The Italian city of Venice was one of the largest cities in medieval and Renaissance era Europe. It was the center of the Republic of Venice, a maritime empire in the Mediterranean, and had one of Europe's largest ports for exotic goods (particularly from Asia), or luxury goods such as glassware. Impact of plague While its population was relatively small by modern standards, it is believed that Venice was among the five most populous cities in Western Europe in the given years between 1050 and 1650. The city's population did fluctuate over time due to devastating pandemics, and it is believed that Venice was one of the main points of entry for the Black Death in Europe. Venice was one of the hardest-hit cities during the Black Death; estimates fluctuate greatly across sources, but it is believed that the city lost around 40 percent of its population during the initial outbreak in the 1340s. Decline Furthermore, Venice lost roughly a third of its population during further plague pandemics (both introduced via war) in the 1570s and 1630s. Because of this, the population was kept fairly consistent across the given years between 1600 and 1800. The 18th century also saw the decline of the Venetian Empire, as other states gained power and influence in the Mediterranean. Venice also lost its importance as the entry point of exotic goods into Europe, as other European powers had already established their own maritime empires and trade routes across the globe. Eventually, the crumbling Venetian Empire fell to Napoleon in 1796, and its overseas territories were gradually taken by or split among various other powers. While the empire fell, the city itself continued to be a center for art and culture in Europe, and it has maintained this status until today. In 2021, Venice had a population of more than 250,000 people.

It is estimated that the largest cities in Western Europe in 1330 were Paris and Granada. At this time, Paris was the seat of power in northern France, while Granada had become the largest multicultural city in southern Spain, controlled by the Muslim, Nasrid Kingdom during Spain's Reconquista period. The next three largest cities were Venice, Genoa and Milan, all in northern Italy, renowned as important trading cities during the middle ages. In October 1347, the first wave of the Black Death had arrived in Sicily and then began spreading throughout Europe, decimating the population.

Medieval European urbanization presents a line of continuity between earlier cities and modern European urban systems. Yet, many of the spatial, political and economic features of medieval European cities were particular to the Middle Ages, and subsequently changed over the Early Modern Period and Industrial Revolution. There is a long tradition of demographic studies estimating the population sizes of medieval European cities, and comparative analyses of these data have shed much light on the long-term evolution of urban systems. However, the next step—to systematically relate the population size of these cities to their spatial and socioeconomic characteristics—has seldom been taken. This raises a series of interesting questions, as both modern and ancient cities have been observed to obey area-population relationships predicted by settlement scaling theory. To address these questions, we analyze a new dataset for the settled area and population of 173 European cities from the early fourteenth century to determine the relationship between population and settled area. To interpret this data, we develop two related models that lead to differing predictions regarding the quantitative form of the population-area relationship, depending on the level of social mixing present in these cities. Our empirical estimates of model parameters show a strong densification of cities with city population size, consistent with patterns in contemporary cities. Although social life in medieval Europe was orchestrated by hierarchical institutions (e.g., guilds, church, municipal organizations), our results show no statistically significant influence of these institutions on agglomeration effects. The similarities between the empirical patterns of settlement relating area to population observed here support the hypothesis that cities throughout history share common principles of organization that self-consistently relate their socioeconomic networks to structured urban spaces.

In the Middle Ages, it is believed the largest Jewish populations in the world were found in Asia, particularly across the Middle East. Of the estimated total Jewish population of 1.2 million people, over 80 percent are thought to have lived in Asia, while 13 percent lived in Europe, and the remaining six precent lived in (North) Africa. The largest populations were found on the Arabian peninsula, as well as Iran and Iraq, while the Near East (here referring to the Levant region) had a much smaller population, despite being the spiritual homeland of the Jewish people.

These figures are based on the records of Benjamin of Tudela, a Jewish traveller from the Middle Ages who provided one of the most comprehensive collections of population statistics from the period. Benjamin's writings not only recorded the number of Jews living across this part of the world, but also gave an insight into societal structures and the ordinary daily lives within Jewish communities in the medieval period. The source providing these figures, however, has adjusted some of the statistics to account for known populations that were missing from Benjamin of Tudela's records, especially in Europe and Asia.

