in the 1030s Harald Hardrada (who fought over the English crown in 1066) was exiled from his Scandinavian homeland. He and hundreds of other vikings went east and eventually became mercenaries in the byzantine empire. Would he or any of his men have ever seen a city before going to Constantinople?

by grapp

as an aside if that's never been used as the basis for a novel, TV series, movie or play it should have been

elephantofdoom

What definition of city are we going by? If you mean a city as large as Constantinople then no, as there were no cities in Europe bigger than Constantinople. In fact, there would have been no larger cities in the world outside of China. In northern and western Europe, cities were very small in comparison to cities in the Middle East, India and China. A place like London would only have a population in the low tens-of-thousands, as the populations were spread out and restricted from moving due to Feudalism, and that is the higher end city sizes. In places like Denmark, Sweden or Norway the largest population centers would have similar or lower numbers, and none of these places would have anything close in scale to the grand architecture of Hagia Sophia. Now, if we are going by a very generous definition of city, then as a noble he would have certainly spent time in the largest cities in Scandinavia, and many of his companions probably would have spent time in these cities as well. Its also possible that some of these mercenaries would have traveled around Europe to find work, and may have been too some of the larger cities, like Paris or Kiev, that would have had populations at least on the same magnitude as Constantinople, though still much smaller in size.