Gilbert of Lannoy, who visited the republic about 1413, has left a description of it, in the course of which he says, describing the city of his day, "Novgorod is a prodigiously large town situated in a beautiful plain in the midst of vast forests. The soil is low, subject to inundations, and marshy in places. The town is surrounded by imperfect ramparts, formed of gabions; the towers are of stone."
Portions of these fortifications alluded to above still exist, by which we are able to form some idea of the immense extent of the ancient city. She seems to have had within her walls at least one hundred thousand people, while within her domains, which stretched northward to Lapland and eastward to the Ural mountains and northeast into Siberia, she could not have had less than three hundred thousand subjects.
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From General Nelson A. Miles
Thrilling Stories of The Russian-Japanese War, 1904
