Káldy–Nagy Gyula: A budai szandzsák 1546–1590. évi összeírásai. Demográfiai és gazdaságtörténeti adatok - Pest Megye Múltjából 6. (Budapest, 1985)

Introduction

710 had to pay the jizye tax, whereas, by that time, practically all heads of families were obligated to pay it. Trying to find an answer to this, we also find it rather strange that while in 1546 they registered 91 single male servants along with the 295 heads of families in Kecskemét, by 1580 the number of the unmarried had shrunk to only four. Presumably, the 376 persons registered along with the 710 jizye tax paying heads of families were either male servants, or at best, they were cotters. Further examination of the matter also proves that the 1580 census taker must have registered many fewer unmarried males not only in Kecskemét but throughout the sanjak of Buda (in our volume, we listed these people in the „miscellaneous unmarried" column). We feel that the matter will become clearer if we summarize the number of singles from the demographic data of this volume. Doing this we arrive at the following: 1546 1559 1562 1580 1590 917 181 125 306 643 Looking at the above figures, the question might arise as to why the number of unmarried persons has declined. Is it perhaps that after 1546 the male servants were registered by their last names (as if they had been married) in order to show a greater number of families ? This theory does not hold, however, for the census taker of 1590, as he more then doubled the number of singles his predecessor had registered. Male servants, however, were not taxpayers; in the five censuses of Buda we can rarely find examples of even sickle money having been levied on them. The 1580 census taker also stated in his previously cited report that when he registered the additional 1134 families, he brought up the expected income of the sanjak of Buda by 200,000 akches, although this figure shrank to 50,000 akches in his letter of three months later. For the evaluation of the de facto size of this excess income we wish to state that the census taker of 1580 levied 48,111 akches on the village of (Sziget-)Szentmiklós alone, although its population consisted of only 113 families. (We have intentionally omitted any reference by way of comparison to such villages as, for instance, Rácalmás, where the census taker levied an amount of 45,000 akches on a total number of only 77 residents.) All of this shows that there is no correlation between the larger number of families and the higher level of expected income the 1580 census taker reported. This is the fact that brought forth the theory that the census taker also registered the male servants, who were incapable of paying taxes, although if they were married cotters, then from the standpoint of demographic research, this does not present a problem. At times, there seems to be a lack of harmony between the various econo-historical data as well. The grain, must and hay tenths the first two censuses establish may appear to be too high in certain settlements compared to the number of jizye-paying inhabitants (another factor which is indicative of the economic strenght of the population), or vice versa. In these cases the corresponding data of the neighbouring settlements are 36