Population densities in Roman-Age Europe?

Wed Jun 4 12:33:19 UTC 2014

I know these measurements are hugely variable and highly likely to be inaccurate.

The first reason is that there is just almost no data.

The second reason is that the data there is better referred to as propaganda.

The third reason is that the propaganda data is skewed ideologically.

The first mostly explains itself. Unless you lived in places where written censuses were taken regularly, it’s mostly guessing. Often hundreds to thousands of years after the fact.

Second, censuses are taken by people in powerful nations. One major way to show the power of your nation is to have a large population (of fighting men). So you will very quickly get to suspiciously convenient figures of so many tens of thousands or so many hundreds of thousands.

Related to this is that it is often unknown whether a census is of “fighting men”  or includes other people. If it is of “fighting men” how is that defined, and how many other people exist per fighting man? For example, is the 10 year old squire to a knight who has been given a sharp short knife a fighting man? 

Also related to this is commonly census data is really data derived from military conquests. Here we have the “we are powerful because we defeated so many people” effect. Or “we are so awesome that so few of us defeated so many of them”. Either way, you have an inflated figure.

Going the other way, (especially local) censuses were often inaccurate on the low side. They were often taken for tax purposes or for forced military service requirements. People with criminal records were often treated to extreme violence if they encountered government representatives. This all leads to people hiding when the census taker comes to town.

Even in the industrial era, accurate censuses of major nations and major cities could be highly inaccurate. Right now, China, India, and Africa are full of large cities where literally no one knows the population. Sometimes by millions of people. Sometimes because only certain status inhabitants count. Sometimes because urban areas are not defined.

This was true of places like New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Istanbul, Vienna, Rome, Moscow, Tokyo 100-150 years ago.

Third, serious investigation of this subject has come mostly in the 20th century. This was a very ideologically skewed period filled with many wars.

In this case, it was often desirable to show the suffering your people had undergone by proposing large casualty figures, which would be debated and disputed for decades. How many Russians were killed by Germans in WW2 (and do Ukrainians count as Russians)? How many Russians were killed by Stalin’s programs in and around WW2? How accurate were the censuses of the Russian population when the country had been in a state of war and revolution from 1905 to at least the mid-1920s? Same with Chinese casualties from Japan. Mao vs. Stalin vs. Hitler?

And we have the reverse: how many casualties did Germany and Japan have? If you care too much, are you a Nazi or an Imperialist?

Do the same for smaller wars.

Then we have the example of the Americas. How many people lived in the American continents before the Europeans arrived? Estimates have ranged from a couple million to a hundred million. Your preference for an estimate is often biased by whether you are eager to show the United States and its authoritarian South American allies as vicious fiends, or are eager to show that your noble ancestors created a wonderful nation out of a vastly unpopulated land laid out for them by god.

But digging up dead people and making population estimates has grown in accuracy with advancements in genetic knowledge and technology (for humans, animals and plants), and widespread archaeology that was not focused on finding the gold but figuring out how people in general lived and what they ate. These things were very expensive before the late 1990s, or impossible. Keep that in mind when using older estimates that tend to be made by historians looking at books written by other historians.

Now here’s an example: “Caesar greifft daraufhin die Eindringlinge an. Von angeblich 430 000 Usipeten und Tenkterern sterben die meisten. (in 55BC)” (From Caesar’s “Commentarii de Bello Gallico”)

This says that Caesar estimated that up to 430,000 people from the Germanic Usipeten and Tenkteren tribes died facing his legions. In this case, the legions were forcing these tribes to move from the Roman side of the Rhine to the other side.  The Usipeten and Tenkteren had crossed the Rhine in the first place because they were fleeing other Germanic tribes (the Sueves particularly, now source of the name Swabia).

So the Sueves were supposedly powerful enough that two tribes of 500,000+ people were forced by them to cross a river into enemy territory, and that the Romans killed 430,000 of those tribes to convince them to move back to the other side of the river where the Sueves who had already violently convinced them to leave still were waiting.

The Romans also built two bridges across the Rhine so they could more thoroughly dispatch the Usipeten and the Tenkeren, burning down all the villages and farms they could find.

The Usipeten tribe is believed to have inhabited the right bank of the Rhine in a region roughly between Dusseldorf and Köln, with the territory extending eastward into the forest in the Sauerland region. About 3000km2, which is about 167 people per km2. Assuming that the number from Caesar including non-combatants, that they all moved, and we’re ignoring the Sueves who moved in there.

Does this sound plausible? It was written by a first-hand observer. It also suggests that populations the Germanic tribes of central and eastern Europe were far higher than 6-8 people per km2.

The Usipeten returned to cause trouble on the Roman side of the Rhine in 16BC and 12BC, and by the 1st century got across the Rhine and stayed there. They remained a political entity until the 4th Century when they became part of the Frankish coalition. So they could take a hit of a few hundred thousand and keep going.
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