This article discusses human demography in Europe during the Middle Ages, including population trends and movements. Demographic changes helped to shape and define the Middle Ages. Population trends in Europe during the Middle Ages can be roughly categorized:
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Late Antiquity saw various indicators of Roman civilization begin 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 first.[1] During the period from 150 to 400 the population of the Roman Empire is estimated to have fallen from 70 million to 50 million, a decline of more than 20%. Proximate causes of the population decrease include the Antonine Plague, 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 there was a decrease in global temperatures which impaired agricultural yields.[2]
The Early Middle Ages saw a continued de-urbanization of the population, but relatively little population growth because of continued political instability with Viking expansion in the north, Arab expansion in the south and to the east Slavs and Magyars. 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, and of this more than half were in the Carolingian Empire that covered modern France, the Low Countries, western Germany, Austria, Slovenia, northern Italy and part of northern Spain. Some medieval settlements were relatively large, with agricultural land and large zones of unpopulated and lawless wilderness in between.
In the 11th century, agriculture expanded into the wilderness, in what are known as the "great clearances". During the High Middle Ages, many forests and marshes were cleared and cultivated. At the same time, during the Ostsiedlung, Germans settled 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 southern Italy. These movements and conquests are part of a larger pattern of population expansion and resettlement that occurred in Europe at this time.[3]
Reasons for this expansion and colonization include
The population of England, around 1 million in 1086, is estimated to have grown to somewhere between 5 and 7 million. France in 1328 (which was geographically smaller than France is today) is believed to have supported 18 to 20 million people, a number not reached again until the early modern period. The region of Tuscany had 2 million people in 1300, which it would not reach again until 1850. Overall, the population of Europe is believed to have reached a peak of 70 to 100 million.[4]
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, then the Hundred Years' War and the Black Death of 1348–1350, the population of Europe plummeted. The period between 1348 and 1420 saw the heaviest loss. In Germany, about 40% of the named inhabitants disappeared. The population of Provence was reduced by 50% and in some regions in Tuscany 70% were lost during this period.
Historians have struggled to explain how so many could have died. There are problems with the long-standing theory that the decline in population was caused only by a contagious disease (see further discussions at Black Death) and so historians have examined other social factors:
Regardless of the cause, populations continued to fall and remained low into the 16th century.
Medieval demography is a fairly new area of study. The sources traditionally used by demographers, such as marriage, birth and death records, are generally not available for this period, so scholars rely on other sources: field data (archaeological) and available written records.
Examples of field data include the physical size of a settlement, and how it grows over time, and the appearance, or disappearance, of settlements. For example after the Black Death the archaeological record shows the abandonment of upwards of 25% of all villages in Spain. However archaeological data are often difficult to interpret. It is often difficult to assign a precise age to discoveries. Also, some of the largest and most important sites are still occupied and cannot be investigated. Available archaeological records may be concentrated on the more peripheral regions, for example early Middle Ages Anglo–Saxon burials at Sutton Hoo, in East Anglia in England, for which otherwise no records exist.
Because of these limitations, much of our knowledge comes from written records: descriptive and administrative accounts. Descriptive accounts include those of chroniclers who wrote about the size of armies, victims of war or famine, participants in an oath. However these cannot be relied on as accurate, and are most useful as supporting evidence rather than being taken factually on their own.
The most important written accounts are those contained in administrative records. These accounts are more objective and accurate because the motivation for writing them was not to influence others. These records can be divided into two categories: surveys and serial documents. Surveys cover an estate or region on a particular date, rather like a modern inventory. Manorial surveys were very common throughout the Middle Ages, in particular in France and England, but faded as serfdom gave way to a money economy. Fiscal surveys came with the rise of the money economy, the most famous and earliest being Domesday Book in 1086. The Book of Hearths from Italy in 1244 is another example. The largest fiscal survey was of France in 1328. As kings continued to look for new ways to raise money, these fiscal surveys increased in number and scope over time. Surveys have limitations, because they are only a snapshot in time; they do not show long term trends, and they tend to exclude elements of society.
Serial records come in different forms. The earliest are from the 8th century and are land conveyances such as sales, exchanges, donations, and leases. Other types of serial records include death records from religious institutions and baptismal registrations. Other helpful records include heriots, court records, food prices and rent prices, from which inferences can be made.
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