The earliest point where scientists can make reasonable estimates for the population of global regions is around 10,000 years before the Common Era (or 12,000 years ago). Estimates suggest that Asia has consistently been the most populated continent, and the least populated continent has generally been Oceania (although it was more heavily populated than areas such as North America in very early years). Population growth was very slow, but an increase can be observed between most of the given time periods. There were, however, dips in population due to pandemics, the most notable of these being the impact of plague in Eurasia in the 14th century, and the impact of European contact with the indigenous populations of the Americas after 1492, where it took almost four centuries for the population of Latin America to return to its pre-1500 level. The world's population first reached one billion people in 1803, which also coincided with a spike in population growth, due to the onset of the demographic transition. This wave of growth first spread across the most industrially developed countries in the 19th century, and the correlation between demographic development and industrial or economic maturity continued until today, with Africa being the final major region to begin its transition in the late-1900s.

Throughout the early modern period, the largest city in Italy was Naples. The middle ages saw many metropolitan areas along the Mediterranean grow to become the largest in Europe, as they developed into meeting ports for merchants travelling between the three continents. Italy, throughout this time, was not a unified country, but rather a collection of smaller states that had many cultural similarities, and political control of these cities regularly shifted over the given period. Across this time, the population of each city generally grew between each century, but a series of plague outbreaks in the 1600s devastated the populations of Italy's metropolitan areas, which can be observed here. Naples At the beginning of the 1500s, the Kingdom of Naples was taken under the control of the Spanish crown, where its capital grew to become the largest city in the newly-expanding Spanish Empire. Prosperity then grew in the 16th and 17th centuries, before the city's international importance declined in the 18th century. There is also a noticeable dip in Naples' population size between 1600 and 1700, due to an outbreak of plague in 1656 that almost halved the population. Today, Naples is just the third largest city in Italy, behind Rome and Milan. Rome Over 2,000 years ago, Rome became the first city in the world to have a population of more than one million people, and in 2021, it was Italy's largest city with a population of 2.8 million; however it did go through a period of great decline in the middle ages. After the Fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476CE, Rome's population dropped rapidly, below 100,000 inhabitants in 500CE. 1,000 years later, Rome was an important city in Europe as it was the seat of the Catholic Church, and it had a powerful banking sector, but its population was just 55,000 people as it did not have the same appeal for merchants or migrants held by the other port cities. A series of reforms by the Papacy in the late-1500s then saw significant improvements to infrastructure, housing, and sanitation, and living standards rose greatly. Over the following centuries, the Papacy consolidated its power in the center of the Italian peninsula, which brought stability to the region, and the city of Rome became a cultural center. Across this period, Rome's population grew almost three times larger, which was the highest level of growth of these cities.

Background: Habitat fragmentation has accelerated within the last century, but may have been ongoing over longer time scales. We analyzed the timing and genetic consequences of fragmentation in two isolated lake-dwelling brown trout populations. They are from the same river system (the Gudenå River, Denmark) and have been isolated from downstream anadromous trout by dams established ca. 600-800 years ago. For reference, we included ten other anadromous populations and two hatchery strains. Based on analysis of 44 microsatellite loci we investigated if the lake populations have been naturally genetically differentiated from anadromous trout for thousands of years, or have diverged recently due to the establishment of dams. Results: Divergence time estimates were based on 1) Approximate Bayesian Computation and 2) a coalescent-based isolation-with-gene-flow model. Both methods suggested divergence times ca. 600-800 years bp, providing strong evidence for establishment of dams in the Medieval as the factor causing divergence. Bayesian cluster analysis showed influence of stocked trout in several reference populations, but not in the focal lake and anadromous populations. Estimates of effective population size using a linkage disequilibrium method ranged from 244 to > 1,000 in all but one anadromous population, but were lower (153 and 252) in the lake populations. Conclusions: We show that genetic divergence of lake-dwelling trout in two Danish lakes reflects establishment of water mills and impassable dams ca. 600-800 years ago rather than a natural genetic population structure. Although effective population sizes of the two lake populations are not critically low they may ultimately limit response to selection and thereby future adaptation. Our results demonstrate that populations may have been affected by anthropogenic disturbance over longer time scales than normally assumed.

