Turakian Populations

[arcady]

Re: Turakian Populations

 

Meso America, India, Asia, and Africa were locked in more warfare and strife than Europe during the period, but still had cities with vastly larger populations.

 

Europe chose a fractured decentralized system of government based on making 90%+ of the population serfs - a form of slavery in that it prevented freedom of movement and freedom of economic activity. It's closest modern equivalent are the collectives of Mao's cultural revolution and what happened in Cambodia - both of which caused massive deaths and population drains on their civilizations (but for reasons somewhat different than those of Feudal Europe).

 

In most of the world during that period you could freely travel and adventure, and make your way in life - and this worked to boost populations as it encouraged great trading empires like the Persians, and the situation in India, or empires of conquest like the Aztecs and Inca. Or other great empires like Ethiopia, Benin and Songhai.

 

 

Despite western fantasy having cultures that seem European, Europe is actually a very -bad- model for getting your details. There are some very key and very critical problems with using Europe as an example, some of them are:

 

• Feudalism prevents free travel, land ownership, and the right of claiming booty - which conflicts with the fantasy idea of family owned farms and people who wander as they will for hire as sellswords or simply to pillage minority disenfranchised populations like orcs.
  
• Europe's plagues are not typical for fantasy. They disrupt the pattern for populations.
  
• Europe was already too deforested. It lacked the same number of 'monsters' as most of the world.
  
• Monotheism created an over riding cultural pressure of conformity. Fantasy tends to have a diversity to it's belief systems and a level of social egalitarianism not possible under the monotheisticly controlled society.
  
• Lack of strong central governments. This at first might seem to match fantasy - which often claims the same nobility structure as Europe. But fantasy's nobility tends to work more like Monarchy or Imperial systems - Brittain, Ancient Rome, China, Aztecs and so on. Fantasy's nobility tends to be stronger and weaker at the same time - stronger in holding the 'kingdom' as a whole, but weaker in not having the complete dominance of people's lives one sees in Feudalism (were everyone is a vassal, or slave, of someone else).

 

DnD Fantasy, which is what Turakian Age uses, has as the easiest example to draw from Earth the Roman Empire, but with the technology of Europe's middle ages. Moving out of Europe however, you can often find many societies with social and economic structures very similar to fantasy. Many of them even have wildlands full of monsters (lions, tigers, bears, oh my!).

[Curufea]

Re: Turakian Populations

 

All true, it's a shame the resources are harder to find, though.

[arcady]

Re: Turakian Populations

 

Well, you don't really need to do all the research.

 

The short end of what I'm getting at is that 'western fantasy' doesn't map to what it claims to be based on. It is not medieval. The genre conventions aren't possible in the medieval feudal model.

 

You can toss the genre and go feudal, or keep the genre and not try to fit medieval statistics to it.

 

If you choose the second option, you then only need to do research if you care about the statistics.

 

Most people get by with 'its a big crowded city'. But if you care more than that, you need to find a way to figure out how big. Since most of the rest of the world -does- work as an example for the western fantasy genre you can just pull easy to find numbers from anywhere else.

 

 

If you care for the statistics, know that the actual regions of the western world make a poor map over for western fantasy after the fall of the Roman empire.

 

Look at a place with tech and political structures similar to 'western fantasy' and you find some things are 'the same' and others are different from Europe.

 

Communities are still highly clustered - a village every mile sort of thing, with wilderness in lands not ideal to farming. Cities are just bigger, because trade allows that even in the face of constant war. Even with things like the Mongols killing 100% of the population of Beijing (or was it Shanghai?), you still get cities in the hundreds of thousands up to a million or so.

 

Almost anywhere in the world makes for a decent example, save for Europe. Europe just had a very odd political and health situation from about the fall of Rome up until the rise of nations that caused its cities to be smaller than they should have been and made the whole idea of freely wandering adventure very difficult (for example, the California gold rush was a gold rush not because of the gold, but because it was almost the first time in western history that the wealth was not owned by the state or even mined with forced labor).

 

 

Medieval Europe had small cities, but, in many of them it also had a lot of ruins from when those cities were once larger...

