Medieval demography


Medieval demography is the study of human demography in Europe and the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages. It estimates and seeks to explain the number of people who were alive during the Medieval period, population trends, life expectancy, family structure, and related issues. Demography is considered a crucial element of historical change throughout the Middle Ages.
The population of Europe remained at a low level in the Early Middle Ages, boomed during the High Middle Ages and reached a peak around 1300, then a number of calamities caused a steep decline, the nature of which historians have debated. Population levels began to recover around the late 15th century, gaining momentum in the early 16th century.
The science of medieval demography relies on various lines of evidence, such as administrative records, wills and other types of records, archaeological field data, economic data, and written histories. Because the data are often incomplete and/or ambiguous, there can be significant disagreement among medieval demographers.

Demographic history of Europe

The population levels of Europe during the Middle Ages can be roughly categorized:
  • 400–600 : population decline
  • 600–1000 : stable at a low level, with intermittent growth.
  • 1000–1250 : population boom and expansion.
  • 1250–1348 : stable or intermittently rising at a high level, with fall in 1315–17 in most of Europe.
  • 1348–1420 : steep decline in England and France, growth in East Central Europe.
  • 1420–1470 : stable or intermittently falling to a low level in Western Europe, growth in East Central Europe.
  • 1470–onward: slow expansion gaining momentum in the early 16th century.

    Late Antiquity

saw various indicators of Roman civilization beginning to decline, including urbanization, seaborne commerce, and total population. Only 40% as many Mediterranean shipwrecks have been found for the 3rd century as for the 1st. During the period from 150 to 400, with the intermittent appearance of plague, the population of the Roman Empire ranged from a high of 70 to a low of 50 million, followed by a fairly good recovery if not to the previous highs of the Early Empire. Serious gradual depopulation began in the West only in the 5th century and in the East due to the appearance of bubonic plague in 541 after 250 years of economic growth after the troubles which afflicted the empire from the 250s to 270s. Proximate causes of the population decrease include the Antonine Plague, the Plague of Cyprian, and the Crisis of the Third Century. European population probably reached a minimum during the extreme weather events of 535–536 and the ensuing Plague of Justinian. Some have connected this demographic transition to the Migration Period Pessimum, when a decrease in global temperatures impaired agricultural yields.

Early Middle Ages

A major plague epidemic struck the Mediterranean, and much of Europe, in the 6th century.
The Early Middle Ages saw relatively little population growth with urbanization well below its Roman peak, reflecting a low technological level, limited trade and political, social and economic dislocation exacerbated by the impact of Viking expansion in the north, Arab expansion in the south and the movement of Slavs and Bulgarians, and later the Magyars in the east. This rural, uncertain life spurred the development of feudalism and the Christianization of Europe. Estimates of the total population of Europe are speculative, but at the time of Charlemagne it is thought to have been between 25 and 30 million, of which perhaps half were in the Carolingian Empire that covered modern France, the Low Countries, western Germany, Austria, Slovenia, northern Italy and part of northern Spain. Most medieval settlements remained small, with agricultural land and large zones of unpopulated and lawless wilderness in between.
Population density was only two to five persons per square kilometer in Britain, similarly in Germany, and somewhat higher in France.
Manorial surveys and some allusions to provincial hearth taxes suggest a population of 5 million for Carolingian France. Presumed densities of settlement support estimates of 4 million for Italy and a similar number for Iberia, as well as German lands ; 6 million for Slavic lands and perhaps 2 million for Greece and southern Balkans; 1.5 million people for the entire British Isles.