In the period between 400 to 800 AD, also known as the period of the Barbarian invasions, intense migration is documented in the historical record of Europe. However, little is known about the demographic impact of these historical movements, potentially ranging from negligible to substantial. As a pilot study in a broader project on Medieval Europe, we sampled 102 specimens from 5 burial sites in Northwestern Italy, archaeologically classified as belonging to Lombards or Longobards, a Germanic people ruling over a vast section of the Italian peninsula from 568 to 774. We successfully amplified and typed the mitochondrial hypervariable region I (HVR-I) of 28 individuals. Comparisons of genetic diversity with other ancient populations and haplotype networks did not suggest that these samples are heterogeneous, and hence allowed us to jointly compare them with three isolated contemporary populations, and with a modern sample of a large city, representing a control for the effects of recent immigration. We then generated by serial coalescent simulations 16 millions of genealogies, contrasting a model of genealogical continuity with one in which the contemporary samples are genealogically independent from the medieval sample. Analyses by Approximate Bayesian Computation showed that the latter model fits the data in most cases, with one exception, Trino Vercellese, in which the evidence was compatible with persistence up to the present time of genetic features observed among this early medieval population. We conclude that it is possible, in general, to detect evidence of genealogical ties between medieval and specific modern populations. However, only seldom did mitochondrial DNA data allow us to reject with confidence either model tested, which indicates that broader analyses, based on larger assemblages of samples and genetic markers, are needed to understand in detail the effects of medieval migration.

The world's Jewish population has had a complex and tumultuous history over the past millennia, regularly dealing with persecution, pogroms, and even genocide. The legacy of expulsion and persecution of Jews, including bans on land ownership, meant that Jewish communities disproportionately lived in urban areas, working as artisans or traders, and often lived in their own settlements separate to the rest of the urban population. This separation contributed to the impression that events such as pandemics, famines, or economic shocks did not affect Jews as much as other populations, and such factors came to form the basis of the mistrust and stereotypes of wealth (characterized as greed) that have made up anti-Semitic rhetoric for centuries. Development since the Middle Ages The concentration of Jewish populations across the world has shifted across different centuries. In the Middle Ages, the largest Jewish populations were found in Palestine and the wider Levant region, with other sizeable populations in present-day France, Italy, and Spain. Later, however, the Jewish disapora became increasingly concentrated in Eastern Europe after waves of pogroms in the west saw Jewish communities move eastward. Poland in particular was often considered a refuge for Jews from the late-Middle Ages until the 18th century, when it was then partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia, and persecution increased. Push factors such as major pogroms in the Russian Empire in the 19th century and growing oppression in the west during the interwar period then saw many Jews migrate to the United States in search of opportunity.

Keywords; Search terms: historical time series; historical statistics; histat / HISTAT .

Abstract:

The author`s analysis explains to what extent the Central European agriculture and food industry has managed to satisfy the demand of the population in the centuries since the Middle Ages. For this purpose, the author collects and analyses prices, wages, rents, agricultural products, and population movements, as well as the costs of living of broad levels of the population. The price data at hand (prices of wheat and rye in Germany, Europe and America) provide a substantial basis for his analysis.

On the basis of the long-term fluctuation of corn prices in England, France, Northern Italy, Germany and Austria, three waves of development can be identified:

1. An upswing in the 13th and partly also at the beginning of the 14th century is followed by a downswing in the late Middle Ages.
2. Another upswing in the 16th century was interrupted in the 17th century;
3. a third upswing in the 18th century dissolved in the 19th century into shorter and partly opposed movements that merge again only in the late 19th and 20th century.

What do these waves mean?

