For the continent as a whole, the population growth under way by 1500 continued over the “long” 16th century until the second or third decade of the 17th century. A recent estimate by the American historian Jan De Vries set Europe’s population (excluding Russia and the Ottoman Empire) at 61.6 million in 1500, 70.2 million in 1550, and 78.0 million in 1600; it then lapsed back to 74.6 million in 1650. The distribution of population across the continent was also shifting. Northwestern Europe (especially the Low Countries and the British Isles) witnessed the most vigorous expansion; England’s population more than doubled between 1500, when it stood at an estimated 2.6 million, and 1650, when it probably attained 5.6 million. Northwestern Europe also largely escaped the demographic downturn of the mid-17th century, which was especially pronounced in Germany, Italy, and Spain. In Germany, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) may have cost the country, according to different estimates, between 25 and 40 percent of its population.
Cities also grew, though slowly at first. The proportion of Europeans living in cities with 10,000 or more residents increased from 5.6 percent of the total population in 1500 to only 6.3 percent in 1550. The towns of England continued to suffer a kind of depression, now often called “urban decay,” in the first half of the century. The process of urbanization then accelerated, placing 7.6 percent of the population in cities by 1600, and even continued during the 17th-century crisis. The proportion of population in cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants reached 8.3 percent in 1650.
More remarkable than the slow growth in the number of urban residents was the formation of cities of a size never achieved in the medieval period. These large cities were of two principal types. Capitals and administrative centres—such as Naples, Rome, Madrid, Paris, Vienna, and Moscow—give testimony to the new powers of the state and its ability to mobilize society’s resources in support of courts and bureaucracies. Naples, one of Europe’s largest cities in 1550, was also one of its poorest. The demographic historian J.C. Russell theorized that Naples’ swollen size was indicative of the community’s “loss of control” over its numbers. Already in the 16th century, Naples was a prototype of the big, slum-ridden, semiparasitic cities to be found in many poorer regions of the world in the late 20th century.
Commercial ports, which might also have been capitals, formed a second set of large cities: examples include Venice, Livorno, Sevilla (Seville), Lisbon, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, Bremen, and Hamburg. About 1550, Antwerp was the chief port of the north. In 1510, the Portuguese moved their trading station from Brugge to Antwerp, making it the chief northern market for the spices they were importing from India. The Antwerp bourse, or exchange, simultaneously became the leading money market of the north. At its heyday in mid-century, the city counted 90,000 inhabitants. The revolt of the Low Countries against Spanish rule (from 1568) ruined Antwerp’s prosperity. Amsterdam, which replaced it as the greatest northern port, grew from 30,000 in 1550 to 65,000 in 1600 and 175,000 in 1650. The mid-17th century—a period of recession in many European regions—was Holland’s golden age. Late in the century, Amsterdam faced the growing challenge of another northern port, which was also the capital of a powerful national state—London. With 400,000 residents by 1650 and growing rapidly, London then ranked below only Paris (440,000) as Europe’s largest city. Urban concentrations of such magnitude were unprecedented; in the Middle Ages, the largest size attained was roughly 220,000, reached by a single city, Paris, about 1328.
Another novelty of the 16th century was the appearance of urban systems, or hierarchies of cities linked together by their political or commercial functions. Most European cities had been founded in medieval or even in ancient times, but they long remained intensely competitive, duplicated each other’s functions, and never coalesced during the Middle Ages into tight urban systems. The more intensive, more far-flung commerce of the early modern age required a clearer distribution of functions and cooperation as much as competition. The centralization of governments in the 16th century also demanded clearly defined lines of authority and firm divisions of functions between national and regional capitals.