hi I'm from your pseudo-medieval fantasy city. yeah. you forgot to put farms around us. we have very impressive walls and stuff but everyone here is starving. the hero showed up here as part of his quest and we killed and ate him
yeah umm actually everyone kinda lives, inside.. the walls yeah. no yeah theres not any surrounding farming communities or villages to levy taxes from so we're pretty much just in a stone pit all together. Theres a massive stone castle tho! where did the infrastructure for the stone quarring come from? I dont know... Evil wizard maybe?
If you actually want to know how medieval (and overall pre-industrial) cities interacted with its rural enviroment, check out these articles:
This week and next, we’re going to look at an issue not of battles, but of settings: pre-modern cities – particularly the trope of the city,
Last week, we looked at a model for what the countryside around an ‘ideal city’ might look like. Today we’re going to introduce some complic
Long story short, cities weren't islands in the middle of nowhere. If you're a generic fantasy character approaching a city, you wouldn't find a lonely Shining City Upon A Hill (hmm, interesting imagery there, wonder what it means...), but actually a highly populated area of farms, orchards and all that feeds and maintains a city.
