decay. Gold coinage ceased, merchants from the eastern Mediterranean no longer appear
in the sources, and cities that were walled during the chaos of the 3rd century became so
depopulated that they reduced the circuits of the walls, sometimes enclosing little more
than a fortified cathedral.
Like his father and grandfather, Charlemagne (d. 814) pushed back the Muslims,
creating the Spanish March. He annexed Lombardy and Germany, creating a large, safe,
and prosperous empire with a good silver coinage. Gaul’s population regained 5 million,
and for the first time the region surpassed Italy as Europe’s most populous. It remained
almost entirely rural. A modest revival of some towns ended with the disintegration of
the Carolingian empire in the face of Viking raids. Population suffered a new decline in
the 9th and 10th centuries, as Danes seized Normandy and destroyed the Flemish ports;
Muslims attacking from the south established a base at La Garde Freinet in Provence.
Survivors fled to the interior, often to hills, where local lords could defend them more
easily against raiders following the river valleys.
After the raids ended, improved agricultural technology by the 11th century made the
deep, well-watered fields of northern and western France much more productive than the
shallow, sandy soils of the Mediterranean valleys south of the Massif Central. In the
north, the French augmented plowlands by clearing forests that may have come to cover
three-fourths of the surface. Three centuries of expansion followed, and Europe’s
population doubled, while that of France nearly quadrupled, from about 4 to 15 million.
A royal census of 1328, which did not cover the entire kingdom, listed 23,800 parishes
and 2,470,000 hearths. Adding 893,752 hearths to cover the rest of the kingdom,
Ferdinand Lot used a multiplier of five per hearth (except for Paris, where he used 3.5)
and calculated that the French king then ruled 17.6 million people. Other authorities have
since argued for a lower coefficient and a population of 15 million.
Pirenne has described the urbanization of these centuries, as a revival of trade and
industry coincided with the agricultural revolution. Although over 90 percent still lived in
rural settlements, town populations soared. Abandoned Roman sites were reoccupied and
new ones formed under castle walls, faubourgs, or suburbs (burg means fortress), where
merchants wintered. Most of the villeneuves founded during the grands défrichements
remained merely large agricultural villages, although sometimes as large as true towns of
2,000–3,000 people who lived mainly on commerce and industry. Except for the great
towns of Flanders, and Paris (which may have grown from 25,000 in 1200 to 210,000 by
1328), only Marseille, Montpellier, Lyon, and Bordeaux ever attained a population of
30,000. Few other French towns, even important trading or administrative centers,
reached as many as 10,000 people. Because of congestion and poor sanitation, towns
always had a higher mortality rate than rural areas. In spite of considerable emigration,
some areas of Normandy and Burgundy contained as many people ca. 1300 as they do
today.
In the wake of the Black Death of 1348 and extended periods of warfare, France’s
population plunged to about 10 million by 1450, recovering gradually thereafter as
plague recurred less frequently. By 1500, it had still not regained the pre-Black Death
level. After the first visitation wiped out over half their population, some villages and
towns were abandoned and never recovered, but fresh immigrants from the countryside
repopulated most communities, raising the urban percentage of the entire population.
Paris and other cities soon exceeded their preplague totals. The ensuing shortage of rural
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1416