On August 11, 106 AD, after the end of the pacification campaign of Decebal’s kingdom, Emperor Nerva Traian issued a Constitutio Provinciae, the act of founding a new imperial province, Dacia Augusti. Usually such an act was accompanied by a census, in fact a general assessment of the human resources available to the new territory. We assume that the information the late Roman historian Ioannes Lydus retains about Dacia are derived from this census, which leads us to the conclusion that the territory added to the Empire of Nerva Trajan was inhabited, at this time, by over two million people.
