ABSTRACT
The city is the point of intersection of people, goods and information. Here we would like to consider the location and functions of the city in both region and society in terms of the flow of people and goods. Though the basis for such discussion is demography and social and economic history, it must be admitted that reliable research and historical documents are scarce for urban populations in the premodern Middle East and Central Asia. Ottoman period land survey registers remain for the Balkans, Anatolia and Syria, where the timar system was in place, and they include the household census for each quarter in the cities, scholars like Ö. L. Barkan and A. Raymond have carried out studies of the populations of regional urban centres and their fluctuations, and made comparisons with rural villages (pp. 129, 134, 151, 198, 203-4). Because there are no such records for other times and places, estimates have been made using hints contained in descriptive sources like chronicles and topographies (regarding for example the number of quarters, mosques and public baths, the area of residential quarters, the number of soldiers in the army, and the death count from plague) and from reports in the travel records of Europeans (pp. 59,125). For example, estimates of the population of Baghdad in the 10th century range from 300,000 to 1,500,000.11 Needless to say even such hints are not available for medium to small cities and rural villages. Therefore, though the ratio of urban population to the total is generally thought to be high, there is little that can be done other than to collect data of differing quality from various types of historical document and make estimates from them. O. G. Bol'shakov, after a laborious study of archaeological remains of cities and domestic dwellings, estimated a ratio of between 25% and 30% for pre-Mongol Central Asian cities (p. 289). A project for the future will be to construct a model of population distribution and movement for Ottoman period Anatolia and Syria, for which we have data that can be used for statistical analysis, and use it in conjunction with pre-Ottoman narrative sources to consider fluctuations over the long term and from region to region. Another important theme is movement and migration between cities and between the city and its surroundings. In this sense, even reports that in pre-20th century Central Asian cities 70% to 80% of the population left the city in summer to engage in farming and other activities are of great value (pp. 310-1).
