On the Evidence of Growth of Population in the West from the Eleventh to the Thirteenth Century

Economic expansion, religious ferment, renaissance of letters and development of science, creation of an original art, territorial gains at the expense of the infidel world, all these phenomena of which the life of Christian Europe was woven between the 11th century and the 13th are in some way related to a net growth of the population. This chapter shows that, although some historians may have exaggerated in speaking of the "demographic revolution of the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries" and although knowledge is still far from precise, the impression that population was growing is well founded. Along with chance references to the development of rural industry, the chapter provides a clear proof of a rise in the population curve-in the expansion of the West. Between the 11th century and the 13th, and even into the 14th century, they were drawing colonists from all parts of the Christian West.