In the Podcast Mrežnica broadcast on July 14 this year, guest Tado Jurić, a demographer and professor at the Catholic University of Croatia (the episode is available here), spoke about historical changes in the number of Croats. Among other things, he stated:

“When we compare ourselves to the Serbs, let’s say in the 19th century, after Turkish rule, after the Serbian uprisings, in the 1840s, they numbered about 1.1 million. Croats at that time were twice as large as the Serbs as a people. Many people think that the Serbs were always the more numerous nation – no, Croats were twice as numerous as Serbs in the 19th century.” (also available in a clip from the show here)

However, such a thesis cannot be considered accurate, since it is based on a selective presentation of data, without regard for temporal, let alone spatial, context. First of all, regular population censuses conducted every ten years under standardized criteria, both in Croatia and in Serbia, were only introduced with the establishment of the joint Yugoslav state, in 1921. All earlier censuses, aside from being carried out at different times, must therefore be viewed as results of different state interests and needs – those of rulers in Croatian territories on the one hand, and Serbian rulers on the other. [1]

As for censuses in Serbia, specifically within the borders of the Principality of Serbia (consisting at the time of the districts of Šumadija, Mačva, Raška, Timočka Krajina, and the town of Belgrade), this institution was first introduced by Miloš Obrenović in 1815, when 473,000 individuals were counted. However, this census cannot be regarded as complete, since it only included married men and omitted both Turkish and Roma populations.[2] The following census of 1818, although broader in scope (recording all males over seven years of age, divided by occupation: priests, officials, other public servants, merchants, craftsmen, farmers.), was still incomplete.[3] In the 1840s, the period Jurić highlights, three censuses were carried out under Prince Mihailo Obrenović.[4] In the 1840s, the period Jurić highlights, three censuses were carried out under Prince Mihailo Obrenović[1]. The 1841 census recorded 828,895 inhabitants of both sexes; the 1844 census counted 849,286, including Turks and Roma for the first time, though still excluding children under seven and the population of Belgrade. The first truly comprehensive census of the Principality of Serbia was therefore the one conducted in 1846, which for the first time included all children as well as the inhabitants of Belgrade, recording a total of 892,315 people. Yet even this number, smaller than the one Jurić cites, referred only to the Principality, an area much smaller than present-day Serbia. For a fairer comparison with today’s territory, one would also have to add the population of Vojvodina (estimated[5] at 912,754 in 1840) and probably also Kosovo and Metohija, though no population data exist there prior to 1899. [6]

In Croatia, the first full census, systematically organized like in the rest of the Habsburg Empire, was carried out in 1857.[7] The population figure from the 1840s cited by Jurić[8] originated from a later study by Mladen Lorković,[9] widely considered problematic on several grounds. Published in his work The People and Land of the Croats,[10] it cited a total of 1,605,730 inhabitants of “Croatia and Slavonia” in the year 1840, of whom 1,075,627 were Croats and 304,179 were Serbs. First, it should be noted that Lorković only published his study in 1939, a full 99 years after the period he was referencing. The data he presents were compiled as a composite of records on the religious composition of the population, maintained by church authorities of different denominations, each using varying methodologies, levels of accuracy, and purposes, published between 1802 and 1843.[11] This covers a period of at least 41 years, longer than the average life expectancy in the region at that time,[12] a span during which, according to modern standards, at least four new censuses should have been conducted. Errors related to migration dynamics, as well as birth and death rates, which could have led to double or multiple counting of the same individuals, as well as the inclusion of people who were not contemporaries at all, were inevitable [13] in such a study. Scholars also dispute Lorković’s method of ‘mapping’ religious statistics onto the categories of modern nations, since for the purposes of his study he counted all Catholics as Croats, all Orthodox as Serbs, and all Protestants as either Hungarians or Germans, depending on which of the two groups was numerically dominant in the area at that time. [14] Finally, even if these figures were accepted at face value, Lorković’s data cannot be regarded as an accurate representation of the ‘number of Croats’ or of the Croatian population as a whole, as they refer only to the territory of ‘Croatia and Slavonia,’ that is, the counties of Križevci, Primorje, Požega, Srijem, Slavonia, Varaždin, and Zagreb, as well as the Military Frontier.

