u/Sourcerid

The Source of the image is this

However, the source of the values

>Patrick Boucheron, Denis Menjot La Ville médievalé - Histoire de l'Europe Urbaine Vol. 2
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Figure 9 - Les principales villes en Europe en 1300

A shame it isn't available in English language, as it is the case for an astounding amount of books from the middle ages that are often only in French. This is true from pop informative books to some foundational cornerstones of study, they often have only French or French + local language of the place that was studied.

What is immediately most recognizable as the biggest highlight is the absolute predominance of Italy in the figures. Approx. 1250-1350 is when urban figures are most skewed in favour of Italy in Europe, and it also coincides with the period of highest economic activity in Medieval/Early Modern Italy.

From the same book, from the approximately 150 towns above 10k people in Europe, about 80 of them were in Italy!

The 6 cities above 80k are Paris, London, Milan, Venice, Genoa, Florence

The period comes after the urban boom fuelled by the internal political changes and institutional renovation of Northern Italian cities, which are then followed by policies targetted at commercially expanding these states.

The other part is that the period precedes the Black Death, after which Italy sharply drops in Urban population, the level of urbanization took until the 19th century to recover! Economic activity took less than five hundred years but still some two centuries to recover.

Contrary to what Reddit loves to repeat, it is not as simple as wages and productivity in Europe grew after the Black Death in the medium term, this is a very local by local instance, and even within two different parts of England, which would have a similar ruling class and laws, the results can be drastically different. Generalized, Italy is worse off the decades after the Black Death.

In contrast, post black death England and Belgium-Netherlands are in particular the places that generally (not entirely) got better off, and are also the places where Urban populations most grew in the medium term. The rest of Europe is more ambiguous than Italy, England, Belgium-Netherlands on whether they truly got better or worse off.

Unfortunately the map says Urban Europe by the 13th century, but it should be Urban Europe in 1300 (as in around 1300). I didn't put "in 1300" in the title because I was afraid a lot of people would come to just comment that I misread the map and skip over everything else.