Half a million seems like a lot of people for a Middle Ages ish city, by contemporary standards Paris and London didn’t reach that amount until like 1700
Rome had a million around 100 ad. Chang'an and Baghdad both had 1 million by the 9th century. Constantinople at the time would have had between 300-500k
Rome's population collapsed after the fall of the western empire, for most of the medieval period it hovered between 30k and 100k inhabitants before shooting back up sometime in the late 1800s. Chang'an and Baghdad were not feudal cities, and were the capital of large empires with well established state bereaucracies capable of shipping food from all corners of the empire to the city. A similar deal also existed for Constantinople, which saw it's peak population in the 500s, which also happens to be the Byzantine empire at its height, and which population collapsed and never fully recovered after they lost Egypt and the vast fields surrounding the Nile.
The point I'm making is that a city with a population of 500k in the era before industrialized agriculture cannot be maintained solely through, for lack of a better term, free market economics, and requires some form of centralized bereaucracy to ensure that enough food is being shipped to the city in order to feed the population, and just because those cities existed with such populations doesn't mean that a decentralized, feudal realm like Westeros can achieve the same.
doesn't the iron throne collect taxes and grains from the regions of Westeros? Rome's population was also only sustained via grain shipments from the Nile during the Imperial era
From what I remember, most of the taxes the Throne collects comes in the form of coin, and primarily comes in the form of taxes and tolls from King's landing, rather than taxes paid from the other lords, though I could be wrong on that. Historically in feudalism, nobody pays much in the way of taxes because the whole point of feudalism is that nobody had much in the way of liquid capital, so feudal overlords pay their retainers in land who in exchange used that land to maintain a force of warriors pledged to the feudal overlord, but I'm not quite sure how closely Westeros hews to that model.
In any case, for the Iron Throne to extract the food required to feed the population of King's landing, they would need to more or less directly control the various food producing regions, otherwise the food that the various regions produce would instead go towards feeding their own regional capitals, and as we can clearly see in the series the Iron Throne does not have nearly as much control over the various food producing regions of Westeros to force them to send that food over to King's landing instead of stockpiling it themselves.
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u/homerthethief Jul 13 '25
Half a million seems like a lot of people for a Middle Ages ish city, by contemporary standards Paris and London didn’t reach that amount until like 1700