Around the millennium, Constantinople was the biggest city in the world that Europeans knew, with around 600,000 inhabitants. It surpassed Islam’s greatest city, Baghdad, and dwarfed the Latin West’s best attempts at urban life such as Rome or Venice, which at best might each muster a tenth of such numbers.1 The scale of the area comprehended by the ancient and medieval walls still has the power to astonish as one walks across it: in societies which were overwhelmingly rural, the first experience of ‘the City’ must have been like a moon landing.
