Baghdad is an outlier, but it cannot be dismissed as just the accidental centre of an Islamic empire: as Ctesiphon it figured before Allah had even been dreamed of.
Second, two bodies of water are at the centre of the half million club. Florence, the city where the modern world began, reached 100,000 pre the Black Death and bumped around there to the 1800s. Delhi perhaps got to quarter of a million in the high Middle Ages. The biggest sub-Saharan cities in this period seem not to have jumped over the 50,000 figure mark. Just to try and give some scale to these failures: Tenochtitlan had managed perhaps 100,000 when Cortés showed up mighty Cahokia had not more than 40,000 inhabitants. 500 AD Constantinople, Chang’an, Baghdad (Ctesiphon)ġ500 AD Beijing, Cairo, Hangzhou, Nanjingįirst, Sub-Saharan Africa, India (surprisingly?) and the Americas seem to have no real contenders: Europe, with the exception of Rome is absent.
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