There are two approaches which could explain these developments: 1. Such price fluctuations are the consequence of a fluctuating supply of money in the Central European economy. 2. The rise in prices is caused by the growing demand of a rapidly growing population. On the one hand, the author verifies the ´laws of development´ by MALTHUS and RICARDO on the basis of the historical facts. On the other hand, the historical series of developments are interpreted by way of an appropriate scheme of terms and relations regarding their meaning.

Topics:

Tables in the ZA-Online-Database HISTAT: - prices of rye in Germany (1341-1940) - prices of wheat and rye in Europe and America (1991-1830) - prices of wheat and rye in Central Europe (1201-1960)

It is estimated that the cities of Cordova (modern-day Córdoba) and Palermo were the largest cities in Europe in 1050, and had between fifteen and twenty times the population of most other entries in this graph, Despite this the cities of Cordova (the capital city of the Umayyad caliphate, who controlled much of the Iberian peninsula from the seventh to eleventh centuries), and Palermo (another Arab-controlled capital in Southern Europe) were still the only cities in Western Europe with a population over one hundred thousand people, closely followed by Seville. It is also noteworthy to point out that the five largest cities on this list were importing trading cities, in modern day Spain or Italy, although the largest cities become more northern and western European in later lists (1200, 1330, 1500, 1650 and 1800). In 1050, todays largest Western European cities, London and Paris, had just twenty-five and twenty thousand inhabitants respectively.

The period of European history (and much of world history) between 500 and 1500 is today known as the 'Dark Ages'. Although the term 'Dark Ages' was originally applied to the lack of literature and arts, it has since been applied to the lack or scarcity of recorded information from this time. Because of these limitations, much information about this time is still being debated today.

ArcGIS shapefile of 245polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the 55 registration counties of England and Wales as given in the 1851 census.

These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century.

The urban peoples of the Swahili coast traded across eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean and were among the first sub-Saharan practitioners of Islam. The extent to which these early interactions between Africans and non-Africans were accompanied by genetic exchange remains unknown. We report ancient DNA data for 80 individuals from six medieval and early modern (1250-1800 CE) coastal towns and an inland town postdating 1650 CE. Many coastal individuals had over half their DNA from primarily female African ancestors, with large proportions and occasionally more than half from Asian ancestors. The Asian ancestry included both Persian and Indian-associated components, with eighty to ninety percent from Persian males. Peoples of African and Asian origins began to mix by about 1000 CE, coinciding with large-scale adoption of Islam. Before about 1500 CE, the Southwest Asian ancestry was mainly Persian-related, consistent with the narrative of the Kilwa Chronicle, the oldest history told by people of the Swahili coast. After this time, the sources became increasingly Arabian, consistent with evidence of growing interactions with southern Arabia. Subsequent interactions with Asians and Africans further changed the ancestry of Swahili coast people relative to the medieval individuals whose DNA we sequenced.

The dataset was created within the project “Land use, social transformations and woodland in Central European Prehistory. Modelling approaches to human-environment interactions” funded by the Czech Science Foundation (19-20970Y). This dataset represents the largest and the most comprehensive collection of archaeological radiocarbon dates from the Czech Republic to date. The dataset offers 1579 samples from 347 archaeological sites dating from Early Mesolithic (10 000 BC) to Medieval Period (AD 1250). Published in a simple spreadsheet format, the database offers researchers a quick tool for further analyses. It is important to highlight that dates we collected originated only from archaeological contexts, which means that we have excluded some radiocarbon dates produced through palaeoecological research without a direct relationship to past human activities, such as pollen records or samples from fossilized trees in river beds. The dataset is intended to be used for demographic modelling of population numbers during periods without written records, i.e. prehistory.

ArcGIS shapefile of 288 polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the fifty-five ancient counties of England and Wales as given in the 1831 census for England and Wales. As such this represents the counties of England and Wales as they were before the boundary changes caused by the Counties (Detached Parts) Act, 1844 (7 & 8 Vict. c. 61) which led to the elimination of some of the detached portions of counties.

