“Mother of cities … mistress of broad provinces and fruitful lands, boundless in multitudes of buildings, peerless in beauty and splendor … she surges as the sea with her throngs of folk and can scarcely contain them for all the capacity of her situation and sustaining power.” Thus Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, a Muslim globetrotter, described the city of Cairo in the 1320s. Lest we think of his description as the report of a highly partisan Muslim, the enormous population of medieval Cairo is also described in several foreign accounts. In 1384, the Italian Frescobaldi claimed that “This city of Cairo has a population greater than all of Tuscany, and there is one street more populated than all of Florence.” At the end of the fifteenth century, Bernard von Breydenbach wrote: “I do not think that there exists another city in the world today as populous, as large, as rich, and as powerful as Cairo … Elbowing our way through masses of men, we saw one spot where the throng of people was beyond words.” Similarly, to Fabri (1483), Cairo was the largest town in the world, three times larger than Cologne and seven times larger than Paris.

Statements of magnitude by medieval reporters, be they indigenous or foreign, should not be taken at face value.