ABSTRACT
Peter Mundy, an English traveller who visited the Royal Prussia in the 1640s, noted in his diary that Danzig, by far the largest city in East-Central Europe, ‘with its suburbs (…) may contain a population half as many as Amsterdam or a quarter of that of London’.1 In general, such a sober estimate correlated with the size of cities and the density of the urban network in the area vis-à-vis the most urbanized parts of Europe, that is the Low Countries and Northern Italy. While leading European urban centres saw unprecedented demographic growth as their population multiplied during the 16th and the first half of the 17th century, the largest cities in the Bohemian Lands, Poland and Hungary, basically followed the same trend, if on a diminished scale. While Paris, Naples, Venice and later London, Amsterdam or Madrid fell into the first category of cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, the two most populous East-Central European centres, Prague and Danzig, fluctuated over the long term between the second (50,000-100,000 inhabitants) and the third (20,000-50,000 inhabitants) category of cities. The absence of a dominant urban settlement with more than 100,000 inhabitants, and consequently a more evenly distributed urban population, made East-Central Europe comparable to Germany, where Cologne (40,000 inhabitants by 1600), Nuremberg (40,000 by 1600) and Frankfurt (20,000 by 1600) ranked among the largest cities and it was only in the 17th century that they were eclipsed by the rapidly expanding Hamburg.2
