TOCQUEVILLE IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

AND ITS HERITAGE
Politics, Society and Economy
edited by

Suraiya Faroqhi and Halil Inalcik

Advisory Board

Fikret Adanir • Idris Bostan • Amnon Cohen • Cornell Fleischer

Barbara Flemming • Alexander de Groot • Klaus Kreiser
Hans Georg Majer • Irène Mélikoff • Ahmet Yaşar Ocak
Abdeljelil Temimi • Gilles Veinstein • Elizabeth Zachariadou

VOLUME 28
 TOCQUEVILLE
IN THE
OTTOMAN EMPIRE
Rival Paths to the Modern State

BY

ARIEL SALZMANN

BRILL
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2004
 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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ISSN 1380-6076
ISBN 90 04 10887 4

© Copyright 2004 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands

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To my mother and father
This page intentionally left blank
 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ...................................................................... ix

Preface ........................................................................................ xi
List of Abbreviations .................................................................. xiii
Note on Transliteration ............................................................ xv

Introduction: Tocqueville’s Ghost .................................................. 1

In Search of an Archive .................................................... 6
The Old Régime through an Ottoman Lens .................. 13
Vocabularies of Early Modernity ...................................... 24

I. On a Map of Eurasia ............................................................ 31

Edges of Empire .................................................................. 38
From the Inside Out .......................................................... 52
Movements of People, Commodities, and Capital .......... 60
Eurasia in Transition .......................................................... 71

II. The Sublime Porte and the Credit Nexus .................................. 75

Palace, “Porte” and Patronage .......................................... 78
Hierarchies of Service ........................................................ 92
“Corporate Patrimonialism” and the Reproduction
of Power .......................................................................... 102
Deyn-ü Devlet (Debt and State): Islamicate
High Finance .................................................................. 110
Completing the Circle ........................................................ 118

III. Government in the Vernacular .................................................. 122

Questions of Jurisdiction .................................................... 127
At the Interstices of Rural Administration ...................... 139
Government in the Vernacular .......................................... 150
Checks and Balances .......................................................... 163
Final Entries ........................................................................ 172

IV. Conclusion: The Paths Not Taken ........................................ 176

The Common Origins of the Modern State .................... 179
A Federalist Alternative? .................................................... 187
viii 

The Diyarbekir Commune of 1819 .................................. 191

Of Democracy and the New Despotism .......................... 194

Glossary ...................................................................................... 201

Bibliography ................................................................................ 203

Index ............................................................................................ 235

 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

1. A double page of a malikâne register .................................. 2

2. A map of eighteenth-century Eurasia .................................. 32
3. Detail of page of a malikâne register .................................... 123
4. Flow chart of shares in a malikâne contract ........................ 124
5. Diyarbekir’s provincial boundaries in flux .......................... 130
6. The final page of a New Order register ............................ 173

Color Plates (between 200 and 201)

1. A farmer leads the procession of the guilds

2. The sultan and the grand vizier
3. The hierarchies of state
4. Janissaries race for their portion of rice
5. French and Russian ambassadors view the festivities
6. The sultan distributes gold coins
This page intentionally left blank
 PREFACE

Exotic painters, hack journalists, and impoverished academics have

picked over the relics of the Ottoman old regime. Yet for some the
empire has not died. Whether it is the Islamist’s dream of a com-
passionate theocracy, a Balkan nationalist’s vow to avenge a medieval
defeat, or an American president’s blueprint for the “new” Iraq,
there is reason to question those who seek to remake its past.
Rather than braving this unsettled history alone, I have invited a
more seasoned traveler to join me. Alexis de Tocqueville’s specter
lends this project a comparative slant while furnishing a conceptual
anchor to an inherently unmanageable topic. Those familiar with
my dissertation, “Measures of State: Tax Farmers and the Ottoman
Ancien Régime, (1695–1807) (Columbia University, 1995) will rec-
ognize themes and sources. However, the aims of the present work
are quite different. From a study on the political economy of tax
farming, it has become an inquiry into the origins of government
under the old regime.
This essay trespasses across many disciplinary boundaries. Courses
in sociology, language and history at Binghamton and Columbia uni-
versities with Ca[lar Keyder, Rhoads Murphey, and Kathleen Burrill
introduced me to the Ottoman Empire. Richard Bulliet, Donald
Quataert, John Mundy, and Charles Tilly shaped my historical
method and tolerated my eclecticism. In proseminars, conferences,
workshops, and over coffee in New York City and Cincinnati, many
colleagues have patiently considered my ideas; my students have
inspired me.
Countless hours in the archives and many gifted scholars have
transformed me into an Ottomanist. I remain deeply indebted to my
hocalarım Mehmet Genç and Suraiya Faroqhi. Murat Çizakça, Mü-
bahat Kütüko[lu, Engin Akarlı, Cornell Fleischer, Halil Sahillio[lu,
Nejat Göyünç, (dris Bostan, Thomas Goodrich, and Rifa"at Abou-
El-Haj never failed to answer my questions; rahmetli Jean-Pierre Thieck,
Gülden Sarıyıldız, Caroline Finkle, Tony Greenwood, Ne{e Erim,
Caroline and Andy Finkle shared tea and wisdom. Özer Ergenç,
Rifat Özdemir and Mustafa Öztürk tutored me in urban studies.
Halil (nalcık kindly read this manuscript before publication and
xii 

pointed out my errors. Despite their best efforts, more remain.

Naturally, these defects are mine alone.
Special thanks are reserved for those who contributed very directly
to the preparation of the manuscript: my editor at Brill, Trudy
Kamperveen, Betty Seaver who groomed the text; Paula Hible whose
artistry polished the maps. Jane Kepp, Geoff Porter, Yüksel Duman,
Sabri Ate{, and Markus Dressler took on editorial tasks. Materially,
the author benefited from the support of the Pratt Institute and New
York University. Two National Endowment for the Humanities-
American Research Institute in Turkey grants (in 1994 and 1999)
allowed me to continue archival research and a writing fellowship
from American Council of Learned Societies 1999–2000 gave me a
respite from nearly a decade of teaching.
Gratitude goes to an extended family of friends—Noosha Baqi,
Carolle Charles, Jenny White, Selcuk Esenbel, Waheguru Pal Singh
Sidhu, Faruk Tabak, Paula Hible, Serpil Ba[cı, Selim Deringil,
Elizabeth Thompson, Gaynor Ellis, Dan Goffman, Shala Baqi and
Randy Martin who have always been there. The Abbasis of Kabul
and Vancouver, the Ziyabaksh-Tabari of Teheran, the Salzmanns of
London, the Marchettis of Perugia, and the Hanio[lus of Istanbul
fed and sheltered me during my travels. I remember with admira-
tion and love those who have not lived to see this work’s comple-
tion: my art teachers, Kalman and Doris Kubinyi, my second mom
and Harlem activist, Ruth Johnson, my buddy and prisoner-rights
advocate, Felix Reyes, and my ever-defiant aunt Marsha Weiland.
In the end, as in the beginning, my parents have given bound-
lessly to this project. I dedicate this work to my mother, Audrey
Pastor Salzmann and my father, Harold I. Salzmann, my first teachers.
 ABBREVIATIONS

AA Aleppo Ahkâm Defterleri, Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi.

Belgeler Belgelerle Türk Tarihi Dergisi.
Belleten Türk Tarih Kurumu Belleten.
BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies.
CA Cevdet Askeriye, Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi.
CB Cevdet Belediye, Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi.
CD Cevdet Dahiliye, Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi.
CDp Cevdet Darphane, Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi.
C? Cevdet (ktisat, Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi.
CM Cevdet Maliye, Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi.
CMRS Cahiers de Monde Russe et Sovietique.
CT Cevdet Timar, Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi.
CZ Cevdet Zaptiye, Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi.
CSSH Comparative Studies in Society and History.
DA Diyarbekir Ahkâm Defterleri, Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi.
EA Erzurum Ahkâm Defterleri Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi.
EI 2 Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition.
D.B}M Ba{muhâsebe Kalemi, Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi.
D.MKF Bâb-ı Defteri Mevkûfât Kalemi, Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi.
D}S Diyarbekir }eriye Sicilleri Milli Kütüphane.
(A (slâm Ansiklopedisi.
(FM (stanbul Üniversitesi (ktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası.
IJMES International Journal of Middle East Studies.
IJTS International Journal of Turkish Studies.
I}MS Istanbul }eriye Mahkeme Sicilleri (microfilm).
JTS Journal of Turkish Studies.
JESHO Journal of the Economic and History of the Orient.
JOAS Journal of the American Oriental Society.
KK Kâmil Kepeci, Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi.
MMD Maliye"den Müdevver Defterleri, Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi.
M}S Mardin }er"iye Sicilleri Milli Kütüphane.
POF Prilozi za Orijentalnu Filologiyu i Istorija Jugoslavenskih Naroda
pod Turskom Valdavinom.
RMMM Revue du Monde Musulmane et de la Mediterranée.
SA Sivas Ahkâm Defterleri, Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi.
xiv 

TKSA Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Ar{ivi.

TKSK Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi.
TTK Türk Tarih Kurumu.
ZDMG Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlädischen Geselleschaft.
 NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

English spellings have been used for commonly used Middle Eastern
terms (e.g. ulema, vizier, pasha) and place names. Terms with ref-
erence to the broader Islamic world (e.g. Naqshbandiyya, shah, waqf,
shaykh, etc.) have been transcribed from Arabic or Persian without
diacritics or italics.
I adhere to the New Redhouse Turkish-English Dictionary (Istanbul:
Redhouse Press, 8th Ed., 1986) for the transcription of Ottoman ter-
minology with certain modifications: to account for the Arabic sound-
and Persian plural, I use “ât” and “ân” respectively; and I have also
chosen to preserve the original Arabic articles (ul- al-) and Persian
ezafe (-i) instead of a compound: e.g. }eyh"ül-(slam vs. }eyhülislam.
Throughout, I have attempted to reduce the number of diacritical
marks.
English readers unfamiliar with Turkish characters should note the
following: the “ç” is pronounced like the “ch” in church; the “c”
like “j” in jam; the “{” like “sh” in shoe. The “[”, though silent,
lengthens the preceding vowel. As for vowels: the “ı” is like the “i”
in slip; the “ö” as “u” in burr; and the “ü” is pronounced as the
“u” in French.
 INTRODUCTION

TOCQUEVILLE’S GHOST

Distracted by the call to prayer that echoed across Divan Yolu from
the mosque at Sultan Ahmad, the guard did not notice as Alexis de
Tocqueville, the historian of the old regime and the scholar of mod-
ern government, slipped quietly past and entered the Prime Minister’s
Archive.1
He strode briskly along the corridor and up a short flight of stairs,
then he turned left toward the reading hall. Heading toward the last
row of desks at the back of the room, he seated himself. The pre-
vious researcher had left at the desk a pile of red-bound registers.
Curious, Tocqueville opened the uppermost document (Fig. 1). He
bent over to get a better look at the unfamiliar handwriting before
realizing that what lay before him was a ledger of contracts issued
on village revenues in a remote province. Scrawled over its pages
were notations that spanned nearly a century, between 1697 and
1793.
As he peeled back the pages, tattered by time and use, Tocqueville
contemplated the profound changes in the style of the chancellery:
unlike the clear and comprehensive registers of the fifteenth and six-
teenth centuries, the ancien régime’s records seemed a patois of
script, cipher, and haphazard numbers.2 He sighed, thinking of the
“clarity and intelligence of the men” who compiled the first cadastral
records of the early sixteenth century. These “obscure, ill ordered,
incomplete, and slovenly” pages did not bode well for the eighteenth-

1
Quotations are from The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1955). When meaning is unclear, I
have also checked L’ancien régime et la Révolution, ed. J.-P. Mayer (Paris: Éditions
Gallimard, 1967), and François Furet and Françoise Mélonio’s new edition of the
complete text and Tocqueville’s notes, translated by Alan S. Kahan, 2 vols. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998). Also see J.-P. Mayer, ed. Oeuvres complètes (Paris:
Gallimard, 1951–) 12 vols.
2
For samples, see Mübahat S. Kütüko[lu, Osmanlı Belgelerinin Dili (Diplomatik)
(Istanbul: Kubbealtı Akademisi Kütür ve San"at Vakfı, 1998).
2 

Fig. 1. A double page (reduced) from a malikâne mukataa “master” register for the
province (eyalet) of Diyarbekir (MMD 9518:17–18). On the right hand side there are
six entries; on the left, five. The transactions between contractors, connected by
flourishes of the pen, span nearly a century. By permission of the Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi.
 ’  3

century empire. They conjured up an image of a great power teetering

on the edge of an abyss.3
The Ottomans, he mused, once dominated the Mediterranean and
West Asia. Their neighbors regarded their political institutions as a
marvel of statecraft. The sultan’s civil servants formed tight admin-
istrative cadres, hierarchically organized, hardworking and honest.
His soldiers possessed an incomparable ésprit de corps. What had
happened to this great state? The fierce janissaries laid down their
muskets for pushcarts. Administrators, shunning their duties, distrib-
uted liberties and immunities far and wide. The sale of agricultural
tithes, internal tariffs, and offices impoverished the peasantry and
handicapped the merchant. Even the most powerful viziers and gen-
erals owed their political fortunes to Istanbul’s Christian and Jewish
bankers.
Tocqueville felt as if he had entered a hall of mirrors: the sem-
blances between prerevolutionary France and the Ottoman old regime
were uncanny. There was the strange synchrony of rise and fall,
reform and centralization that punctuated the eighteenth Christian
and the corresponding twelfth Islamic centuries. Administrative con-
solidation had begun under the absolutism of the Sun King, Louis
XIV, as well as under the reign of his contemporary, the “Hunter-
Sultan,” Mehmet IV. Similar to the fiscal reforms carried out by the
Bourbon minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (d. 1683), the imperial pro-
gram was pushed forward by a succession of Körpülü viziers
(1656–1683) as well as by Sultan Ahmed III’s Grand Vizier (brahim
Pasha (r. 1718–1730). As in France, years of dramatic innovation
were followed by decades of prevaricating, borrowing, special favors,
and venality. Stunned by the outcome of military engagements and
the financial crises they wrought, the administrators of both regimes
threw themselves into a program of fiscal reform in the last quarter
century which culminated in the founding of a central treasury in

3
“The progressive decay of the institutions stemming from the Middle Ages can
be followed in records of the period . . . In the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century
registers I examined, I was much impressed by the skill with which they were
drafted, their clarity, and the intelligence of the men compiling them, In later peri-
ods, however, there is a very definite falling off; the terriers become more and more
obscure, ill ordered, incomplete, and slovenly” The Old Régime, 16. Echoes of
Tocqueville ring through Bernard Lewis’ account of Ottoman decline (The Emergence
of Modern Turkey [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961, 3d ed., 2002]), 23.
4 

France (1788) and the “New Order” fisc ((rade-i Cedid Hazinesi ) in
Istanbul (1793). Yet this defensive centralization only hastened the
downfall of the ancien régime and sealed the fate of both sovereigns,
Louis XVI in 1790 and Selim III in 1807.
Tocqueville suddenly grew disconcerted by his discovery: if the
policies and institutional patterns of the old regime were so similar
in character and so close in timing why did their paths suddenly
divide? Why did France cohere and the Ottoman Empire fall apart?
Tocqueville straightened his waistcoat and closed the ledger. Rising
from his seat, he turned his back on the reading room and walked
deliberately down the stairs, past the guard’s station and into the
street. A thin figure in quaint attire disappeared among the throngs
of tourists milling in the gardens and the teahouses of the Hippodrome.

Alexis de Tocqueville did not, of course, visit Istanbul or its archives.

Yet despite such imperious intellectual indifference to France’s
former ally, Tocqueville’s ghost haunts the social scientific imagina-
tion of the Ottoman past.4 It is found in the model of the modern
state, whose genesis is encapsulated in his classic L’ancien régime et
la Revolution.5 As the popularizer of one of the most influential
accounts of state centralization his thoughts about power and society

4
For a selection of his writings on Ottoman Algeria, see Alexis de Tocqueville,
De la colonie en Algérie, ed. Tzvetan Todorovo (Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1988);
and Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001). For one of the most sustained reflections, Tocqueville,
Oeuvres compléte, 3 pt. 1:129–253.
5
On his life and works, see André Jardin, Tocqueville: A Biography, (New York:
Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1988); Cheryl B. Welch, De Tocqueville (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 2001). As Edward Shills notes (“Tradition, Ecology
and Institution in the History of Sociology,” in The Constitution of Society [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982], 359), the revival of Tocqueville in sociological
theory owes to Raymond Aron. See Raymond Aron, Les Étapes de la pensée socio-
logique. Montesquieu. Comte. Marx. Tocqueville. Durkheim. Pareto. Weber. (Paris: Gallimard,
1967), and “Tocqueville retrouvé,” Tocqueville Review (1979): 8–23. I was grateful for
the opportunity to hear Cheryl Welch, “Tocqueville between Two Worlds: France
and Algeria,” and Joyce Appleby, “Does It Matter That Tocqueville Got Some
Things Wrong?” at the special colloquium on Sheldon S. Wolin’s Tocqueville Between
Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001), held at the Institute of French Studies of New York University on
April 19, 2002.
 ’  5

in eighteenth-century Europe are still refracted across the canon of

political science and sociology.6 As an explanation for the rise of lib-
eral government, his analysis rests on a “uniquely” European tem-
plate of social and cultural institutions from which the prophets of
modernization have derived many of their most cherished theories
and policies.7 Extracting Europe from the interactive meridian of ter-
ritorial states and oceanic empires and establishing the exceptional-
ism of the French political culture, the Tocquevillean model has also
misrepresented the nature of historical change—the modern state
could be implanted in foreign soils only through acculturation, cap-
italism, or colonialism.
There is, however, a paradox here. As our imaginary Tocqueville
discovers, France had no monopoly over the institutional features of
the ancien régime. In rereading Tocqueville’s classic through the
filter of a growing body of early modern European, Middle Eastern
and South Asian historiography, we find abundant contradictions,
equivocations, and, at times, what seem to be willful misreading of
the past. As our understanding of the historical record broadens and
gains greater geographic equilibrium, so too the Islamic A.H. twelfth
or, alternately, the Christian A.D. eighteenth centuries come into
new focus, highlighting trends, processes, and phenomena that pre-
vious scholars once relegated to the margins. Comparison is not only
possible,8 it is also absolutely necessary to make sense of political
change in the past as well as to appreciate the peculiar stresses and
strains of regimes in transition.

6
The assumption that the state under the ancien régime achieved a high degree
of institutional centralization appears to filter from Tocqueville through Marx to
modern social science, as David Waldner notes in State Building and Late Development
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 31. See also Theda Skocpol, States and Social
Revolution: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1979), 178–179. For Durkheim and the concept of centralization,
Bertrand Badie and Pierre Birnbaum, The Sociology of the State (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1983), 12; and Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of
European State-Making,” 64, in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed.
Idem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
7
The list is long. For some well known representatives in historical and politi-
cal sociology, see S. N. Eisenstadt, Modernization: Protest and Change (Englewood Cliffs,
N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1966); and Lucian W. Pye and Sidney Verba, eds. Political Culture
and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965). See also Seymour
Drescher, Dilemmas of Democracy: Tocqueville and Modernization (Pittsburg: University of
Pittsburg Press, 1968).
8
Michael Mann (The Sources of Social Power [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
6 

Far from rendering his study of the old regime obsolete, Tocqueville’s
encounter with the Ottoman Empire might further our inquiry into the
inner workings of the early modern state while helping us to exorcize
a nineteenth ghost that still stalks the social scientific imagination.

