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# Demography

Factors affecting the size of Transylvania's population were fewer and less complex after 1771 than over the preceding sixty years. There were no great waves of immigration or emigration, internal migration waned, and demographic change followed a comparatively even course. The last wave of the plague swept across the south-eastern corner of Transylvania at the beginning of the period, in 1770–71, and the only significant recurrence of epidemics was in 1813–18, during a period of famine and migration.

The harvest was poor in 1813 and for several years thereafter. The chief cause was inclement weather, to which Transylvania's backward agriculture was particularly sensitive. When the weather was generally bad, villeins had less time to cultivate their plots, for as soon as there was an improvement, they had to make up the backlog in their socage obligations or participate in public works; as a result, livestock suffered a severe drop in numbers. Moreover, in spring 1817, an already malnourished peasant population was struck by a scurvy-like epidemic; in villages of Kraszna County, corpses were evacuated by the cartload, and death by starvation became a common occurrence in other regions. Villeins tried to survive by migrating to less stricken parts of the country, and groups of several hundred set off for Wallachia, Moldavia, or Hungary. Some of these would-be emigrants were turned back by military force, others perished in snowstorms in the Fogaras mountains. However, many of those who did manage to leave the country returned when the famine came to an end. However, these migrations did not produce significant change in the size and composition of Transylvania's population.

{2-624.} According to the first professionally-conducted census, in 1786, the population of Transylvania (including the military frontier zones) stood at 1,560,000. Population density ranged from 11.1 to 41.8 per square kilometre, depending on the district, while for the country as a whole (but excluding the frontier zones and royal free boroughs) the figure was 22.5. The average-sized community was a village of 500-1000 inhabitants; excluding the royal free towns, 39.5 percent of the population was found in this category of locality. The dominance of this type of settlement is underscored by the fact that the next smaller category, localities with 300–500 inhabitants, accounted for only 21.8 percent of the population, and the next larger category, localities with 1,000–2,000 inhabitants, for only 16.1 percent. Thus the three categories combined accounted for 77.4 percent of the population.

The size of the towns reflects a slow rate of urbanization. The population of the largest towns (Brassó had 17,792 inhabitants, Szeben 14,066, and Kolozsvár 13,928) was only 18–22 times greater than that of the average village; each of the other royal free boroughs counted fewer than 6,000 inhabitants. A few mining centres had grown into towns: Zalatna had 4,950 inhabitants, and Abrudbánya (including Verespatak) had 4,699, while Vizakna counted 2,934, and Kapnikbánya 2,912 inhabitants. Urbanization was even more marked in mining centres that had additional administrative functions: the population of Torda stood at 6,374, and of Dés (including Désakna) at 5,194. Some other, declining mining centres did not even reach the national average: Körösbánya had 443 inhabitants, Riska 371, and Karács 308. Of the so-called market towns, if one excludes those in the frontier guard zone, only five had a population of over 3,000: Nagyenyed (3,897), Zilah (3,832), Fogaras (3,376), Rozsnyó (3,129), and Feketehalom (3,017).

Thus, in 1786, the size of Transylvania's localities remained modest, and within a narrow range of differentiation. As emigration and immigration declined, and as epidemics grew rarer, the population {2-625.} slowly expanded to reach the two million mark in the mid-1800s. There was little change in the ethnic balance after 1760. All three major ethnic groups gained and lost members thanks to natural processes of assimilation. The phenomenon of deliberate or directed assimilation was not present in this period.