Page 201 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Urban Opportunities

200). However, new curacies and chaplaincies (later elevated to parishes)
were established in the area from the late eighteenth century onwards,
each keeping its registers. Due to the challenging merge of data from all
these ecclesiastical administrative units and the unreliability of discern-
ing vital statistics by individual villages until the 1730s, this study adopts a
dual-scale approach, referring to the entire parish territory until the 1780s.
Subsequently, it narrows its focus to the territory of the Tomaj curacy. In
terms of content, alongside an indicative reconstruction of population
development, focus will be placed on how demographic dynamics inter-
twined with the opportunities for work and life presented by the nearby
expanding port city of Trieste. This exploration will also consider the in-
terconnections with social, economic, and political factors of both local
and international significance.

Historical Traits of the Demography of Tomaj
Discussing the population of the Tomaj area in the Middle Ages and early
modern period necessitates specific research into fragmentary data from
secular and ecclesiastical sources, which is beyond the scope of this paper.
Even in the eighteenth century, due to the above-mentioned data series
discontinuities, following demographic trends is only possible hypotheti-
cally. This paper aims to present only the main outlines of population de-
velopment, with an emphasis on natural and social factors and the sys-
temic aspects of their functioning. Therefore, we rely on available birth
records from the early modern era as a basis for drawing conclusions about
long-term demographic dynamics and roughly estimating the size of the
population in various historical phases.
The birth data series indicates a historical demographic shift in the
Tomaj area at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Throughout both centuries, short-term birth dynamics fluctuated greatly.
However, in the seventeenth century, the population within the parish’s
territory remained relatively stationary in the long run. Conversely, the
eighteenth century was characterized by consistent, and at times vigor-
ous, population growth, which continued into the following century. The
seventeenth century is renowned as the ‘crisis’ century of European de-
mography. Unlike the sixteenth century, which saw overall positive demo-
graphic growth, the seventeenth century was marked by stagnation. The
population experienced sharp fluctuations due to alternating periods of
high natality or mortality, yet its overall size did not significantly change
in the long term. The stationarity and fluctuations reflected the precarious

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