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# Population Growth and Migration

Over the sixty years between the first census after the revolution and the last census before World War I, Transylvania's population increased by close to 40 percent. This represented 750,000 additional inhabitants in an area of 58,000 square kilometres, the historical boundaries of which had been altered only marginally in the administrative reorganization of 1876. The rate had accelerated, for two thirds of the growth occurred in the last three decades of the period. The natural increase per thousand can be estimated at 8 between 1839 and 1845, and 6.2 between 1851 and 1857; a surge in the 1860s was followed by a sharp decline in the rate. Cholera, a demographic disaster that had been common in the Middle Ages, struck Transylvania one last time; the disease appeared in 1854–55, then became an epidemic in 1873. In Hungary proper, the demographic losses were made up within three years, but in Transylvania it took ten years for the population to rise again to its 1869 level. The epidemic was followed by the outbreak of contagious children's diseases, and the population started to increase significantly only in the 1880s.

In the early stages of modernization and industrialization, the typical demographic pattern is one of rapid growth, for mortality rates fall while birth rates remain high. This transitional phase took much longer in Transylvania than in Hungary. In the counties of Alsó-Fehér, Kis-Küküllő, and Szolnok-Doboka, there were years in the 1880s and 1890s when the mortality rate surpassed the birth rate. In 1869, and for several years thereafter, emigration and a low birth rate caused the population of Nagy-Küküllő to decline. {3-543.} Emigration subtracted 6 to 7 percent from the natural increase in Brassó, Háromszék, Udvarhely, and Fogaras counties. Throughout the period, Transylvania's population increased at a rate lower than the national average. It is likely that the birth rate was already low in the pre-Compromise era, and that the higher natural increase at that time — surpassing that of Transdanubia — was due to longer life expectancy. High infant mortality contributed to a natural increase that was far below the national average at the end of the century. Transylvania shared with some neighbouring regions behaviour patterns that had demographic consequences. In the eastern half of Hungary, including Transylvania, the marriage age was comparatively low, but rose steadily. In 1890, women in northern Transylvania married between the ages of 18 and 20, and in the southern regions between 20 and 22; in 1910, the marriage age had risen to 20–22 in the north, and 21–25 in the south. However, a higher marriage age tended to coincide with growth in economic productivity. The bloc of counties that included Szatmár, Bihar, Máramaros, and Szolnok-Doboka had a higher natural increase than the region stretching from Beszterce through Hunyad to Baranya; at the time, statisticians were already puzzling over this disparity, and historians have yet to provide an adequate explanation. In the 1890s, the population of the northern and western regions increased at a rapid rate, whereas in the southeast corner emigration continued to have a negative demographic impact. The strongest population growth occurred in the country's central region, north of Brassó and Fogaras; similarly, population density was highest in the central quadrangle between Kolozsvár, Marosvásárhely, Segesvár, and Szászsebes, where, in 1890, it reached 50–80 people per square kilometre; the population density in Transylvania as a whole was 37.4 per sq.km. in 1880, 39.2 in 1890, and 46.3 in 1910. The reproduction rate was extremely low among the Romanians and Saxons in southern Transylvania, as it was among the better-off Romanians and Swabians farther west, in {3-544.} the Banat. The Saxons, like people in Transdanubia, tended to voluntarily limit family size; in order to avoid the fragmentation of their land, farmers adopted the habit of having no more than one or two children.

Taken together, Transylvania, Máramaros, Szatmár, Bihar, and the Banat present a somewhat different picture. Between 1909 and 1910, the average natural increase in these regions was 10.6 per thousand (representing the difference between live births of 35.9 per thousand and mortality of 25.3 per thousand). The rate, although higher than that for Transylvania alone, was still lower than the national average.

At the turn of the century, Hungary's demographics reflected the general East European pattern of high birth rates, high mortality rates, and low marriage age, as well as the Western European tendency to limit family size. Transylvania was distinguished from the Hungarian demographic pattern by its lower birth rate and longer life expectancy, phenomena that have yet to be fully examined and explained (see table 19).