 

 

You can, for an easy mark to western fantasy, and as such Turakian as well, take a Europe like layout and just up the populations in any place with good trade and low disease. Then toss out the word feudal - that's not the political structure of DnD/western fantasy. Look instead to Monarchy Or Impterial - the systems of Europe after and before Feudal.

[Markdoc]

Re: Turakian Populations

 

Speaking of cities' date=' it has been pointed out that when the SCA holds it Pennsic War in August, roughly 10-12,000 people show up. That's more people in one place than something like 99% of the cities in Europe circa 1400. The exceptions are Paris, Rome, and London.[/quote']

 

Also Constantinople, Florence, Genoa, Ghent, Milan, Venice, Bologna, Brescia, Bruges, Cordoba, Cremona, Granada, London, Naples, Padua, Rouen, Verona, Antwerp, Avignon, Basra, Bergamo, Cologne, Damietta, Ferrara, Liege, Lille, Lucca, Lubeck, Magdeburg, Mantua, Messina, Modena, Novgorod, Nuremberg, Palermo, Palma, Parma, Pavia, Piacenza, Pisa, Prague, Sana, Seville, Siena, Toledo, Valencia, Vicenza, etc, etc.

 

I think you underestimate a bit - around 1400, there were literally scores of cities in excess of 10-12000 people. The list above is just a partial one of cities with populations estimated as greater than 20,000.

 

Of the three you mention, Paris was the largest city in the European region with a population of between a quarter million and 300,000, Rome was at the end of it's long period of decline with a population of about 25,000 (it was only important because the guy with the white, pointy hat lived there: it wasn't one of Italy's major cities) and London was between 120,000 and 150,000.

 

You can get decent estimates of Medieval European populations from Tertius Chandler's "Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth". It's out of print, but you can probably get it from Amazon.

 

In real life, 10-12,000 (including camp followers) would have been a smallish army - the Yorkists in 1403 had several armies in the field, and the "small" army which was defeated at Shrewsbury had somewhere around 16-20,000 fighting men. The Lancastrians also had at least two armies in the field and their army at Shrewsbury was apparently on the order of 40-60,000 men. At Agincourt the English army was described by contemporaries as "small" and it was about 5-8,000 (not counting camp followers).

 

cheers, Mark

[Susano]

Re: Turakian Populations

 

Yeah, I was thinking 1400 seemed wrong. Someone gave me a date once and I can't recall what it is. Let me think.... SCA tries for arms and armor of... 1000 AD? 1100 AD? Maybe that was the time. I do know that 10,000-12,000 people made for a respectable town during much of the "middle ages" and Pennsic is just that. You have most things you'd expect in a town of that size, in some form or another (just not 100% exact).

[Curufea]

Re: Turakian Populations

 

SCA is late middle ages, during the Plate period - 1300+

[Susano]

Re: Turakian Populations

 

SCA is late middle ages' date=' during the Plate period - 1300+[/quote']

 

Not exactly. SCA is an attempt to re-create the time period from 600 AD to 1600 AD. Most people seem to concentrate around 1400 or so, but I have seen early Vikings and Saxons, and very late Elizabethans and the like. And, of course, Saracens, Japanese, Mongols, and what not.

[Curufea]

Re: Turakian Populations

 

I haven't seen any other periods done by them - but locally they only have a small group (of course, as we have a small population).

 

Do they still use the chivalric terms for the other time periods?

[Markdoc]

Re: Turakian Populations

 

Yeah' date=' I was thinking 1400 seemed wrong. Someone gave me a date once and I can't recall what it is. Let me think.... SCA tries for arms and armor of... 1000 AD? 1100 AD? Maybe that was the time. I do know that 10,000-12,000 people made for a respectable town during much of the "middle ages" and Pennsic is just that. You have most things you'd expect in a town of that size, in some form or another (just not 100% exact).[/quote']

 

OK, that sounds about right. For Europe, the tipping point was around 1000 AD (very roughly) - at that point population growth and clearing of forested land started to expand very rapidly - up until that point population growth had been small enough that major events (wars, famines, etc) could cause it to stabilise and drop, so the land being cleared was more or less the same as land being let go back to forest.

