I've been looking up historical populations in Europe for a world that I'm building and I noticed that France had an enormous population in comparison to other states of similar size. Something like double Poland-Lithuania's population and 3/2 Spain's. Why is this?
It has better soils/climate than Spain. Also Poland-Lithuania are in eastern europe, an area very lightly populated before the Middle Ages. If you compare to Germany and the low countries, French population density wasn't that big.