Population History as Source Criticism

Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg’s 1891 reference article, Bevölkerung des Mittelalters und der neueren Zeit bis Ende des 18. Jahrh. in Europa, surveys European population history through the eighteenth century. Its twelve sections move from methodological cautions and a continental overview to the German Empire, German towns, Austria, Switzerland, England, Denmark, France, Belgium, Italy, and Spain. Tables and an extensive bibliography support a reconstruction whose central argument is twofold: premodern demographic growth was repeatedly interrupted, and its measurement depends on records produced for purposes other than counting populations.

Die Bevölkerung wurde höchstens gelegentlich aus Anlaß konkreter Verwaltungsaufgaben verzeichnet.

English translation: The population was recorded at most occasionally in connection with specific administrative tasks.

This administrative origin determines the limits of the evidence. Personal-tax registers sometimes permit relatively secure calculations, whereas hearth and property taxes leave both the taxable population and household size uncertain. Communicant lists, civic registers, and military rolls require conversion factors that cannot simply be assumed. Parish registers become more common only in the sixteenth century and remain incomplete. Inama thus distinguishes recorded persons, households, and fiscal units from the total populations historians seek to reconstruct.

His continental narrative links population to economic organization, settlement, and political security. After the disruption of late Roman society, medieval recovery culminated in colonizing migrations and settlement expansion between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. Fourteenth-century epidemics and unrest interrupted that movement; subsequent wars and recurrent disease repeatedly cancelled gains. Eighteenth-century growth remained modest beside the nineteenth-century acceleration.

For Germany, methodological restraint is especially explicit:

Es ist bei dem gegenwärtigen Stande der Quellen absolut unmöglich, die Bevölkerung des alten deutschen Reiches während des Mittelalters auch nur ganz annähernd zu bestimmen.

English translation: Given the present state of the sources, it is absolutely impossible to determine the population of the old German Empire during the Middle Ages even approximately.

Decentralized administration left no empire-wide statistical foundation. Inama therefore turns to indirect evidence: woodland clearance, subdivision of holdings, eastward settlement, and migration into towns suggest growth before the mid-fourteenth century. Later territorial records make the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War more measurable. Württemberg’s reconstructed population falls from roughly 415,000 in 1634 to 97,000 in 1639; recovery was prolonged. Prussian and Austrian series also trace the gradual emergence of more systematic state enumeration.

The urban section brings population size into relation with demographic structure. Recent research revises inflated estimates of medieval German towns downward. Studies of Frankfurt suggest a larger female share, fewer children because of high childhood mortality, and deaths often exceeding births. Urban population cannot therefore be explained through natural increase alone; migration becomes essential. The Swiss material similarly replaces a smooth growth curve with local histories of epidemic reversals and uneven recovery.

England supplies an unusually rich medieval source in Domesday Book, but even here totals depend on adjustments for omitted towns, household size, and territorial coverage. Comparison with the 1377 poll tax yields only a hypothetical conclusion about long-term stagnation. Denmark likewise requires estimates from holdings and fiscal records, followed by long documentary gaps. France illustrates the broader chronology: Inama follows estimates placing an early-fourteenth-century population peak near a level regained only in the eighteenth century. Belgian evidence again suggests little net growth across several centuries.

Italy sharpens the distinction between demographic change and changes in record-making. Rising numbers of taxable hearths under Spanish rule may chiefly reflect stricter assessment, not rapid population growth. Later censuses nevertheless support prolonged stagnation, followed by eighteenth-century expansion. For urban estimates, Inama retains a pointed reservation:

Wieweit diese Zahlen die Wirklichkeit übertreiben, läßt sich bei dem Mangel genauerer Untersuchungen über die Lebensbedingungen der einzelnen großen Städte nicht angeben.

English translation: To what extent these figures exaggerate reality cannot be stated, given the lack of more precise investigations into living conditions in the individual large cities.

The concluding Spanish section broadens the explanation of decline beyond epidemic and war to expulsions, emigration, taxation, industrial weakness, poverty, reduced marriage, and poor nutrition. Across these regional accounts, population is both an outcome of economic and social conditions and evidence through which those conditions are interpreted. The article’s enduring methodological relevance lies in keeping enumeration practices distinct from the realities they imperfectly register, even where its own sweeping reconstructions remain conjectural.