 

In the 11th century, a city of 10-12,000 would be a good size. There were a few exceptions that were much, much bigger - Paris, Rome, Grenada and Constantinople all spring to mind - but there were not a lot of cities on their scale. The London of the day would have been (as far as we can tell)- about that size.

 

Likewise, 10-12,000 would have been a BIG army by the scale of those days (at least in Europe). The Viking "great army" that was active in the Britain of a century before may have been as small as 800 men (though it was probably 1-2,000) and William conquered Britain nearly a century later with only 8,000 men.

 

But a lot happened between 1000-1400. The continent changed out of all recognition in terms of technology, philosophy, political structure, social structure and outlook. In 1000 Fuedalism was yet to reach its peak, by 1400, the medievalism had not only replaced it but had reached its own peak and was about to collapse, to be replaced by Monarchism (in very general terms of course).

 

cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

Re: Turakian Populations

 

Oh - and a general comment. I do find it very helpful for my own games to work out a general population schema, even if you don't need to know how many shoemakers there are in Tarsh. It's one of the first things I do when setting up a new country and does several things: tells me how many cities I should have, how big they are and also tells me about the tech level they need. How I put these things together automatically generates game-useful stuff - political relationships, how easy it is for the players to find an armourer, how easy it is to hide from the authorities, etc.

 

Here's what I normally do:

 

1. Decide what I WANT the country to be be (feudal, mageocratic, theocratic, republic, etc).

2. Decide the tech level

3. Decide the total population

 

All of these are to some extent decided by the neighbouring countries/areas I have already detailed and by the geography.

 

Then I place the cities where I want them, taking into account logical placements (Cities tend to be on rivers, good agricultural land or trade routes, unless placed deliberately as settlements to subdue or defend an area). Why a city is where it is, often generates an automatic basic history and thus decides its character, especially when combined with the three first decisions. Finally, I usually choose a "real-life" city as a loose model.

 

Here's an example. I placed two city-states in my game. I wanted both to be big, high-tech trading cities, with populations in the hundreds of thousands.

 

The first city - Lacramar is the capital of a trading state, with a population in the millions. It's on the coast, in a tropical region and has a late medieval/Early renaissance tech level. The real life model is classical Athens. Athens in the classical era had a population of about 200,000 and it is though to have held almost HALF the population of Attica, so it in no way resembles the medieval models we discussed - instead you get one big city surrounded by estates and small farms with almost no villages/small towns. To mak ethat model work, you need good trade routes to bring in the needed food and a strong military to enure they run smoothly. I replaced the Greek poltical model with one based on medival guilds and wards and ended up with a swarming anthill of a city, with a population of around a million, that sprawls along the coast and sits at the middle of a vast trade network - that means a big dock area and also a traders' quarter: I drew in the network, noted down a few major political players and drew a map.

 

Pnume I placed in the middle of a big swamp with the idea that it was where a group of Mages had withdrawn to work in isolation and security and then grown over time. The model was planted cities like Carcassone. Swampland doesn't offer much in the way of possibilities for expansion or cropland, so the city itself is built like a huge pyramid, with buildings piled high on each other and twisty narrow streets. The surrounding swampland is covered with fish farms and rice paddies, but that's not enough. So the lords of Pnume built a fleet of flying ships to ferry food from farms on the arable land at the edge of the great rift - terraced farms and strongholds tied together by the flying ships. Once you have the flying ships, then trading further afield becomes plausible - hence the trading network and so on. I drew in a second trade network overlapping partially with the one from Lacaramar - flying traders deal in different goods and different places from Lacramar's seaborne traders. Pnume ended up a much more cramped place than Lacaramar even though it has about 200,000 inhabitants

 

Thinking about these things a little in advance makes it easy to run adventures on the fly and plan out your world in a logical fashion - and I find it generates ideas for further play easily. It also avoids "generic fantasy city" syndrome.

 

cheers, Mark