Transcription and evaluation of the Muslim Population Book of Çağa district in Bolu Sanjak (Hijri 1256 - Gregorian 1840)

The Ottoman State was a state with a well-established registration system. Thanks to the system that started with Tahrir and continued with Avarız and Temettuat registers, the state, which registered land and animals in almost every region of the country, could easily determine how much tax it would collect from which region. However, these books did not contain clear and accurate information about the population of the country. For this reason, a nationwide census was initiated in the first half of the 19th century, The census, initiated in 1831 by order of Sultan Mahmud the Second, was recorded as the first modern census in Ottoman history. The purpose of this census was to provide soldiers to the new military order created after the abolition of the Janissary Corps and to identify taxpayers in the country. The population registers, which were created as a result of the population censuses that started with these purposes and continued in the following periods, contain very valuable information about the economic and administrative situations of the regions as well as the demographic structure of different periods of the Ottoman society. With this study we have done, we discussed the Age of Muslim Population Book of Age 698 dated 1256 - 1840 AD, which is one of the Ottoman population registers. We evaluated the information we obtained by transcribing the relevant notebook. Thus, information was given about the administrative, economic and socio-cultural structure of the Çağa district of the period, by considering the neighborhoods and villages in the current book, the professions performed in the region, the nicknames of the families and the titles indicating the social status of the people. In addition to these, our study has been turned into a resource study by tabulating the obtained data. KEYWORDS: Bolu Sanjak, Çağa District, Population Register, Demographic Structure