Did you know that the Dutchman Michael Keel, in his main book published in 1985, gave a special place to the cities of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom, which in two words are “small and inconspicuous, incomparable with the West and even with other Balkan countries”.
He contemptuously calls the capital Tarnovgrad Fluchstadt – “cursed city”, with a modest population of 4-5000 people.
There are no lawyers and attorneys in this country, and people live to be 85 years old.
Our historians At. However, Popov and Y. Andreev are of the opinion that the population of Tarnovgrad reached 12-15,000 people and this was the reason for Callistus to compare it with Constantinople, which then had 30,000 inhabitants.
But especially interesting is the figure given by one of the greatest researchers of medieval European demography – Paul Bayroch, along with his co-authors Jean Batou and Pierre Chevre.
According to them, the citizens of Tarnovgrad at the beginning of the 14th century were 35,000! The same authors are categorical about the number of inhabitants of other Bulgarian cities from this period: Shumen (15,000), Preslav (20,000), Sredets (20,000), etc.
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