How could you have a medieval-level technology fantasy city stretch for forty miles in all directions?

How could you have a medieval-level technology fantasy city stretch for forty miles in all directions?

However you damn well like. It's a fantasy city.

You can explain it or justify it with magic, divine blessings or some other bullshit, or you could just have it be a thing.

The sewage and waste disposal systems need to be not shit for one

>Magicâ„¢

Every citizen is taught the spell to dispose of waste by their parents at a young age, think like the equivalent of potty training or learning to wipe your own ass as a kid
Nobody knows who first came up with the spell or what it exactly does, where the waste even goes, it just works and nobody worries about it

Somewhere in some other plane of existence there's just shit raining from the sky and one day the inhabitant demons of that world will get their revenge

Va-poo-rize

I believe that organizing the large and organizing the small is all the same: organization, organization, organization. If a large enough empire has the resources, its capital can be as large as it wants. Think about it: Tokyo has the population of the entire Benelux and then some.

The only problem Medieval Europe had in that regard (and why its cities were smaller than Roman ones despite the advance in tech) is a lack of centralized power and proper governance.

Well, to elaborate on my kind of autistic post, other than shit like taking care of hygiene (which can be done with proper architecture), the biggest issue is food. You both need abundent farmlands (or enough resources to trade for food with neighbors with abundent farmland), reliable and diverse crops (so 20% of your population doesn't die when there's bad rainfall) and the logistics to bring food to most of the population reliantly and consistently.

You'll most likely end up falling back on 'taters.

Where does the shit go? We wanna know!

you could say that Otyughs are used specifically for this purpose, and there is a fleet of workers who are tasked with making sure their lair/sewer areas are functioning properly and all gates are in working order to keep them confined to the undertunnels, as well as making sure the population stays balanced where it needs to be etc.

>Walls every ten miles imposing taxes.
>Trade center.
>On a trade route.

perhaps there is a state apparatus consisting of druids acting as a department of agriculture.

druids don't like cities and technological progress you say? in this advanced fantasy civilization that could actually be a huge source of conflict, the reformed druid religion which operates with the state to both help preserve the environment while at the same time providing for humanity, and the old-school hardline druids who have to operate outside the bounds of the law of the land and perpetrate acts of magical terrorism etc.

Rome++
I'd actually think of it sort of like Ravnica.

Aqueducts can water a city that size, but the Bigger problem comes with feeding that many people.Maybe some of the more powerful nobles have big estates where they grow their own food and sell the excess.

when you say fantasy, you mean what level of fantasy? Because as fantasy with medieval stuff goes, I would say Ravnica.

Druids could be another reason for the huge city.

Instead of humans cities and their pollution spread out across the land they are concentrated into single areas. Yes, that area is going to be hit harder, but it also means the druids know exactly where to concentrate their efforts and that there can be huge tracts of untamed and untouched wilderness.

So perhaps multiple Central Park-sized biomes that are basically a strictly deliniated forest that self-regulates the growth of foodstuffs and regularly needs to be harvested to prevent extreme overgrowth, controlled by druids? I can dig it.

Those druids could even be sort-of-hermits that never leave their cozy NEET forests and use easily angered, loudly screeching green frogs as sentries to make sure no normies enter their magical realm.

Play in Eberron.

>Those druids could even be sort-of-hermits that never leave their cozy NEET forests and use easily angered, loudly screeching green frogs as sentries to make sure no normies enter their magical realm.

I love it.

It's like you never heard of troll-burgers. It's the biggest metropolitan franchise. You go in, choose your burger, sit down. The screaming* means a troll is being constantly sliced to provide meat. One million trolls, the entire global population, provide just as many tons of meat every day.

*People like when trolls suffer, it's documented that districts with McTroll have better life quality and less crimes.

ME AM PLAY GODS

Yes, but it would probably be heavily uneven in how populated it is at any given point. Large stretches gutted by fire given over to growing gardens and grazing animals in the grassy ruins.

Immense ancient temples surrounded by expanses of lean-to hovels and massive crowded apartments.

A not insubstantial part of the city is inhabited not by the living, but by the dead, whose vast necropoleis have more headstones than other worldly cities have heads.

Such a city would most logically be situated along several gigantic fast flowing rivers to explain the ability to obtain fresh water and remove stagnant water quickly, and much of it's newer districts would be built atop hills of discarded pottery, masonry, and defunct fortifications from a time when The City was once many cities.

put a wall around your entire agricultural center

without magic? how would they eat? how would they move enough food to feed the millions who are over 20 miles from agricultural lands? food in general. and that's disregarding sanitation and fires.

>Forty mile radius

That would take 2-3 days to traverse if it was empty. If there's traffic, if expect it to take a week. That would be hell for logistics, but the worst would be food.

Imagine you're a baker near the city center, running a pretty sizable operation. Everyon for a few blocks relies on you for bread.

It's the end of the week, and you're going to get your shipment of flour in tomorrow morning so you can make a fresh batch. Except it doesn't arrive, because it takes over a day for the cart to reach you from the city center, and there's going to be hundreds of streets for him to get held up or delayed.

Now imagine this on a grander scale, with even more bakers and blacksmiths and potters and traders who all need these constant shipments on a weekly basis, only for the roads to get choked up by the sheer number of carts you would need to get anywhere.

Someone born in the center of the city might never even see outside, since it's such a far walk.

Eh, you still had a lot of Grecians and Romans make huge-ass trips to the middle of fucking nowhere - as far away as Georgia and Russia or right the fuck to Spain, even into where the Sahara starts.

There's a reason this didn't happen.

Cities are defined by population density. Dense populations need food. The more food they need, the more agricultural land required to support them. That food must reach the city before it spoils.

When Rome fell, it was because there were great famines in the cities that killed off the literate population. Those famines occurred because the army stopped maintaining the roads when Rome could no longer afford to pay its army. When the roads were not maintained, the carts broke and were stuck until repaired (if not looted by bandits first). When the carts were stuck and the food did not arrive, people starved.

Without refrigeration, meat almost had to be produced locally. Fruit did not last long without modern preservation techniques. Some vegetables fair better than others. But grain that has spilt into the mud or been stolen is forever lost.

A city 40 miles wide would require tremendous shipping logistics. Almost necessarily a port city in a bread basket. It must be surrounded on all sides by fertile fields and highways, and furthermore receive foods from many oceanic territories and have ample space to dock many ships every day. Furthermore a river will be necessary as a shipping lane even more efficient than a highway. Something like the fertile crescent perhaps. Even then, I doubt you could sustain such a metropolis in preindustrial times.

The largest sized city I can think of in medieval times was Nanjing during Marco Polo's visit. And Marco Polo lied gratuitously in his account, so even with that I am dubious.

I mean, Egypt's traditionally been basically an urban agglomeration pinned to the length of the lower Nile.