In Search of an Archive

Like the terriers that provoked the real Tocqueville’s exasperated assess-
ment, the registers and loose documents of the Ottoman ancien-
régime archive have disappointed and baffled many researchers. Yet
this seeming unintelligibility or purported opacity is also a modern
affect, a result of the physical and ideological clean sweep of the his-
torical record during the early nineteenth century. The selective purge
of history began well before the French Revolution and would become
part of the colonial project as well. During the Enlightenment, advo-
cates of statistical knowledge tied numerical precision to the very
image of state power.9 Napoleon’s conquests in the Mediterranean
put these radical alterations to collective memory into effect.
Revolutionary engineers transformed the urban plan, beginning with
the razing of ghetto walls; and bureaucrats reshuffled the contents
of archives, from Papal Rome to Mamluk Cairo.10 By the early nine-
teenth century, historians too entered the fray, claiming the archives

Press, 1986] 1:502–503) insists: “Comparison fails . . . Consider for a moment one
obvious additional case, Islamic civilization. Why did the Miracle not occur there? . . .
One distinctive feature of Islam has been tribalism; another, that religious funda-
mentalism recurs powerfully, usually from desert tribal bases . . . The comparative
method has no solution to these problems, not because of any general logical or
epistemological defects it might have but because, in dealing with the problems we
simply do not have enough autonomous, analogical cases.” For one response, see
Rifa'at 'Ali Abou-El-Haj, Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire Sixteenth to
Eighteenth Centuries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991). For some
important qualifications of the comparative method, see R. Bin Wong, China
Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of the European Experience (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1997).
9
On the “statistical” school of Göttingen University, see Theodore M. Porter,
The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820 –1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986), 23. Ausgust Ludwig von Schlözer was an early student of the Ottoman
Empire and an exponent of the new “scientific” method.
10
On the impact on Italy, see Silvana Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood: Writing
Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1996), 8.
 ’  7

as their own. Some, most notably Leopold von Ranke, who directed
the Prussian state archives, even busied themselves with reworking
the very raw materials of their craft.11 Already a symbol of the sov-
ereignty of the modern nation state, industrial might and colonial
domination allowed the European archive to subsume the world’s
past.12
If revolutionary fervor remade the past, as Tocqueville’s own dis-
claimer acknowledges (“. . . [W]hen great revolutions are successful
their causes cease to exist and the very fact of their success has made
them incomprehensible”), modern historians have had an even freer
hand in rewriting the history of states that failed to make the late
eighteenth-century transition.13 This is not simply because the his-
toricist rewriting of the Ottoman past came from implacably hostile
and religiously-biased corners of the globe.14 Rather, the distortions
of the Ottoman past, owe first and foremost to the empire’s loss of
sovereignty over the raw materials of memory. Unlike the defeated
colonizing nation-state—such as France, which covered its retreat
from North American in 1763 and two century later from Algeria,15
clutching the fig leaf of its “archives de souverainté”—Ottoman
archival materials were spoils that fell to the great powers or the
new states of the Balkans.16 After World War I, the Ottoman past

11
George G. Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography (Hanover, N.H.:
University of New England, 1984), 19.
12
E.g. Leopold von Ranke, The Ottoman and the Spanish Empires, in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1845). This is not simply a ques-
tion of ignoring the world’s history, but effectively of putting “history” itself on sep-
arate and unequal empirical and methodological tracks. Ranke justified very different
methods for classical, biblical, and non-Western history. Iggers, New Directions in
European Historiography, 15–17.
13
Tocqueville, The Old Régime, 5.
14
On the impact of orientalism on Ottoman history, see Suraiya Faroqhi, Approaching
Ottoman history: An Introduction to the Sources (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999); and for a critique of historicism on Indian historiography, see Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000).
15
While robbing other peoples of their past, European states seem to have con-
sidered the return of archives to be part of the gentleman’s rules of war. Article
22 of the treaty concluding the Seven Years War specified the return of French
administrative documentation. Zenab Esmat Rashed, The Peace of Paris, 1763
(Liverpool: University Press, 1951), 212–229.
16
(smet Binark, ed., Ba{bakanlık Osmanlı Ar{ivi Rehberi (Ankara: Turkish Republic
Ba{bakanlık Devlet Ar{ivileri Genel Müdürlü[ü Osmanlı Ar{ivi Daire Ba{bakanlı[ı,
1992), 14–34.
8 

was unceremoniously stripped away in colonial mandates. Just as in

the nineteenth-century Balkans, these materials would become the
contested inheritance of nation-states and the nations without states.
As many, often competing, national narratives superseded it, archival
dismemberment reinforced a partial and self-serving vision of the
features of a multicontinental and multiethnic state.17
Given the dispersal of the remains, the prospect of writing a com-
prehensive study of this Ottoman century, one that unifies the dis-
parate threads of provinces and center seems daunting indeed.
Although there is rapid growth in this field, the historiography devoted
to the eighteenth century still falls far short of research carried out
on the empire’s earlier centuries.18 Together, the monographic research
devoted to the Ottoman past constitutes but a fraction of the accu-
mulated studies on early modern Europe.19 Mindful of the long road
ahead and fully appreciating whence we have come, the task I pro-
pose is a very different one.
This study does not pretend to reconstruct the Ottoman Empire’s
political history as such. Rather, it seeks to construct a series of inter-
pretive frames derived from the current state of Ottoman historio-
graphy that might scrutinize Tocqueville’s legacy while reexamining
the paradoxes of power that obscure the past and remain an imped-

17
The literature continues to reinforce this divide by focusing on either provin-
cial social and political history or on central-state institutional studies. For a sam-
pling of studies that try to surmount this frontier, see Abdul-Karim Refeq, The
Province of Damascus, 1723–1783 (Beirut: Khayats, 1966); Stanford Shaw, Between Old
and New: The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III, 1789–1807 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1971); Madeline Zilfi, The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the
Postclassical Age (1600–1800) (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1988); T. Naff and
R. Owen, eds., Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History (Carbondale: University of
Southern Illinois Press, 1977); Robert W. Olson, The Siege of Mosul and Ottoman-
Persian Relations, 1718–43 (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1975). One of the
most comprehensive studies to date on Ottoman fiscality is Yavuz Cezar, Osmanlı
Maliyesinde Bunalım ve De[i{im Dönemi XVIII Yüzyıldan Tanzimat"a Mali Tarih (Istanbul:
Alan Yayıncılık, 1986).
18
Leaving to one side Hamilton A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen’s outdated
overview of the “Arab provinces,” (Islamic Society and the West: A Study of the Impact
of Western Civilization on Moslem Culture in the Near East, 2 vols. [London: Oxford
University Press, 1950 and 1957]) an introduction to the last generation of eight-
eenth-century studies may to be found in Bruce McGowan, “The Age of the Ayan,”
in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Halil (nalcık with Donald
Quataert (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 637–743; and Robert
Mantran et al., Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman (Paris: Fayard, 1989).
19
A point well taken by Abou-El-Haj, Formation of the Modern State, 6.
 ’  9

iment to understanding modern political paths. By filtering one of

the classic narratives of socio-political change and revolution through
an unfamiliar lens, the Ottoman ancien régime prods historians to
turn questions of socio-organizational change both inward and out-
ward: inward, toward the complex social and economic relationships
between a center and its many peripheries; and outward, toward
ever greater integration of historical polities within and among adjoin-
ing, converging or colliding, cultural and political systems.
Even by reducing the scope of this inquiry and taking advantage
of a wide range of sources, both archival and published, this study
has required more than a decade of empirical and conceptual spade-
work. It began in 1986 with a study on the economic history of the
province of Diyarbekir, located in the Kurdish southeast of today’s
Republic of Turkey. Only a year into that project, my focus began
to change. As I peered deeper into the Ottoman past and ques-
tioned the received wisdom of European political theory, I was drawn
into the larger puzzle of the eighteenth-century state. Realizing that
it was impossible to understand a part without a better grasp of the
mechanisms of the whole, I persevered in the archive. Repeatedly,
I have returned to Istanbul and Ankara to conduct research, to con-
sult with colleagues, and to explore newly catalogued sources.20
The dissertation, “Measures of Empire: Tax Farmers and the
Ottoman Ancien Régime,”21 reassessed the role of fiscal and admin-
istrative decentralization in early modern state formation. Conceptually
and methodologically, it was built on the foundation laid for eigh-
teenth-century political economy by Mehmet Genç. Addressing the
large question of economic development from an Ottoman vantage
point, Genç devised a method for using Ottoman archival docu-
mentation for quantifying change in the empire’s domestic market.22

20
Despite casting my net wide, I have scraped only the surface of many of the
new collections in the Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi in Istanbul. In 1994, I was able to con-
sult the Ottoman judicial court records ({er"iye sicilleri ) for eighteenth-century Mardin
and Diyarbekir that had been transferred to Milli Kütüphane in Ankara. For more
on the local court records found in the Republic of Turkey, see Ahmet Akgündüz
et al., eds., }er "iye Sicilleri, 2 vols. (Istanbul: Türk Dünya{i Ara{tırmaları Vakfı, 1988).
21
Ph.D. diss. Columbia University, 1995.
22
Mehmet Genç, “A Study on the Feasibility of Using Eighteenth-Century
Ottoman Financial Records as an Indicator of Economic Activity,” in The Ottoman
Empire in the World Economy, ed. Huri Islamo[lu-Inan (Cambridge UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), 345–373.
10 

By adapting what had long been regarded as the quintessentially

old-regime type of revenue contracting, the quasi-proprietary, lease-
for-life malikâne contract to this end, he also furnished students of
the old regime with an acutely sensitive tool for retracing social rela-
tionships and political organization. Recognizing its promise for social
history, Jean-Pierre Thieck, who was working on a monograph on
Aleppo before his untimely death in 1990, cracked another key part
of the old regime puzzle.23 He employed tax-farming documentation
to reconstruct the economy and polity of northern Syria. By trac-
ing connections between town and country through rural tax farms
and by identifying gentry-contractors, he illuminated a government
of the urban gentry forming in the shadow of the state’s policies of
extraction and redistribution.
Applying these conceptual and methodological insights to new data
and bringing an outline of the central-state’s redistributive structure
together with the evolving administrative system in the provinces,
my research pointed to concomitant processes.24 First, as the web of
contractual relationships emanating from contracting identified the
actors and interests that cemented the old-regime elite, I observed
that sectoral investments distinguished the state elite from non-investors
such as the religious establishment, as well as from more ordinary
contractors, members of what we might call the third estate, whose
portfolios were restricted to small scale agricultural holdings. Even
as this system of contracting networks grew more distended in space,
I speculated, the state’s monetary policy and regulation of credit
markets assured Istanbul’s continued dominance over many of the
key imperial actors.25

23
Jean-Pierre Thieck, “Décentralisation ottomane et affirmation urbaine à Alep
à la fin du XVIIIème siècle,” in Mouvements communautaires et espaces urbains au Machreq,
ed. Mona Zakaria et al. (Beirut: Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur le Moyen-
Orient Contemporain, 1985), 118–168. For an expanded version of this seminal
article as well as the journalistic writings of “Michel Farrère”) see Gilles Kepel, ed.,
Passion d’Orient (Paris: Éditions Karthala, 1992).
24
See Ariel Salzmann, “An Ancien Régime Revisited: Privatization and Political
Economy in the 18th Century Ottoman Empire,” Politics & Society 21 (1993): 393–423.
25
For more on Istanbul’s arbitrage policies, see Halil Sahillio[lu, “The Role of
International Monetary and Metal Movements in Ottoman Monetary History,
1300–1700,” in Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, ed. J. F.
Richards (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 1983), 269–304; and }evket
Pamuk, “The Recovery of the Ottoman Monetary System in the Eighteenth Century,”
in Kemal Karpat, The Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000),
188–211.
 ’  11

Second, by studying the devolution, transfer, and partnerships of

shareholders of tax farms, I noted that premodern “privatization”
did not necessarily contribute to economic and political disaffection
with the state. Instead, it fostered a distinct form of sociopolitical
integration: vertically, as the rical-ı devlet, the Ottoman aristocracy of
service and courtiers cultivated extensive networks across the empire
in order to manage their assets; and horizontally, as gentry (e{râf ve
ayân) invested in smaller-scale tax farming as a means for creating
spheres of influence within cities and the countryside. Not “indirect
rule” or the solvent of an imperial structure, tax farming should be
considered state formation by other means.
The dissertation, which offered an alternative model for eighteenth-
century Ottoman sociopolitical history, lent itself toward further quan-
titative and qualitative research. Rather than continue to quantify
these aspects of the imperial structure, the present work explores sev-
eral of the more misunderstood facets of old-regime rule and gov-
ernance. Thankfully, I did not have to start from scratch. Although
much of the material in chapter 1 is substantially new, the core of
my dissertation research, including a quasi-monographic account of
the political economy of an Ottoman province, provided raw mate-
rials for the present essay as well.
Despite its distance (approximately 1400 kilometers from Istanbul),
Diyarbekir was tethered to the imperial system in a peculiar logisti-
cal, social, and economic fashion. Like northern and central Syria,
northeastern Anatolia, and many of the Balkan provinces,26 political
relationships in Diyarbekir exemplify the old regime compromise. By
contrast, as recent monographs on eighteenth-century Cairo, Mosul,
Baghdad, Basra, and southern Syria/Palestine have shown, outer-
ring Asian and African provinces were simply too far removed to
exhibit the more characteristic aspects of vernacular government
under the old regime. As Tocqueville himself found for France’s
southernmost provinces, the so-called pays d’états, these outlying zones
testify to the territorial limits of the early modern state: during much
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their actors responded
to the strategic concerns of the frontier or the opportunities afforded
by a competitive interstate system.27

26
For another example, see Michael Robert Hickok, Ottoman Military Administration
in Eighteenth-Century Bosnia (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997).
27
See, in particular, Richard van Leeuwen, Notables and Clergy in Mount Lebanon:
12 

If benefiting from earlier choices, the present study has presented

new documentary challenges. Ideally, I would have hoped to have
stumbled upon a rich cache of documents, such as the cahiers de
doléance or the diaries of provincial elites, that might help better
explain the political ideas of the gentry or the quotidian cultural and
social relations within and between a provincial city and the Sublime
Porte. Although I did not, there is every reason to believe that the
patient and creative researcher will yet find them.28 But the records
I have used, although all too often drafted in Istanbul itself, do help
me reconstruct no less compelling features of the polity of the old
regime. In addressing issues of space, hierarchy, and government, I
have tried to diversify the witnesses and media of documentation,
teasing information from documents left by palace scientists, artists,
court historians, judges and bureaucrats. Despite efforts to broaden
my witnesses, readers will note many absences and silences. Few sub-
alterns and no women, with the exception of a rare cameo appear-
ance, are to be found within these pages.
While preoccupied with managing the scale of this endeavor, it is
no less true that even the most determined attempts to provide a
synthetic overview of an as yet unintegrated historical landscape will
fail without attention to more specific regional realities. To the extent
possible, I have tried to accomplish this by maintaining a critical
distance from the unparalleled but inherently biased vantage point
offered by the registers, edits, orders, and reports of the Sublime
Porte. In addition to another round of research in the eighteenth-
century court records for Diyarbekir and Mardin, I have gleaned
information from monographs on the provincial history of neigh-
boring regions to build a composite picture. (brahim Yılmazçelik’s
fine study on Diyarbekir’s late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth-century
capital district and city of Amid, a monograph that relies almost

The Khazin Sheikhs and the Maronite Church (1736–1840) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995); Jane
Hathaway, The Politics of Household in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazada[lı (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997); Thabit A. J. Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks, and
Murder: The Political Economy of Trade in Eighteenth-Century Basra (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2001); Dina Rizk Khoury, State and provincial society in the Ottoman
Empire: Mosul, 1540–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Beshara
Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
28
For Arabic sources, see Reinhard Schulze, “Was Ist Die Islamische Augklärung?”
Die Welt Des Islams 36 (1996): 277–325.
 ’  13

exclusively on provincial documentation and narrative sources other-

wise unavailable to me, keeps the provincial story from faltering.29
If the Ottoman Empire challenges students of the old regime in
an acute fashion, it is not simply a consequence of documentation.
The difficulties of reading and interpretation are part and parcel of
modern notions of sovereignty.30 For modern sovereignty entails not
only a notion of a monopoly of powers and the mutual recognition
of its members within a “club” of nation-states, but also predisposes
the investigator to adopting a particular perspective within the polity
itself. As such, an interpretation of the Ottoman past has invariably
demanded that researchers choose a central point of perspective and,
by it, to predetermine the gravitational center of power between a
state elite and the populations of its many peripheries. By beginning
this study with a map in which the empire itself is embedded in
larger geopolitical landscape of Eurasia, I hope to remind myself as
much as my readers, that the picture I paint would be very different
had I limited my perspective to Belgrade, Cairo, Istanbul or Baghdad.
As historians and social scientists recover diverse facets of a com-
mon past, it is will not be enough to revise narratives or simply
scrap the dominant paradigm; we must also re-site historiography
itself.

The Old Régime through an Ottoman Lens

The Ottoman Empire, the sociological axiom goes, is not a state; it

is an empire, to be exact, as Talcott Parsons would have it, an
“intermediate empire.”31 This classification conveys a preordained
course: a “youth” of precocious, albeit despotic centralization,

29
Dr. Yılmazçelik kindly provided me with a copy of his dissertation, “XIX.
Yüzyılın ilk Yarısında Diyarbakır, 1790–1840,” (Fırat University, 1991) 2 vols., dur-
ing my visit to Elazı[/Harput in 1992; given discrepancies in documentation, I cite
from both the dissertation as well as the resulting monograph, XIX. Yüzyılın ilk
Yarısında Diyarbakır, 1790–1840 (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1995).
30
On revisions to the classic notions of sovereignty, see John Ruggie, “Territoriality
and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in International Relations,” International
Organisation, 47 (1993): 139–74; and Thomas J. Biersteker and Cynthia Weber, eds.,
State Sovereignty as a Social Construct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
31
S. N. Eisenstadt, The Political System of Empires (New York: Free Press, 1969),
17–23. For an early critique, see Norman Izkowitz, “Eighteenth Century Ottoman
Realities,” Studia Islamica 16 (1962): 73–94.
14 

middle years of social stasis, followed inevitably by institutional decay

and violent collapse. As new studies disabuse such generalizations,
Ottoman scholars are increasingly reluctant to accept the received
wisdom of nineteenth-century historiography and social science or to
reflexively segregate a Eurasia and African state from the course of
modern political history.32 In fact, a healthy degree of skepticism
with regard to the authority of the Western canon has become an
indispensable tool of our trade.
Ironically, a student of Ottoman history who might peruse The
Old Régime and the French Revolution today no longer sees in the bud-
ding “state” of Western Europe an alien, impossibly distant entity.
Quite the contrary, she finds herself at home in Tocqueville’s descrip-
tion of the twists and turns in the old-regime plot and smiles with
familiarity at the recurrence of the comparable tropes. Tocqueville’s
celebration of Louis XIV’s role as the grand architect of French
absolutism (borrowed from Voltaire) begs for comparison with the
glorification of Süleyman the Magnificent (d. 1566) in the historiog-
raphy of Ottoman statecraft or the line of continuity traced between
the programs of “Westernization” of Ahmet III and those of his
grandson Selim III (r. 1789–1807).33
Although the Ottoman historian might sympathize with an author
who tries sustain his central thesis despite the contradictory evidence
he examines, we can no longer ignore the ideological blinders that
fundamentally obstructed his field of vision. Addressing the French
Revolution’s sharpest critic in his introduction and proposing to trace
its roots to the genetic structure Western institutions and the specific
socioeconomic conditions of old-regime France, book 1 steers read-
ers away from the territorial state system and the world economy.34
Outside of space, European institutional structures appear primor-
dial.35 Teleology replaces contingency. Whether we call them paths

32
See Abou-El-Haj, Formation of the Modern State.
33
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Ancien Régime: A History of France, 1610–1774
(Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 72, 266–267, 273, 630–635;
Halil (nalcık and Cemal Kafadar eds., Suleyman The First and His Time (Istanbul: Isis
Press, 1993) and Cornell H. Fleischer, “The Lawgiver as Messiah: The Making of
the Imperial Image in the Reign of Süleymân,” In Soliman le Manifique et son temps:
actes du colloque de Paris Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais 7–10 Mars 1990, ed. Gilles
Veinstein (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Science Sociales, 1992), 159–77.
34
The Old Régime, bk. 1, ch. 4.
35
Ibid., 10–11. François Furet (The Old Regime, vol. 1, 99) voices frustration over
Tocqueville’s lack of concern for the wars of religion.
 ’  15

or modes of production, only the nations “des confins de la Polande

à la mer d’Irlande” that arise from post-Roman, Christian “Europe”
plot a common course that leads through “feudalism,” parish com-
munities, and aristocracy toward private property, capitalism and
modern government, irrespective of the interactive, interdependent
Eurasian and African state systems. In subsequent chapters we real-
ize the significance of these abstract claims: as the rudiments of the
modern state emerge from absolutist monarchy in the late seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, it is Christian civilization, the bonds
of the rural parish, and the residue of an autonomous aristocratic
hierarchy which guard European absolutism from lapsing into pure
despotism (one assumes of an “oriental” variety).36
Even if we accept a grain-of-truth argument about the political
constitution of medieval Europe, the peculiarities of the French clergy,
and the specificities of culture and cultivation, the fact remains that
Tocqueville’s strongest interpretative arguments about the institu-
tional and social structure of prerevolutionary France are at odds
with the findings of most social historians.37 Despite Tocqueville’s
insistence, claims that old regime laid the basic foundation for fur-
ther centralization in areas of taxation, military recruitment, and jus-
tice, that Paris became “maitre” of the nation, or that the cultural
identity of its populations grew increasingly homogeneous ring hol-
low. France of the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries more
closely resembled the classic definition of an early modern “empire”
than a nation-state.38 It was a composite of regional governments
and near city-states, which zealously defended local languages, legal
codes and customs.39 Half of its revenues derived from indirect meth-
ods of finance and revenue collection, including tax farming and the
sale of thousands of venal offices.40

36
The Old Régime, 27; bk. 2, ch. 11.
37
Charles Tilly, “State and Counterrevolution in France,” Social Research, 56
(1989): 72–73. For references in The Old Régime: on the influence of Paris over the
provinces, 35, 65–72; on the destruction of the nobility, 27, 72–79; on the cen-
tralization process, 34–38, 65 131, 204; on conscription, 104–105; on the rule of
the intendants, 36–38, 134–135, 180.
38
George Rudé, Europe in the 18th Century: Aristocracy and the Buorgeois Challenge
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 85, 117–119.
39
For the provincial dimension, see Charles Tilly, The Contentious French: Four
Centuries of Popular Struggle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); and
more recently, Pierre Deyon, L’état face au pouvoir local: un autre regard sur l’histoire de
France (Paris: Editions Locales de France, 1996).
40
George T. Matthews, The Royal General Farms in Eighteenth Century France (New
16 

Despite his renewed popularity among certain schools of French

historiography,41 Tocqueville’s archival database for the The Old Régime
and the French Revolution was exceedingly shallow. While appreciating
Tocquevillean sensitivity toward the interplay of state and society,
we must recognize that his method of analysis is frequently contra-
dictory and his conclusions are often inconsistent with his own evi-
dence.42 Causality is elusive: in one section Tocqueville might attribute
the catalyst of change to the pressures of increasing state central-
ization; pages later, he will point to the role of forms of decentral-
ization in mounting social tensions. In fact, struggles for what we
might define as social and political rights do not necessarily owe to
confrontations with central authority. Rather, following the texts of
the Enlightenment, Tocqueville cites the arbitrary exercise of power,
the failure to pay creditors, the promiscuous sale of offices, and the
granting of immunities as the kindling that ignited intellectual dis-
sent and inter-estate conflict.
The Old Régime, despite its author’s insistence, does not sustain his
argument for a linear social and organizational progression from
absolutism to revolution and the modern nation-state. Moreover, the
institutional features of the old regime that he identified are not
unique to France, but are found in other settings, including the
Ottoman Empire. Yet, these contradictions should not detract from
what this essay did accomplish, if largely impressionistically. For even
as Tocqueville reinstated the old regime as an important stage in
modern political development, he was forced to grapple with the
paradoxical nature of the processes that characterized eighteenth-
century political transformation overall. Thus, unlike many of his
later interpreters, he remained keenly aware of the very tentative
nature of the “infrastructural power” of early modern polities and
relevance of the concessions made en route to consolidation:

York: Columbia University Press, 1958), 3–16; Isser Woloch, The New Regime:
Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789–1820 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994),
114–118; and Eugen Joseph Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural
France, 1870–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).
41
François Furet (Penser la Révolution française [Paris: Gallimard, 1978]) was one
of the main proponents of the Tocquevillean turn; see also Roger Chartier, The
Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G. Cohrane (Durhan: Duke
University Press, 1991); compare, George C. Comninel, Rethinking the French Revolution:
Marxism and the Revisionists (London: Verso, 1987).
42
Compare, Theda Skocpol, “Introduction: Bringing the State Back In: Strategies
of Analysis in Current Research” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. T. Skocpol, Peter
Evans, and Dietrich Rueschemeyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 21.
 ’  17

