Population by Country in 1000

Movies and television are often set in the past, giving us a potential new way to interact with information about a period of time we weren’t alive for. However, modern interpretations of the past skew a realistic understanding of what the past was actually like, making it sometimes hard for modern students to gain a realistic picture of the past.

In 1500, there was a population of 461 million people, and the world was much different than it is now. Many modern countries, such as the United States, didn’t exist yet, although other societies lived and thrived on those lands. Limited forms of mass communication meant that cities remained the center of information and development. On the other hand, the world had spent years dealing the Bubonic plague, which had decimated populations and completely changed the way of life in many places. Some of the societal shifts, especially among workers, from the end of the historic plague are repeating today as we work through emerging from our own pandemic.

China had a population somewhere between 60 and 103 million and made up 25% of the world’s total population. Outside of China, empires ruled the world. We still feel the impact of the Holy Roman Empire, but in 1500, it had a population of 23 million and made up 5.3% of the world’s population. This is slightly smaller than the 25 million people in the Vijayanagara Empire, which accounted for 5.7% of the world’s population.

Even the population of the Catholic Church was booming. While today, we associate the Pope with the smallest country in the world, Vatican City, in 1500, the Papal States had a population of 2 million. The Incan and Aztec Empires were both going strong with populations of 12 million and 6 million, respectively. In Western Europe, Paris was the largest city with 225 thousand people. This was 100 thousand people more than the next largest city, Naples, and more than double the populations of Venice and Milan.