The first truly relevant census, therefore, is the one from 1857, which was carried out simultaneously across the whole territory and also included data for the vast majority of today’s Croatian lands. According to its results, there were a total of 2,181,499 [15] inhabitants in this area. This figure can then be roughly compared with the population of Serbia in the following way: Vojvodina, covered by the same census, had 1,030,545 inhabitants,[16] while the Principality of Serbia recorded 1,078,281 inhabitants in 1859.[17] This means that within today’s borders (excluding Kosovo and Metohija, for which data was still unavailable at the time), Serbia counted 2,108,826 inhabitants. Although the two-year difference between the Habsburg and the Serbian census again prevents absolute precision, it may be concluded that by the late 1850s, at the time of the first modern censuses on the territories of both present-day states, Croatia did indeed have more inhabitants than Serbia – but only by about seventy thousand (72,673 when comparing the two censuses side by side), and not twice as many, as Tade Jurić suggests.

However, Jurić’s references to “the Croatian people” and “the Serbian people” in the context of mid-19th-century censuses cannot be regarded as reliable. Firstly, because none of the censuses in question (apart from Lorković’s later calculations) recorded nationality – at that time still a much more fluid and emerging category – but only religion, and in the case of the censuses from the era of Prince Miloš, not even that. Even if one were to assume that most Catholics in the region later adopted a Croatian, and most Orthodox a Serbian national identity, it would still be impossible to reconstruct uniform figures for the mid-19th century, since Croats and Serbs were to be found not only within the borders of Croatia and of Serbia with Vojvodina, but also in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo and Metohija, and Montenegro, as well as likely in parts of Slovenia, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania.

In conclusion, Jurić’s statement, though it may sound like an intriguing forgotten historical fact, does not reflect reality. It relies on unreliable, selective sources and methodologically questionable calculations. When relevant mid-19th-century censuses and their contexts are considered, it is clear that Croats were not twice as numerous as Serbs, but only marginally more so.

[1] According to Allcock, John. Explaining Yugoslavia (Columbia University Press, 2004), 82.

[2] Population Censuses in the Principality of Serbia (1815–1882) (Belgrade: Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia, 2022), 7.

[3] Ibid. 9.

[4] Ibid. 10.

[5] Đere, Zoltan. “Sketch of Changes in the Ethnic Structure of Today’s Vojvodina,” Istraživanja 15 (2004), 119.

[6] Ocić, Časlav. “Kosovo and Metohia: Ethnodemographic Changes from the End of World War II to 1991,” in Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija (Belgrade: SANU, 2006), 457.

[7] See: https://geografija.hr/popis-stanovnistva-1857-godine/ or https://abcgeografija.com/teme/popis2021/ (pristup 25.8.2025.)

[8] Comparison of the presentation in the program with: Jurić, Tade. “How Many Croats Were There Throughout History: A Historical Demography Approach.” In: Obnova 19 (2024). 155-169. Available at: https://hrcak.srce.hr/clanak/471231 (accessed August 25, 2025)

[9] Mladen Lorković (Zagreb, 1909 – Lepoglava, 1945), a lawyer by profession with no formal training in demography or history; later known as Minister of Foreign Affairs and subsequently Minister of the Interior of the Independent State of Croatia, and one of the instigators of the failed coup against Ante Pavelić

[10] Lorković, Mladen. The People and the Land of the Croats (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1939), 86–87.

[11] Korunić, Petar. “The Beginnings of Ethnographic Statistics in the Habsburg Monarchy and Croatia.” In: Historijski zbornik 13 (2010), 28.

[12] O’Neil, Aaron. ‘Life expectancy (from birth) in Austria, from 1870 to 2020.’ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041189/life-expectancy-austria-all-time/ (accessed August 25, 2025)

[13] Compare: Korunić, Petar. “The Beginnings of Ethnographic Statistics in the Habsburg Monarchy and Croatia.” In: Historijski zbornik 13 (2010), 27–31; Gross, Mirjana. The Beginnings of Modern Croatia (Zagreb: Globus, 1985).

[14] Compare: Chaunu, Pierre. Time of Reforms: Religious History and the Civilizational System (Zagreb: Antibarbarus, 2002); Korunić, Petar. Settlements and Population of the Croatian Provinces 1750–1857, . vol. I (Zagreb: FF Press, 2018), 83–87.

[15] https://abcgeografija.com/teme/popis2021/ (accessed August 25, 2025)

[16] Popović, Dušan. Serbs in Vojvodina, vol. I (Novi Sad: Matica srpska, 1957), 212.

[17] Population Censuses in the Principality of Serbia (1815–1882), (Belgrade: Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia, 2022), 35.

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