Could besieged medieval cities develop a micro-economy during wars to endure the siege for long time?
Upvote:5
If people could grow enough food in cities, then they wouldn't have farms, they would just have cities.
Even modern farms would not be able to supply enough food, and they are far from self-sufficient. They are heavily dependent on water and fossil fuels.
And your title is a bit misleading; "economy" refers to the management of resources, not its production (although production of resources is a factor in economies). One can't stop a population from starving just by passing money around.
Upvote:6
As answered in comments and by Gort, there is zero chance of this happening by growing crops. It's not just the space that's insufficient, it's the complete and utter lack of soil.
The one workaround involves 2 things:
- Exploitation of all available food sources.
- Drastic reduction of population.
Upvote:33
No. Cities were simply too small physically to feed themselves. Constantinople was one of the biggest cities of its time, at 2.3 sq miles. This works out to around 1500 acres. To feed a single person you need, at minimum 6-8 acres of land. This means that if the entire area of the city were farmland, it would feed at best around 250 people.
Even with modern farming methods, you would need just under 1/2 acre per person. That still puts you at only around 3000 people.
Using extreme techniques, some people claim to be able to do as well as even 20 people per acre. This requires a large investment in modern technological produces like drip irrigation, and assumes access to electricity and running water. If we took this number, and applied it to Constantinople, we would get roughly 30,000 people fed. (Assuming you could do it at this scale, which no one has even done in modern times.)
Constantinople had on the order of a half million people, which puts it at around 350 people per acre. So yeah, this is just entirely unworkable even with modern techniques.
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