The Number and Age of Recruits from the Croatian Military Frontier (.. and a note on the1848 Hungarian Revolution)

Here, finally, is the first post looking at the data on soldiers from the Udbina area from the Austro-Hungarian records.

And to start, here's a simple graph showing the number of soldiers who were enrolled each year from 1820 to the late 1860s.  Here's the color scheme:
     The blue line = total number of soldiers enrolled that year.
     The red line = average age of soldiers enrolled that year.

The first thing to note is that there is a positive correlation (with a correlation of 0.45) between the two trend lines.  In years where they enroll more men, the average age of those men was older.   It seems that when they had to recruit a larger group, they dug deeper into the barrel.

The big peak in the number of enrollees is 1848, the year of the Hungarian revolution.  The 1848 Hungarian revolution was extremely consequential for the Croatian military frontier.  When Hungary revolted, the leaders of Croatia had a choice of whether to fight for Austria in putting down the revolt or to declare their own independence.  The Croatian leader Ban Jeličić (NOTE - Ban is a title) agreed to fight for Austria on the provision that they would get greater independence within the Austrian empire.  The efforts to stop the revolt took everything the Austrians had (including a lot of help from Russia) and it shows up here in the larger number of soldiers who were drafted that year.  (The Austrians drafted 358 soldiers from these villages that year.  The next highest year was 174 - less than half the number drafted in 1848.)

As a side note, Ban Jeličić, is an important figure in Croatian history and is memorialized on the 20 kuna banknote and with lots of memorials throughout Croatia.  He is also on the square as pictured here: