Transylvania the Romanian population of Transylvania gathered in Alba Iulia on 1 December 1918 to proclaim the union of Transylvania with the Kingdom of Romania. In Transylvania, there are many medieval smaller towns such as Sighișoara, Mediaș, Sebeș, and Bistrița. Official censuses with information on Transylvania's population have been conducted since the 18th century. On May 1, 1784 the Emperor Joseph II called for the first official census of the Habsburg Empire, including Transylvania. The data was published in 1787, and this census showed only the overall population (1,440,986 inhabitants). , a 19th-century Hungarian statistician, estimated in 1842 that in the
History of Transylvania 895. This is supported by an eleventh-century Russian tradition that the Hungarians moved to the Carpathian Basin by way of Kiev. However, according to Florin Curta no evidence exists of Magyars crossing Eastern Carpathian Mountains into Transylvania. According to supporters of the Daco-Roman continuity theory, Transylvania was populated by Romanians at the time of the Hungarian conquest. Opponents of this theory assert that Transylvania was sparsely inhabited by peoples of Slavic origin and Turkic people. The year of the conquest of Transylvania is unknown; the earliest Magyar artifacts found in the region date to the first half of the 10th