These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century.

Minimum, maximum, and mean DSR values (μmday-1) within 200 μm from the EDJ.

ArcGIS shapefile of 1194 polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the 624 registration districts of England and Wales as given in the 1851 census.

These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century.

It is only in the past two centuries where demographics and the development of human populations has emerged as a subject in its own right, as industrialization and improvements in medicine gave way to exponential growth of the world's population. There are very few known demographic studies conducted before the 1800s, which means that modern scholars have had to use a variety of documents from centuries gone by, along with archeological and anthropological studies, to try and gain a better understanding of the world's demographic development. Genealogical records One such method is the study of genealogical records from the past; luckily, there are many genealogies relating to European families that date back as far as medieval times. Unfortunately, however, all of these studies relate to families in the upper and elite classes; this is not entirely representative of the overall population as these families had a much higher standard of living and were less susceptible to famine or malnutrition than the average person (although elites were more likely to die during times of war). Nonetheless, there is much to be learned from this data. Impact of the Black Death In the centuries between 1200 and 1745, English male aristocrats who made it to their 21st birthday were generally expected to live to an age between 62 and 72 years old. The only century where life expectancy among this group was much lower was in the 1300s, where the Black Death caused life expectancy among adult English noblemen to drop to just 45 years. Experts assume that the pre-plague population of England was somewhere between four and seven million people in the thirteenth century, and just two million in the fourteenth century, meaning that Britain lost at least half of its population due to the plague. Although the plague only peaked in England for approximately eighteen months, between 1348 and 1350, it devastated the entire population, and further outbreaks in the following decades caused life expectancy in the decade to drop further. The bubonic plague did return to England sporadically until the mid-seventeenth century, although life expectancy among English male aristocrats rose again in the centuries following the worst outbreak, and even peaked at more than 71 years in the first half of the sixteenth century.

