Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T04:57:34.978Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Muslims in Ottoman Europe: Population from 1800 to 1912

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Justin McCarthy*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Louisville, U.S.A.

Extract

Investigating the Muslim population of Ottoman Europe is the stuff of a demographer's nightmare. There is no lack of material to study; thousands of estimates of Balkan population were made throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Unfortunately, almost all of them were nonsense, the prejudiced guesses of nationalistic advocates or estimates made by travellers who felt a journey through a land provided enough information for accurate estimates of population numbers.

Type
The Historical Background
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. See Justin McCarthy, ‘The Population of Ottoman Europe Before and After the Fall of the Empire,” in Heath W. Lowry and Ralph S. Hattox, eds, Third Congress on the Social and Economic History of Turkey, Istanbul, 1990, (Isis), pp. 277280. The real statistics were part of a general compilation the Ottomans produced in 1905. Hilmi Paşa, the Inspector General in Macedonia, was only one of the officials all over the Empire who oversaw the compilation. On Macedonia, see Daniel Panzac, “La Population de la Macédoine au XIXe Siècle (1820–1912),” REMMM, Vol. 66, No. 4, 1992, pp. 113134.Google Scholar

2. See the Appendix.Google Scholar

3. These Ottoman counts are often wrongly called “censuses.” They were actually summaries of population registrations, which were theoretically kept and updated for each village in a province. The difference is significant. A census, which is taken in an entire area at one time, would almost surely have been more accurate than registrations, which depended on the records of a great number of bureaucrats, not all of whom took their job seriously.Google Scholar

4. Many areas, such as Bosnia, were not included in the 1831 data. The estimate of underregistration is drawn by comparison to and projection from later data.Google Scholar

5. For an extensive discussion of the Midhat Paşa statistics and analysis of urban data from those statistics, see Nicolaj (Nicolai) Todorov, “The Balkan Town in the Second Half of the 19th Century,” Balkan Studies, Vol. 2, 1969, pp. 3150.Google Scholar

6. Romania and the northwest Black Sea littoral, whose Muslim population was not entered in nineteenth-century Ottoman statistics, are not considered here.Google Scholar

7. For a more complete and descriptive list of the various Muslim groups, see Alexandre Toumarkine, Les Migrations des Populations Musulmanes Balkaniques en Anatolie (1876–1913) , (Istanbul, 1995).Google Scholar

8. See the Appendix.Google Scholar

9. It should be noted, however, that accurate statistics do not exist for the period before major in-migration raised the Muslim populations in both Bosnia and northeast Bulgaria. It may well be that Christians somewhat outnumbered Muslims in both northeast Bulgaria and Bosnia at the start of the nineteenth century, although Muslims were surely a plurality among the various religious groups in Bosnia and in parts of northern Bulgaria.Google Scholar

10. If Yenipazar Sancaǧi were not included, as it was not in earlier years, Muslim proportions would have declined to 48%. Figures are from Justin McCarthy, “Ottoman Bosnia, 1800 to 1878,” in The Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1994), pp. 5483.Google Scholar

11. See Ahmet Cevdet Eren, Türkiye'd Göç ve Göçmen Meselesi (Istanbul: Nurgök Mat., 1966), pp. 3134.Google Scholar

12. Alexandre Popovic, L'Islam Balkanique (Berlin: Freien Universität, 1986), pp. 262265. The figures for 1874 have the appearance of a detailed enumeration. They fit well with later data, and seem reliable. The earlier data are more an estimate, but conform to a number of other estimates.Google Scholar

13. It is from a nearly contemporary Greek source that surely had no cause to inflate Muslim numbers. Popovic lists the estimates in detail (p. 111). He has carefully compared sources and taken those that appeared most reasonable. It must be remembered, however, that these are estimates only.Google Scholar

14. Estimates range to “above 50,000,” but it seems best to take the lower figure here. See Popovic, pp. 119121.Google Scholar

15. Bulgaria is considered here to include the region south of the Danube delta, the Dobruja. The region eventually went to Romania in 1876, expanded slightly in 1913, but the Ottomans considered it part of Bulgaria, in the Silistre Eyaleti.Google Scholar

16. Justin McCarthy, “An Ottoman Document on the Refugees of the Crimean Period,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 2930.Google Scholar

17. For other estimates, see Mark Pinson, “Russian Policy and the Emigration of the Crimean Tatars to the Ottoman Empire,” Güney-Doǧu Avrupa Araştırmalan Dergisi, Vols I and II; Ethhem Feyzi Gözaydin, Kırım (Istanbul: Kirim Vakit Mat., 1943), pp. 4041, 83–86, 9598; Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830–1914 (Madison: Karpatu of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 65. The most comprehensive consideration of the figures is in Alan Fisher, “Emigration of Muslims from the Russian Empire in the Years After the Crimean War,” Jahrbucher für Geschichte Osteuropas, Vol. 35, No. 3, pp. 356371. Nedim İpek gives estimates for the Tatar and other migrations before 1877; Rumeli'den Anadolu'ya Türk Goçleri (Ankara: Ipek TTK, 1994), pp. 110.Google Scholar

18. Eyalets were the Ottoman provinces before vilǎyets were created in the reform in 1864. They conformed more to historic regions but were often administratively unwieldly.Google Scholar

