Introduction

A dearth of sound quantitative information generally is recognized to be a serious problem faced by scholars who try to understand the history of the Late Antique West. In this context, demography surely is among those areas of study in which the substantial lack of statistically significant data is felt most keenly. As a result, estimates regarding population sizes in the Late Antique era remain highly controversial. The same may be said for the size of urban populations and for the urban districts (civitates) or rural administrative districts (pagi) of which, in each case, the fortified city (urbs) was the capital or administrative center. In light of the dearth of reliable statistical data, it is even rare to find a consensus in regard to whether a particular population was growing or declining over time, or, for that matter, whether it saw no significant change.

Perhaps the most controversial area of Late Antique demographic research or, at least, the most frequently debated focuses on the size of so-called “barbarian” groups, which in the past were often referred to as “tribes.” This is especially the case for those who moved from beyond the frontiers of the empire and settled within its borders. For example, there seems to be no general consensus as to the order of magnitude of the population of barbarians, as a whole, during the period from ca. 300 to ca. 500.