ABSTRACT
Broadly speaking one can say that at the beginning of the new millennium Europe’s population was thinly scattered across the continent: around the year AD 1000 there were probably no more than 30 to 35 million people in the whole of Europe (Russia and the Balkans included). From the tenth century until the beginning of the fourteenth century the population grew slowly but steadily.1 During this period the populations of France, Germany, and the British Isles probably tripled, while the population of Italy probably doubled. By the 1330s and 1340s the total population of Europe must have been at least 80 million. Then in 1348 came the Black Death, which wiped out some 25 million in a matter of about two years. Wars, famines, and above all epidemics struck again and again over the following 150 years or so, and population recovery was painfully slow. At the end of the fifteenth century the total population of Europe was still around the 80million mark. The sixteenth century saw substantial growth, and by the beginning of the seventeenth century Europe must have totaled about 100 million people. The wars and epidemics of the seventeenth century had the effect of stabilizing the population at that level, and in 1700 Europe must still have numbered around 110 million inhabitants (see Table 1.1, p. 4).
