ABSTRACT
Most surveys of urban growth in ‘the long sixteenth century’ stress the comparatively high level of early modern population mobility encouraged by the emergence of qualitatively new phenomena in the spheres of the economy, culture and religion. There is also a prevailing consensus among historians referring to ‘natural decrease theory’. Historical demographers have suggested that, because of the high mortality rates caused by epidemics, wars, natural catastrophes, and continual problems with hygiene, the natural increase of the urban population was either moderate or nonexistent.1 Therefore, it was primarily immigration that either produced the rise or compensated for population losses.2
