Note 436 — PART I.

This calculation was made by some priests from the harach, (a pole-tax levied upon the male Christians and Jews, after they arrive at a certain age that they are supposed to be capable of work): an estimate of the bread consumed in the city, and the number of those who died of the plague in 1742; which they found to be among the Christians in the proportion of five to the hundred, and from thence they calculated the Turks to be in the same proportion, and so reckoned the number at 300,000: but as all the Christians who can afford it keep out of the way of infection, which but few Turks dare do, it is plain a much greater proportion of the latter must die of the disease, and so cause a fallacy in this calculation; so that I have only reckoned them at 200,000.