ABSTRACT
The demographic history of Southeastern Europe remains not as well known as that of other parts of Europe. One reason is that sources for population history and historical demography in this region are unfortunately available in smaller number and often in lower quality. The registration of births, marriages, and deaths was done by religious authorities before the states took over this task. The Catholic Church and Protestant churches introduced this kind of record for their followers in the sixteenth century, while the Orthodox Churches introduced it later, and Islam did not have this practice at all. The registration of current population was done with the help of census taking. Regularly counting the population became a common feature for European states in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Ottoman Empire introduced counting the complete population quite late, because its administration had been interested only in tax-payers and possible military recruits. The new independent successor states in Southeastern Europe lagged behind Western and Central Europe in establishing an efficient bureaucracy, and census taking was therefore harder to conduct. Serbia was an exception, having an impressive series of censuses already carried out in the nineteenth century. Another obstacle for administrating population counts and procedures was the high rate of illiteracy in the region until the end of the nineteenth century, reducing the reliability of responses from the population to printed questionnaires.
