Village Desertions in Late Medieval
Germany
This map shows the geographic varation of village desertions in
late medieval Germany. The highest quotient seems to have been in a district of
northern Thuringia, a region bounded by the rivers Elbe, Saale, Bode and Sülze:
there, of 179 settlements extant during the period between 1000 and 1200, only
33 remained in the mid-sixteenth century.This represented a local decline of 83%.All
in all, the number of settlements in Germany declined from approximately 170,000
to 130,000 between 1300 and 1500, a drop of about 23.5 percent. There was also
considerable regional variation:
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