Page 200 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Aleksej Kalc

siastical affiliation to the Trieste diocese. This meant religious and spiritual
relations between the area and Trieste, and the employment of upper-class
Trieste citizens in ecclesiastical positions in Karst parishes. However, as
Trieste changed from a communal coastal town under the administration
of the local patriciate to the main port and maritime mercantile centre
of the Habsburg monarchy, the influence of the maritime city grew from
the early eighteenth century onwards and was increasingly reflected in the
socio-economic level as well as in the demographic dynamics of the Karst
region.
Nevertheless, it should be emphasized that the socio-economic relations
between the city and its surrounding countryside did not develop linear-
ly over time. The economy and social development of the rural areas were
affected by the expanding city to different degrees in individual historical
phases. It should also be taken into account that in the territory of to-
day’s Slovenia, towns were mostly small and did not have the same direct
economic and political impact on the countryside as in the countries orga-
nized on communal administrative systems. In the case of Trieste, which
was developing into one of the economic poles on a nationwide scale in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the location and distance of in-
dividual rural areas from the city, their administrative political affiliation,
and the development of traffic and other logistic infrastructure played an
important role. All these elements were also reflected in the history of the
Tomaj area, where the city was not within direct, so to speak, daily reach
of the residents, as were the village communities within the Trieste mu-
nicipal territory. This affected the extent and forms of involvement in the
city’s economic and social dynamics.
In the case of Tomaj, as in other Karst villages, illustrating the popu-
lation’s evolution and the underlying dynamics over the centuries poses
a significant challenge. The birth and death datasets from the parish reg-
isters, starting in 1625, are incomplete until the 1820s, while a series of
official censuses do not begin until the nineteenth century (šak, žat,
sa 1820). The outcomes of earlier national censuses, inaugurated in the
1750s, remain unavailable or have not been preserved. We only have data
of ecclesiastical origin on the number of souls for 1732 (šak, žat, mkk
1762−1784). Consequently, tracking population trends during the early
modern era relies solely on indirect estimates. A further complication
arises from the ecclesiastical administrative configuration. The territory
of the parish of St Peter and Paul in Tomaj, first mentioned in 1272, did
not change until the second half of the nineteenth century (Höfler 2016,

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