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Before the Mongol invasions? That would surprise me, if so. Would be interested to see his evidence, if anything from the book is online.
by benbreen 9y ago
Before the Mongol invasions? That would surprise me, if so. Would be interested to see his evidence, if anything from the book is online.
- nl 9y agoI haven't read this book, but it is on my list. This data would surprise me too, but the author is fairly well credentialed and has done reasonable work at estimating this kind of thing before. He is one of the authors of https://classics.stanford.edu/publications/cambridge-economic-history-greco-roman-world https://classics.stanford.edu/publications/cambridge-economi... His work on city size seems to be in this PDF, pages 109-117: http://www.ianmorris.org/docs/social-development.pdf http://www.ianmorris.org/docs/social-development.pdf I'm far from an expert on this. The only thing I noted was that his estimate of 125K in 1000CE Baghdad is lower than I expected. He argues it may actually have been lower given the documented size, and he notes the 500K-700K estimates for Baghdad imply a much higher density to anywhere else at that time. I'd note that I don't see the OP's point (that population declined in the Muslim cities during this period) reflected in the numbers I'm seeing in this document. That is mostly because it isn't clear about the whole area population as opposed to the largest cities.