{3-545.}

Table 19: Growth of the population of Transylvania, 1850–1910

Year | Transylvania and the Partium (1102 sq. miles, 60700 sq. km.) | Transylvania with the old borders (998 sq. miles, 54948 sq. km.) | Transylvania with the borders in 1860 (57804 sq. km.)
civil population present in absolut numbers | average growth per year (per mill) | civil population present in absolut numbers | average growth per year (per mill) | civil population present in absolut numbers | average growth per year (per mill)
1850 | 2073737 |  | 1856600 |  | 1900000 |
1857 | 2172748 | 6.7 | 1926797 |
1869 | 2393206 | 8.1 | 2101727 | 7.3 | 2152805
1880 |  |  |  |  | +252805 (13.3%) | 6.6
1890 | 2084048 | -2.7
1900 | 1456838 | 8.8
1910 | 2658159 | 7.9
1850-1910 |  |  |  |  | +758159 (39.9%) | 5.6
1869-1910 | +505354 (23.5%) | 5.2
1880-1910 | +574111 (27.5%) | 8.7

The creation of a public health service that reached virtually the entire population had a significant demographic impact. Although medical services were steadily improved after 1850, the major advances had to await the end of the century. In the absolutist period, 'national hospitals' were operating in Kolozsvár and Marosvásárhely (largely thanks to private donations in the case of the latter), clinics named after the king were established at Nagyszeben and Sepsiszentgyörgy, an 'imperial and royal lunatic asylum' was set up, also in Nagyszeben, and patients had access to thirteen other county and municipal infirmaries, which at the time were also called hospitals. Smallpox vaccination was made compulsory in the 1870s, and after revaccination was introduced in 1887, smallpox was effectively eradicated. Of course, epidemics of other diseases continued to break out from time to time. A progressive public health law enacted in 1876 prescribed the responsibilities of central, {3-546.} county, and municipal authorities, the modalities of health checks for homes, schools, and public buildings, and the standards for the construction and maintenance of hospitals. Towns and other municipalities with over 6,000 inhabitants were required to have a medical doctor; the inhabitants of smaller villages were cared for by a district doctor, and the impecunious were not charged for his services. The extreme poverty of many villages and the shortage of doctors prevented a full implementation of the new prescriptions, but there was a considerable improvement in medical services. The number of hospitals rose from 20 in 1878 to 29 (with 1,900 beds) in 1893, and to 56 hospitals, with 5,645 beds, in 1913. The last prewar census enumerated 3,001 health-service workers, including 545 doctors and 523 pharmacists. (Romanians made up 22 percent of health-service workers and 13 percent of medical doctors.) There were 29 qualified doctors, 62 midwives, and 191 hospital beds per 100,000 people. Only one third of deceased people had received medical care, and health conditions varied widely between towns and villages, as well as between districts. At the turn of the century, the incidence in Transylvania of patients with infectious diseases was still higher than the national average, but fewer people were afflicted with the deadly scourge of the times, tuberculosis. The number of accidental deaths approximated 500 a year, and there were close to 300 suicides annually; that was three times the rate at mid-century, and the suicide rate was exceptionally high in Háromszék County. Some one hundred murders were registered each year (the highest incidence being in Hunyad and Háromszék counties), half the level fifty years earlier; this decline was presumably brought about by a prolonged period of peace, strict law enforcement, and the spread of middle-class values.

The last major cause of unnatural death in this period was World War I. According to official statistics. up to the end of 1917, the proportion of Transylvanians who lost their lives in the war was 24 per thousand of population (and at least 37 per thousand in {3-547.} Udvarhely and Csík counties). Of the generation born in 1895–1896, twenty percent perished. Meanwhile, on the home front, mortality increased and the birth rate fell by 55–58 percent.

