Medieval European population can only be estimated from very incomplete data, but the sophisticated research techniques that demographers have developed to exploit these data, and the cautious nature of their conclusions in individual studies, give historians some confidence in their calculations. What their efforts suggest is that from the year 1000 until the Black Death struck in the mid-fourteenth century, the population of the continent increased from roughly thirty-five million to about eighty million.
By the end of the period, the most populous region, as defined by modern political boundaries, was France with roughly fifteen million inhabitants, although some scholars suggest that the number may have been as high as nineteen million. It had reached this peak from a starting point in the year 1000 of about five million. Not far behind were the Germanic-speaking regions of the continent, whose population grew from three or four million at the millennium to twelve to fourteen million by the early fourteenth century. Italy and England, two other regions on which demographers have done convincing work, saw growth from five million and two million respectively to eight or ten million, in the first case, and perhaps five million, in the second.
It is more difficult to estimate demographic change over this period for Iberia, modern Portugal and Spain, where the records are uneven owing to the disruptions brought on by the nearly incessant wars between Christian and Muslim principalities, but one estimate sees a net rise from about seven million at the millennium to nine million at its height before the Plague. It is equally difficult to make entirely persuasive estimates for the Scandinavian countries and parts of central and eastern Europe in the absence of the kinds of written records that exist for France, Germany, Italy, England and certain regions of Iberia. Nonetheless, impressionistic evidence suggests overall general increases of the