Size of a pre-industrial city?

[GeekDavid]

Real simple question, what would you say is about the maximum population of a pre-industrial city?

 

[Devor]

The max? Probably anything under a million would be believable. The city to look at is Constantinople, which peaked with somewhere between 500,000 to as many as 750,000 residents.

((err, what ThinkerX says, below))

 

[ThinkerX]

They could be pretty dang big. First century Rome (time of Jesus and Paul) had a population on the order of two million, half of them slaves. Several other cities in the Roman empire of the time had populations over a million. Not only that, the empire kept these cities running at more or less those population levels for centuries, until the barbarians took over and order collapsed.

Thing is, cities like this drain *everything* out of the landscape for hundreds of miles around: food, cloth, wood, metals, all that and more. 'All roads lead to Rome.' And while pre-industrial, the Romans were very well organized.

 

[TrustMeImRudy]

From wikipedia on the ancient capital of China:

Around AD 750, Chang'an was called a "million people's city" in Chinese records, while modern estimates put it at around 800,000–1,000,000 within city walls.[1] According to the census in 742 recorded in the New Book of Tang, 362,921 families with 1,960,188 persons were counted in Jingzhao Fu (京兆府), the metropolitan area including small cities in the vicinity.

So Thinker has a point.

 

[Bruce McKnight]

There are some good estimates on European city demographics on the page Medieval Demographics Made Easy.