Largest possible medieval city?

The are some sources stating that Bagdad at it's height had almost 2 million, so I thought a slightly larger caliphate centered there would be able to push that a little further. (Or maybe a Roman Constantinople that fends off the Arabs, or a Tang Xian that manages to hold Central Asia and Korea, and possibly also a larger Angkor Wat could pull off such numbers)
Currently the actual number is assumed to be around 800,000-1,000,000. I'd say not more that low 1 millions. Maybe 1.5 but only in rare instances.

And let me ask my perennial question, how was sanitation handled in the Muslim cities? You have discussion of China, India, Europe, Africa, but the Middle East is skipped. I've been trying to find the answer for some time. But all you get is stuff about personal hygiene.
 
My understanding is that disease burdens were fairly manageable until the later Middle Ages when cites became too dense to support things like kitchen gardens. So if you had a city that didn't need walls or whose walls could be easily and regularly expanded, that would allow cities to grow quite a bit bigger. This might actually be why Tenotihuacan got so big-they could easily expand the city as much as needed.

Late middle ages cities were no denser on average than earlier cities, though of course there was enormous variation. Density is a product of the main mode of transport and no pre-modern city was ever more than two hours walk from one side to the other. Also it depends how you define "city"; the Rhine delta had an enormous number of urban areas interspersed with fields that by today's standards would be regarded as a metropolitan area (the Randstad) but in the middle ages and earlier the key qualification was a contiguous built up area. Anyway the disease burden varied enormously in different climates and at different times but Ancient Rome was hit by just as many plagues and epidemics as Medieval Paris with the exception of the Black Death which was unique in it's virulence, the Plague of Justinian was bad, but not that bad.
 

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Estimates suggest Rome needed to import 50,000 people a year to maintain a population of 1.2 million and when that stopped Rome started shrinking.

This is an interesting number. So the city of Rome would have to "import" four times its population during a century, just to avoid its population shrinking.

It is well known that Rome figuratively sucked the population out of the provinces which population fell in a horrifying way, but this number makes the fact better understandable.
 
This is an interesting number. So the city of Rome would have to "import" four times its population during a century, just to avoid its population shrinking.

It is well known that Rome figuratively sucked the population out of the provinces which population fell in a horrifying way, but this number makes the fact better understandable.

It's mostly guesswork, there is a distinct lack of accurate census data for the period but yes Rome especially the Aventine which was the main immigrant neighbourhood and the Subura which was the main working class area had horrific mortality rates. If you were an immigrant to Rome you either got rich and moved to one of the nicer, less dense areas and lived or stayed in the slums and died.
 
It's mostly guesswork, there is a distinct lack of accurate census data for the period but yes Rome especially the Aventine which was the main immigrant neighbourhood and the Subura which was the main working class area had horrific mortality rates. If you were an immigrant to Rome you either got rich and moved to one of the nicer, less dense areas and lived or stayed in the slums and died.

Are slaves also counted among those immigrants?
 
Are slaves also counted among those immigrants?

Yes, in fact those are the ones we have the most accurate information for. During the Principate under the Julio-Claudian dynasty around 40,00 total, 30,000 net slaves were imported into Rome a year. The figure for 20,000 free migrants is entirely guesswork, but as the proportion of slaves stayed largely static at around 35% and considering the much lower death rate of freemen that is the best guess we can make. Or rather that was the guess the author of the book I read made.
 
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