While the central government was gradually taking over all the pow-
ers of local authorities and coming more and more to monopolize the
whole administration of the country, some institutions which it had
allowed to survive and even some new ones created by itself tended
to check this centripetal movement . . . it had no very clear idea of the
extent of its power. None of its rights was firmly established or unequi-
vocally defined, and though its sphere of action was already vast, it had
to grope, so to speak in the dark and exercise much prudence.43
Of the features Tocqueville describes, fiscal and administrative decen-
tralization remains one of the more intransigent components of the
old-regime paradox.44 It is ironic that precisely because of an error-
ridden social scientific paradigms on “empires,” decentralization,
along with its attendant state involution, have long taken center stage
in eighteenth-century Ottoman studies. Over the past quarter cen-
tury, new political and socioeconomic investigations have shed the
anachronism and reductionism of functionalist sociology, furnishing
early modern historiography with a far more complex analysis of an
evolving institutional structure.45 Approaching the problem of decen-
tralization from different points on the Ottoman map, Albert Hourani
and Halil (nalcık have been at the forefront of this reassessment of
the old regime.46 Although neither scholar addresses Tocqueville
directly, their creative interpretation of Ottoman realities actually
helps us reconsider his classic account of state formation in the eight-
eenth century. For example, Hourani’s characterization of Istanbul’s

43
The Old Régime, 108–109.
44
See Ian Copland and Michael R. Godley,“Revenue Farming in Comparative
Perspective: Reflections on Taxation, Social Structure and Development in the Early-
Modern Period,” in The Rise and Fall of Revenue Farming: Business Elites and the Emergence
of the Modern State in Southeast Asia, ed. John Butcher and Howard Dick (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 45–68. Helen Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Habsburg
Sale of Towns, 1516–1700 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1990); Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh and the Punjab,
1707–1748 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986); Gabriel Ardant, “Financial Policy
and Economic Infrastructure of Modern States and Nations,” in The Formation of
National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1975), 164–242; Susan Mann, Local Merchants and the Chinese Breaucracy,
1750 –1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987); and Murat Çizakça, A
Comparative Evolution of Business Partnerships: The Islamic World and Europe with Specific
Reference to the Ottoman Archives (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1996).
45
Note Virginia H. Aksan, Locating the Ottomans among Early Modern Empires,”
Journal of Early Modern History 3 (1999): 1–32.
46
Albert Hourani, “The Changing Face of the Fertile Crescent in the XVIIIth
Century,” Studia Islamica 8 (1957): 89–122, reprinted in Hourani, A Vision of History
(London: Constable & Co. Ltd., 1961), 35–70; and Halil (nalcık, “Centralization
and Decentralization Ottoman Administration,” in Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic
History, 27–52.
18 

authority over old-regime Arab cities demonstrates that what Toc-

queville calls Versailles’ “tutelle administrative,” did not subvert the
power of urban elites so much as complement it.47 The uneasy dom-
ination of the court over the provincial bourgeoisie, feudal lords, and
priests would be better considered within Halil (nalcık’s dialectical
framework, which posits an ongoing tug-of-war between the Sublime
Porte (Bab-ı Âli ), commanders in the field, and particularly the provin-
cial gentry.48
Conscious of the larger historical context, studies on Ottoman his-
tory have also refined our understanding of the questions that
Tocqueville summarily discarded, such as the impact of the world
market on state formation.49 Rescuing Ottoman economic history
from the anecdotal or unidimensional accounts that had filled in a
vast, undetermined space in world history, Mehmet Genç recon-
structs a trajectory of economic growth during the first three-quarters
of the century.50 His research demonstrates the intimate relationship
between global financial trends and state development, as well as
between Istanbul’s policies of military command and the relative
resiliency of Ottoman industry. Genç’s studies also reveal the fact
that the state’s ability to grant immunities and privileges expanded
and contracted with wars and fiscal exigencies.
By reimagining the space of the early modern state, recent stud-
ies shed light on the complexities of socio-organizational change in
the provinces and in the imperial capital. Research on Syria by Jean-
Pierre Thieck and Karl Barbir points to the fact that Istanbul might
decentralize, even devolve military authority unto provincial agents,
while simultaneously building new nodes of state power throughout
the empire. Policies of decentralization were no less important for
the cohesion of the ruling elite. Rifa"at Abou-El-Haj documents how

47
Hourani, “The Changing Face of the Fertile Crescent,” 100.
48
See (nalcık, “Centralization and Decentralization.”
49
For representatives of this school, see Huri (slamo[lu-Inan, ed. The Ottoman
Empire and the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For
a superb new monograph, see Edhem Eldem, French Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth
Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999).
50
Mehmet Genç, “Osmanlı Ekonomisi ve }ava{,” Yapıt 49 (1984): 52–61, Tables
49: (1984): 86–93; Genç “Osmanlı Maliyesinde Malikâne Sistemi,” in (ktisat Tarihi
Semineri, ed. Osman Okyar and Ünal Nalbanto[lu (Ankara: Hacetepe Üniversitesi
Yay., 1975), 231–96; and Genç, Osmanlı (mparatorlu[unda: Devlet ve Ekonomi (Istanbul:
Ötüken, 2000).
 ’  19

a bureaucratic and military “aristocracy”, lacking hereditary title or

property, reproduced itself as an estate by extensive political house-
holds or patronage networks.51 As we will see in chapter 2, prime
access to information and resources, particularly fiscal favors, was
essential to sustaining these networks. The Istanbul “aristocracy of
service,” took advantage of a distinctly old-regime type of insider
trading or what the economist Joseph Stiglitz calls in a modern con-
text “asymmetric information.”52
Ottoman historians have another advantage in a critical reread-
ing of the Tocquevillean account of institutional change in the eight-
eenth century. As an ancien régime writ large, Ottoman history has
demanded a complex and often fragmented approach to its parts;
indeed, it has never really been possible to investigate a polity, which
at one time encompassed lands from Yemen to Hungary, using a
single unit of analysis. Although modern notions of sovereignty ( just
as the ideology of absolutism and “reason of state” in the past) might
require that political scientists maintain this fiction,53 there is no rea-
son for the historian to accept the category of the unitary state at
face value.
As an anthropologist of law, Sally Falk Moore reminds fellow social
scientists that even the contemporary state is an “organization of
organizations” whose integration (and disintegration) over time occurs
through competition and negotiation.54 To put this in an early mod-
ern context, we might say that despite the growing concentration of
coercive powers, autonomous behavior, and increased agility in coor-
dinating its parts, the pre-modern state, as Tocqueville conceded

51
“The Ottoman Vezir and Pasha Households, 1683–1703: A Preliminary Report,”
JAOS 94 (1972): 438–47.
52
Compare, Philip T. Hoffman, Gille Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal,
“Information and Economic History: How the Credit Market in Old Regime Paris
Forces us to Rethink the Transition to Capitalism,” The American Historical Review
101 (1999): 69–94.
53
Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern
European Monarchy (London: Longman, 1992), esp. Introduction. See also J. P. Nettl,
“The State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics 20 (1968): 559–592. On the
morrow of WWI, Harold J. Laski (Studies in the Problem of Sovereignty [New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1917], 1) rendered it thusly: “Hegelianwise, we cannot avoid
the temptation that bids us make our State a unity. It is to be all-absorptive. All
groups within itself are to be but the ministrants to its life; their relativity is the
outcome of its sovereignty since without it they could have no existence.”
54
Sally Falk Moore, Law as Process: An Anthropological Approach (London: Routledge,
1978), 1–31.
20 

above, operated within a limited range and with varying degrees of

efficiency. Rather than a monopoly of powers in the Weberian sense,
the absolutist sovereign relied on a plurality of force: the early mod-
ern state ruled, but it did not govern.
In disaggregating the early modern state, the experience of Ottoman
historiography also warns us about repeating the error of merely
splitting a large territorial polity along what appears to be its most
obvious sociological and spatial seams. Instead, it is the very irreg-
ularities of rule that give us some idea of the complex division of
organizational and administrative labor, or of the “split capacities”
between center and periphery, as well as between cities and the
countryside. As Tocqueville himself conceded, this was not a zero-
sum game in which the center perpetually gained the upper hand
as peripheries surrendered powers. The governmental capacity of
the province might grow alongside the expanding powers of the cen-
tral state. These powers might be adjunctive or complementary; on
other occasions local powers came into direct competition with the
central state.
Taxation remains one of the more sensitive economic and socio-
organizational indicators of the gradual process of state consolida-
tion which also helps to map this division of labor in space. There
is a fair degree of congruence among the old regimes of Europe and
Asia in the timing of the first direct taxes. Although both the French
and Ottoman centers introduced a variety of taxes from the six-
teenth century onward, fiscal obligations and rents (whether deemed
state or private) were still, in large part, diverted into local coffers.
Officially or unofficially, this seepage was part of the equation of
rule. Even as statesmen attempted to impose more “direct” meth-
ods of taxation, they were forced to devolve other facets of govern-
ment to local actors in order to forge alliances. Ironically, rather
than closing the power gap, increasing obligations also made for new
opportunities for exemptions. In both France and the Ottoman Empire
tax farming increased apace with direct taxation. The paradox re-
mains: although tax farming dispersed state capacity, it also estab-
lished uniform terms of contract between sovereign and a certain
stratum of the subject population; it standardized an important polit-
ical relationship.
New research on questions of privilege and property within Europe
suggests that we should look to forms of decentralization and devo-
lution of power to help us better appreciate the rise of modern gov-
 ’  21

ernment and changing political claims of subjects.55 Such agreements

were not merely economic transactions. Although privileges and
immunities were not rights in the classical sense, they were far from
ephemeral. In the Ottoman case, tax farming implicitly or explicitly
entailed a redefinition of obligations and privilege, hence of politi-
cal status. On a more abstract plane, long-standing privileges, like
property, established new boundaries between state and society.
Cumulatively, revenue contracting and venal offices often constituted
veritable forms of governance. Moreover, these privileges or con-
tractual relations established a baseline from which subjects might
make new demands of central authority or, alternately, erect barri-
ers against the further state encroachment on local authority.
By better appreciating variation within a single polity, disaggre-
gating the premodern state also allows us to gauge the synchronic-
ity and the contingency of state formation across the European and
Asian meridian of territorial states as well as appreciating multi-
lateral relationships with respect to other territorial states.56 This
reorientation is particularly critical for states like the Ottoman Empire,
not only because of scale but also because of its geopolitical coor-
dinates at the intersection of different regional systems.57 As the
“hinge” of Eurasia,58 the Ottoman state responded to diverse forms
of warfare, the pulse of discrete trade networks, and a multiplicity
of administrative forms. In the West, the Ottoman state remained a
critical guarantor, with France, of the balance of power within the

55
See Philip T. Hoffman and Kathryn Norberg, eds. Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and
Representative Government, 1450–1789 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
56
See Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990–1990 (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1990); and Otto Hintze, “The Formation of States and Constitutional
Development: A Study in History and Politics,” in The Historical Essays, ed. Felix
Gilbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 157–178. Edward W. Soja (“Re-
Presenting the Spatial Critique of Historicism,” in Thirdspace: Journeys to Los
Angeles and Other Read-and-Imagined Places [Malden, MA and Oxford: M.I.T.
Press, 1996], 164–185) takes discursive analysis to task and Hayden White’s approach
in particular, for de-territorialing the same contexts they pretend to historicize.
57
The conflation of so-called empires with the colonizing nation-states of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries only further obscures the contrasts and similar-
ities between historic polities. See Ariel Salzmann, “Toward a Comparative History
of the Ottoman State, 1450–1850” Archív orientální (Oriental Archive) 66 (1998), spe-
cial issue, Supplementa VIII, 351–66.
58
Compare, William Hardy McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe, 1081–1797
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974) and McNeill, Europe’s Steppe Frontier,
1500 –1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
22 

European state system until the end of the Seven Years War.59 It
was also an active participant in a very unstable West Asian system
of states.
If the empire was the hinge, then Iran might well be considered
the geopolitical epicenter of early modern European and Asian his-
tory. The protracted post-Safavid civil wars raged intermittently
between 1720 and the final assumption of power by the Qajars after
1790. Spilling over into the Caucasus, Iraq, Central Asia, and India,
the wars of the Iranian succession facilitated Russian and British
expansion in Asia. The Ottoman Empire’s own increasing territor-
ial vulnerability during the last quarter of the eighteenth century was
an indirect product of Nadir Shah’s invasion of the Gulf and Mughal
India and a direct consequence of the new global parameters of
power after the Seven Years War. By the late eighteenth century
the Ottoman Empire had lost a French counterweight to Britain in
the Indian Ocean and to Russia in eastern Europe. Lacking a viable
framework for a West Asian order, it also remained isolated from
the emerging central European coalitions.60
Taking as a given the compound makeup of most premodern
polities and the multiplicity of geopolitical contexts in which such
entities operated, territorial scale becomes a historical, rather than
an institutional, ethnic, or demographic question. Whether we con-
sider the multiple divisions of Poland, the relatively lax colonial
regime in North America or the administrative decentralization in
pre-revolutionary France, new lessons were learned on the relation-
ship of state building and the degree of administrative consolidation
in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. To put the modern
state in historical perspective demands that we recognize that in both

59
See Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994); and Thomas Naff, “The Ottoman Empire and the European
State System,” in The Expansion of International Society, ed. H. Bull and A. Watson
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 143–170.
60
There have been several attempts to come to come to terms with the early
modern “Euro-Asian” (Frank Perlin’s term) and African state system. See, for exam-
ple, Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World
Civilization. Vol. 3, The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1974); C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World,
1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories:
Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies,
31 (1997): 735–762; and Victor Lieberman, “Transcending East-West Dichotomies:
State and Culture Formation in Six Ostensibly Disparate Areas,” Modern Asian Studies
31 (1997): 463–546, among others.
 ’  23

France and the Ottoman Empire the first blow to the old regime
was not ideological agitation or mass mobilization but fiscal crises,
induced by prior military commitments.61 Yet both reached an impasse.
Ottoman vulnerability to fluctuations in financial markets was exac-
erbated by a political apparatus soldered by credit. As it began to
retract privileges and reached more deeply into provincial pockets,
Istanbul confronted resistance at many levels.
Summoning the will, neither the Ottoman Empire in 1793 nor
France in 1788, could call upon the political, coercive, administra-
tive or legislative means to enforce it. Even a relatively compact
state, such as France (with a land mass that comprised a territory
smaller than even the Ottoman “core” in Asia Minor) came up short
at the end of the century. Although revolutionary mobilization in
the context of a European-wide war overwhelmed the opposition
and counter-revolution, the gap between the state apparatus and
local government in the Ottoman Empire could not be filled by the
emerging unitary state.
A rereading of the Tocquevillean investigation of the emergence
of modern government and correction for its myopia in matters of
geopolitics and world economy, suggests that the reasons for the
parting of political paths between Europe and Asia can be explained
only by considering the common conundrums of power left by the
nearly simultaneous dissolution of the old regime political order. In
all cases, the transition was rocky and protracted. Some states, Venice
and Poland, to name only two, fell by the wayside. The old regime
sputtered to a close over the course of four decades in the Ottoman
Empire. Interruptions and detours in state programs of fiscal cen-
tralization after 1793 allowed provincial elites and local governments
ample time to regroup and dig in their heels. With its many exposed
territorial edges and the fluid geopolitical situation of the Napoleonic
Wars, provincial powers were able to renegotiate their relationship
with the central state with outside support. In sharp contrast to the
care with which statesmen crafted and restored “Europe,” including

61
Among many studies on this subject, see Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capital-
ism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 180–214; and Frank Perlin, “Financial Institutions and Business Prac-
tices across the Euro-Asian Interface: Comparative and Structural Considerations,
1500–1900,” in The European Discovery of the World and Its Economic Effects on Pre-
Industrial Society, 1500–1900: Papers of the Tenth International Economic History Congress,
ed. Hans Pohl (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1990), 257–303.
24 

the offending French state after 1815, was the refusal of the Great
Powers to extend equivalent recognition to Ottoman sovereignty or
to guarantee its territorial integrity. This summary dissolution of the
old-regime order and the expulsion of the Ottomans from the mod-
ern state system were rendered in a convenient euphemism: “The
Eastern Question.”62 In the decades that followed every successful
“exit” from the Ottoman Empire, including that of Greece in 1830
and Egypt after 1840, was mediated by foreign powers who not only
conferred the laurels of sovereignty on local leadership but also mil-
itarily imposed new territorial divisions.63

Vocabularies of Early Modernity

Tocqueville might have learned much from the Ottoman old regime
had he removed his geographical and cultural blinders. Yet he still
would have been stymied for lack of a suitable lexicon. Indeed, one
of the greatest handicaps for those who attempt comparative inves-
tigations of the early modern world, a world before the crude stamp
of colonialism and the nation-state took its toll on the diversity of
cultures and reduced the variations of political organization, has been
the absence of a common historical vocabulary.
For a handle on the premodern polity, we might borrow Toc-
queville’s own all-embracing notion of the “ancien régime” (or old
regime)64 as a short hand for an amalgamated or, what Michael
Hanagan would call, an “unconsolidated” state found in both Europe
and Asia. If this term allows us to gather disparate facets of poli-
tics, society and economy under one historical umbrella, it also blurs
the distinction between capacities that were dispersed in space. Rather
than coining new terms, it might be best to modify existing termi-
nology to acknowledge the inherent disjuncture of powers within the

62
Compare, Biancamaria Fontana, “The Napoleonic Empire and the Europe of
Nations,” in The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union, ed. Anthony
Pagden (Cambridge, U.K. and Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002),
116–138.
63
Consider, Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in
Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
64
For the history of the term, see D. Venturino, “La Naissance de l’Ancien
Régime,” in The Political Culture of the French Revolution, ed. Colin Lucas (Oxford:
Pergamon Press, 1988), 11–40.
 ’  25

premodern “state” and to emphasize the protracted and uneven his-

torical process involved in their realignment in space and sociolog-
ically into what we now know as the modern state.
For the purpose of this inquiry, I use the term state in a rela-
tively narrow sense: it corresponds to a limited set of institutions and
individuals within a territorial policy; it refers to actors who ruled
primarily from or through the capital city and via politywide insti-
tutions (e.g., the dynasty/palace/court, the judiciary and formulation
of imperial law, administrative and military hierarchies, the regula-
tion of internal and external trade). During the early modern period,
even though domestic challengers remained, the autonomy of state
centers grew as a result of competition in an interstate arena. States
were armed with unprecedented stockpiles of weapons and standing
armies; they dressed each other in identifiable cultural uniforms on
the battlefields and established patterns of alliances through an expand-
ing web of diplomatic exchanges. Advancing at times and retreating
at others, socio-organizational elements of the state during the early
modern period permeated the periphery and were reproduced in
cognate forms, among and between them.
Having narrowed the sense and reference of the premodern “state,”
it is no less important to rename those dimensions of rule that escaped
its direct cultural, coercive, and socio-organizational reach. Rather
than conflating the notion of those who rule with those who gov-
ern, we might reserve the terms governance or government specifically
for the complex of distinct provincial capacities: the quotidian acts
of administration, adjudication, and enforcement. Not only was old-
regime governance institutionally separate from many of the official
organs of the state, it was also highly localized.65 At the same time,
it assured a peculiar form of standardization owing to the fact that
government retained (in the case of the Ottomans) or gained (in
many European contexts) elements of an overarching state “syntax.”
This partial capacity, constituted of fragments of standard idiom amid
diverse languages of power, made each government a hybrid, a “ver-
nacular.”66 Less inhibited by the officially constituted and chartered

65
My sense of the “local” differs importantly from Clifford Geertz’s (Local Knowledge:
Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology [New York: Basic Books, 1983], 167–234) con-
cept of “local knowledge.”
66
By vernacular I appeal to the relationship between the Latinate languages and
26 

hierarchies of the center, vernacular governments could act through

a variety of agents, including formally constituted bodies such as
urban parliaments and advisory councils. In other cases, govern-
mental agency was vested in individuals drawn from the “third estate”
under special patents; or, in the absence of stronger claimants legit-
imized by the state, governmental powers were seized by rural lords,
religious leaders, or revenue collectors.
In addition to the reminting of two concepts, readers will find
an eclectic mix of historical idioms. For instance: in place of the tra-
ditional, often reified, dyad, askeri/reaya (military order/subject), I
invoke the notion of the second and third estates. My intent is to
highlight the central importance of privilege and fiscal immunity in
the definition of status under the old regime, qualities that distin-
guished the Ottoman religious establishment, or ulema/ilmiye and its
“aristocracy of service,” the rical-ı devlet, no less than their French
counterparts.67 So too the non-class-based social umbrella conveyed
by the notion of the “third estate” is eminently serviceable in the
Ottoman context for the tax-paying reaya, a category that in theory
designated gentry, bourgeoisie, and peasantry alike. By drawing out
similarities, I can also better clarify what I regard to be the key
differences between the European nobility and the Ottoman “aris-
tocracy of service.” It is precisely the inability to guarantee their pat-
rimony from one generation to the next that gave rise to an extensive
intra-generational form of accumulation (“corporate patrimonialism”)
through networks and fungible assets, like tax-farms.68

Latin during the Medieval period. Contrast, Jenny White, Islamicist Mobilization in
Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003),
esp. Introduction.
67
Gail Bossenga (“Society,” in Old Regime France, ed. William Doyle [Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001], 76) comments that “The legal system of the old
regime had its roots in a far more personal and paternalistic society that failed to
distinguish explicitly between personal status, political rule, and rights of property.”
68
Carter V. Findley (Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte,
1789 –1922 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) stresses the singular impor-
tance of the political household in the formation of the Ottoman state. Although I
would not dispute the importance of networks in this or any political organization,
the specific strategies that I describe in chapter 2 are not uniquely Ottoman. In
fact, I believe that they are constitutive of the institutional changes that are associated
with political modernization. See Gernot Grabher and David Stark, eds. Restructuring
Networks in Post-Socialism: Legacies, Linkages, and Localities (Oxford; New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997).
 ’  27

Even in cases where the fit may appear more difficult, French or

English equivalents have been used interchangeably with Ottoman
terms for the purposes of fostering comparative reflection. (Indeed,
the Armenian dragoman, Mouragea D’Ohsson [1740–1807] readily
found French equivalents for Ottoman old-regime personnel and
fiscal institutions throughout his multivolume opus.)69 For example,
the duties and origins of the chief, fiscal officer of a province, often
called voyvoda in Ottoman parlance might have differed throughout
the Ottoman Empire and was clearly not a replica of his next-of-
kin in old-regime France, the intendant.70 However, there is broad
enough congruence on the social origins of these actors (members
of the third estate), the nature of these offices within the respective
old regimes and, no less importantly, the increasingly strategic posi-
tion they occupied in the historical evolution of government-state
relations, to warrant this risky translation.71 In other cases, it seems
only appropriate to swap Ottoman “buzz words” for terms with no
less controversial baggage in their respective fields, such as the term
“gentry” for the collective noun, ayân-ı vilayet and “judge” for kadı.72
The occasional importation of terminology (mainly of European
extraction) in this study does in no way minimize the specificity of
the old regime in North Africa and West Asia. Yet some exchange
of historiographical argot is necessary in order to furnish a medium
for comparison. Even as I attempt to translate parallel social and
political arrangements, I have also preserved terms that are of spe-
cial import to the history of the Ottoman and the larger Islamicate

