Human Realm Demographics

From Fantasy Novel

[edit] Types of Communities

  • Villages range from 20 to 1,000 people, with typical villages ranging from 50-300. Most kingdoms will have thousands of them. Villages are agrarian communities within the safe folds of civilization. They provide the basic source of food and land-stability in a feudal system. Usually, a village that supports orchards (instead of grainfields) is called a "hamlet." Occasionally, game writers use the term to apply to a very small village, regardless of what food it produces.
  • Towns range in population from 1,000-8,000 people, with typical values somewhere around 2,500. Culturally, these are the equivalent to the smaller American cities that line the interstates. Cities and towns tend to have walls only if they are frequently threatened.
  • Cities tend to be from 8,000-12,000 people, with an average in the middle of that range. A typical large kingdom will have only a few cities in this population range. Centers of scholarly pursuits (the Universities) tend to be in cities of this size, with only the rare exception thriving in a Big City.
  • Capital Cities range from 12,000-100,000 people, with some exceptional cities exceeding this scale. Some historical examples include London (25,000-40,000), Paris (50,000-80,000), Genoa (75,000-100,000), and Venice (100,000+). Moscow in the 15th century had a population in excess of 200,000!

[edit] Types of Cities

This will be a simplified version of reality. Rather than the literally hundreds of different types of cities that existed in the middle ages, we'll stick with just a few.

  • Fortified City - A city surrounded by fortified walls, completely surrounding the city. Most of the time, it will include a castle on the interior of the city. The castle is a multipurpose structure, serving as the main residence for the lord/king, as well as being an offensive or defensive weapon. Defensively, it can serve like a citadel, depending on size (some castles are merely Manors/Palaces with some fortifications, while others are massive), and offensively, it can serve as a weapon to stake claim on a area/region - being built to allow a lord to militarily control a region. For our purposes here, a castle would be a palace overlooking or even preceeding a city, with walls, a keep, and all the other parts of a castle, overlooking the city.
  • Fortress/Citadel - A city where a great fort/citadel looms over a city, housing the military protection of the city and serving as the last line of defense for a beseiged population. It serves as a stronghold for the people to retreat into, containing provisions/food/water and allowing for the most effective defense. Examples of this would be something like Helms Deep in LOTR. Typically for a large city here, I would assume that the Lord's residence would be outside the Citadel, and could even possibly be a castle, though I would think a palace would be more likely. I would say a grand city that was a commercial/cultural center (ie not a major strategic military post) would contain a Citadel. This makes it different as the city does not have walls.

[edit] Towns

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