Famine due to poor harvests and other natural disasters affected not only the standard of living but also birth rates, and this despite the growing commitment of public authorities to assist the victims of such disasters. Social solidarity helped to succour those most affected by famine in 1864–65, and, at the turn of the century, villages struck by poor harvests were routinely provided by the authorities with free or low-cost grain. By then, devastating famines were a thing of the past, although poor nutrition and reliance on corn as a substitute for bread led to the wide incidence of pellagra. According to a survey conducted in the 1880s, Transylvania's annual food consumption included 77,000 cattle, 29,000 calves, over 500,000 sheep, and nearly as many pigs. Best fed were the people of Brassó, Fogaras, and Háromszék counties. The annual expenditure on food in Transylvania was 65 forints per capita, the national average, but the diet was less varied, and the high consumption of fruit indicated not so much a healthier way of life as compensation for the shortage of other victuals. There were wide regional variations in the consumption of meat and bread, but the consumption of brandy was uniformly high everywhere; Kis-Küküllő County topped the national leagues with a yearly 41 litres per capita.

The population's geographical mobility increased at the end of the century. Economic growth and the transformation of agriculture did lead to a fall in the number of shepherds engaged in transhumance, but many more people now felt impelled to leave their birthplaces and traditional surroundings.

Even before the Compromise, many Romanians and Székelys, men and women, left Transylvania to find work in the Romanian principalities. In 1860, there were 12,000 Hungarians in Bucharest, and according to official estimates, some 40,000 'Hungarian subjects' {3-548.} lived in Romania in the late 1870s. Nearly 70,000 people — a third of them Székelys — emigrated to Romania between 1880 and 1900, and another 80,000 between 1900 and 1914; these statistics do not account for those who crossed the long and unguarded Carpathian border illegally. Most of the migrants sought temporary employment, and not a permanent home in Romania, which explains the small number of children and the high proportion of people over the age of 50 among them. The migrants came mainly from the southern counties and the Székelyföld. 'It seems that all the pharmacies in Wallachia and Moldavia have been rented by Saxons,' noted a contemporary observer; a boyar's agent signed up the entire labour force of a village in Háromszék to work in Romania from spring till fall, and 'at the slightest offense, servants will run off to Romania.'[14]14. L. Hegedűs, A székelyek kivándorlása Romániába (Budapest, 1902), pp. 10, 73. As a result, it often happened that Slovak workers had to be brought in a harvest time, and even the occasional Slovene for brick burning. Contemporary statisticians estimated that between 1899 and 1914, the number of those who left for Romania was equivalent to almost a quarter of the natural increase in Transylvania's population, and a half in the case of Brassó and Szeben counties. In 1913, over 200,000 people born in Hungary (i.e. not just Transylvanians) lived in Romania, 30,000 of them in its rapidly growing capital city.

Transylvania still recorded a slight surplus of immigrants over emigrants at the end of the century, but afterwards the pattern was reversed. America's drawing power began to be felt, offering Transylvanian emigrants the option of a destination more advanced than Romania. The peak years of emigration, 1904–1907 and 1912–1913, coincided with the height of America's appeal. Official records show that over a period of fifteen years, 95,000 Transylvanians emigrated to the United States, and 10,000 to Germany, in addition to those who, as noted, had gone to Romania. The major source of emigrants was an area bounded by the Maros River, the two Küküllő rivers, and the Olt River. Large numbers of {3-549.} Transylvanian Hungarians ended up in the industrial plants and mines of Pennsylvania, in the factories of Ohio, New York, and New Jersey, and many Romanians found a new home in Indiana; emigrants of both nationalities settled in such large cities as New York, Cleveland, and Chicago.

Emigration was only one aspect the migration that occurred in this period. Over 100,000 people moved to settle in other parts of Transylvania. The scale of this inner migration was comparatively low — in 1890, only 18 percent of the population resided in a location other than their birthplace, whereas in Transdanubia the proportion was almost twice as high — but it grew at the turn of the century.