69
Tableau général de l’Empire othoman, divisé en deux parties, dont l’une comprend la légis-
lation mahométane; l’autre, l’histoire de l’Empire othoman (Paris, Imp. de monsieur [Firmin
Didot] 1787–1820), vol. 3, 370–371. He translated eyalet as “government”; and the
life-lease (malikâne) becomes “ferme fiscale”.
70
Tocqueville (The Old Régime, 36) recounts a quip, made by John Law to the
Marquis d’Argenson, to the effect that the administration of France rested in hands
of two dozen intendants. For France, see J. F. Bosher, French Finances 1770–1795:
From Business to Bureaucracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
71
In many instances, the reluctance to translate reveals an ideological unease
with the consequences of equivalence rather than a penchant for historical specificity.
See Frank Perlin, “Concepts of Order and Comparison, with a Diversion on Counter
Ideologies and Corporate Institutions in Late Pre-Colonial India,” in Feudalism and
non-European Societies, ed. T. J. Byres and Harbans Mukhia (London: Frank Cass
1985), 87–165.
72
See P. R. Coss, “The Formation of the English Gentry,” Past and Present 147
(1995): 38–64. On attempts to redefine the social sense and reference of these
groups, see Deena Sadat, “Notables in the Ottoman Empire: The Ayan,” (Ph.D.
28 

world (e.g., ulema, waqf, timar, sipahi, malikâne, etc.). These terms
should form part of the growing lexicon of world and comparative
early modern history. For general readers, in addition to the requi-
site glossary, I have tried cushioning the use of Ottoman terms with
explanatory context to make them comprehensible or have provided
a rough translation in parentheses. Finally, although I do from time
to time make use of the Islamic calendar for the dating of docu-
ments or manuscripts, for simplicity’s sake as much as to engage the
standard, that is, Western, chronology of political change, I have
employed a single, common-era dating system.
Vocabularies and calendars are some of the more obvious imped-
iments to reconceptualizing the modern political time line. In the
case of Islamic history, there has been a particularly insidious imbal-
ance in the visual representation of the past, a veil over history cre-
ated by the prolific output of nineteenth-century Orientalist painters.73
In searching for a new way to narrate socio-organizational change
in a distant time and place, over the past years I have made a con-
certed effort to locate new visual signposts. The result are the images
that I have inserted within these pages. They should not be regarded
as supplements to my text. Rather, these graphic references are an
integral part of the narrative.
Sandwiched between two attempts to reappraise the historiograph-
ical legacy of Tocqueville, are three sketches of the Ottoman old
regime. In chapter 1, questions of territoriality involve a dialogue
with the cartographer and artist who produced one of perhaps three
large polychromic maps on silk completed in the palace in Istanbul
between 1727 and 1728.74 Laden with both graphic and textual infor-

diss. Rutgers University, 1969); and Engin D. Akarlı, “Provincial Power Magnates
in Ottoman Bilad al-Sham and Egypt, 1740–1840,” in La vie sociale dans les provinces
arabes a l’époque ottomane, ed. Abdeljelil Temimi, vol. 3, 41–56 (Tunis: Publications
du Centre d’Études et de Recherches Ottomanes, Morisques, de Documentation et
d’Informations, 1988).
73
There is a wealth of new studies on this subject following Edward Said’s sem-
inal Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979) and Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court:
European Fantasies of the East (New York: Verso, 1998). See for example, Aslı Çirakman,
From the “Terror of the World” to the ‘Sick Man of Europe’: Images of Ottoman Empire and
Society from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth (New York: Peter Lang, 2002).
74
Topkapı Sarayı Museum Library (TKSK) H. 447. The map reproduced here
is a retouched photograph (by Paula Hible) of the outline published as an large
folded insert by Faik Re{id Unat without commentary in Tarih Vesikaları 1 (1941)
 ’  29

mation, this unusual map helps modern visitors explore the dimensions
of premodern territoriality and the historical and logistical meanings
of state domination. By setting the West Asian portions of the empire
amidst the space of Eurasia, it also helps to alternate an under-
standing of the geography of sovereignty that has largely been apprized
from its Mediterranean shores.
Chapter 2’s discussion revolves around the portraits of the revelers
and participants in the pageant that preceded the circumcisions of
the sons of Ahmet III in 1720. As an introduction to the masks of
Ottoman absolutism, these portraits of courtly life contain oblique
references to the actual workings of the state. Evaluating position
and repetition of imagery we might discern the increasing concen-
tration of powers, under the omnipresent figures of the grand vizier
and the bureaucracy, the Sublime Porte. We might also consider the
social characteristics of the first and second estates, such as the
members of the religious establishment, or ulema, the military and
the bureaucracy seated at the table of the sultan. Hidden from
view, however, are the imperial circuits of distribution cemented by
the burgeoning market in life-leases (malikâne mukataât) and the Islami-
cate nexus of finance capitalism that tied the ulema, courtiers, and
gentry-officers to the Christian and Jewish bankers of Istanbul and
the merchants of Marseilles.
In chapter 3, we reexamine one of those infamous tax-farm-
ing registers produced by the clerks of the ancien régime.75 Adjusted
for the parallax of modern expectations,76 this document becomes
an eloquent witness of the fluidity of state-government relation-
ships and administrative changes within the province of Diyarbekir.
Tracing the transfer of title from central-state to provincial actors
reveals the shift in the balance of powers. Meandering notations

between pages 160–161. Thomas D. Goodrich provided much important biblio-

graphic information and brought to my attention other copies of the map in Turkey
and Austria. Permission for reproduction of the outline was provided by the Türk
Tarih Kurumu.
75
Photocopy (and permission) from Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi for the reproduction of a
page from register MMD 9518, “Defter-i Mukataât-ı Malikânehâ-i Mezkûre der Eyâlet-i
Diyarbekir,” registering transactions on tax farms from 1697 to 1791. MMD 9519
spans the years 1792 to 1845 in the same province. Among the other examples,
are Tokat, MMD 9543; Athens, MMD 9512; Mosul, MMD 9611; Damascus, MMD
9530, 9538; and Erzurum, MMD 9517.
76
See James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human
Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
30 

across the page serve as an apt metaphor for the “creative destruc-
tion” of revenue contracting that dissolved the administrative bound-
aries between town and country laid down in the early centuries of
the empire. Venal offices bring into relief the vernacular government
of provincial cities and the role of the urban gentry, what Tocqueville
might have called a “petty oligarchy,” in perpetuating rule.
After exploring these facets of the old regime in West Asia, this
study returns to the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville and his Ottoman
contemporary, the religious scholar and pro-reform statesmen, Ahmed
Cevdet Pasha. In our conclusion, we consider one among the many
possible sequels to the old regime in the Ottoman Empire while rais-
ing new questions about the nineteenth-century imperatives and prej-
udices which continue to haunt contemporary social scientific thought.
 CHAPTER ONE

ON A MAP OF EURASIA

There was no need to inscribe the words “the realms of the exalted
Ottoman state” (memâlik-i Devlet-i Âliye-i Osmaniye) over the broad areas
of early modern maps of Europe and Asia.1 Literate audiences of
the period would have instantly recognized the outline of Ottoman
Empire. Over the span of four centuries the sultans had reassem-
bled virtually all the territories that had once made up the Roman
Empire in Europe, Africa, and Asia, striking terror and awe in the
hearts of the sovereigns of Christendom. Of its continental territo-
ries, Ottoman Asia remained the empire’s largest—nearly twice the
area of its European lands and roughly half of its entirety.2 Despite
letters, treatises, and reports by travelers, merchants, and an occa-
sional natural scientist, Western scholars remained largely ignorant
of Ottoman economic, political, and social geography. Beyond the
sliver of terra firma bordering the Mediterranean and its major trad-
ing towns and highways, Dutch and Italian maps of the day filled
in these lacunae with classical and biblical references.3 Even an

1
In addition to well-known maps by Gerard Mercato (1512–94) and Jodocus
Hondius, Sr. (1563–1612), see Willem Blaeu’s 1617 maps of the “Turcicum Imperium,”
in Joan Blaeu’s widely circulating Atlas Major (1662); reprint, introduced and edited
by Johan Gross (London: Random House, 1997). In 1668, a copy of the Atlas was
presented to the Ottoman court by Justin Collier, the Dutch ambassador, and trans-
lated by Ebu Bekir b. Bahram al-Dimi{ki in 1685 (Ekmeleddin (hsano[lu, Ramazan
}e{en, M. Serdar Bekar, Gülcan Gündüz, and A Hamdi Furat, eds., Osmanlı Co[rafya
Literatürü [Istanbul: IRCICA, 2000], vol. 1, 111).
2
Donald Edgar Pitcher (An Historical Geography of the Ottoman Empire from the Earliest
Times to the End of the Sixteenth Century with Detailed Maps to Illustrate the Expansion of
the Empire [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972], 134) estimates the empire’s land surface in
1606 to have been 1,071,000 square miles, including vassals. See also Andreas
Birken, Die Provinzen des Osmanischen Reiches (Wiesbaden: Beihefte zum Tübinger Atlas
des Vorderen Orients, 1976) and logistical maps in Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman
Warfare, 1500–1700 (London: University of London Press, 1999). For comparison
with the Roman Empire’s frontiers along the Danube, Euphrates, and Rhine, C. R.
Whittaker, Frontiers of the Roman Empire: A Social and Economic Study (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1994).
3
Ir. C. Koeman, Joan Blaeu and His Grand Atlas: Introduction to the Facsimile Edition
of “Le Grand Atlas,” 1663 (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1970), 84.
32  

Enlightenment polymath who prided himself on an encyclopedic

knowledge of surveying techniques and the ability to classify flora
and fauna with Linnæean precision, such as Count Luigi Ferdinando
Marsigli, in his 1732 encyclopedia of Ottoman military structure
deferred to the authority of the Muslim scientist Ebu Bekir Efendi
al-Dimi{ki, whose map provided Ottoman administrative divisions
(“Beylerbati, Passalati, e Beylati” [sic]).4 So, too, at the eve of the
Seven Years War, the French cartographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon
D’Anville (1697–1782), famed for his geographies of Africa, Asia,
and the Americas, confessed his reliance on Katıp Çelebi’s world
geography, Cihânumâ, in describing the lands between Afghanistan
and the Indus in his own Éclaircissements Géographiques sur la Carte de
l’Inde (1753).5
We do not know the name or qualifications of the Ottoman carto-
grapher who at some point between 1727 and 1728 completed the
large map of Eurasia reproduced in black and white outline in figure 2.6

4
Stato Militare dell’Impero Ottomanno (Amsterdam and Hague: Herm. Uytawerf &
Franc. Changuion, 1732; reprint, Graz-Austria: Akademische Druck Verlagsanstalt,
1972), vol. 1, 9–10, insert. On Ebübekir b. Behrâm’ın Nusretü’l (slâm’s (ad-Dimaski)
maps, see G. J. Halasi-Kun, “The Map of ‘}eki-i Yeni Felemenk Maa (ngiliz’ in
Ebubekir Dimi{ki’s Tercüme-i Atlas Mayor,” Archivium Ottomanicum 11 (1988): 51–70.
On Marsigli, see John Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, 1680–1730: The Life and Times of Luigi
Ferdinando Marsigli, Soldier and Virtuoso (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
5
“La pluspart des lieux marqués sur ma carte entre Kandahar & l’Indus, je les
dois a la geographie Turque, conpilée par Kiatib-shelebi, sous le titre de Gehan-
Numa (le miroir du Monde),” confesses Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon D’Anville in his
Eclaircissements Geographiques su La Carte de l’Inde (Paris: De l’Imprimerie royale, 1753),
20. For D’Anville’s place in the early cartography, Leo Bagrow, History of Cartography,
2d ed., revised and enlarged by R. A. Skelton (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1985),
185–86.
6
TKSK H. 447. The map measures 210 cm. × 150 cm. Faik Re{id Unat (Tarih
Vesikaları 1 [Istanbul, 1941], 160 insert) published an outline of it without com-
mentary, which I have reproduced in Fig. 2; passing mention is made by Ahmet
Karamustafa in J. B. Harley and David Woodward, eds., Joseph E. Schwartzberg,
Gerald R. Tibbetts, and Ahmet T. Karamustafa, assoc. eds., The History of Cartography
vol. 2 pt. 1, Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 225; Thomas D. Goodrich, “Old Maps in the
Library of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul,” Imago Mundi 45 (1993): 120–33. Professor
Goodrich calls TKSK H. 447 “the first modern political and economic Ottoman
map.” He attributes the Iranian geography to a map of Iran found in J. B. Homan’s
Neuor Atlas, a copy of which is also in the Topkapı Sarayı Library (H. 2740).
According to Goodrich, another copy of the same map, albeit lacking coloring, is
found in the Istanbul Archeological Museum. I am extremely grateful to him for
his attention to this chapter and for sharing photographs of a third copy, found in
the Kriegsarchiv in Vienna.
Fig. 2 An outline drawing of a map produced in the palace of Ahmed III. One of several
colored copies, the original is found in the Topkapæ Sarayæ Museum Library (H. 447). After
Faik Re×id Unat, ed. Tarih Vesikalaræ 1 (1941): 160–161. By permission of the Türk Tarih
Kurumu and Topkapæ Sarayæ Museum.
      33

Clearly, however, he is a beneficiary of an ongoing exchange of

scientific information between East and West. The science of car-
tography in the Ottoman Empire advanced with the arrival of
European manuals on geography and mapmaking.7 Translations of
new surveying methods and descriptions of unseen lands enriched
an already well developed Islamic scientific foundation. By the early
eighteenth century, in addition to manuscripts describing the New
World and portolan charts of the oceans, maps of Europe, the Black
Sea, and the Caspian rolled off the presses of the court engineer
(brahim Müteferrika (1674–1744). An officer of Hungarian origin,
(brahim’s efforts were supported by sultans and viziers.8
Even by the rigorous scientific and artistic standards of the day,
the anonymous cartographer’s effort is prodigious, unique for its sub-
ject matter, scale, and artistry. On the original, an enormous can-
vas tableau (measuring three meters in length and a meter and half
in height), we would see an empire drawn across the “Asia” of
Ptolemy in the measure of Alexander the Great. In this rendering,
Eurasia stretches from the borders of Rumeli (Thrace) at the far left
to the Pamirs and the foothills of the Himalayas near its right border.9

7
Generally, Abdulhak Adnan Adivar, Osmanlı Türklerinde Ilım (Istanbul: Maarif
Matbaasi, 1943). Katib Çelebı or Haci Halifa Mustafa ibn Abullah was familiar
with Mercator’s Atlas Major (Bagrow, History of Cartography, 210–211). On the impact
of European science on the Ottomans during the first half of the eighteenth cen-
tury, see Ekmeleddin (hsano[lu et al., eds., Osmanlı Co[rafya Literatürü, vol. 1, 111–43.
In 1732, (brahim Müteferrika published Katib Çelebı’s (Haci Halifa Mustafa b.
Abdullah) Kitab-ı Cihânnüma (Constantinople). On the state of Islamic cartography,
see also David A. King, World Maps for Finding the Direction and Distance of Mecca:
Examples of Innovation and Tradition in Islamic Science (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999); and
Thomas D. Goodrich, The Ottoman Turks and the New World: A Study of Tarih-i Hind-i
Garbi and Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Americana (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1990). For
sixteenth-century European maps of the Ottoman Empire, see Jerry Brotton, Trading
Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
8
See Turgut Kut and Fatma Türe, eds., Yazmadan Basmaya: Müteferrika, Mühendishane,
Uskudar (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi, 1996); William J. Watson, “(brahim Müteferrika and
Turkish Incunabul,” JAOS 88 (1968): 435–41; Halasi Kun, “(brahım Müteferrika”
(A 5, pt. 2: 896–900; (brahim Müteferrika published Katib Çelebı’s Kitab-ı Cihannuma
in 1732. On the exchange of information between Europe and the empire, Virginia
H. Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700–1783
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 34–42.
9
There is a Ptolemaic conception of Asia at work; note book 7 of Ptolemy’s
Geography (Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones, Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated
Translation of the Theoretical Chapters [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000]).
See also Karl J. Schmidt, An Atlas and Survey of South Asian History (Armonk, N. Y.
and London: Missouri Southern State College, Sharpe: 1995), 19; and Serpil Ba[cı,
34  

Without betraying the secrets behind its commission, much less the
patron’s political aims, the map still resonates with imagined delib-
erations in vizierial chambers concerning history, technology, and
territorial ambitions. The mottled colorings of provinces and terri-
tories contrast with one another in soft blue, red and yellow while
the pale green seas appeal to the aesthetic inclination of the viewer,
as well as enhancing the map’s topographical and regional character.10
It is not improbable that map celebrated the empire’s newest mil-
itary conquests. The armies of Sultan Ahmed III (r. 1703–1730) and
his son-in-law, Grand Vizier Nev{ehirli (brahim Pasha (r. 1718–1730),
were victorious in the lands of what had been their chief Muslim
rival, the Shi’i Safavid shah of Iran. Occupying the cities of Tabriz
and Hamedan, the sultan had annexed the provinces of Azarbayjan,
Kermanshah, and Luristan. The members of imperial council, the
divan, undoubtedly debated the czar’s strategy in the Volga region.
Looking east beyond “Turan”—the great middle ground between
the empires—they might have contemplated the status of the coun-
try of Tibet (already under Manchu rule), which is profiled in upper-
right corner.
In two large cartouches that obscure part of Arabia and Upper
Egypt, the cartographer puts his purposes in more modest terms:
The principal aim and object of this map is to render a pictorial and
written account in accordance with the principles of the science of
geography, the clime, or rather the continent of, Asia; its countries,
towns, territories, seas, mountains and rivers, from the felicitous seat
of the abode of the kingdom, the most excellent Istanbul, eastward to
the lands of India. And within this expanse [its objective] is [also] to
capture to the best of our ability, the breadth and length of the set-
tlements, seas, countries, and lands over which the exalted Ottoman
state rules . . . to record in picture and text those of the land of Iran
otherwise known as “Acem” and those of [the lands of ] Turan, in the
vicinity of the Oxus river, as well as [the region of ] Transoxiana . . .

“Osmanlı Dünyasında Efsanevı Yönetıcı Imgesı Olarak Büyük Iskender ve Osmanlı

Iskendernamesi,” in Humana Boskurt Güvenç e Arma[an (Istanbul: Kültür Bakanlı[ı,
1994), 111–31, for the geographical conquests and the later iconography of Alexander
the Great within Ottoman art.
10
Karen Pinto (American University in Beirut) gave me a brief introduction to
the importance of color in medieval Islamic world maps. Compare, François de
Dainville, Le langage des géographes: termes, signes, couleurs des cartes anciennes, 1500–1800
(Paris: A. et J. Picard, 1964).
      35

where today reside the Uzbek, Ça[atay, Turks, Turkmen and Tatar
and other tribes and clans . . .11
The scale of this enterprise appears to intimidate the cartographer.
He seems unsure of his ability to do justice to the many kingdoms
and lands that he has been commissioned to depict. The legends,
commentary, and captions written over the map are more than orna-
ment. They enhance his images with historical explication, orienta-
tion, and institutional relief, compensating in words for the limits of
his visual knowledge. In deference to his sovereign, Istanbul figures
prominently in the upper right of his canvas, but the cartographer
cannot but pay greater homage to Mecca and Medina. He embel-
lishes the symbols for the Holy Cities of Islam and places them at
the nexus of many lines of trade and pilgrimage. Giving short shrift
to the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad, he apologizes for his
omission of much of the Arabian peninsula by reminding his view-
ers that the areas inhabited by the beduins are so large that “it takes
six and half months to travel the length and breadth.”12
Words allow him to provide potentially useful logistical informa-
tion beyond the empire. He offers the approximate distances between
Georgia and the Black Sea, the length, in farsakhs (farshakh/parasang,
a league or 3 miles) of the province of Azarbayjan. He inscribes
over the Persian Gulf the number of days, thirty-two, it takes mon-
soon winds to speed a dhow from the Makran coast to Oman.

