Abstract

Summary

Coping with the World. How Medieval Latin Authors Described the Size and Density of World’s Population

This paper takes a dual approach to the topic of medieval demographic thinking between the 13th and 15th century. In a first step, the analysis focusses on travel accounts (e. g. those of John of Plano Carpini, William of Rubruk and Marco Polo) and their depiction of foreign regions and populations. Many Latin Christian travellers shared the impression that the Mongolian steppe was only sparsely populated, quite in contrast to the urban centres in eastern China, which they described in great detail. While most travellers were fascinated by the densely populated areas of the East, other authors and cartographers (e. g. Bartholomeus Anglicus, Roger Bacon, Andreas Walsperger), who did not travel themselves, reacted rather pusillanimously. The paper analyses their rather theoretical statements in a second step. It shows that the huge number of Non-Christians worried those who stayed back. They felt that ‘Christianity’ was under threat. Even more, they equated Christianity with Europe and compared ‘their’ part of the earth to the (infidel) continents of Africa and Asia. Thus, the knowledge that the travellers gained on their journeys was stripped of its admiring character and condensed into a much more negative and anxious point of view. The empirical experience might have given the impulse to think afresh about the distribution of the population of the world, but it was not necessary for the interpretation of this observation. The paper serves as a case study about how knowledge was adapted and interpreted in quite different contexts.