The Settlement and Colonization of Europe

Dark ages and dark areas: global deforestation in the deep past

“…Sometimes the two 'frontiers' were coincident and coterminous, such as in the massive Germanic colonization of the sparsely populated Slavic lands of central and eastern Europe from the tenth to twelfth centuries. [65] Faced with an increasing size and density of population the Medieval agriculturalist needed to increase food production. As the existing intensity of land use was relatively light one obvious way to do this was to shorten the fallow period, either during cropping or in grazing rotations, a strategy which, according to Boserup, would be likely to occur when population densities reached about 30 per km 2 as it had in a few localities by that time.…”

Work and Society in the Orthodox East: Byzantium and Russia, AD 450–1861

“…In AD 332, to mitigate the ensuing flight of destitute peasants from the land, the Code of Constantine made the peasant's tillage of their plot a hereditary obligation. In the cities and towns, the craft worker was also denied the possibility of social mobility as their trade was also made a hereditary responsibility (Koerner 1941(Koerner /1966. In addition, taxes were increasingly made a collective responsibility of the village or commune, an outcome that caused neighbor to oversee neighbor in the knowledge that they would have to make up tax shortfalls caused by either peasant flight or subterfuge.…”