This project seeks to understand prehistoric and historical Norse uses of whales, seals and walruses in the North Atlantic and Eastern Arctic over the course of the Middle Ages, from 800-1500 CE (Common Era). Evidence from Arctic and North Atlantic historical and literary sources and archaeological sites reveals frequent use of marine mammals by prehistoric hunters and scavengers and Norse settlers, but details about the uses of whale, seal, and walrus are unquantified, broad and approximate. These northern regions are critically important ecosystems to current North American economies and interests. They were home to the world's earliest whaling industries and support ongoing sealing and whaling traditions. However, we know almost nothing about the origins and scale of whale, seal, and walrus use in these once fertile waters. Given the complexity of marine food webs in regions like the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans, reconstruction of preindustrial or 'pristine' maritime ecosystems is critical in modern restoration efforts and for the preservation and sustainable use of fish and mammal populations today. Without clear knowledge of ancient and early historic marine mammal populations, we cannot gauge what healthy marine mammal populations would look like today. The fourteen-member research team, from the disciplines of humanities, history, archaeology, biology, genetics and others, aims to investigate the deep history of whale, seal, and walrus use in the Eastern Arctic and North Atlantic. This research will span the first settlements of the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland in the Viking Age (beginning around 800 CE), through the Medieval Warm Period (circa 1000-1250), and concluding with the Little Ice Age at the end of the Middle Ages (1300-1500). In addition to assessing the social, cultural, and economic importance of marine mammal use among Norse populations, the research study uses cutting-edge genetic and chemical analyses to provide a far better understanding of marine mammal populations in the Arctic and North Atlantic before the major changes resulting from industrial-scale hunting beginning in the sixteenth century. Evidence from houses, burials, and trading sites, from current archaeological excavations and museum collections, as well as histories, sagas, maps, illuminated manuscripts and other traditional sources of knowledge, are combined with scientific approaches to ancient animal bones and the genetic stories that they can tell. This project will build interdisciplinary connections across the social and natural sciences, will bring together researchers and students from six countries and eleven academic institutions and museums, and will employ the most current technologies and scholarship in genetics, biology, digital humanities, and zooarchaeology. The research team hopes to uncover new evidence about the marine animals that populated medieval seas, and the manners in which medieval Icelanders, Greenlanders, and others encountered and exploited these mammals. The project team will produce scholarly articles, translations, new genetic and zooarchaeological data sets, will participate in academic conferences and public presentations, and will design both curricular and museum materials to communicate our results to a broader audience. Undergraduate and graduate students will be guided through transdisciplinary research collaborations in the US and abroad. Finally, the team scientists think that their results may also aid colleagues in the natural sciences in reconstruction of ancient seas, climates, animal populations, and environmental change, with direct application to major issues of future sustainability. This project seeks answers to fundamental questions about medieval marine mammal exploitation, focusing on Norse uses of whales, seals and walruses in the North Atlantic prior to 1500 CE. In a region dominated by charismatic Arctic megafauna, where modern industrial whaling was born and where current whaling and sealing attract global attention, the prehistory and early history of marine mammal use remain unclear in its scale and purpose. The researchers' transdisciplinary approach employs Local and Traditional Knowledge (LTK), digital humanities, environmental histories, and innovative technologies of genetic analysis to new and existing sea mammal archaeofaunal assemblages to produce a holistic long-term perspective on the social, cultural, and economic history of marine mammal use in medieval northern Europe. This research spans the first settlements of the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland in the Viking Age and the Medieval Climatic Optimum, through the Little Ice Age onset in the high Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. The length of the project survey period (+ 700 years) will result in samples across a broad range of time and space, which allows the science team to contextualize newly-generated aDNA marine mammal data across several documented periods of major climate change in the North Atlantic and Subarctic. The project will also provide a far better understanding of marine mammal dynamics in these regions prior to the major changes resulting from industrial-scale hunting impacts beginning in the sixteenth century. The project utilizes: 1) a new integration with the rich medieval written record for Iceland aided by digital and environmental humanities approaches; 2) a greatly expanded zooarchaeological database created since the International Polar Year (IPY) by the North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) research cooperative; 3) newly expanded capabilities in ancient DNA (aDNA) analysis, allowing species-level identification on a wide range of otherwise unidentifiable sea mammal bones; 4) new data management and visualization tools providing more effective cross disciplinary communication and wider public engagement through cooperation with the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NISDC) and NABO project management system; and 5) facilities for wide transdisciplinary dissemination of results through the Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (IHOPE) program as part of the Future Earth global change initiative. This project will build capacity for scientific collaboration and data management, dissemination, and visualization, while improving species-level identification, exceeding current capabilities of simple morphometric analysis or collagen fingerprinting of sea mammal bones from archaeological contexts and museum collections. In addition, it offers the promise to create important new bodies of evidence for a range of scholarly disciplines across a broad temporal and geographical series of case studies. Finally, the proposed project's use of extant data sets - textual, archaeological, biological - may provide an innovative new model for transdisciplinary analysis of premodern marine mammal use that can be applied across the North Atlantic and circumpolar Arctic. The researchers hope to establish a historical baseline of marine mammal use that reveals a more complete economic and ecological portrait of the Norse North Atlantic. Through collaborations with North Pacific and Western Arctic colleagues, the research team's work will complete a circumpolar perspective of prehistoric and early historic marine mammal exploitation. By answering fundamental questions of marine mammal use, this research has the potential to provide context or evidence for lost genetic diversity among key marine species, now under pressure from both natural and human drivers of environmental change. This integrative approach, including collaboration of scholars and students from twelve institutions across North America and Europe, also provides new models and innovative methodologies for transdisciplinary research in the social sciences and humanities, with direct application to major issues of future sustainability.

ArcGIS shapefile of 244 polygons providing boundary and attribute data for the fifty-five ancient counties of England and Wales as given in the 1851 census for England and Wales.

These data were created as part of a research program directed by Leigh Shaw-Taylor and Tony Wrigley, which aims ultimately to reconstruct the evolution of the occupational structure of Britain from the late medieval period down to the early twentieth century.