Hi, anyone know of any statistics for this? couldn't find any data using Google so I thought I would put the question to the more educated portion of the forum goers and hope that they have an answer readily available
Hi, anyone know of any statistics for this? couldn't find any data using Google so I thought I would put the question to the more educated portion of the forum goers and hope that they have an answer readily available
Depends on some factors, but for the peasants it would be about an average of 30 to 40 and for nobles 50 to 60. Obviously this can be cut drastically short or extended by a bit. Infant mortality was huge during this time, for example. Even the nobles struggled to maintain their health because force marching armies through swamps and into sieges, followed by huge feasts of food and wine, are not terribly conducive behaviors to a long life.
So the answer can vary quite a bit, but 60 is a good upper limit for the average life expectancy of nobles, 40 for peasants, and infant mortality was a problem for everyone.
Not a lie in the slightest. When you have 1 person living to 90 and 100 infants dying before they reach 5, of course your average is going to be low. Multiply that by several million and you have medieval europe in a nutshell. Nobles lived fairly long, but were the vast minority of the peoples of the time, leaving a small impact on the overall average.
As an above poster implied, "averages" are actually an extremely inaccurate way to go about gathering date.
CK2 effectively rules out infant and child deaths (they do happen, but not on the massive scale that they did IRL) and so, effectively, we have a survivor bias. But I don't think that's a problem.
Ah ok thanks for the quick reply, the reason I asked was because I thought the rulers in my games often survived for surprising amounts of time, I checked my last game and the rulers of my line lived for an average of 58 (7 rulers) years so it would appear to be spot on, I've seen many complaints about the long lifespans on the forum but it would appear that it usually evens out, I'm guessing when the monarch survives for a long periods of time this sticks more in ones memory than the 20 something that preceded him or her. I would be interested in hearing more opinions about this
The main factor people miss is that average life expectancy in no way gives you any indication on at which age people died. That may seem counterintuitive at first, but it's true.
Average life expectancy was way lower then, because lots of things cutting your life short then are perfectly survivable now, which cut the average down. But people that didn't have deadly accidents or caught lethal diseases and got an ok calorie intake (so mostly nobility) could expect to live for almost as long then as they do now, before "natural death" occured.
Look at the death dates of famous people of the era and you see that reaching your seventies, while less common than now, wasn't really unusual either.
Averages are tricky like that. Always remember: Almost every single person on earth has a higher than average amount of legs... (because there are people with less than two legs, but none with more, so the arithmetic mean {the most commonly used "average"} is actually slightly below two)
In my research for Icelandic characters I found a lot with the age of 70 to 90. And this in Iceland.
High ages wasn't so rare in the mediæval tines. There live some nobles over 100. So...
The bad living conditions in the middel ages are a lie of the Enlightenment to say "We are better!"
Then that stuff of icelandic characters living 70 or 80 years must have some genetical component (I mean, that they were genetically predisposed to be long lived persons. Or perhaps, living in Iceland, they ate far more fish and far less hunting meat, which is very greasy, than nobles in the continent, which helped them live longer).
I tell it because very few Spanish, French or English kings lived beyond 70 years. I guess the same will be for German or Italian lords.