I know that Robert Graves isn't a historical source, but in his book "Count Belisarius" he claims that he sticks as close to history as he can, not making up any events or characters other than his narrator. He also cites Procopius as his primary source for the book's material so I assume that the figures he uses for the populations of cities has some basis in the historical record.
In the books he mentions that 300 000 people were massacred in Milan when the Goths reclaimed it from the Romans, he also states that 400 000 civilians left the city of Rome, leaving only 100 000 people behind.
These are much larger than the figures that I am used to seeing for 6th century population.
I was wondering why Graves would use these numbers, would they have been the numbers reported by Procopius? Perhaps they are his own invention and count the amount of people from the countryside and have taken refuge? Or even would these numbers have been accepted by historians at some point?
Thank you for any information.
Procopius did indeed make the claim about Milan:
... the city [Milan] they [the Goths] razed to the ground, killing all the males of every age to the number of not less than three hundred thousand and reducing the women to slavery and then presenting them to the Burgundians by way of repaying them for their alliance.
I don't buy it though, as this would imply that Milan had a population at least 600,000, which is improbable in Western Europe, which was always less urbanised than regions ruled by the Eastern Roman Empire. Late antique writers (and to be honest most historians from the ancient/medieval period) tend to exaggerate, a lot, so I wouldn't take this number at face-value anyway. Procopius wrote this when the Romans were still at war with the Goths, so it made logical sense for a loyal Roman to write this and to portray the Goths as evil barbarians, which had been a standard trope for 'civilised' writers for centuries. It no doubt would have also appealed to Procopius' audience. Moreover, from reading the passages before and after this, I don't get the impression that Procopius was an eyewitness (as he was for many other events he wrote about), so he didn't have the opportunity to do a head-count and would have to rely on hearsay and official reports.
I am sure that some sort of massacre happened, since Procopius don't tend to invent events from nothing, but the scale is definitely wildly exaggerated and I doubt you'd find a serious scholar nowadays taking it seriously. In the past though these figures were accepted as generally correct, which I think contributed to the idea of late antiquity/early middle ages being the "Dark Ages", during which life was nasty, brutish and short.
As for the claim about Rome, that sounds like the kind of thing Procopius would claim - later on in his History of the Wars he even talked about how only a few hundred people were left in Rome after a Gothic siege. Rome's population did decline precipitously from the late empire onwards, so that seems plausible - the Rome we encounter in sources from the late sixth century was certainly in a very dilapidated state, which fits with the general narrative of depopulation Procopius described (though I imagine a decent chunk of the refugees would have returned after the siege/war, which Procopius obviously didn't talk about as that didn't have anything to do with the war he was chronicling).