11
The author is presently preparing a translation of the entire text with a detailed
analysis of the map for publication. “Hakki buyurulmaya ki, asitane-i saadet a{iyane-i
belde tayibbe-i Konstantiniye’den ibtidaen olup, {arkta memâlik-i Hindustan’a var-
inca mesafe-i mübeyinde vaki memâlik ve bilad, yerar, bihar, cibel, ve enhar kaide-
i fenn-i co[rafya üzre resm ve tahrir olunmak i{ bu haritada umde ve maksud ul-asl
oldu[una binaen, iklim-i Asya tabir olunur kitaya dahil ve mesafe-i merkumede vaki
olup, tulen ve arzen daire-i Devlet-i Âliye-i Osmaniye’nin hakim oldu[u yer ve bihar
ve memâlik ve bilad al’el-kader ül’[ittikan ?] tersim ve te{kil olunup, Iran-Zemin
tabir olunur Acem dahi bitamam ma’dud resm ve tahrir ve Nehr-i Ceyhun’un
mavaresinde Turan Zeminde . . . hala mesken-i tava’if-i Özbek ve Ça[atay ve Türk
ve Türkmen ve Tatar ve sair kaba’il ve a{a’ir meskunları olan memâlik-i Maave-
raünnehir . . .”
12
“(klim-i Ceziret’ül-Arap, bu iklim on iki kisma taksim olunup . . . bu iklimin
mesafesi ve devri altı buçuk ay mesafe olup, i{ bu haritada tamamen resmine mesaha
olma(ma)[la, Mekke-i Mükereme ve Medine-i Münvvera vaki oldu[u memleket-i
Hicaz’dan ve bâdiyeden bir miktar resm iktifa olunmu{tur . . .” For more on the
Hijaz during this period, see Abdulrahman S. M. Alorabi, “The Ottoman Policy
in the Hejaz in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Political and Administrative
Developments, 1143–1202.” (Ph.D. diss., University of Utah, 1988).
36  

Indeed, his lines are meant to convey movement as well as static

information. They represent the pilgrims, soldiers, and merchants
traveling in convoys along highways and linkages between cities. The
oceans surge: a galley sets sail on the Mediterranean. Yet as he pro-
ceeds eastward, the reliability of his comments falters and his infor-
mation about the current state of affairs in the eastern regions of
Iran wears thin. And he seems unaware of the political disposition
of either Afghanistan or India.13
Although these inaccuracies may have troubled and certainly mis-
led his contemporaries, they in no way detract from the map’s cul-
tural and historical value. As a densely coded document of a past
conception of space as much as a graphic description of the larger
Eurasian context of the empire, it is the combination of the textual
(tahrir) and the graphic (resm) that leads modern viewers closer toward
the “multitude of intersections” that qualify an Ottoman apprecia-
tion of territoriality in the early eighteenth century.14 Often these
mediums of conveying information take us in opposite directions. As
an image of mountains, deserts, and rivers, the map draws our gaze
toward the two great inland “seas,” the Black and the Caspian, and
to the foci of Russo-Ottoman conflict during the eighteenth century.
The narrative, by contrast, describes the political and institutional
space of states. The legend leads our eye not from the center or
from the edges but from west to east, beginning with Anatolia, or
as the cartographer prefers, “Asia Minor” (“Küçük Asya,” his trans-
lation from the Latin). In a landscape without graphic boundaries
or borders, the description of provinces and principalities in words,
not lines, slices through painstakingly rendered topographic details
depicting the high plateaus of Anatolia and Iran, the mountain ranges

13
See W. Bartold, An Historical Geography of Iran, trans., Svat Soucek (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1984). Khorasan is rendered as the “clime” (iklim) of
“Hirandan,” though correctly identified by its cities of Herat, Nishapur, and the
site of the tomb of Imam Rıza (i.e., Mashhad). These and other mistakes lead me
to suspect that a painter, rather than a geographer, supervised and executed the
final versions.
14
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 33. For different
views on the historical meaning of space, see Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies:
The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989); Robert D. Sack,
Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986); and David Harvey, “On the History and Present Conditions of Geography:
An Historical Materialist Manifesto,” Professional Geographer 3 (1984): 1–11.
      37

and deserts of the Hindu Kush, and along the riverine systems from
the Nile to the Amu Darya.
This is a landscape of classical proportions, drawn in accordance
with modern, that is, mimetic, cartographic standards. As such, it is
not simply another, less familiar way of framing the Ottoman Empire
on a world map. Rather, by inserting this European and Asian state
in a contiguous meridian of state from the Mediterranean eastward,
it emphatically conveys to modern viewers the cultural artifice of
“Europe” and of a “natural” division between Orient and Occident.
Ottoman Asia is not external to but hinges on an intersecting polit-
ical geography. It serves as a check on European expansion in the
Balkans and continues to shape and constrain the ever-changing bal-
ance of power among the great powers of continental Christendom
that emerged in the aftermath of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1714.
Sitting out the exhausting series of dynastic squabbles of the first
half of the eighteenth century, not only that of Spain but of Poland
(1731–35) and Austria (1740–48), the Ottoman military, though weak-
ened, held its forward line in “Europe,” to the consternation of both
the Habsburgs and Russians.
Territorially, however, the gravitational center of this map is not
the Ottoman Empire per se. Rather, by dint of its rendering of
Ptolemaic Asia, it emphasizes Iran, the center of an unfolding drama
whose impact would reverberate globally. The collapse of the Safavid
state in 1722 with an invasion of its former Afghan vassals was not
simply another example of the fragility of dynastic regimes and the
tentative nature of the territorial state. As the opening salvo in a
series of devastating civil wars (resumed in 1747 and again in 1779),
or what should properly be called the Iranian Wars of Succession,
it also proved the tenacity of the Safavid political system, for the
ensuing seven decades of conflict invariably brought forward a claimant
from among the dynasty’s former tribal confederates. Although the
initial phases of the war drew in Iran’s more powerful neighbors,
the Ottomans and Russians, the partition of Iran would not hold.
Moreover, between 1739 and 1741, the Iranian wars fatefully spilled
across the Indian Ocean.15

15
Virginia Aksan’s comments (“Ottoman War and Warfare, 1453–1812,” in War
in the Early Modern World, ed. Jeremy Black [London: University College London
Press, 1999], 147–76) on the military constraints of the empire serve as a much
needed antidote to a rather sweeping and overly simplistic assessment of West Asian
38  

Edges of Empires

The cartographer is rather tight-lipped about the extent of the

Ottoman incursion into its neighbor, Safavid Iran. Perhaps that is
because the sultan had only recently signed a new trade agreement
with Shah Sultan Huseyin II (r. 1694–1722).16 By setting aside the
rhetoric of Shi"i-Sunni sectarianism, nearly a century of peace pre-
vailed between the two countries, lasting from the Treaty of Zuhab
(1639) until the Ottoman invasion of Luristan and Azarbayjan in
1724. Quiet on the eastern frontier had freed the Ottomans to con-
tinue their expansion into the Aegean and to launch a final, ill-
considered bid to pluck the “red apple” of Vienna from the center
of Catholic Europe in 1683. In the humiliating aftermath of the
Peace of Karlowitz (1699), which ceded Hungary to the Holy Roman
Emperor, this pattern of mutual recognition and peaceful negotia-
tion with the shah of disputes over trade routes and tariffs allowed
the Ottomans to counter Peter the Great at Pruth in 1711 and to
salvage the Morea from Venice four years later.
Yet the death of Huseyin II with the Ghalzai invasion overturned
the West Asian order suddenly and radically. Profiting from the
Afghan siege and occupation of Isfahan, Russian troops occupied the
silk-producing Caspian provinces of Dagestan and Shirvan. As the
surviving Safavid heir, Shah Tahmasb II (r. 1722–1732?), fled north-
ward toward his Qizilbash confederates, the Afshars and Qajars,
members of the Ottoman imperial council (divan) weighed their
response.17 In an unusual meeting of minds, mediated by the French

geopolitics in the eighteenth century, including that of C. A. Bayly in Imperial

Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London: Longman, 1989). For
an inclusive and interactive approach to Europe-Eurasia, see Charles Tilly, Coercion,
Capital and European States, AD 990–1990 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) and Paul
W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1994). For chronology, see (smail Hakkı Uzunçar{ılı, XVIII Yüzyıl, vol. 4, pts.
1 and 2, Osmanlı Tarihi (Ankara: TTK Basımevi, 1983); and Peter Jackson and
Laurence Lockhardt, eds., The Timurid and Safavid Periods, vol. 6 of The Cambridge
History of Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
16
Münir Aktepe, ed., 1720–1724 Osmanlı-Iran Münasebetleri ve Silah{ör Kemani Mustafa
A[a"nın Revan Fetih-Namesi (Istanbul: Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayınları,
1970), 6–8.
17
Ibid. For a pioneering study on the Ottoman policy during its occupation of
Iran, see Fariba Zarinebaf-Shahr, “Tabriz under Ottoman Rule, 1725–1730” (Ph.D.
diss., University of Chicago, 1991). See also B. H. Sumner, Peter the Great and the
Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 1949); and Raoul Motika and Michael Ursinus,
      39

ambassador, Ahmed III agreed to recognize Peter the Great’s gains

in the Caspian. The czar, in exchange, acquiesced to the sultan’s
territorial ambitions in Azarbayjan and Georgia.18
The opportunity to push the Ottoman frontier forward into the
Caucasus and western Iran was not missed, although this military
gamble and potential overreach of manpower and supply lines was
still carried out within an overall geopolitical calculus of East-West
commitments. Yet, as the Russo-Ottoman agreement to partition
Iran demonstrates, force of arms was increasingly tempered with
diplomacy. From the outset of the century, West Asia was abuzz
with envoys and new diplomatic initiatives.19 The Ottoman court
received an embassy from the Kalmyk tribes of the eastern Volga
in search of an alliance that would protect them from the Russians
in Astrakhan.20 Viziers entertained ambassadors from the Uzbek ruler
of Transoxiana, the empire’s habitual Sunni partner and beneficiary
of its military technology in containing the “heretical” Safavids.21
After years of silence, the new Mughal sultan, Farrukhsiya, dispatched
a plenipotentiary to Istanbul in 1712–13, in the first of what appears
to have been several missions.22

eds., Caucasia between the Ottoman Empire and Iran, 1555–1914 (Wiesbaden: Reichert,
2000).
18
Aktepe, 1720–1724 Osmanlı-Iran Münasebetleri, 19–32; J. C. Hurewitz, The Middle
East and North Africa in World Politics, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1975), 1:65–74; and Ernest Tucker’s excellent analysis, “The Peace Negotiation of
1736: A Conceptual Turning Point in Ottoman-Iranian Relations,” TSA Bulletin 20
(1996): 16–37.
19
P. Kahle, “China as Described by Turkish Geographers from Iranian Sources,”
Proceedings of the Iran Society, vol. 11 (London, 1940), 48–59.
20
On the ill-fated negotiations initiated by Kalmyks with the Russians, the
Manchu, and the Ottomans between 1704 and 1714, Michael Khodarkovsky, Where
Two Worlds Met: The Russian State and the Kalmyk Nomads, 1600–1771 (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1992), 139, 153–55.
21
Sultan Ahmad II (r. 1691–1695) toyed with the idea of joint action against
the Safavids in 1691. However, the Uzbek dynasty itself was fractured. Undoubtedly
this is why the cartographer describes Balkh as a “part of Khorasan [which] has
many rulers and towns. Currently, it is under the rule of Uzbeks.” See also
J. Audrey Burton, “Relations between Bukhara and Turkey,” IJTS 5 (1990–91):
83–103; and on the arrival of the Uzbek ambassador, Anonim Osmanlı Tarihi
(1099 –1116/1688–1704), ed. Abdülkadir Özcan (Ankara: Türk Tarihi Kurumu
Basımevi, 2000), 222.
22
On Ottoman claims to the caliphate and relations with the Mughals, see
Naimur Rahman Farooqi, Mughal-Ottoman Relations: A Study of Political and Diplomatic
Relations between Mughal India and the Ottoman Empire, 1556–1748 (New Delhi: Idarah-i
Adabiyat-i Delhi, 1989), 6–71.
40  

If contacts among West Asian states remained episodic, the first

decades of the century witnessed a phase of sustained, multilateral
diplomatic relations with the empire’s Western neighbors, the “Christian
nations” (milel-i nasrani ). Throughout the century, France, which under
Louis XIV began casting its diplomatic net ever wider in eastern
Europe, the Black Sea, and the Indian Ocean, retained its place as
most favored ally. Yet Istanbul also recognized the need to diversify
its alliances in the Mediterranean and signed new treaties and com-
mercial agreements with the British and Dutch.23 At war again
between 1737 and 1739 with Austria and Russia, to which he lost
the key Crimean fortress of Azov in 1736, the sultan tried to hem
in the czar diplomatically in the Baltic by concluding agreements
with both Sweden and Denmark.24
Certainly, “friends” like the king of France were able to wrest
unprecedented liberties in the Red Sea, with respect to Christian
holy sites in Palestine, in addition to expanding their commercial
privileges in Istanbul itself.25 However, the Sun King and his suc-
cessors repaid the sultan in kind. French diplomatic finesse proved
invaluable in the complicated negotiations with Habsburg Austria
that resulted in the restoration of Ottoman control over the city of
Belgrade in 1739. After the heyday of Franco-Ottoman relations
under the embassy of the Marquis Louis Sauveur de Villeneuve

23
Halil (nalcık, “Imtiyâzât,” EI 2 3: 1178–1189. Ottoman missions to Europe
included Russia (1722–23, 1740–42), Austria (1719, 1730, 1748, 1757–58), France
(1721), and Poland (1730, 1757–58) (Faik Re{it Unat, Osmanlı Sefirleri ve Sefaretnameleri
[Ankara: TTK Basımevi, 1987]). See also (brahim Müteferika’s description of the
different forms of government in Europe, Usûl’ûl-Hikem fî Nizâmü’l-Umem, ed. Adel
}en (Ankara: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1995); and the extremely interesting, though
anonymous, “dialogue” between a Christian and Muslim officer from this period,
published by Faik Re{id Unat, “Ahmed III devrine ait bir Islahat Takiri,” Tarih
Vesikaları 1 (1941): 107–21. For examples of reports and analysis of individual mis-
sions during the first half of the eighteenth century, see Beynun Akyava{, ed.,
Yirmisekiz Çelebi Mehmed Efendi’nin Fransa Sefâretnâmesi (Ankara: Türk Kültürünü Ara{tırma
Enstitüsü, 1993), and Mubadele—An Ottoman Russian Exchange of Ambassadors, anno-
tated and translated by Norman Itzkowitz and Max Mote (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1970). For an overview of Ottoman-European diplomatic practice,
see Maria Pia Pedani’s meticulous study, In Nome del Gran Signore: Inviati Ottomani a
Venezia della Caduta di Costantinopoli alla Guerra di Candia (Venezia: Deputazione Editrice,
1994) and Aksan’s An Ottoman Statesman.
24
Charles of Sweden sought Ottoman help as early as 1709. Karl A. Roider, Jr.,
Austria’s Eastern Question, 1700–1790 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 18.
25
France, too, dreamed of dividing the empire according to L. Darperon, “Le
Grand Dessein sécret de Louis XIV,” Revue de Géographie 1 (1877): 435–61.
      41

between 1728 and 1741, Versailles’ regard for its ally, the Sublime
Porte, may have waxed and waned over the second half of the cen-
tury. Nonetheless, the Porte’s military presence in the heart of Europe
as much as the prospect of furthering Russian territorial gains at
Ottoman expense in the East, remained a sobering thought for
Vienna. Peace held with Istanbul from 1740 to 1769.26
The increasing frequency of diplomatic exchange was bound to
have an impact on the way Ottoman statesmen saw other powers,
as well as on the way both sides came to view the still illusive con-
cept of territorial sovereignty during this period.27 Certainly the bat-
tle cry in Europe to “throw the Turk completely out of Europe,”
remained as loud as ever and, invoking the spirit of the Crusades,
still enlisted the support of Pope Clement XII, who levied a special
tithe on Church properties within Austria itself in 1737. Yet depend-
ing on the context, one might discern that the Realpolitik between
states and the succession crises contributed to an overall muting of
traditional religious and sectarian overtones in favor of respect for
dynastic claims.28 Continued Ottoman negotiations with the last
Safavids (Tahmasp II [r. 1722–29] and 'Abbas III [r. 1729–36]),
although without issue, did have their political motivation. By be-
grudging recognition to both the Sunni Afghan and Tahmasp Kuli
Khan, the Afshar regent who would declare himself sovereign under
the name of Nadir Shah in 1736, indeed, condemning both as rebels,
Ottoman statesmen clung to the fiction of the Safavid dynastic
legitimacy.29
Rather than trying to reconcile the semantic drift among histori-
cal accounts, diplomatic formulae, religious treatises, and internal

26
For more on Habsburg-Ottoman relations, see Roider, Austria’s Eastern Question.
And for an introduction to Russia’s “Iran question,” see Muriel Atkin, Russia and
Iran, 1780–1828 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980).
27
Note the utterly contradictory reports of the extravagant Ottoman embassy to
Vienna in 1718. Roider, Austria’s Eastern Question, 59.
28
Much to the unhappiness of Austria, the Ottomans took their inclusion in
intra-European diplomacy quite seriously: they tried to mediate the Austrian war
of succession and sent a protest to Maria Theresa’s after her decision to expel the
Jews of Prague whom she charged with collusion with Prussia. Roider, Austria’s
Eastern Question, 77, 95.
29
Tucker, “The Peace Negotiation of 1736,” 22. Decades of war would even-
tually prod Istanbul into formal recognition of Nadir Shah. But the Safavids con-
tinued in effigy: the last puppet shah, Ismail III, would die in 1773. See J. R. Perry,
“The Last Safavids, 1722–73,” Iran 9 (1971): 59–70.
42  

memos, we may defer to our cautious cartographer, whose words

and images match terminology with coordinates in space.30 However,
to reconsider sovereignty from this perspective does require modern
viewers to suspend their operating understanding of the unitary state
as it emerged in the nineteenth century and with Ratzelian notions
of political geography.31 Indeed, early modern rule was far from
even: from the center to its frontier, state control was a question of
degrees and forms. Above all, it was a matter of the mapmaker’s
perspective.
Describing the permutations of power from Istanbul, the cartog-
rapher naturally accords his own patrons the highest expressions of
“stateness”: it is the Ottomans who rule (hakim), “enjoy the fruits of ”
(tassaruf ) or vanquish (zapt) territory. Defining the gradations between
direct institutional control— conveyed by the Ottoman division into
provinces (eyalet) and military districts (sancak) or, for the Safavids,
into command units (tumen)—and the myriad forms of suzerainty
remains an exercise in frustration: often on the map’s face or in the
legend one reads the term tâbi [dependent] in conjunction with a
dynastic title over lands, peoples, and cities. He thus recognizes lands
attributed to the Uzbeks, the Safavids, the czars (Moscow), and the
Mughals (“Monarch of India”).
Apparently, other considerations enter into our mapmaker’s eval-
uation of suzerainty, vassalage, and tributary polities. Before dou-
bling back in his legend to acknowledge the Ottoman occupation of
Tiflis and Kaht,32 the cartographer relates that Georgia, a non-trib-

30
Navigation and shipping terminology had long been received multiple influences.
For an example of the hybridity of geographic idiom, see the treatise of Bartınlı
(brahim Hamdi (Cengiz Orhonlu, “XVIII Yüzyılda Osmanlılarda Co[rafya ve
Bartınlı (brahim Hamdi’nin Atlası,” Tarih Dergisi 10 (1959): 115–40). (brahim uses
such locutions as the “European frontier,” (“hudud-i Avrupa”) and translates the
papal state in Rome with the term “hükümet” (reserved in Ottoman parlance for
the enclaves ruled by Kurdish dynasties). This comparison, beyond the bounds of
the present work, must take as its point of departure Katib Çelebi’s Kitab-ı Cihânnüma:
see Gottfried Hagen, Ein osmanischer Geograph bei der Arbeit. Entstehung and Gedankenwelt
von Kâtib Çelebis Cihânnümâ. Ph.D. diss., Freie Universität Berlin, 1996).
31
For a critique of the work of Friedrich Ratzel, the political geographer of
Bismarck’s Germany, see Lucien Febvre’s La terre et l’évolution humaine. introduction géo-
graphique à l’histoire (Paris: Renaissance du Livre, 1922). The literature on sovereignty
is also relevant. For an introduction to European thought on the subject of sover-
eignty, see Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1995).
32
The legend makes no mention of the Russian occupation or the the Afghan
      43

ute-paying but politically subordinate principality, is itself “subdivided

into different countries (ülke).”33 Large expanses of steppe and desert,
such as Transoxiana and Arabia, where fluid relationships among
nomadic pastoralists may or may not obey a proximate agrarian
hegemon, are left to the imagination.34 Above all, what seems to
matter, in every quarter of the map and every verbal qualifier, is
history. Time pervades space. It justifies the recognition of neigh-
bors, whether or not their claims are granted equality with those of
the sultan. Time also accounts for the layering of jurisdictions,
exemplified by the recurrence of the word “realm” (or “country”)
(memlikat, pl. memâlik), which does not so much beg the question of
independence as of prior or concurrent political identities.35
For those habituated to reading sovereignty from the political and
ethnoreligiously coded maps drafted in western Europe ateliers dur-
ing this period or from the pen of a pope who with one stroke
divided the Americas between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns
under the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), the Ottoman cartographer’s
reluctance to encapsulate dynastic claims and nations with graphic
lines seems strange. Indeed, given the sultan’s undiminished assertion
of universal sovereignty, the lack of an apparent fines ottomanorum in

siege of Isfahan. The cartographer does volunteer logistical information and in the
case of Shirvan, described by its sixteenth-century Ottoman name, Demürkapı,
admits that it has been redivided into seven military districts. (“. . . nevah-i Demürkapı
Devlet-i Âliye canibinden zabt olundukta yedi sanca[a taksim olunmu{, sancakları
bunlardır, }abur, Da[istan, Dahti, Be{ker, Dur, Berrak, Destab).” As for Georgia,
we are finally told that it is “half under the rule of the Ottomans.” (“Memâlik-i
Gürcüstan bilada tahrir oldu[u üzre bu memleketlerin nisf miktarı öteden berü
Devlet-i Âliye"e tâbi ve nisf-i ahri Acem’e tâbi olup, Acem’e tâbi olan yerleri Tiflis
ve Kaht eyaletleri bir kaç tümen ‘ad olunur . . .”) For military appointments to
Tabriz, Erdilan, Genc (Ganja), Rumiye, and Mara[a, see Fahameddin Ba{ar, Osmanlı
Eyâlet Tevcihâtı (1717–1730) (Ankara: TTK Basımevi, 1997).
33
Pitcher, An Historical Geography, 140.
34
Over the face of the map, in the vast, uncharted regions of the Kara and
Kızıl Kum, he simply writes, “The tribes of the Tatar, Turk, Turkmen, Kalmyk
and Kalamak, Mongol, Kazak, and other nomadic peoples.”
35
Bartınlı (brahim Hamdi (Orhonlu, “XVIII Yüzyılda Osmanlılarda Co[rafya,”
139) attempts to use terminology with a certain consistency: e.g., “empire” applies
to Spain while Austria and Venice are distinguished with the term clime (iklim). As
on our map of Eurasia, the parts that make up such “compound” polities are often
recognized as having a separate historical identity, such as the “country (memliket)
of al-Andalus” or bundles of semi-sovereign countries, such as the Germanys, “mem-
liket-i Cermanya.” See also Henry Kahane, Reneé Kahane, Andreas Tietze, The Lingua
Franca in the Levant: Turkish Nautical Terms of Italian and Greek Origin (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1958), 594–97.
44  

Asia might strike the viewer as overtly menacing.36 Yet in this sim-
ple and telling act, the Ottoman cartographer betrays one of the
great secrets of absolutism. True borders—fully surveyed, mapped,
and continuously demarcated with ditches, fences, and walls, and
monitored by a network of stations and fortresses—were still a rar-
ity and would remain so even in western Europe until the nine-
teenth century. Part of the bluff and bluster of colonizers, they were
hardly relevant to imperial claims or the actual disposition of colonies,
including those in the Americas.37 Thus, despite the obsessive reflection
on the territorial state after the Peace of Westphalia (1648), on many
fronts, including that between Russia and the Ottomans, the cessa-
tion of conflict often meant retaining whatever territories and fortresses
were in hand, in accordance with the venerable Roman principle of
uti possidetis.38
Recently, some exceptions had appeared.39 An unusual clause in
the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699) which dictated the formation of a
commission to survey and physically define a border stretching the
entire length of the Croatian-Ottoman frontier to an exactitude of
two hours from either side, did constitute, as Rifa’at Abou-El-Haj
notes, an “unambiguous declaration of territorial integrity.”40 But
even the foremost scientists of the day, Count Marsigli being one of

