За вътрешните миграции на българите през XVII в.
The Internal Migrations of the Bulgarians in the 17th Century

Summary/Abstract: The study expands the notion of the internal migrations of the Bulgarians during one of the so-called “emigration” centuries, using for this purpose abundant and so far unpublished source material mainly from four Ottoman Turkish “Books of Complains” (şikayet Defteri) of 1649-1650, 1675, 1698 and 1718. If one judges by the data extracted from them, the process of migration during the period under review concerned to the highest degree: 1) the different categories of “privileged” population with special obligations in the military auxiliary and economic sphere (voynuks, ore-miners, rice-growers, derbentcis, etc.) and 2) the reaya from the vakifs, irrespective of whether they had been founded by sultans, their mothers, wives, daughters, etc., by prominent Ottoman dignitaries or persons of lower rank in the service hierarchy. The cause for these flights usually were of a complex character, but comparatively most often they consisted in the neglect and even official abolition of certain concessions and privileges of the indicated two groups of vassal population, the imposition of them of taxes from which they had been exempted in the past and their subjection to violation and arbitrary acts. A factor for the migrations sometimes was also the intensification of the conflict between the ordinary reaya and the privileged people. Taking into account the numerous directions of migration, as areas in the south along the arc Edrine-Lozengrad-Viza and along the Danube. It is not accidental that in the processing of large amounts of data from the registers of the Christian population from the 17th century are encountered some of the rare cases for the period of growth of this population, evidently also mechanical to one or other extent.

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