The Mediterranean retained the world’s densest urban network into the sixteenth century

Evidence

Even by the late sixteenth century, the contrast in urban life was still great between the European hinterland and the Mediterranean, Braudel writes: “[T]he Mediterranean region in the sixteenth century (and it must be extended to its maximum when we are talking of towns) was unique in its immensity. In the sixteenth century no other region in the world had such a developed urban network. Paris and London were just on the threshold of their modern careers. The towns of the Low Countries and southern Germany (the latter bathing in the reflected glory of the Mediterranean, the former stimulated economically by merchants and sailors from the South), further north the industrious but small towns of the Hanseatic League, all of these towns, thriving and beautiful though they might be, did not make up a network as closely knit and complex as that of the Mediterranean, where town followed town in endless strings, punctuated by great cities: Venice, Genoa, Florence, Milan, Barcelona, Seville, Algiers, Naples, Constantinople, Cairo.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1475