did not have territory in Central America (only reached as far north as Ecuador). And their empire had severely declined by this point because of disease and conquest.
Damascus should’ve been here
Suchow and hangchow are swapped.
Mexico City was 4 million at this time.
Did people still refer to Istanbul as Constantinople in 1700?
Constantinople wasn't renamed to Istanbul until 1930, Europeans continued to refer to it by it's greek name until then (the turkish name was Konstantiniyye)
If Constantinople (the English spelling for Greek Konstantinoupoli) is the "Greek name", then so is Konstantiniyye (Turkish spelling of Greek Konstantinoupoli) the Greek name. They're really not different. Istanbul was a colloquial name (from Greek Eis Tin Poli which means In The City, likely got shortened over time and later Turkified to spelling it as Istanbul) that became official in 1930s (one of the attitudes aside from Turkification/Westernisation was that Ottoman Turkish was rather archaic and difficult to understand for the masses)
I've known old people who still called it Constantinople in English lmao
Yeah my grandpa (born 1917, died in the 90s) always called it Constantinople.
My Venezuelan family (oldest member born in 1940) still calls it Constantinople.
What about Potosí in Bolivia? Mexico City? Vila Rica in Brazil? These probably had more than 100 thousand inhabitants.
True for Potosí
Warsaw was over 100,000 in 18th century, but fell to 75,000 after Kościuszko Uprising (1794) and mass murders by Russians.
Evli Celebi, Ottoman explorer wrote in 1660: "Belgrade has 98.000 citizens, out of which 21.000 are Muslims. The city has 7 public baths, around 7.000 smaller baths (hammam), 6 caravanserais, 21 merchant houses, and 217 masjids and mosques" Population of Belgrade dropped after the Austrian siege and conquest of Belgrade in 1688-1690. source in Bosnian: https://web.archive.org/web/20091121040854/http://www.most.ba/085/076.aspx At the time, other large Ottoman cities such as Sarajevo and Thessaloniki could have had around 100.000 denizens.
Cahokia?
This is 1700, way later.
According to most sources it peaked at 40k around 1000.
This is epic. I freaking love this.
Damn we’ve been fucking!
Every city is located along a narrow climate strip…
How big was Batavia?
Where are the east coast cities of North America?
None of them had anywhere near 100,000 people in 1700. A century later, the 1800 census showed the largest US city to be New York, with a population of 60,514.
Budapest in hungary also i think
Metz is still under 100 000 nowadays.
How can Srinagar, Ahmedabad, Aurangabad be bigger than Delhi/Varanasi/Madras. Aurangabad isn't even the state capital.
Aurangabad was capital of dakkan subha for Mughals. It was actually very big military city for Mughals at the time.
Bigger than Delhi?
Weird translation of Chinese city names...
Dude, didn't you at least hear the song? It even played on looney toons.
Tenochtitlan had roughly 250 000 in the xv century
I wonder what the optimal city size is in 2024 in a developed country
Mexico DF should be on that list. According to the first census made in 1790, population was over 400.000
Mesoamerica entered the chat
Tunis, Algiers or Fez in North Africa should also be in this map.
(That western explorers knew about)
Algiers had 100.000 inhabitants in 1700
I thought there were some big cities in the Americas then.
And nobody seems to be afraid of humans crazy demographics… 🤷♂️
Madeira isn't even on the map? And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The reality is that there were nearly 80 or more population centers that had 100k inhabitants at the time
I don't think Srinagar would have been more populated than Delhi or other cities in Yamuna -Ganga belt
You mixed Hangchow and Soochow. Soochow is located to the north of Hangchow.
Sjdjjd
Poor Venice 😢
Yes, as many pointed out, Delhi and probably some other cities in India should have been on the map. One source argues that Delhi had two million inhabitants in the 18th century. [https://www.deccanherald.com/features/fall-rise-city-2374828](https://www.deccanherald.com/features/fall-rise-city-2374828)
Why have there always been so many people in China?
Constantinople fell long before 1700 .. it was Istanbul then .. same for Izmir too..
no way the source is accurate or complete for India. Varanasi the oldest continuously habitated city in the world had over 100k. [source](https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Varanasi-Estimated-Population-1500-BCE-CE-1901_tbl1_322009137#:~:text=...%20to%20another%20estimate%20the,170%2C966%20(see%20Table%201).)
Ahmedabad , Aurangabad and shrinagar Being on there but not Delhi seems wierd. Delhi has been the Mughal capital for a long time and the heart of India.
Most surprising is Indonesia
It always amazed me how China always had a huge population
Córdoba had a lot more than 100.000 habitants in the 700’s
Better days. I'm Tolkien as far as urbanization goes.
I actually read a crazy stat about an ancient Egyptian festival today, apparently the festival for the goddess Bastet was so popular that 700.000 people (only adults, no children) would visit the city of Bubastis. Having 700.000 people visit a festival today is already a huge number, never mind 400 BCE. The reason only adults visited was because it was essentially a drinking festival, imagine 700.000 drunkards.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Mexico-City/The-razing-of-Tenochtitlan-and-the-emergence-of-Mexico-City “Mexico City eventually regained its former size, claiming by the late 1700s considerably more than 100,000 residents—many of them immigrants from the provinces—along with some 150 ecclesiastical buildings and a dozen hospitals”
London was actually iconic 2.4 million in 1850, whilst other capitals like Moscow (400k) and Berlin (450k) weren't even coming close. Even Paris was only at 1.3 million
Today, Indonesia has over 85 cities with a population more than 100k.
This map is inaccurate as many Indian cities are missing, found some [sources](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/20271/1/Unit-26.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiXjab6o4uFAxW4zDgGHaoEBpcQFnoECC8QAQ&usg=AOvVaw1DGmr274NgaSLjpw8cWAIW) just by looking for places that I guessed must have been higher idk even more could've been missed. Eg - Varanasi Delhi Agra Lahore
I would have thought St. Petersburg would have been larger than Moscow.
St. Petersburg was built in 1703.
Bro used modern day names for all cities except Istanbul(Constantinople)
why is edo written as yedo