Introduction

France was Europe’s most populous and powerful country in the Middle Ages. On the eve of the Black Death, France contained 16–17 million inhabitants, around 20 million within the present borders, by far the largest population of any European country, e.g., about three times the population of England. This population inhabited a territory of about 425,000 km2, about 75,000 km2 smaller than today. The average population density was 38–40 persons/km2, among the highest in Europe. The routes and remains of the Roman network of cobbled or stone-paved roads or highways (voies romaine) were still the main communication lines by land, and, therefore, the principal routes along which the Black Death was spread by trade and travel and from which it was fanning out into the countryside along trackways and pathways.

France was politically and administratively fragmented according to basic feudal social structures. Dukes and counts and local assemblies of grandees exerted considerable political powers. The English king held a large territory in south-western France in homage of the French king, the Duchy of Guyenne, which also comprised Gascony and the leading city and important seaport of Bordeaux with nearly 30,000 inhabitants. At the time of the Black Death, the Hundred Years War had broken out because of conflicting views on the political status of these areas. Even the pope enjoyed possession of French territory, namely Avignon and surrounding districts situated about 90 km north-west of Marseille where, at the time of the Black Death, the popes had been resident since 1309 (and would remain so until 1377).

The history of the Black Death in France is a somewhat neglected topic. There are mainly scattered local studies, also some valuable chapters in monographs on the history of areas or cities. Baratier’s impressive 1961 treatise on the demography of Provence in the period 1300–1600 contains important information on the Black Death but the epidemic is not really in focus and the information is not gathered systematically together for analysis and synthesis. There is not any specific study focusing on the Black Death’s arrival and spread in France with the ambition to gather together all relevant data and establish a deductive basis for a synthesis on the pattern and dynamics of spread and the mortality rate at the national, regional or local levels of analysis.