History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Volume 1Gibbon, Edward
HistoryWestern
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Volume 1
Gibbon, Edward
Byzantine Empire -- History -- To 527; Rome -- History -- Empire, 30 B.C.-476 A.D.
Dureau de la Malle is very curious and full on some of the
minuter points of Roman statistics.—M. 1845.]
62 (return) [ Compute twenty millions in France, twenty-two in
Germany, four in Hungary, ten in Italy with its islands, eight in
Great Britain and Ireland, eight in Spain and Portugal, ten or
twelve in the European Russia, six in Poland, six in Greece and
Turkey, four in Sweden, three in Denmark and Norway, four in the
Low Countries. The whole would amount to one hundred and five, or
one hundred and seven millions. See Voltaire, de l’Histoire
Generale. * Note: The present population of Europe is estimated
at 227,700,000. Malts Bran, Geogr. Trans edit. 1832 See details
in the different volumes Another authority, (Almanach de Gotha,)
quoted in a recent English publication, gives the following
details:—
France, 32,897,521 Germany, (including Hungary, Prussian and
Austrian Poland,) 56,136,213 Italy, 20,548,616 Great Britain and
Ireland, 24,062,947 Spain and Portugal, 13,953,959. 3,144,000
Russia, including Poland, 44,220,600 Cracow, 128,480 Turkey,
(including Pachalic of Dschesair,) 9,545,300 Greece, 637,700
Ionian Islands, 208,100 Sweden and Norway, 3,914,963 Denmark,
2,012,998 Belgium, 3,533,538 Holland, 2,444,550 Switzerland,
985,000. Total, 219,344,116
Since the publication of my first annotated edition of Gibbon,
the subject of the population of the Roman empire has been
investigated by two writers of great industry and learning; Mons.
Dureau de la Malle, in his Economie Politique des Romains, liv.
ii. c. 1. to 8, and M. Zumpt, in a dissertation printed in the
Transactions of the Berlin Academy, 1840. M. Dureau de la Malle
confines his inquiry almost entirely to the city of Rome, and
Roman Italy. Zumpt examines at greater length the axiom, which he
supposes to have been assumed by Gibbon as unquestionable, “that
Italy and the Roman world was never so populous as in the time of
the Antonines.” Though this probably was Gibbon’s opinion, he has
not stated it so peremptorily as asserted by Mr. Zumpt. It had
before been expressly laid down by Hume, and his statement was
controverted by Wallace and by Malthus. Gibbon says (p. 84) that
there is no reason to believe the country (of Italy) less
populous in the age of the Antonines, than in that of Romulus;
and Zumpt acknowledges that we have no satisfactory knowledge of
the state of Italy at that early age. Zumpt, in my opinion with
some reason, takes the period just before the first Punic war, as
that in which Roman Italy (all south of the Rubicon) was most
populous. From that time, the numbers began to diminish, at first
from the enormous waste of life out of the free population in the
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