19. The largest group were Circassians, but Abhazians, Chechens, and smaller groups were also settled.Google Scholar

20. These figures are taken from Ottoman reports, mainly of the Refugee Commission. They are given in the very valuable doctoral dissertation of Bedri Habiçoǧlu, “Kafkasya'dan Osmanh İmparatorluǧu'na Göçler ve İskanlan,” Istanbul University, 1983. For statistics, see pp. 46, 47, 94, 95, and 119–121. My thanks to Paul Henze for bringing the work to my attention. See also Eren, pp. 7475. Karpat, pp. 6570, gives estimates of the total migration from the Caucasus and the Crimea, as does Justin McCarthy in Death and Exile (Princeton: Darwin, 1995), pp. 3239.Google Scholar

21. On the statistics of the Muslims in the Dobruja, see Müstecib Ülküsal, Dobruca ve Türkler (Ankara, 1966), pp. 2449.Google Scholar

22. Tuna Vilǎyeti less Tulça Sancaǧi and Cuma Kazasi.Google Scholar

23. Kizil Aǧaç and Pınar Hisar kazas of Edirne Sancaǧi, Filibe Sancagakı less Ahi Çelebi and Sultan Yeri kazas, and İslimiye Sancaǧi.Google Scholar

24. Habiçoǧlu, pp.95, 121.Google Scholar

25. McCarthy, Death and Exile , pp. 8891, 341343.Google Scholar

26. The 1905 Bulgarian census listed 37,000 who had come to Bulgaria from Edirne Vilǎyeti, 38,000 from Manastir and Selanik Vilǎyets, and 13,000 from “other parts of Ottoman Europe” (assumed to be Yanya and Kosova Vilǎyets). Comparison to the 1881 census of Bulgaria (which did not include Eastern Rumelia and so gave only partial migration statistics—32,000 “born in Thrace and Macedonia”) indicates that almost all of those recorded in 1905 had come before 1881. Since a majority of the migrants had died by 1905, the population of original migrants was assumed to correspond to the Coale and Demeny Life Table values East-6 and projection made to 1876, yielding 187,000 total Bulgarian migrants from Ottoman Europe.Google Scholar

27. See McCarthy, Death and Exile , p. 104.Google Scholar

28. The numbers in Table 4, drawn primarily from McCarthy, Death and Exile and “Ottoman Bosnia,” did not always fit neatly into provincial boundaries. For example, all that is known of the Bosnia migrants is the total number leaving Bosnia, which has been divided artificially among provinces in the table. Such divisions are naturally open to question.Google Scholar

29. See McCarthy, “Ottoman Bosnia.”Google Scholar

30. The 1897 war with Greece cannot be considered major, nor was mortality high. The war in Yemen was a drain of soldiers’ lives, but it was fought far away from Europe and was not a cause of civilian population loss there.Google Scholar

31. For the derivation of these figures, see McCarthy, “The Population of Ottoman Europe,” which also contains more detailed data, and Death and Exile , pp. 156164. The statistics are drawn from Ottoman population records, corrected for undercounts of women and children. See also the various estimates and registration statistics for various areas in Ahmet Halaçoǧlu, Rumeli, den Türk Göçleri (1912–1913) (Ankara: TTK, 1995), pp. 4163, 72–79.Google Scholar

The mortality statistics do not include much of Ottoman Albania, because of a lack of post-war statistics for comparison. Montenegran troops ravaged northern Albania during the Balkan Wars, so mortality must have been high. For the post-war enumerations of the European forces that occupied Albania, see Jacques Bourcart, “La population de la Albanie,” La Geographie, Vol. 37, 1922, pp. 281283.Google Scholar

32. There is a great deal of demographic information in the Ottoman registers, but it also takes a great deal of information to collect and analyze the statistics. For an excellent use of the registers, see Maria N. Todorova, Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern (Lanham, MD: American University Press, 1993), especially Chapter 2.Google Scholar

33. Based on the East family of tables, Mortality Level 6, GRR = 3.0 in Ansley J. Coale and Paul Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations , 2nd edn (New York, 1983). For explanations of the process involved in estimating, see Justin McCarthy, Muslims and Minorities (New York, 1983), Appendix 4, and “The Population of Ottoman Europe.”Google Scholar

34. Evidence for this is very limited, however. See “Population of Ottoman Europe,” pp. 294297.Google Scholar

35. Austrian censuses of 1895 and 1910. See also Popovic, pp. 271.Google Scholar

36. The Serbian census of 1921 and statistical yearbooks of 1893 and 1905.Google Scholar

37. The Bulgarian census of 1881 and statistical yearbook of 19231924.Google Scholar

38. The rates and calculations are in McCarthy, “The Population of Ottoman Europe.”Google Scholar

39. La population de la Turquie et de la Bulgarie au XVIII et XIX siècle: recherches bibliographico-statistiques (Sofia: Tsarska pridvorna pechatnitsa, 1915–1935).Google Scholar

40. A good example of this, easily accessible, is the estimates of Bulgarians, Serbs, and Greeks quoted in Donation Carnegie pour la Paix Internationale, Enquěte dans les Balkans (Paris: Carnegie Endowment, 1914), pp. 812, 184185.Google Scholar

41. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1951.Google Scholar

42. Gotha: J. Perthes, various years.Google Scholar

43. Ankara: T. C. Basbakanlik Devlet Istatistik Enstitüsü, 1996.Google Scholar

44. Freiburg: Schwarz, 1976.Google Scholar

45. Munich: J. Trojenik, 1983.Google Scholar

46. Die Albanischen Muslime sur Zeit der nationalen Unabhängigkeitsbewegung (1878–1912) (Wiesbaden Harrassowitz, 1968), pp. 3786.Google Scholar