The White Council

Re: Estimation of Population in Gondor and Minas Tirith

Tolkien and Inklings Discussion

: : : A book called Byzantium and its Army by W. Treadgold gives a : : : method for roughly estimating the population of Gondor. : : : Byzantium and Gondor have a number of parallels: pre-industrial : : : economies, similar geographic position (as far as we can tell), : : : a high culture somewhat diminished from former times, a : : : centralised state with some localised aristocracies, and most : : : importantly a standing army plus semi-professional troops.

: : : Treadgold has worked out that the total number of troops in the : : : Byzantine state varied between 1.2 to 2.4% of the total : : : population in the period from 284 to 1081 AD. At around 850 AD : : : the state had about 170,000 troops and a population a little in : : : excess of 12 million.

: : : Estimation of the size of Gondorian armed forces is difficult : : : but I would imagine it was between 40,000 and 50,000.

: : : If the parallel holds then this would suggest, for a : : : conservative percentage of 1.5% in the armed forces, a figure : : : of around 3.5 million inhabitants for Gondor, and for Minas : : : Tirith (compared to 250,000 people for Constantinople) a : : : population of 73,500.

: : Martin, unless I'm doing the math wrong, your 73,500 population for Minas Tirith allows only for 1102.5 men. Even rounding up, that wouldn't begin to approach the numbers we've discussed for Minas Tirith in the other thread.

: : 1.5% of the population does sound about right, however. Assuming Gondor at the end of the Third Age had about 35,000 soldiers, the population would be around 2,333,333.333333. For Minas Tirith, if there were 11,000 soldiers stationed there, the supporting population would in the neighborhood of 733,333.3333333. This includes not just the city but the supportive lands as well.

: : If we assume Gondor had 45,000 soldiers, the overall population goes up to about 3,000,000.

: That is very, very, very little, I agree mostly though (remember my remark that Gondor was more sparsely populated than Denmark in the Iron Age?). I believe that we have to try and take another perspective though- one where we assume that the situation is similar to the west roman empire in its death throes. It was still supposed to have a large army (I cannot remember the exact number but Arther Ferril gives a good analysis of the situation in his "The fall of the Roman empire- the military explanation"), but could field no more than 10.000- 50.000 men and mercenaries on any given campaign- even a major one (I am talking after Julian's catastophic Parthian campaign, Hadrianopolis, Frigid River etc.) : ;-) Neithan Turambar : (I just feel that Gondor should have a somewhat larger population)

The Eastern Empire had a population of around 19 million in c.450 AD (Jones - Later Roman Empire). At the same time it had an army of around 350,000 troops of all types, it probably contributed about 50,000 troops to the disasterous expedition against the Vandals at roughly the same time. Around 400 AD the Western Empire had a slightly larger population around 21 million and a slightly smaller army c. 300,000 men. All these figures seem much larger than the troop numbers we can glean for Gondor at the time of the Ring War.