36
For reflections on the ideology of expansion, see Pal Fodor, In Quest of the
Golden Apple: Imperial Ideology, Politics, and Military Administration in the Ottoman Empire
(Istanbul: Isis Press, 2000).
37
Compare the gradual formation of frontiers between New World empires in
Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes
Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
and their claims to sovereignty, in Anthony Pagden, Lords of the World: Ideologies of
Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1995), 78.
38
The territoriality of the state remained of utmost concern for political thinkers
in Europe of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. For more on Hobbes,
Spinoza, Locke, and von Pufendorf, among others, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundation
of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978);
Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, 101; and Roider, Austria’s Eastern Question, 44–59.
39
Compare Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrennees
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 274–75; Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe,
181–83.
40
Rifa"at 'Ali Abou-El-Haj,” The Formal Closure of the Ottoman Frontier in
Europe,” JOAS 89 (1969): 467; see also Stefanos Yerasimos, Questions d’Orient: Frontiers
et Minorités des Balkans au Caucase (Paris: Editions de Decouverte, 1993), and Gunter
E. Rothenberg, The Austrian Military Border in Croatia, 1522–1737 (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1960). For important new studies on Ottoman borders, see Dariusz
      45

them, found their astrolabes and surveying instruments inadequate

to the task. Ottoman and Hapsburg representatives alike returned
to time-honored methods of judging the edge between empires: they
neglected mountainous regions entirely and readily deferred to nat-
ural markers, such as rivers. Indeed, the frontiers remained as they
had been since antiquity: zones of continuous passage and exchange
as much as of regulation and military control.41
There were nonetheless other man-made solutions to the problem
of frontiers between political units.42 Recasting the modern image of
the state, it is helpful to think of early modern polities not only as
bundles of “realms” but as packages containing multiple cores and
variegated edges. The wide margins or edges that separated larger,
dominant powers were themselves composed of more loosely con-
trolled zones and subordinate polities, qualified in Ottoman Turkish
with salyane or haracguzar, and often rendered, unhappily, with mod-
ern terms such as vassal-state, client, tributary, or protectorate. Looking
at the map’s rendering of the Black Sea, we must envision the clus-
ter of such semiautonomous polities that formed an active, at times
mobile, frontier between the Ottoman heartland, Russia, and Poland.
It was composed of peoples, including the Nogay Tatars and Zapo-
rozhye Cossacks, as well as the principalities of Moldavia, Wallachia,
Transylvania, and briefly, Podolia-Ukraine.
Although all parties established pragmatic policies with regard to
their more dominant neighbors, specific constitutional terms defined

Kolodziejczyk, Ottoman-Polish Diplomatic Relations (15th–18th century): An Annotated Edition

of Ahdnames and Other Documents. Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe:
The Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000); and
Daniel Power and Naomi Standen, Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands, 700–1700
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). In “The Ottoman-Venetian Frontier (15th–18th
Centuries),” in The Great Ottoman-Turkish Civilization, ed. Kemal Çiçek, Ercümen
Kuran, Nejat Göyünç, (ber Ortaylı, et al. (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye, 2000), 1: 171–77,
Maria Pia Pedani Fabris makes a case for an earlier prototype in the Adriatic.
41
Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, 175–76. On the subject of frontiers, see also Whittaker’s
comments (in Frontiers of the Roman Empire, 66–72), which are based on the con-
ceptual framework of Lucien Febvre (La Terre et l’Evolution Humaine).
42
Owen Lattimore’s discussion (Inner Asian Frontiers of China [New York: Oxford
University Press, 1940], 244) suggests a dual frontier, a concept that recognizes both
the ecological limits of territorialization and need for political demarcation. By con-
trast, David Moon (“Peasant Migration and the Settlement of Russia’s Frontiers,
1509–1897,” The Historical Journal 40 (1997): 859–893) speaks of three frontiers
beyond the “political”: between forest and steppe, between peasant and tribesman,
as well as between peasant village and Russian administration.
46  

relationships and the extent of reciprocity within the Ottoman polit-

ical umbrella. The Orthodox principalities submitted to Muslim
suzerainty, rather than that of Christian Russia or Catholic Poland,
in order to safeguard their own religious autonomy. In exchange for
logistical services, notably provision of grain for the Hungarian cam-
paigns and tributary payments to Istanbul in war and peacetime,
they retained the right to select their prince from among the land-
holding elite and to refuse the indignities of having Muslim soldiers
or merchants quartered in their cities.43 In the Crimea, the Giray
Khans played a parallel territorial role. However, by virtue of their
status as Muslim military allies, their receipt of sizable subventions
from Istanbul, as well as protection money from their Christian neigh-
bors, they retained a far greater degree of independence in the con-
duct of internal and external affairs. The Crimean Khan proclaimed
his hegemony over weaker Tatar groups such as the Nogay.44 Notable
for the Black Sea region as a whole during the first decades of the
eighteenth century was the increasing rigidity of the relationship
between frontier-state and suzerain power. In a period of rising
Russian influence, Tatar defiance of Istanbul resulted in blunt inter-
vention in the Crimean khanate in 1703.45 As for the principalities,
Istanbul bypassed the local elite altogether after 1716, selecting new
hospodars and voyvoda from the prominent Greeks of the Fener quar-
ter of Istanbul, the so-called Phanariote.46
Religious animosity electrified other perimeters of the empire.
Beyond the bounds of our map, in the Magrib, the largely inde-

43
Uzunçar{ılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, vol. 4, pt. 2, 41–77. }erban Constantin, “La
suzerainetée Ottomane a l’égard des pays roumains dans le contexte des relations
internationales Européenes (Sec. XVI–XVII),” Tarih Dergisi 32 (1979): 211–18; M. M.
Alexandrescu-Dersca Bulgaru, “L’approvisionnement d’Istanbul par les Princi-
pautés Roumaines au XVIIIe siecle: Commerce ou Requisition?” RMMM 66 (1992):
73–78; compare Bistra Cvetkova, “Les celep et leur rôle dans la vie économique des
Balkans à l’époque ottomane (XVe–XVIIIe s.),” in Studies in the Economic History of
the Middle East, ed. M. A. Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 172–93.
44
A. W. Fisher, “Les rapports entre l’Empire ottoman et la Crimée: L’aspect
financier,” CMRS 13 (1967): 368–81, notes the increased dependency of the khanate
because of the curtailment of the Crimean slave trade in the first decades of the
century; see also Uzunçar{ılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, vol. 4, pt. 2, 1–37.
45
Abou-El-Haj, “The Formal Closure,” 472–74. For French mediation between
Poland and the khans, see Gilles Veinstein, “Les Tatar de Crimée et la seconde
élection de Stanislas Leszczynski,” CMRS 11 (1965): 24–92.
46
For an Ottoman perspective, Münir Aktepe, ed., Mehmed Emni Beyefendi Pa{a"nın
Rusya Sefareti ve Sefaret Namesi (Ankara: TTK Basımevi, 1989), 52.
      47

pendent and hereditary Deys of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli faced off

against their perennial foes, Spain, the Knights of Malta, and Catholic
buccaneers.47 In eastern Europe, the Catholic borderlands of the
Balkans, Croatia, Hungary, and Slovakia, and after 1721, Venetian
Dalmatia, parried the Muslim-ruled Balkans. The Wars of the Iranian
Succession also rekindled sectarian hatreds between Sunni and Shi'i
Qizilbash although the newly crowned Nadir Shah (r. 1736–47) tried
to distinguish his own reign by declaring his veneration of Ja"far,
the sixth, rather than of Reza, the eighth, Imam.
Yet it would be a mistake to see religious antagonism as an indeli-
ble mark on the geopolitical map. As the common-cause alliances
between Cossack and Tatar in previous centuries and the Tunisian-
European treaties struck in the first decades of the eighteenth cen-
tury demonstrated, political empathy and commercial concerns still
transcended confessional lines.48 In fact, it was Catholicism’s resur-
gent anti-Protestantism, in Hungary and in France, the revocation
of the Treaty of Nantes in 1691, that more accurately characterized
the changing nature of religious frontiers. As western European atti-
tudes toward the “other” at home hardened, the multiconfessional
enclaves of Albania, Bosnia, and Mount Lebanon made the Ottoman
Empire appear as more incidious threat: a permeable frontier of
shaded contrasts rather than stark contraries.49 Indeed, extraterrito-
rial rights clouded borders; between Karlowitz (1699) and the Treaty
of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, dynastic sovereignty was enhanced by

47
Uzunçar{ılı, Osmanlı Tarihi, vol. 4, pt. 2, 253–58; Abdallah Laroui, The History
of the Maghrib: An Interpretive Essay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977),
262–70.
48
See Charles Frazee, Catholics and Sultans: The Church and the Ottoman Empire,
1453–1917 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Gregory L. Bruess
(Religion, Identity, and Empire: A Greek Archbishop in the Russia of Catherine the Great
[Boulder: East European Monographs, 1997], 61) notes that Russia insisted on the
dissolution of the Zaporozhian Cossak Host in 1774, precisely to subsume this
“nation” under the larger banner of religion. On the religious frontier in another
setting, see Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 228–67.
49
Conversion to Islam in Albania was a continous process, according to Ferit
Duka, “XV–XVIII. Yüzyıllarda Arnavut Nüfusunun Islamla{ması Süreci üzerine
Gözlemler,” Ankara Üniversitesi Osmanlı Tarihi Ara{tırma ve Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi 2
(1991): 63–72. On Bosnia, see Michael Robert Hickok, Ottoman Military Administration
in Eighteenth-Century Bosnia (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997); and on Lebanon, Richard van
Leeuwen, Notables and Clergy in Mount Lebanon: The Khazin Sheikhs and the Maronite
Church (1736–1840) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995).
48  

extraterritorial claims, not only for the Habsburg emperor over

Catholics and for the czar over Orthodox populations with the
Ottoman lands but also with respect to the sultan’s caliphal author-
ity over Muslims living in Christendom.50
Precisely because nationalism has tended to color the boundaries
between states in ethnic as well as confessional hues, it has become
difficult to appreciate the fact that the internal edges of empire, as
well as the edges abutting constitutionally tributary powers, also
molded themselves to new geopolitical and institutional conditions.
Just as the Ottomans reached forms of accommodation with both
Christian and Muslim subordinates along the frontier with Christendom,
they also accommodated Muslim elites within. In fact, accommoda-
tion was built into the administrative architecture of Asia. Logistics
alone demanded an administrative system with ample institutional
seams and wide political perimeters. The road from Istanbul to
Baghdad is more than twice the length of that to Belgrade.51 As the
premier Muslim power in the West, the sultan had earned the des-
ignation and responsibilities of the “servitor of the Holy Cities,”
guardian of Mecca and Medina. However, with normal communi-
cations requiring three to four weeks to relay information between
Egypt and Damascus alone,52 the supervision of the yearly pilgrim-
age, which in the measure of the day entailed 316.5 hours’ journey
from Istanbul to Damascus and nearly equal time, 379 hours, to
Mecca (150 days of normal travel), was increasingly delegated to the
pashas of Damascus and the janissary serdar in Cairo.53
In the Red Sea region, the age of gunpowder weaponry had only
accentuated the inherent obstacles to direct rule. After local powers

50
D. Sourdel, “Khal fa,” EI 2 4: 946.
51
Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 22; Halil Sahillio[lu, “Dördüncü Murad’in Ba[dad
Seferinin Menzilnamesi,” Belgeler 2 (1965): 1–36.
52
Antoine Abdel Nour, “Le Réseau Routier de la Syrie Ottomane (XVIe–XVIIIe
siècle),” Arabica 30 (1983): 174.
53
TKSK MS. H. 446 (1762–1763) is a record of the post-stations (menzilhane)
and the distances between them in “hours” from Uskudar to Mecca. According to
Marsigili (Stato Militare, vol. 1, 9) “The Turks measure distances between places by
the hours that a horse can traverse at a good pace which corresponds to three
Italian miles.” Murphey (Ottoman Warfare, 65) estimates a typical 4–5 “hour” day
of riding to average 22 kilometers. For general orientation, see Suraiya Faroqhi,
Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under the Ottomans (London: I. B. Taurus, 1994), 156–62.
On the Egyptian caravan, Jane Hathaway, The Politics of Household in Ottoman Egypt:
The Rise of the Qazada[lı (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 134.
      49

gained access to artillery, muskets, and other ordinance, the Ottoman

armada, once the lords of the Horn of Africa and southern Arabia,
relinquished Yemen definitively in 1636, and by the end of the cen-
tury, its presence had receded to the coastline.54
The Egypt profiled in our map also required a new type of rul-
ing formula. Until the rise of Ali Bey al-Kabir after 1757, the large
garrisons of Cairo, regular circuits of intra-imperial commerce, high-
level appointments (to the governorship and the elite müterrika corps),
as well as the large yearly payment (salyâne), secured strong ties to
the Istanbul court. At the same time, Cairo witnessed the rising
influence of local military households aspiring for the de facto power
of the beylicate, particularly under the Qazda[lı party and compe-
tition for leadership of the seven regiments. As in the Balkans these
developments, it may be argued, owed less to a slackening of Ottoman
rule than to a local economy swollen with commerce. In Cairo,
wealth revolved around the coffee trade and state contracts issued
for the endowed grain lands benefitting the Holy Cities.55
Similarly, the West Asian reaches of the empire, with their low
population density, relative to that of western Anatolia and the
Balkans, and with their widespread nomadic or seminomadic popu-
lations, continually confounded attempts to impose an overarching
imperial apparatus and, for the purposes of security and war, to allo-
cate resources effectively.56 Although the road network of western
and northern Anatolia permitted wheeled traffic, from the Euphrates

54
Halil (nalcık, “The Socio-Political Effects of the Diffusion of Fire-Arms in the
Middle East,” in War, Technology and Society in the Middle East, ed. V. J. Parry and
M. E. Yapp (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 203–6.
55
See Hathaway, The Politics of Households; and Kenneth M. Cuno, The Pasha’s
Peasants: Land, Society, and Economy in Lower Egypt, 1740–1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992).
56
For a useful model, see G. William Skinner, “Cities and the Hierarchy of
Local Systems,” in The City in Late Imperial China, ed. Skinner (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1977), 275–351. For an attempt to estimate the empire’s eigh-
teenth-century population, see Bruce McGowan, “The Age of the Ayan,” in An
Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Halil (nalcık with Donald Quataert,
Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 666; Following Daniel Panzac,
(“La population de l’Empire ottoman et de ses marges du XVe au XIXe siècle: bib-
liographie (1941–80) et bilan provisoire,” Revue de l’Occident Musulmane et e la Méditerranée.
31 [1981]: 119–37) and others, McGowan estimates the population of the empire
as a whole, circa 1800, to have been between 25 and 32 millions, with all parts
of the empire, but particularly the Asian provinces, lagging behind growth in west-
ern Europe.
50  

southward convoys of donkeys, horses, and camels would remain the

chief mode of transport for cargo and people toward destinations in
Syria and Iraq.57 Neither the Euphrates nor the Tigris was fully nav-
igable until the advent of the steamship. Only in spring and sum-
mer when the water was at its highest, could barges, laden with
timber, grain, and copper, depart Diyarbekir on the upper Tigris
for Basra, arriving two months later.58 Thus despite the presence of
the janissary corps, the award of fiscal contracts, and ongoing co-
operation in maintaining the security of the imperial highway,
powerful local regimes were needed to contain the festering frontier
with Iran, one of the causes of rural unrest, as tribes, mercenaries,
bandits, and lawless provincial officers competed for resources. An
Istanbul appointee to the governorship of Baghdad, Hasan Pasha
(r. 1702–24) founded a new dynasty that, perpetuated by his son,
Ahmad (r. 1724–47), and subsequently by their administrative corps,
slaves of Georgian origin, guarded Ottoman interests while holding
on to regional power until the early nineteenth century.59
As the cartographer put the final touches on the geography of
Asia, Istanbul’s direct control over provincial administration in West
Asia was probably at its highest point in decades. Even so, as he
arrives at the easternmost edge of the empire, the border with the
Iranian shah, a distance of more than four hundred “hours” from
the army encampment in Uskudar, he indulges in an uncharacter-
istically long digression on the “region of Kurdistan” that helps us
to put the nature of territorial sovereignty under this old regime in
its proper perspective.60

57
Suraiya Faroqhi, “Camels, Wagons, and the Ottoman State in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries,” IJMES 14 (1982): 523–39, 553–54; and F. Taescher, Das
Anatolische Wegenetz nach Osmanischen Quellen, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Mayer & Müller, 1924–26).
58
Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanlı (mparatorlu[undaunda Derbend Te{kilâtı (Istanbul: Eren,
1984), 128–33. Additionally, many of the Euphrates ports were fortified with heavy
artillery according to (nalcık, “The Social-Political Effects of the Diffusion of Fire-
Arms,” 214.
59
For an appreciation of local dynamics, see Tom Nieuwenhuis, Politics and Society
in Early Modern Iraq (The Hague-Amsterdam: Studies in Social History of the
International Institute of Social History, 1982); Percy Kemp, Territoire de l’Islam: le
monde vu de Moussoul au XVIII e siècle (Paris: Sindbad, 1982); Hala Fattah, The Politics
of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia and the Gulf, 1745–1900 (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1997); and Dina Rizk Khoury, State and Provincial Society in the
Ottoman Empire Mosul, 1540 –1834 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1997).
60
To be exact, it took 408.5 hours for the route between Uskudar and Tabriz.
      51

The “region (vilayet) of Kurdistan,” he relates, “begins in area of

Hormuz [in the Persian Gulf ] and comprises Malatya and Mara{;
its northernmost region is Yerevan (Armenia) and its southernmost,
Mosul and Iraq.”61 Without mentioning its population or ethnicity,
the cartographer continues his description of this vaguely cultural
geography by noting the centrality of a “magnificent mountain range,”
which begins “at the frontier of the [Safavid] provinces of Fars and
Kerman and stretches as far as Van and the mountain of Erzurum
[Ararat?].”62 Although an ambiguous rendering of space, it is such
ecological details that evoke both peculiar sociological adaptations to
this region as well as a physical and economic remoteness that per-
mitted its myriad populations alternately to evade and comply with
the proximate agrarian-based state.63
Yet there remain other details that capture the difference between
the Ottoman frontier and the lands properly belonging to its neighbor,
the Safavids. “Kurdistan” is not simply an ecological zone between
states. Rather, it is a vast region whose constituent societies are given
peculiar coordinates in space by dominant powers. Here, the carto-
grapher does not attempt to reduce these internal sociological divi-
sions to sectarianism, although this was indeed a factor historically
in fostering allegiances between Kurdish tribes, sultans, and shahs.
Instead, he distinguishes political allegiance in the very forms of
autonomous and semiautonomous organization. Thus, those loyal to
the house of Osman reside in “places [that] go by the name of san-
cak [fully surveyed, command districts], hükümet [hereditary counties
granted to a tribal leadership] and ocaklık [semiautonomous but non-

Suleymaniye Library, Esad Efendi MS. 2362 pt. 8 (n.d.) Anonymous, Menzilname,
folios 157–59. Special envoys and couriers traveled at a much faster pace. For
example, the Ottoman ambassador who left the capital on 29 May 1724 arrived
in Yerevan on 17 June (Aktepe, 1720–1724 Osmanlı-Iran Münasebetleri, 31–32).
61
In contrast to the eyalet, Marsigli (Stato Militare dell’Impero Ottomanno, 9) trans-
lates “vilayet,” credibly, as “all large countries” (“tutti i paesi vasti”).
62
“Vilayet-i Kürdistan: vilayet-i Hürmüz’den ibtida Malatya ve Mara{ hududunda
müntehi olur; {imalisi Revan, cenubisi Musul ve Irak-ı Arab’dır. Ve asl-ı Cebel-i
Kürdistan Acem diyar[ın?]da Fars ve Kirman hududundan [ahiz ?] edüp, Van’a
ve Erzurum cebeline ula{ır. Cebel-i azime silsile ve muttasıldır. Bazi yerleri sancak
hükümet ve ocaklık ünvanlarıyla Âli Osman’a tâbi, bazi yerleri serhad-ı }ah-ı Acemde
vaki olmu{tur. On sekiz miktar vilayet ‘ad olunur.”
63
From the perspective of the state, this was a zone of economic marginality,
as Lattimore in Inner Asian Frontiers notes, but it also featured a symbiosis between
pastoralism and agriculture. On this point, see A. M. Khazanov, Nomads and the
Outside World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
52  

hereditary enclaves].” An organized and bounded autonomy, as much

as formal administrative division, closes the Ottoman edge, separat-
ing it from Kurdish tribes, which, as he says elsewhere, “are found
within the borders [serhad ] of the shah.”64

From the Inside Out

Without drawing a line on the map, the cartographer uses text to

establish the mettle of a state, its organizational logic, and the sociopo-
litical relationship between subject and sovereign.65 This preference
for depicting space in numbers and words is not a surprising response
from a servant of an early modern state famous for leaving an
astounding paper trail. In the sixteenth century, the Ottomans estab-
lished sovereignty by quill as well as by sword: assembling a region’s
inhabitants and notables, a bureaucrat worked with the local kadı

