The Mosul Vilayet (Ottoman Turkish: ولايت موصل, Vilâyet-i Musul‎) was a first-level administrative division (vilayet) of the Ottoman Empire. It was created from the northern sanjaks of the Baghdad Vilayet in 1878. At the beginning of the 20th century it reportedly had an area of 29,220 square miles (75,700 km2), while the preliminary results of the first Ottoman census of 1885 (published in 1908) gave the population as 300,280. The accuracy of the population figures ranges from "approximate" to "merely conjectural" depending on the region from which they were gathered.