The number of villages did not change over this period. The larger ones expanded rapidly, whereas the population of many smaller ones began to decline at the end of the century. On average, a village had around a thousand inhabitants, but the range of variance was wide. There were a hundred or so villages with a population of over 2,000, but 1,800 villages had fewer that a thousand inhabitants. Villages of 500–1,000 inhabitants were the most numerous. Regions differed in the pattern of settlement. Many villages in the Érc Mountains had an elongated form and were known as 'scattered settlements'; others acquired a town-like appearance, such as Hosszúfalu, near Brassó, which absorbed three proximate communities that all engaged in handicrafts. Still other communities, such as the Romanian-inhabited villages of Resinár and Szelistye, grew to considerable size thanks to transhumance and related activities; but the peculiarities of this traditional occupation and the pull of nearby Nagyszeben kept them from developing into real towns. The decline of tradition iron craftsmanship similarly curtailed the development of the Hungarian-inhabited village of Torockó (see table 20).

{3-550.}

Table 20: Distribution of the population according to the main division of activities in 1890 and 1900

Main occupational groups | 1890 | 1900
total population | total population | Hungarian | Rumanian | German | Others
1000 people | % | 1000 people | % | 1000 people | % | 1000 people | % | 1000 people | % | 1000 people | %
I. Primary production | 1789 | 78.9 | 1874 | 75.7 | 515 | 63.2 | 1207 | 86.4 | 140 | 60.1 | 12 | 37.5
II. A Minning and metallurgy | 26 | 1.1 | 33 | 1.3 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
II. B Industry | 188 | 8.3 | 234 | 9.4 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
II. C Trade and credit | 30 | 1.3 | 41 | 1.7 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
II. D Transport | 18 | 0.8 | 36 | 1.5 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
II. A+B+C+D | 262 | 11.5 | 344 | 13.9 | 178 | 21.8 | 89 | 6.4 | 64 | 27.5 | 13 | 40.6
III. Civil and ecclesiastical service, freelance | 59 | 2.6 | 70 | 2.8 | 40 | 4.9 | 19 | 1.4 | 11 | 4.7 | x | x
IV. Armed forces | 19 | 0.8 | 23 | 0.9 | 10 | 1.2 | 8 | 0.6 | 4 | 1.7 | 1 | 3.1
V. Day-laboruer | 63 | 2.8 | 77 | 3.1 | 25 | 3.1 | 46 | 3.3 | 3 | 1.3 | 3 | 9.4
VI. Domestic servant | 39 | 1.7 | 44 | 1.8 | 24 | 2.9 | 17 | 1.2 | 3 | 1.3 | x | x
VII. Others, unknown occupation | 37 | 1.7 | 45 | 1.8 | 23 | 2.9 | 11 | 0.7 | 8 | 3.4 | 3 | 9.4
Total population | 2268 | 100.0 | 2477 | 100.0 | 815 | 100.0 | 1397 | 100.0 | 233 | 100.0 | 32 | 100.0
Wage-earner | 1012 | 44.6 | 1232 | 49.7 | 389 | 47.7 | 708 | 50.7 | 117 | 50.2 | 18 | 56.2
Dependent | 1256 | 55.4 | 1245 | 50.3 | 426 | 52.3 | 689 | 49.3 | 116 | 49.8 | 14 | 43.8

Note: x means data under 1000 people or 0.1%. Information on the native language of groups II/A+B+C+D were given only together in 1900.

Source: M. Stat. Közlemények. Új Sorozat Vol. 2 (Budapest, 1904). ‘A magyar szent korona országainak 1900. évi népszámlálása. A népesség foglalkozása az anyanyelvvel és hitfelekezetekkel egybevetve’ (Manuscript, Budapest, 1906).

{3-551.} The driving force of inner migration was urbanization. The aggregate population of the twenty-seven settlements that were officially classified as towns at the end of the period grew rapidly, from 149,471 in 1850 to 324,955 in 1910. The increase was due in large measure to the influx of people from villages near and far. Half of the population of Kolozsvár and almost a third of that of Marosvásárhely were born in other counties. Nor was urban growth limited to these towns: an additional 50,000 people lived at this time in industrial and mining settlements, such as Petrozsény or Lupény, which in many aspects were similar to the average small town in Transylvania. After 1900, the pattern in the bigger towns was similar to that in Upper Hungary and Transdanubia: half of the population was engaged in industry, trade, and commerce, and of these half were new arrivals drawn by the rapid industrialization that occurred in the period. In their physical appearance and occupational profile, Transylvania's towns resembled the typical central European model.

