52 The Structures of Everyday Life however small the numbers may seem to us.

A group of 20,000 was a significant concentration ofpeople, energy, talents, and mouths to feed - much more so, proportionately speaking, than a community of 100,000 to 200,000 people today. Just think what the lively and original culture of Cologne must have represented in the fifteenth century. Similarly we can justifiably say that Istanbul in the sixteenth century, with at least 400,000 inhabitants (and probably 700,000),56 was an. urban monster, comparable in proportion to the largest agglomerations today. It needed every available flock of sheep from the Balkans to support it; rice, beans and corn from Egypt; corn and wood from the Black Sea; and oxen, camels and horses from Asia Minor. It also required every available man from the Empire to renew its population in addition to the slaves brought back from Russia after Tartar raids or from the Mediterranean coasts by Turkish fleets. All these slaves were offered for sale at the market of Besistan, in the heart of the enormous capital. The armies of mercenaries who squabbled over Italy at the beginning of the sixteenth century also seem very small to us - between 10,000 and 20,000 men, ten to twenty pieces of cannon. These imperial soldiers with their remarkable leaders (Pescara, the Conntable de Bourbon, de Lannoy, Philibert de Chalon) who routed the other armies of mercenaries commanded by Francis I, Bonnivet or Lautrec, numbered no more than 10,000 old troopers, German Lands knechte and Spanish arquebusiers, all of them picked men, but worn out as rapidly as the Napoleonic army between the striking of the camp at Boulogne and the Spanish war (1803-8). They took the stage from La Bicoque (1522) to Lautrecs' defeat at Naples (1528), reaching their zenith at Pavia (1525).57 But these 10,000 mobile, furious and pitiless soldiers (they were responsible for the sack of Rome) represented a far greater force than 50,000 or 100,000 men would do today. Had there been more of them in earlier times there would have been no means of moving or feeding them, except in a country with infinitely rich land. The victory of Pavia was the triumph of the arquebusiers and even more of empty stomachs. Francis i s army was too well fed and protected from enemy cannon, between the walls of the town of Pavia which it was besieging and the ducal park, a game reserve surrounded by walls, where the battle unexpectedly took place on 24 February 1525. Similarly, the terrible and decisive battle of Marston Moor (2 July 1644), the first defeat of the royalist army in the English Civil War, put in the field only a small number of troops: 15,000 royalists and 27,000 on Parliaments side. Crom wells army could be accommodated on the Queen Elizabeth or the Queen M ary\ as Peter Laslett put it in the first edition of his book, concluding that the tiny scale of life in the pre-industrial world is a characteristic feature of the world we have lost58 In the light of this, certain feats, however inconsiderable they may seem by todays standards, regain their significance. The Spanish administrations ability to move galleys, fleets and tercios across the lands and seas of Europe from its