<html><div style='background-color:'><P>I am not a historian of the middle ages, and I do not know the documentary evidence, but from the standpoint of modern social science the likelihood is rather low of a million pilgrims arriving in Santiago each year. Medieval economies simply could not stand that large a percentage of the labor force away from their fields (most were farmers), nor could northern Spain, always an area of difficult agriculture given problems of water supply, provide the excess food, above and beyond the needs of the local population and the rapaciousness (well documented) of those who ruled them. Many pilgrims yes, but most likely in the range of thousands and occasionally tens of thousands.</P>
<P>In many illiterate and semi-literate societies, medieval Europe falling into the latter category, numeric systems are of the "one, two, three, some, and many" variety. Small numbers are likely to be exact, for everyone needs to know them, but large numbers are just that, large numbers. Who could count to a million, let alone had the leisure to enumerate pilgrims? A thousand, a hundred thousand, a million, a billion, anyway many (reminded here of a comment by late and unlmented Senator Dirksen of Illinois, to the effect "a million here, a million there and pretty soon it adds up to real money"). This problem is not uncommon in modern societies (made worse by the fact that the British use of "billion" is not the same as the US usage). How many people in the world today have any real concept of numbers as large as a million, beyond the fact that a million is many?</P>
<P>E. O. Pederson</P>
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