64
Martin van Bruinessen, “The Ottoman Conquest of Diyarbekir and the
Administrative Organization of the Province in the 16th and 17th Centuries,” in
Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir, ed. Van Bruinessen and Hendrik Boeschoten (Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 1988), 13–28. The 1555 treaty between the Ottoman sultan and the Kurdish
}erif Han of Bitlis (Nazmi Sevgen, “Kürtler V,” Belgeler 3 [1968]: 70) defined a
hükümet as a hereditary fief that included fortresses, cities, villages, and fields; Hezarfen
Hüseyin Efendi (Sevim Ilgürel, ed., Hezarfen Hüseyın Efendi Telhisü’l Beyan fi Kavanin-i
Al-i Osman [Ankara: TTK Basımevi, 2000], 132) qualifies hükümet with such expres-
sions as “free from accounts” and “possessor of all its fruits” (“mefruzü’l-kalem ve
maktü’ül-kadem olup evbab-ı mahsulatı her ne ise hakimleri mutasarrıfdır”). The
legend gives the same breakdown for Diyarbekir that we find in the mid-seven-
teenth century: five hükümet (Cezire, E[il, Genç, Palu, and Hazzo)and eight ocaklıks
(Sa[man, Kulp, Mihrani, Tercil, Atak, Pertek, Çapakçur, and Çermik) that carried
no hereditary rights. See also, Chèref-ou’ddîne. Chèref-Nâmeh ou Fastes de la Nation
Kourde, trans. François Bernard Charmoy (St. Pétersbourg: l’Académie Impériale des
Sciences, 1873). Naturally, this did not guarantee autonomy in later centuries, as
Kanûn-nâme-i Sultânî li’ Azîz Efendi: 'Aziz Efendi’s Book of Sultanic Laws and Regulation:
An Agenda for Reform by a Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Statesman (ed. and trans. Rhoads
Murphey [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985] makes clear; for the eight-
eenth century, see Mouradgea D’Ohsson Tableau général de l’Empire othoman, divisé en
deux parties, dont l’une comprend la législation mahométane; l’autre, l’histoire de l’Empire otho-
man (Paris, Imp. de monsieur [Firmin Didot] 1787–1820), vol. 7, 299; and DA
IV:45.
65
Jean Bodin (On Sovereignty: Four Chapters from the Six Books of the Commonwealth,
ed. and trans. Julian H. Franklin [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992],
56) defines sovereignty juridically and institutionally, not territorially, asserting that
“the first prerogative of sovereignty is to give law to all in general and to each in
particular, the latter part refers to privileges, which are in the jurisdiction of sov-
ereign princes to the exclusion of all others.”
      53

and cavalry officer to carry out the cadastration of each eyalet and
component sancak of the empire. These tomes were prefaced by a
kanunnâme, a codification or compendium of customary law and impe-
rial statute as well as relevant Islamic codes, describing the obliga-
tions and rights of subjects.66 Although the types of taxation changed
over the centuries, they overlay a fundamental relationship between
sovereign and subject established with the first local administrative
codes.67 Preparation for war in the eighteenth century still entailed
mustering a wagon load of registers, from texts of treaties, tax receipts,
the numbers of taxable households, provincial complaints and reme-
dies, to the timetable of installments from tax contractors and the
tribute from Egypt. With such guides, paymasters and commanders
could find the names of officials in exile, determine sources of cash
and raw material, and reference important security matters.68
Like a register, the cartographer’s legend guides us on another
tour of West Asia. Keenly aware of logistics, to the extent knowl-
edge and page permit, his commentary is driven by the adminis-
trative space of the Caucasus, Iran, and Central Asia. Like an
architect, he rebuilds the empire itself, beginning with the “inner”
(Kütahya, Karaman, and Sivas) and then the “outer” (the Mediter-
ranean coast and Cyprus) provinces of Anatolia. His geographical
narrative scans the limits of Anatolia on the Euphrates (the province
of Ayintab); then, after a detour through Syria, it returns to the

66
For the classical cadastral system, see Ömer Lûtfi Barkan, “Research on the
Ottoman Fiscal Surveys,” in Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East,” ed.
M. A. Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 163–71; D. A. Howard, “The
Historical Development of the Ottoman Imperial Registry (Defter-i Hakanî): Mid-
Fifteenth to Mid-Seventeenth Centuries,” Archivum Ottomanicum 11 (1988): 213–30;
and H. (nalcık, “Suleiman the Lawgiver and Ottoman Law,” Archivum Ottomanicum
1 (1969): 117–24. Most tahrir were carried out in the sixteenth century and are now
housed in the Ankara’s Tapu Kadastro Kuyûd-ı Kadime Ar{ivi and the Ba{bakanlık
Osmanlı Ar{ivi in Istanbul. For a late European example, Dariusz Kolodziejczyk,
“The Defter-i Mufassal of Kaminiçe from ca. 1681: An example of Late Ottoman
Tahrir, Reliability, Function, Principles of Publication, JOS 13 (1993): 91–98; and
for early-eighteenth-century Tabriz, Zarinebaf-Shahr, “Tabriz under Ottoman Rule,”
115–20.
67
See H. (nalcık, “Osmanlılarda Raiyyet Rüsûmu,” Belleten 23 (1959): 575–600.
68
Feridun M. Emecen, “Sefere Götürülen Defterlerin Defteri,” in Prof. Dr. Bekir
Kütüko[lu’na Arma[an, ed. Mübahat Kütüko[lu (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Basımevi,
1991), 241–68. For a register that fell into enemy hands before Vienna in 1783,
see H. G. Majer, Das osmanische “Registerbuch der Beschwerden” (}ikayet Defteri) wom Jahre
1675: Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Cod. Mixt. 683 (Wien: Verlag der Österreichi-
schen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1984).
54  

Northeast and the province of Erzurum, which he reminds us, was

“formerly part of Ermeniye [Armenia].” From the Caucasus and the
eastern shores of the Black Sea, he completes the tour with a sec-
ondary tier of provinces in the region of the Tigris (Diyarbekir,
Mosul, }ehrizor), Iraq, and Arabia. Given the constraints of space,
the cartographer hardly pauses between his list of twenty-one provinces
and their constituent command units.69
There are times, however, when the need to add critical infor-
mation overcomes economy. Without mentioning the Ottoman state’s
point of origin around the Byzantine cities of Bursa/Brusa and Iznik/
Nicea, the cartographer proceeds directly to the province of Kütahya,
where he provides a fleeting glimpse into the politics of the state’s
early centuries. Reminding his readers that Kütahya enjoys a “spe-
cial position because its annexation to the Ottoman state took place
through divine assistance,” he refers to the prestige of the Germiyan
dynasty from which the city was wrested and the dream that fore-
told the ascent of the Ottomans to world power.70 On a more mun-
dane note, Kütahya’s importance lay in its early incorporation as a
province in the last decade of the fourteenth century, the second
formal unit after Rumeli, the eastern Balkans. An institutional mile-
stone, the introduction of this distinctively Ottoman administrative
structure saw the transformation of a loosely knit alliance between
a frontier lord and tribal armies, bound by oral agreements, honor,
and the spoils of raiding into a hierarchy headed by the provincial
commander, or beglerbe[i, and the subcommander, or sancakbe[i.71
Armed with estimates of agricultural production and the disposition

69
Compare the cartographer’s list of twenty-one provinces with figures and dates
found in Halil (nalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600 (New York:
Praeger Publishers, 1973), 104–18 and Ayn-i Ali Efendi (Tayyib Gökbilgin, ed.,
Kavânin-i Âl-i Osman der Hülâsa-i Mezâmin-i Defter-i Divân [Istanbul: Enderun Kitabevi,
1979].) D’Ohsson, Tableau général, vol. 7, 278–79, speaks of twenty-six “government
generaux” (malikâne-i miri ) and eighteen hundred “ressorts de justices (nahiye)” in the
Middle East.
70
“Eyalet-i Kütahya ibtidaen talu gökse Devlet-i Âliye ebed-i kıyyamdan buna
gelince merâ’at olunan kaide-i mustahsına üzre avn ve inayet-i hak ile feth ve teshiri
müyesser olan memâlik taksim olundukta be[lerbe[li[e . . . bir memleket eyalet itibar
olunup, ol eyalet dahi nice elviye itibar olunageldi[ine binaen, eyalet-i Kütahya on
yedi sancak itibar olunmu{tur.”
71
Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), 8–9, 76–77; compare, Isenbike Togan, Flexibility
and Limitation in Steppe Formations: The Kerait Khanate and Chinggis Khan (Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 1988).
      55

of fields and villages, viziers, commanders, and bureaucrats assigned

taxable units of land (timar) in lieu of salary to the cavalry while
offering a deed of hereditary usufruct to the peasant.
Although the temptation is great for historians to measure the
efficiency and order of Ottoman statecraft by the yardstick of the
classical sancak military hierarchy, changing tactics and technologies
of warfare, especially in the European theater, would soon reduce
the emphasis on cavalry in favor of musket-bearing infantry. An
enduring aspect of rural administration, the timar would change in
function and number while the janissaries, once a special guard,
levied from the Balkans and assigned to the palace, became a stand-
ing army of tens of thousands, domiciled in the capital, in large
cities, and frontier garrisons.72 Beginning in the early seventeenth
century, the full-time infantry was seconded by battalions of merce-
naries (sekban, levend ) and, eventually, large militias (mükemmel kapı)
maintained by provincial governors and viziers.73
With an appreciation of such enormous changes in the structure
of the empire, the cartographer pauses again at Syria. Perhaps, this
is a sign of respect to the former seat of the Umayyad caliphs. It
also provides him the pretext to emphasize the continuities, and not
only the differences, between Sunni dynasties. His contemporaries
would have been well aware of the significance of the conquest of
Damascus, particularly when, within the space of a year, the con-
quest of Mamluk Egypt made the sultan the preeminent Muslim
power of the Mediterranean. The addition of these large, rich provinces
tilted the demography of European and Asian empire toward its
Muslim subjects. It is no coincidence that the flourishing of Hanefite
legal thought and especially the outpouring of fatwa from the pen of
Suleyman the Magnificent’s chief jurist, Ebu Su"ud Efendi, occurred
as the state integrated this Muslim intelligentsia. Syrian and Egyptian
lawyers questioned the status of land designated as eminent domain

72
Hüseyın Efendi Hazarfen (Hezarfen Hüseyın Efendi Telhısü’l Beyan fı Kavanin-i Al-i
Osman, ed. Sevim Ilgürel [Ankara: TTK Basımevi, 2000], 143) distinguishes between
salaried and nonsalaried forces. On the janissaries generally, see (. H. Uzunçar{ılı,
Osmanlı Devleti Te{kilatından Kapıkulu Ocakları. Acemi Oca[ı ve Yeniçeri Oca[ı (Ankara:
TTK Basımevi, 1943); for Cairo, André Raymond, Le Caire des Janissaires: L’apogée
de la ville ottomane sous Abd al-Rahman Katkhuda (Paris: CNRS Editions, 1995).
73
Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 16–42; and H. (nalcık, “Military and Fiscal
Transformation in the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1700,” Archivum Ottomanicum 6 (1980):
283–337.
56  

(miri ) and disputed the onus of taxation.74 With or without the hair-
splitting treatises of the ulema, Ottoman administrators took care to
ease the incorporation of Muslim elites with special inducements,
ranging from high position, the total exemption from bureaucratic
accounts and fiscal surveys (such as the tribal hukumet), and split-rent
agreements (malikane-divani ) to large military estates (zeamet) and long-
term tax-farming leases.75
The cartographer credits Ottoman administration with remaining
faithful to the original territorial divisions of the Syrian lands, trans-
forming such units as the province of Palestine (cund-i Filistin) and
other realms into full-fledged Ottoman eyalet.76 He is not entirely
accurate. Once the dust had settled after early sixteenth-century con-
quests, the addition of an outer tier of provinces (vilâyat-ı saire), stretch-
ing from the eastern Black Sea southward through the Fertile Crescent,
prompted Istanbul to reconsider its overall organization of procure-
ment and recruitment. Provincial boundaries were drawn and redrawn.
The initial land surveys in the provinces of Syria, Kurdistan, east-
ern Anatolia, and Iraq dedicated a greater share of land to crown
lands and viziers’ estates (hass-ı hümayun) than in western Anatolia.77

74
Colin Imber, Ebu"s-su"ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997), 135–37. For the debates, see Baber Johansen, The Islamic Law on Land
Tax and Rent (London: Croom Helm, 1988).
75
Irène Beldiceanu-Steinherr, “Fiscalité et formes de possession de la terre arable
dans l’Anatolie Preottomane,” JESHO 19 (1976): 234–322; I. Beldiceanu-Steinherr,
“Malikâne,” EI 2 4: 227–28; Abdul-Rahim Abu-Husayn, “The Iltizam of Mansur
Faraykh: A Case Study of Iltizam in Sixteenth Century Syria,” in Land Tenure and
Social Transformation in the Middle East, ed. Tarif Khalidi (Beirut: American University
in Beirut Press, 1984), 249–256. For an exhaustive study of one of the provinces
where the Muslim elite went over to the Ottoman side, see M. Mehdi Ilhan, Amid
(Diyarbakır) 1518 Tarihli Defter-I Mufassal (Ankara: TTK Basımevi, 2000).
76
The legend explains that each “cund ” ( jund [in Arabic, a military division or
army]) should be “regarded as a separate realm (memliket)”: “Beyan iklim-i }am.
Bundan akdem }am iklimine mutasarrıf olanlar }am ikliminin muhit oldu[u memâ-
liki be{ kısma taksim edüp, her kısmına cund tesmiye her cundi bir memlekete izafe
etmi{lerdir. Mesala cund-i Filistin, cund-i Ardan, cund-i Dima{k, cund-i Hums, cund-i
Kanasrin gibi. Ve cund dedikleri kurradır. Yani bir kita memâliktir ki med-
den kasabat ve kariye mü{temil ola. Devlet-i Âliye ebed-i kiyyam Osmaniye iklim-i
}am’a mutasarrif oldukta resm-i sabik üzre bir kaç eyalet itibar eylemi{lerdir.) For
the original divisions, see Ruth Kark, “Mamluk and Ottoman Cadastral Surveys
and Early Mapping of Landed Properties in Palestine,” Agricultural History 71 (1997):
46–70.
77
Ömer Lutfi Barkan, “Timar,” (A 12, pt. 1: 288. In comparison to Western
Anatolia, where 26 percent of cultivated lands was set aside for imperial domains
and more than half (56 percent) was held by individual cavalry officers, in Diyarbekir,
      57

Such estates functioned as a pool of discretionary fiscal units (mukataât)

for local treasuries.78 In this outer tier, the timar-cavalry coexisted with
functionaries assigned to imperial estates. In addition to the janis-
saries and urban officials, Istanbul sent special fiscal agents (emin),
awarded contracts to tax farmers (mültezim), and allowed individuals
and entire companies to designate their own stewards and intendants
to collect the revenues assigned for their upkeep and salary.79
Yet there were myriad drawbacks to liquidity. At the turn of the
seventeenth century Istanbul bureaucrats introduced the first uni-
versal, direct taxes, the avârız-ı divaniye and the bedel-i nüzül, which
were levied on both rural and urban households. As a regular cash
flow that bypassed the cavalry, these funds could be utilized within
the region or forwarded, as need arose, to another province or the
imperial treasury.80 However, social upheaval also followed in the
wake of sharp increases in direct taxation. Swollen provincial trea-
suries provided the means for local pretenders to gain power. As
populations fled before demobilized mercenaries, and rebellions, such
as those launched by Fakhr al-Din Ma"n II, amir of Mount Lebanon
(1590–1635), and the Celalis (1595–1609) in Anatolia, the loss of
agricultural labor effectively dissolved many individual timar and
severely eroded the basis of the older system in which protection
services were bartered for peasant rents.

31 percent and in Syria (Aleppo and Damascus combined), 48 percent of lands of

the landed resources were designated as imperial domains and thus were often
administered with some form of revenue contract
78
Douglas Howard’s fine study of the changing timar system, “The Ottoman
Timar System and Its Transformation, 1563–1656,” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University,
1987), establishes the causes for the dissatisfaction of the full-time cavalry. He also
notes the desire of Sultan Murad IV (1623–39) to balance payments in kind with
cash taxation or cash-units, which could be redistributed as “stipends” (ulufe, ocaklık)
and retirement income (arpalık or “fodder money”). Alternately, they could be even-
tually earmarked for expenses or for the salaries of individual officers and battalions.
79
In 1596–97 (MMD 7637:2–4), the largest single component of cash taxes in
the provincial treasury was found under the heading of the “muktaât-ı vilâyet-i
Diyarbekir,” that is, 180,000 kuru{ of a total of 539,000 kuru{. Most of these tax farms
were collected by janissaries. See also Rhoads Murphey, Regional Structure in the
Ottoman Empire: A Sultanic Memorandum of 1636 A.D. Concerning the Sources and Uses of
the Tax-Farm Revenues of Anatolia and the Coastal and Northern Portions of Syria (Wiesbaden:
Otto Harrassowitz, 1987), Introduction.
80
Linda Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and Finance Administration
in the Ottoman Empire, 1560–1650 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 81–119. See also Halil
(nalcık, “Centralization and Decentralization Ottoman Administration,” in Studies in
Eighteenth Century Islamic History, T. Naff and R. Owen (Carbondale: University of
Southern Illinois Press, 1977), 27–52.
58  

As we will see in chapter 3, although the province of Diyarbekir

was particularly hard hit by these rebellions and continuing tribal
depredations along the lower Tigris broader, we must also attribute
changing patterns of administration to secular change in grain cul-
tivation and urbanization. Former tribal areas, benefitted from an
influx of cultivators, as did the districts closest to cities.81 Therefore,
even as the Ottoman state restored order in Syria and eastern
Anatolia, the new tax system allowed for seemingly contradictory
trends. Bureaucratic sleight of hand and changes in appointment
procedures gave the central state the upper hand over the provin-
cial military hierarchy, all the while the central state devolved more
of the quotidian duties of administration and policing to regional
authorities.82
Although these details may not have concerned the mapmaker,
what he does draw attention to is how the Ottoman state resolved
these logistical problems and integrated the myriad changes into its
military and administrative structure. Cash could not resolve all of
the organizational problems caused by such difficult communications
and the resulting costs of forwarding basic supplies, from fodder
to foodstuffs, to the front.83 As Rhoads Murphey’s studies make

81
On peasant flight during and after the Celalis, see Wolf-Dieter Hutteroth and
Kamal Abdulfattah, Historical Geography of Palestine, Transjordan and Southern Syria in
Late 16th Century (Erlangen: Frankische Geographische Ges., 1977); Mustafa Akda[,
“Celali Isyanlarından Büyük Kaçgunluk, 1603–1606,” Tarih Ara{tırmaları Dergisi 2
(1964): 10ff.; and MMD 7637:2 (1596); and William Griswold, Political Unrest and
Rebellion in Anatolia 1000–1020/1591–1611 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1983).
The proportion of ruined (harabe) timar in the tahvil register KK 493, dating from
1694 is particularly high in the urban districts of Amid (22 percent) and Ergani (33
percent).
82
Both (brahim Metin Kunt (The Sultan’s Servants: The Transformation of Ottoman
Provincial Government, 1550 –1650 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983],
68–69) and Rifa"at 'Ali Abou-El-Haj (The 1703 Rebellion and the Structure of Ottoman
Politics [Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut te Istanbul, 1984],
43) note a shift in control over appointments over full-time salaried positions toward
central state elites. Karl Barbir (Ottoman Rule in Damascus, 1708–1758 [Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1980]) observes a parallel process in the province within
the capital city during the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century to
centralize apparatus in the provincial cities under civil and military authority. At
the same time, a great many other duties devolved upon personnel. For an extreme
example of privatization, note the case of poststations and couriers: Colin J. Heywood,
“The Ottoman Menzilhane and Ulak System in Rumeli in the 18th Century,” in
Türkiye’nin Sosyal ve Ekonomik Tarihi (1071–1920), ed. Osman Okyar and Halil Inalcık
(Ankara: Hacetepe Üniversitesi, 1980), 182–84.
83
Lütfi Güçer, XVI–XVII Asırlardan Osmanlı Imparatorlu[unda Hububat Meselesi ve
      59

clear,84 the state relied on a regional division of labor with West

Asia, and in particular a triangular inner bulwark formed by the
agriculturally and industrially rich provinces of Sivas-Tokat, Diyarbekir,
and Aleppo. The pivot of past Iranian campaigns,85 the province of
Diyarbekir remained a major source of grains and a center of tex-
tile manufacturing. It also possessed an important smelting plant for
copper in its capital, Amid, as well as iron and silver mines (in Kigi,
Ergani, and Keban).86
During the Wars of the Iranian Succession, these overlapping forms
of administrative organization moved into high gear. Areas far from
the front sent monies rather than manpower or, as we read in an
order sent to the northern frontier city of Erzurum, which redirected
income earned from commercial taxes for the purchase of beasts of
burden to supply the army.87 The organization of barley, wheat, and
hardtack, to be purchased at nominal rate from peasants or collected
in lieu of taxes, was often directed by Diyarbekir’s voyvoda, an inten-
dant, and in this case, the civil official in charge of revenues from
crown and vizier estates.88

Hububattan Alınan Vergiler (Istanbul: Istanbul Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1964), 29; L.

