Mortality and the Demographic Catastrophe

Modern historical estimates calculate that the Black Death killed between 30 and 60 percent of Europe's total population in the space of roughly six years, between 1347 and 1353. The historian Ole Benedictow, in his influential study The Black Death, 1346-1353: The Complete History (2004), argued for a mortality rate close to 60 percent, notably higher than the traditional estimates of 30 to 40 percent accepted by earlier generations of scholars. Under these reconstructions, Europe's population fell from roughly 75-80 million inhabitants before the pandemic to somewhere between 30 and 50 million afterward, and full demographic recovery took centuries, with many regions not regaining their pre-pandemic population levels until well into the sixteenth century.