When Professor E. J. Hobsbawm set forth his theory of the ‘general crisis’ of the seventeenth century, he reached almost at the outset for one of the most telling indices of a society's vitality, namely, the size of its population and its capacity to sustain population growth. He found that ‘the scattered figures for European population suggest, at worst an actual decline, at best a level or slightly rising plateau between the mounting slopes of the population curve in the later sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.’

Even within the small world of the village of Altopascio, population was a dynamic element that changed its course in response to both economic and natural forces, and in turn imposed alterations within the fabric of the community as a whole. Fortunately a good many records have survived that enable us to calculate the village population, along with its short-term fluctuations in size and long-term modifications of demographic behavior. The picture that emerges from all these data is consistent with the demographic trends outlined by Professor Hobsbawm as evidence for a general European crisis. At Altopascio, over the entire period from 1551 to 1784, the secular trend in absolute size of population divides into a long period of growth through 1647, then an abrupt decline, followed by more than a century of cyclical fluctuations around a static level.