High Middle Ages

In the 10th–13th centuries, agriculture expanded into the wilderness, in what has been termed the "great clearances". During the High Middle Ages, many forests and marshes were cleared and cultivated. At the same time, during the Ostsiedlung, Germans resettled east of the Elbe and Saale rivers, in regions previously only sparsely populated by Polabian Slavs. Crusaders expanded to the Crusader states, parts of the Iberian Peninsula were reconquered from the Moors, and the Normans colonized England and southern Italy. These movements and conquests are part of a larger pattern of population expansion and resettlement that occurred in Europe at this time.
Reasons for this expansion and colonization include an improving climate known as the Medieval warm period, which resulted in longer and more productive growing seasons; the end of the raids by Vikings, Arabs, and Magyars, resulting in greater political stability; advancements in medieval technology allowing more land to be farmed; 11th-century reforms of the Church that further increased social stability; and the rise of Feudalism, which also brought a measure of social stability. Towns and trade revived, and the rise of a money economy began to weaken the bonds of serfdom that tied peasants to the land. Land was at first plentiful while labour to clear and work the land was scarce; lords who owned the land found new ways to attract and keep labour. Urban centres were able to attract serfs with the promise of freedom. As new regions were settled, both internally and externally, population naturally increased.
Overall, European population tripled between the years 1000 to 1348 and is estimated to have reached a peak of 73.5 million to as high as 100 million, which is substantially higher than the population of the Roman Empire at its peak.
  • England – The population of England, between 1.25 and 2 million in 1086, is estimated to have grown to somewhere between 3.7 million and 5–7 million, although the 14th-century estimates derive from sources after the first plague epidemics, and the estimates for pre-plague population depends on assumed plague mortality, the proportion of children and the rate of omissions in returns of taxable population.
  • Germany/Scandinavia – The population in Germany and Scandinavia rose from 4 million in 1000, to 11.5 million by the 1340.
  • Italy – Italy's population around 1300 has been variously estimated at between 10 and 13 million. The two largest cities in Italy, Venice and Florence, had about 100,000 persons each. The larger cities constituted as high as twenty percent of Italy's population. By 1300, the population of the entire province of Tuscany may have then surpassed 2 million people — a level the region would not reach again until after 1850.
  • Denmark – Danish population reached a peak of 1 million by 13th century, estimated from a survey partially preserved in Waldemar's Land Book.
  • France – In 1328, France is believed to have supported between 15 and 17 million people and 20 million people, the latter not reached again until the early modern period.
  • Kingdom of Hungary – The population of the Carpathian Basin probably did not exceed 1 million at the beginning of the 12th century and it may have been between one and two million before the Mongol invasion of 1240. The extent of destruction is reflected in low population growth in the subsequent period. Even in the early 14th century the population was only slightly higher, between 1.4 and 2.3 million. In the fourteenth century, under Angevin dynasty, the population of the Kingdom reached around 3 million, before the Plague. Transylvania, in the eastern part of the Kingdom, had around 550.000 people by 1300.
  • Wallachia – The region in the Southern part of modern Romania had a population of around 400,000 in fifteenth century.
  • Bulgaria – The population of the territories forming modern Bulgaria grew from around 1.1 million in the year 700 to 2.6 million in 1365.
  • Constantinople – In 1203 the population of Constantinople stood 400,000 to 500,000; when the Byzantines reclaimed the city in 1261 there were only about 35,000 inhabitants left. The population of the city stood between 40,000 and 50,000 by the 1450s. The number of people captured by the Ottomans after the fall of the city was around 33,000.
  • Kievan Rus – the population of Kievan Rus is estimated to be between 4.5 million and 8 million, in the absence of historical sources these estimates are based on the assumed population density.

    Late Middle Ages

By the 14th century, the frontiers of settled cultivation had ceased to expand and internal colonization was coming to an end, but population levels remained high. Then a series of events—sometimes called the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages—collectively killed millions. Starting with the Great Famine in 1315 and the Black Death from 1348, the population of Europe fell abruptly. The period between 1348 and 1420 saw the heaviest loss. In parts of Germany, about 40% of the named inhabitants disappeared. The population of Provence was reportedly halved and in some parts of Tuscany, 70% were lost during this period.
Historians have struggled to explain why so many died. Some have questioned the long-standing theory that the decline in population was caused only by infectious disease and so historians have examined other social factors, as follows.
A classic Malthusian argument has been put forward that Europe was overpopulated: even in good times it was barely able to feed its population. Grain yields in the 14th century were between 2:1 and 7:1 Malnutrition developed gradually over decades, lowering resistance to disease, and competition for resources meant more warfare, and then finally crop yields were pushed down by the Little Ice Age.
An alternative theory is that competition for resources exacerbated the imbalance between property-owners and workers, and that the money supply ceased to keep up with fixed increased economic activity so that wages sank while rents rose, leading to demographic stagnation. The economic conditions of the poor also aggravated the calamities of the plague because they had no recourse, such as fleeing to a villa in the country in the manner of the nobles in the Decameron. The poor lived in crowded conditions and could not isolate the sick, and had weaker immunities from a deficient diet, difficult living and working conditions and poor sanitation. After the plague and other exogenous causes of population decline lowered the labor supply, wages increased. This increased the mobility of labour and led to a redistribution of wealth, although property-owners' attempts to resist change through wage freezes and price controls contributed to popular uprisings such as the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. By 1450, the total population of Europe was substantially below that of 150 years earlier, but all classes overall had a higher standard of living.