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We need maximum slope values for carts and pack animals to model the historical traffic of people and goods before the advent of steam and internal combustion engines. With this article, we first calculate maximum slope averages for carts and pack animals by using an extensive geo-referenced and vectorized historical transport network for late 19th-century Southeast Europe. Then by utilizing these slopes and making joint use of the least-cost path, accumulated cost surfaces, and network analyses, we model the movement of carts and pack animals for a large segment of an Ottoman military campaign in 1532, which followed the Via Militaris, between Istanbul and Sofia. Lastly, we compare our modelled routes for carts and pack animals for the 16th century with the existing road infrastructure of the late 19th century.

Bulgarian historiography did not find to date a documentary source based evidence that firmly establishes 6 July 1837 as the birth date of Vasil Levski. Therefore, other hypotheses placing the birth of Levski in 1846 or 1843 have lately been put forward. The present article examines data from the population registers of Karlovo, kept in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, and argues that 1840 is Vasil Levski’s most probable birth date.

This research introduces a novel geo-spatial sampling model to overcome a major difficulty in historical economic geography of Bulgarian lands during a crucial period: immediately before and after the de facto independence of the territory from the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. At its core it seeks to investigate the research question how the Bulgarian independence affected agricultural production in two regions (centered around the cities of Plovdiv and Ruse) of today's Bulgaria, for which there are conflicting yet empirically unsubstantiated claims concerning the economic impact of the political independence. Using our be-spoke geo-sampling strategy we believe, we have sampled regionally representative commensurable agricultural data from the 1840s Ottoman archival documentation, in accord with agricultural censuses conducted by the nascent nation state of Bulgaria in the 1890s., European Union (EU); Horizon 2020; European Research Council (ERC); Research and innovation Programme; Project: "Industrialisation and Urban Growth from the mid-nineteenth century Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey in a Comparative Perspective, 1850-2000"; UrbanOccupationsOETR