Urbanization did not follow a linear development in either time or space. The first phase, in the 1850s and 1860s, came about as a consequence of major social change. In the 1870s, the urban population increased hardly at all. Then, between 1890 and 1910, the number of urban dwellers grew by 100,000 under the impetus of rapid economic growth. In the immediate vicinity of Transylvania, towns such as Máramarossziget, Szatmárnémeti, Nagyvárad, Arad, and Temesvár developed more or less quickly and attracted settlers from all directions. Brassó and the highly urbanized Nagyszeben enjoyed a steady rate of growth. Meanwhile, small mining towns such as Vizakna or Abrudbánya suffered from the decline of their sole industry and stagnated; the population of the latter actually decreased. The small towns of Transylvania were typically marked by slower structural growth and the preservation of traditions. Agricultural workers accounted for a quarter of their population, and craftsmen for over a third, {3-552.} although the common pursuit of both activities makes it impossible to draw a sharp distinction between these two groups.

Urbanization did not erase historic differences between the regions. In 1910, 12.7 percent of Transylvania's population lived in towns; but the proportion was only 7.3 percent in the Székelyföld, while in the onetime Királyföld it was 22.1 percent. The most rapid urbanization occurred in industrial settlements and in a few Székely towns. Between the Compromise and World War I, the population of Lupény increased by a factor of fourteen, of Petrozsény by a factor of seven, of Petrilla by a factor of four, of Csíkszereda by a factor of three, and of Déva and Székelyudvarhely, by a factor of two.

As a consequence of social modernization, the legal status of the thirty royal free towns and privileged boroughs was altered in 1877. Twenty-five of them were designated as towns endowed with local councils; only Marosvásárhely and Kolozsvár were granted greater autonomy, in recognition of their traditional self-governing status. Kolozsvár, Transylvania's 'capital,' developed the most harmoniously. By 1867, Kolozsvár's population had grown to equal that of the biggest town, Brassó, and it grew by a further 122 percent over the next forty years, confirming the town's status as Transylvania's leading urban centre. Although Kolozsvár retained some of its 'single-storey' appearance, urban renewal and the extension of public utilities were turning it into a modern city.

{3-553.}

Table 21: Growth of the population of different towns, 1850–1910

Town | 1850 | 1857 | 1869 | 1880 | 1890 | 1900 | 1910 | Growth
1850-1880 | 1880-1910
%
Kolozsvár | 16886 | 20615 | 26382 | 29923 | 32756 | 46670 | 58481 | 77.20 | 95.43
Marosvásárhely | 8943 | 11217 | 12678 | 18883 | 14212 | 17284 | 23728 | 58.91 | 84.18
Beszterce | 5578 | 3451 | 7212 | 8063 | 9109 | 10873 | 11966 | 44.55 | 48.40
Brassó | 21571 | 26826 | 27766 | 29584 | 30739 | 34511 | 38999 | 37.14 | 31.82
Gyulafehérvár | 5054 | 6034 | 7955 | 7338 | 8160 | 9669 | 9857 | 45.19 | 34.57
Nagyenyed | 4436 | 4548 | 5779 | 5362 | 5932 | 7296 | 8508 | 20.87 | 58.67
Segesvár | 7962 | 7996 | 8204 | 8788 | 9168 | 10857 | 11570 | 10.37 | 31.65
Torda | 7687 | 8302 | 8803 | 9434 | 11079 | 12104 | 13427 | 22.72 | 42.32
Déva | 2129 | 2706 | 3272 | 3935 | 4657 | 6867 | 8459 | 84.82 | 114.69
Medgyes | 5337 | 3814 | 6712 | 6489 | 6766 | 7665 | 8616 | 21.58 | 32.77
Sepsiszentgyörgy | 2294 | 3008 | 4365 | 5268 | 5665 | 7030 | 8554 | 129.64 | 62.37
Székelyudvarhely | 3489 | 4332 | 4376 | 5003 | 5438 | 7733 | 4928 | 43.39 | 98.44