Güçer, “XVI–XVIII Asırlarda Osmanlı Imparatorlu[u’nun Ticaret Politikası,” 31.
See also Bruce Masters, The Origins of Western Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantalism
and the Islamic Economy in Aleppo, 1600–1750 (New York: New York University Press,
1988), 113.
84
For a logistical analysis of the Asian defense system, see Rhoads Murphey,
“Functioning of the Ottoman Army under Murad IV (1623–1639/1032–1049): Key
to the Understanding of the Relationship between Center and Periphery in the
Seventeenth Century Turkey” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1979). Compare
with the Europe theater of war: Caroline B. Finkel, “The Provisioning of the
Ottoman Army during the Campaigns of 1593–1606,” in Habsburgisch-osmanische
Beziehungen/Relations Habsbourg-Ottomanes, ed. Andreas Tietze (Vienna: Verlag des
Verband der wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften Österreichs), 107–24.
85
Diyarbekir lay at mid-point between Basra and Istanbul; it was separated from
the other two important logistiscal cities by approximately ten days’ travel. Vital
Cuinet, (La Turquie d’Asie: Géographie Administrative Statistique Déscriptive et Raisonnée de
Chaque Province de l’Asie-Mineure [Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1890–1894], vol. 1, 451), esti-
mates the distance between Diyarbekir and Tokat at 377 kilometers (or Sivas, 302)
and between Diyarbekir and Aleppo at 312 kilometers.
86
Fahrettin Tizlak, “Osmanli Devleti’nde Ham Bakır (sleme Merkezleri Olarak
Tokat ve Diyarbakir,” Belleten 59 (1995): 643–59. Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 98–101.
87
In 1736, the state ordered (D.MKF 1771) that 2,900 kuru{ from customs income
be used to purchase pack animals for the front. For the impact on the city of
Ayıntab, see Cemil Cahit Güzelbey and Hulusî Yetkin, eds., Gaziantep {eri’i Mahkeme
Sicillerinden Örnekler (Cilt 81–141, Miladi 1729–1820) (Gaziantep: Yeni Matbaa, 1970),
34–35; on Damascus, Barbir, Ottoman Rule in Damascus, 36.
88
In 1701, Diyarbekir’s voyvoda provided 15,000 Istanbul kile of wheat for
60  

So too, the accordionlike layers of the Ottoman military expanded

as early offensive campaigns of the 1720s turned to defensive strate-
gies in the 1730s and 1740s. The third arm of the Yerevan cam-
paign of 1724–25, for example, assembled some 60,000 troops in
Georgia under the command of vizier Hasan Pasha. They included
regular cavalry from the provinces of Diyarbekir, Kars, Sivas, Mara{,
Hüdevendigar, and Karahisar-i }arki, as well as from the districts of
Aksaray and Bayezid. They were followed by 27,000 janissaries, 1,000
specially-trained infantry, 2,500 technical personnel trained in can-
non and other ordinance, and militias commanded by the governors
of Anatolia and Kars.89 When Nadir Shah’s armies turned the tables
on the sultan (between 1730 and 1734, and again between 1741 and
1745), threatening Ottoman Iraq and Kurdistan, the Ottoman mil-
itary activated its reserves: mercenary battalions and local condot-
tieri.90 The defense of the city of Mosul was undertaken by its
governor, Abdülcelil-zâde Hüseyin Pasha, a prominent member of
the local gentry, who summoned Kurdish tribal armies from the
hükümet (which, according to the mapmaker, may have been those
in E[il, Palu, Cizre, Hazzo, and Genc) in addition to regular cav-
alry from Diyarbekir, Mosul, and }ehrizor.91

Movements of People, Commodities, and Capital

These territorial conflicts with Iran cannot be separated from an

ongoing struggle to control and tax the movement of people and

Daltaban Mustafa Pasha to put down a revolt in Baghdad. (I thank Dina Khoury
for bringing MMD 3134:126 to my attention). For one of many examples during
the era of Nadir Shah, see MMD 10,168:252 (grain at the rate of, 30 sa[ akçe per
kile or 22,112.5 kuru{ in 1725–26); and Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanlı (mparatorlu[unda
unda {ehirçilik ve Ula{ım Üzerine Ara{tırmalar ((zmir: Ege Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi
Yayınları, 1984), 130; and according to Stephen H. Longrigg (Four Centuries of Modern
Iraq [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925], 144), in July 1741, a single order to
restock the Baghdad fortress stipulated 36,150 Istanbul kile of wheat and 150,000
Istanbul kile of barley. See also Robert W. Olson, The Siege of Mosul and Ottoman-
Persian Relations, 1718–43 (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 1975).
89
Aktepe, 1720–1724 Osmanlı-Iran Münasebetleri, 18–20, 33–34.
90
For the life and times of Nadir Shah, see Ernest S. Tucker, “Religion and
Politics in the Era of Nâdir Shâh: The View of Six Contemporary Sources,” (Ph.D.
diss., University of Chicago, 1992).
91
Münir Aktepe, ed., }em"dâni-zâde Fındıklı Süleyman Efendi Tarihi Mur"i"t-Tevarih
(Istanbul: Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayınları, 1978) vol. 1A, 113–14.
      61

goods across West Asia. Of the highways for commerce and pil-
grimage etched on the map, in 1722 the Ghalzai horsemen took the
one traversing the belly of southwest Asia. From their native Kandahar
they headed toward Khorasan, where they encountered another
Safavid vassal, the Abdali; from there they rode through Kirman
toward Isfahan, the Safavid capital and chief trading entrepot.92
The Ottomans, too, in response to the Russian occupation of the
silk-producing regions of the Caspian, launched their first and sec-
ond offensives through the heart of the East-West trading network.
The second front targeted the northern part of the silk route, which
ran from Tabriz, Iran’s second-most-important trading center, toward
Anatolia and Syria. Nadir Shah was more audacious still. After test-
ing Ottoman defenses in Iraq, he launched a full-scale assault on
the West Asian trading system. In 1738–39 he marched on Delhi;
the new Iranian monarch and his Afghan ally and looted the impe-
rial treasury of the Mughals. Upon his return in 1741, he targeted
the coffee-rich state of Oman.
Unabashedly material motives did not, however, necessarily obtain
the desired results. The war derailed older trading linkages rather
than securing new ones, often driving away merchants and sending
shock waves through commodity markets as far west as Aleppo.93
Chaos within Iran forced merchants to change their routing while
ships avoided the Safavid ports in the Gulf. Conflict choked the
lucrative Iranian silk trade through the Ottoman Empire. Indeed,
Ne{e Erim’s study of the customs post at Erzurum demonstrates how
quickly this conflict extinguished the trans-Anatolian silk trade, which
once accounted for approximately 2 percent of imperial revenues
and furnished an estimated two thousand bales of Caspian silk yearly
for domestic and international markets.94 Mediterranean consumers
soon found alternatives to Iranian goods in Bursa, Syria, Bengal, and

92
The route, including the number of hours between Baghdad and North India,
may be found in an undated but, plausibly eighteenth-century manuscript, Suleymaniye
Library, Esad Efendi MS. 2362 pt. 8, folios 157r–159v.
93
Katsumi Fukasawa, Toilerie et commerce du Levant au XVIII e siècle d’Alep à Marseille
(Marseille: Groupe de Recherche et d’Ètudes sur le Proche Orient Centre Regional
de Publication de Marseille, 1985), 22–24.
94
Ne{e Erim, “Onsekizinci Yüzyılda Erzurum Gümrü[ü.” (Ph.D. diss., Istanbul
University, 1984), 13–14. Generally on this trade, see Rudolph P. Matthee, The
Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600 –1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999).
62  

China.95 Only the czar translated annexation into commercial advan-

tage. As the cartographer’s rendering of ships on the Caspian sug-
gest, Russian merchants diverted Iranian silk production northward
through their entrepôts at Astrakhan.96
If the merchants of the middle routes, particularly those inter-
secting with Safavid cities and their chief port of Bandar 'Abbas, felt
the negative impact of war for many decades, commerce in other
Ottoman cities and ports soon revived and even prospered from their
neighbors’ misfortunes. Pilgrims continued to bring a steady stream
of merchandise both small and large through Damascus. Although
the sub-Saharan gold trade between Takfur to Egypt was already in
decline, ships on the Red Sea and caravans along the Nile carried
coffee and Indian goods as well as Chinese export porcelain.97
Commerce on the Black Sea, which remained an Ottoman lake until
1774, expanded rapidly after the Treaty of Belgrade (1739). Ottoman
captains transported Russian traders who were bringing furs and iron
and exchanged these goods in Syria and Istanbul for Indian cloth
and Arabian coffee.98 Izmir’s entrepreneurs shipped Ankara mohair,
Anatolia cotton twist, and a range of raw agricultural products.99
Throughout the eighteenth century, the Ottoman Mediterranean
ports of Salonika, Izmir, and Alexandria maintained a favorable bal-
ance of trade with their European partners.100

95
E. Hertzig, “The Iranian Raw Silk Trade and European Manufacture in the
XVIIth and XVIIIth Century,” Journal of European Economic History 12 (1990): 73–91;
Masters, The Origins of Western Dominance in the Middle East, 196.
96
See Stephen Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600–1700 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).
97
There is an enormous literature on the subject, beginning with André Raymond,
Les commerçants au Caire au XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Damas: Institut Français de Damas,
1973–74). For some interesting, recent additions, see Cheryl Ward, “The Sadana
Island Shipwreck,” in An Historical Archaeology of the Ottoman Empire: Breaking New
Ground, ed. Uzi Baram and Lynda Carroll (New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London,
Moscow: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2000), 185–202; and Colette Establet
and Jean-Paul Pascual, Ultime voyage pour la Mecque: Les inventaires apres dèces de pélerins
morts a Damas vers 1700 (Damas: Institut français d’études arabes de Damas, 1998).
98
(dris Bostan, “Rusya"nin Karadeniz"de Ticaret Ba{laması ve Osmanlı (mpara-
torlu[u (1700–1787),” Belleten 59 (1995): 362.
99
Daniel Goffman, Izmir and the Levantine World, 1550–1650 (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1990), 10–11, 36–38, 69–70. For later developments, see
Necmi Ülker, “The Rise of Izmir, 1688–1740” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan,
1974); Daniel Panzac, “International and Domestic Maritime Trade in the Ottoman
Empire during the 18th Century,” IJMES 24 (1992): 189–206.
100
On Bursa, see Halil (nalcık, “Bursa and the Commerce of the Levant,” JESHO
      63

In addition to the pilgrims’ destination in the Hijaz, the cartog-

rapher defers to the commanding presence of Istanbul, one of the
Mediterranean’s largest cities over the long-distance commercial sys-
tem. Its population, rich and poor, consumed imported manufac-
tures, raw materials, and foods in enormous quantities. In fact, the
city imported four times more than it exported.101 Istanbul’s unbri-
dled consumption spurred the growth of the local industries, includ-
ing the textile manufacturing of Bursa, as well as spurring the
development of the Aegean port of Izmir. Although Istanbul’s growth
after the sixteenth century dwarfed that of towns in western Anatolia,
long-distance trade percolated through the region on its way to the
Bosphorus.102 Cities and towns exchanged ready-made cloaks, belts,
embroidered pillow cases, and shawls. They depended on a steady
supply of local raw and semifinished materials, such as dye stuffs,
henna, and soap, as well as locally prized items, such as the squir-
rel pelts that a merchant from Erzurum transported in addition to
his fine cotton and raw wool.103 In the eighteenth century, a boom-
ing trade in cotton twist and textile manufactures from Aleppo to
Mosul found foreign markets.104 To keep roadways open and safe
throughout Anatolia, unemployed mercenaries on contract functioned
as guardians (derbentçi) while peasants were obligated to repair bridges
and caravansaries.105

3 (1960): 131–47. Haim Gerber, Economy and Society in an Ottoman City: Bursa,
1600 –1700 ( Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, 1988). On Syria and Iraq, see
Amnon Cohen, Economic Life in Ottoman Jerusalem (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989); André Raymond, “The Ottoman Conquest and the Development of
the Great Arab Towns,” IJTS 1 (1979–1980): 84–101; and Antoine Abdel Nour,
Introduction à l’Historie Urbaine de la Syrie Ottomane, (Beirut: Publications de l’Université
Libanaise, 1982), 174.
101
Panzac, “International and Domestic Maritime Trade,” 193.
102
Leila T. Erder and Suraiya Faroqhi (“The Development of the Anatolian
Urban Network During the Sixteenth Century,” JESHO 23 [1980]: 284) speak of
great development. For a detailed study, see Usha M. Luther, Historical Route Network
of Anatolia (Istanbul-Izmir-Konya) 1550’s to 1850’s: A Methodological Study (Ankara: TTK
Basımevi, 1989); see also Suraiya Faroqhi, Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia:
Trade, Crafts, and Food Production in an Urban Setting, 1520–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984).
103
EA II:201.
104
Fukasawa, Toilerie et commerce du Levant, 21–27. During the period of recovery,
cotton cloth represented 9.4 percent of cargo shipped from the Levant to France.
105
Orhonlu, Osmanlı Imparatorlu[u"nda Derbend Te{kilâtı, 60–63; and Orhonlu, Osmanlı
(mparatorlu[unda {ehirçilik, 13–16, 48, 71–73, 78–79.
64  

The efflorescence of urban consumerism and manufacture within

the eighteenth-century empire has long been the focus of Mehmet
Genç’s research. Without his empirical studies and pathbreaking inter-
pretation of Ottoman economic policy, it would be impossible to
appreciate the dynamism of, or the peculiar constraints on, the
Ottoman market during this period.106 Both external and internal
commerce were regulated by the Ottoman tariff system (gümrük). More
than a means to skim off revenues from transit trade, the tariff sys-
tem was designed to channel goods and merchants in directions dic-
tated by state priorities. In theory, commercial taxation favored the
subjects of the empire, with Muslims paying lower rates than either
Ottoman Christians and Jews or foreign merchants. Far from dis-
couraging trade or sealing the empire off from foreign capital, the
terms of treaty (ahîdname) afforded many European merchants and
tax-immune Ottoman traders (officers, officials, and patent holders
[beratlı]) special privileges and opportunities.107 Indeed, state income
from commercial taxation and industrial production grew apace
between 1730 and 1768.108 The growing demand from internal cities,
despite the devastating epidemics of 1729, 1756–58, and 1772–74,

106
For the complete works in Turkish, see Mehmet Genç, Osmanlı (mparatorlu[unda:
Devlet ve Ekonomi (Istanbul: Ötüken, 2000).
107
(nalcık, “Imtiyâzât,” 1180–85; Masters, The Origins of Western Dominance, 194–95;
Genç, “Osmanlı Imparatorlu[unda Devlet ve Ekonomi,” in V. Milletlerarası Türkiye
Sosyal ve (ktisat Tarihi Kongresi, ed. Hakkı Dursun Yıldız, (nci Enginün, and Emine
Gürsoy Naskalı (Ankara: TTK Basımevi, 1990), 13–25; Zeki Arıkan, “Osmanlı
(mparatorlu[unda (hracı Yasak Mallar,” in Prof. Dr. Bekir Kütüko[lu Arma[an, ed.
Mübahat S. Kütüko[lu (Istanbul: Istanbul Edebiyat Fakültesi Basımevi, 1991),
279–306; Rhoads Murphey, “Conditions of Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean:
An Appraisal of Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Documents from Aleppo,” JESHO
33 (1990): 35–50.
108
Mehmet Genç,”Osmanlı (ktisadî Dünya Görü{ünün (lkeleri,” Sosyoloji Dergisi
Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi, 3rd ser. 1 (1989): 176–85; idem, “Osmanlı Dev-
leti’nde (ç Gümrük Rejimi,” in Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Türkiye Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul:
(leti{im Yayınları, 1985) 3:786–89; idem, “Osmanlı Ekonomisi ve }ava{,” Yapıt 49
(1984): 52–61, 86–93; see also Lütfi Güçer, “XVI–XVIII Asırlarda Osmanlı
Imparatorlu[u’nun Ticaret Politikası,” Türk Iktisat Tarihi Yıllı[ı, no. 1 (Istanbul:
Istanbul Üniversitesi (ktisat Fakültesi Türk (ktisat ve (ctimaiyat Tarihi Ara{tırmaları
Merkezi, 1987), 1–55; and Roger Owen, The Middle East in the World Economy,
1800 –1914 (London: Methuen, 1981), 1–23. On “private control” of the Istanbul
customs, see Sarı Mehmed Pasha, Ottoman Statecraft: The Book of Counsel for Vezirs and
Governors of Sarı Mehmed Pa“a (Nasa'ih ul-vuzera ve’l-umera), ed. and trans. W. L. Wright
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1935), 107. For the income in the first half
of the eighteenth century from the Istanbul gümrük, see Ahmet Tabako[lu, Gerileme
Dönemine Osmanlı Maliyesi (Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 1986), 95, 232, 237, 269, 274.
      65

also contributed to the rise of imported consumer goods, like coffee

and tobacco.109 Appreciating these multilateral linkages, in the early
eighteenth century, the state placed new customs posts in secondary
cities like Urfa, in addition to long-standing tariff stations at ports
and transit cities like Tokat, Erzurum, Trabzon, Aleppo, Damascus,
Baghdad, and Diyarbekir.110
Although Western European woolens and watches made inroads
into middle-class homes in the empire, the Indian subcontinent would
remain the empire’s single largest source of imported manufactures
and raw materials.111 Even Istanbul, the empire’s most avid con-
sumer of things European, imported twice as many goods from the
Indian Ocean as it did from France, its leading Western trade part-
ner. Taking into account the domestic market overall and re-exports
to Central and Eastern Europe, statistical data for Istanbul’s com-
modity consumption must be considered as only the tip of an enor-
mous iceberg of the Indian Ocean traffic in textiles, coffee, dyes,
and spices in the empire.112

109
On the trail of epidemics that accompanied expanded trade linkages, see
Daniel Panzac, La peste dans l’empire ottoman: 1700 –1850 (Leuven: Peeters, 1985),
105–33. Between 1717 and 1788, the tax-farm on the transit gümrük station in Tokat
(mukataa-yı amediye) rose tenfold in nominal terms from 6.6 million akçe to 60 mil-
lion akçe, according to Mehmet Genç, “A Study on the Feasibility of Using Eighteenth-
Century Ottoman Financial Records as an Indicator of Economic Activity,” in The
Ottoman Empire in the World Economy, ed. Huri (slamo[lu-(nan (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), 363.
110
Mehmet Genç, “Osmanlı Devleti’nde (ç Gümrük Rejimi,” in Tanzimat’tan
Cumhuriyet’e Türkiye Ansiklopedisi, vol. 3, 786–89; Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken,
84–85.
111
On the American coffee trade, see Edhem Eldem, French Trade in Istanbul in
the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999), 75–76. For one perspective on elite
consumption, see Fatma Müge Göcek, Rise of the Bourgeoisie; Demise of Empire: Ottoman
Westernization and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
112
Panzac, “International and Domestic Maritime Trade,” 191; Halil (nalcık,
“Osmanlı Pamuklu Pazarı, Hindistan ve Ingiltere, Pazar Rekabetinde Emek Maliyetinin
Rolü,” Orta Do[u Teknik Üniversitesi Geli{me Dergisi Özel Sayısı (1979–80): 1–66. Some
sense of the scale of the interstate transit trade may be gauged from the dispute
between the Austrian Paolo and the merchant Abdul Rahman over 13,500 kuru{ in
cash and coffee in 1763–64 (DA III:44); as for the scale of domestic commerce,
see the complaint brought by an Ottoman Jewish merchant to the Diyarbekir judge,
Seyyid Halil, in 1748–49 concerning a robbery in Cizre, involving coffee, nutmeg,
cloves, as well as Baghdadi and Indian cloth (DA I:150). For estimates of the early
nineteenth century, see E. Wirth, “Aleppo im 19. Jahrhundert—ein Beispiel für
Stabilität und Dynamik spätosmanischer Wirtschaft,” Osmanistische Studien zur Wirtschafts-
und Sozialgeschichte. Im memoriam Van o Bo“kov, ed. Hans Georg Majer (Wiesbaden:
Otto Harrassowitz, 1986), 187–206.
66  

Much of this trade was funneled through the Ottoman port of

Basra, the greatest beneficiary of the decline of Bandar 'Abbas after
1722.113 Monsoon winds carried ships bearing textiles, dyes, sugars,
cotton twist, spices, musk, and lac from Bengal, the Coromandel
coast, and Gujarat in addition to the commerce in slaves, ivory, and,
above all, coffee, from Musqat, Oman, and Mukha.114 Smaller car-
avans picking up their goods after the “long monsoon” took mer-
chants and their wares in spring via Baghdad and Diyarbekir to the
Ottoman capital.115 Others took the the meandering Euphrates high-
way toward Aleppo. But the shortest route to the Mediterranean
from the Indian Ocean cut directly across the Syrian desert. Departures
along the desert route were the least frequent because security
demanded larger convoys—comprising between 1,500 and 4,000
camels (each bearing more than 200 kilograms of goods). Caravans
traveled through Syria at the pace of 25–30 kilometers a day.116
Ottoman administrators had spared no expense in realizing their
aim of reintegrating Basra into the empire at the turn of the cen-
tury.117 They took into consideration the perspective of merchants,
who carefully calculated their options and profits on the basis of the
fluctuating price of pack animals, tolls, and the seasonal risks to per-
son and property in overland transport.118 To lure the merchants
toward the more highly taxed but better patrolled highways linking
Basra to Istanbul and Aleppo, they improved facilities and security.

113
Zarinebaf-Shahr, “Tabriz under Ottoman Rule,” 165. Thabit A. J. Abdullah,
Merchants, Mamluks, and Murder: The Political Economy of Trade in Eighteenth-Century Basra
(Albany, State University of New York Press, 2001), 49.
114
D.B}M 694. The textiles entering Baghdad in 1692, included both Iraqi and
Indian goods. Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks, 58.
115
On the Diyarbekir route, the peak season for traffic to and from the Gulf
was autumn (August, September, and October) in the early nineteenth century. KK
5594 (1823–24).
116
Masters, Origins of Western Dominance, 113. Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks, 78.
On the routes through Syria, Abdel Nour, “Le Réseau Routier de la Syrie Ottomane
(XVIe–XVIIIe siècle),” Arabica 30 (1983): 174.
117
For highlights of the reintegration of Basra into the empire between 1695 and
1701, see Özcan, Anonim Osmanlı Tarihi, 106, 141–59.
118
From Baghdad, the route proceeded toward Kerkuk (8 days), Mosul (4 days),
Mardin (8 days), Urfa (7 days), and Aleppo (5 days), totaling 33 days in the 1750s.
Bartholomew Plaisted, The Desert Route to India Being the Journals of Four Travellers by
the Great Desert Caravan Route between Aleppo and Basra, 1745–51. Narrative of a Journey
from Basra to Aleppo in 1750 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1929), 102–3. See also Ne{e
Erim, “Trade, Traders, and the State in Eighteenth-Century Erzurum,” New Perspectives
on Turkey 5 (1991): 123–50.
      67

To oversee operations at the lower confluence of the two rivers, the

}at"ül-Arab, the state created a new office, the “confluence captain”
( {at kaptanı). Istanbul transferred experienced personnel from the
Danube to supervise dredging and other engineering operations in
the lower end of the Euphrates River near Dir, Ana, and Hit. State
largesse flowed toward the construction of harbors and ports and
paid for skilled craftsmen to construct new dual-purpose trade and
military ships on the upper branch of the Eurphrates.119 Had such
efforts continued, they might have improved intra-imperial transport
within Asia.
As for protection, the regional and central-state administrations
responded to merchant complaints and pledged to pacify the main
axes linking Istanbul and Aleppo and the Persian Gulf. In addition
to tracking down notorious bandits, between 1690 and 1740, provin-
cial commanders launched repeated campaigns to remove the Turkish,
Kurdish, and Arab tribes who raided transport in Kurdistan, Syria,
and Iraq and to forcibly resettle them in the western provinces of
Rakka and Adana, far from the trade routes. Yet the burgeoning
wealth in transit invited new interlopers. During the middle years of
the eighteenth century, only strong local regimes could effectively
contain the Kurdish lords of Cizre or the Milan tribe of the upper
Tigris, the Arab Shammar, and 'Anaza of the Middle Euphrates,
and the Ka'b and Khaza'il at the southern end of the trade routes,
much less counter the large and powerful confederate of the Muntafiq
of Khuzistan.120
The ebb and flow of the central-state’s territorial control along
these commercial corridors prevented Istanbul from restraining the
political latitude of action of the provincial regimes of Baghdad and
Mosul. However, even without force of arms, Istanbul exerted a new

119
New ships and barges capable of carrying seventy persons and their cargo
were built at the dockyards of Payas near Ayıntab and at Birecik. Orhonlu, Osmanlı
(mparatorlu[unda }ehircilik ve Ulasım, 128–33. Güzelbey and Yetkin, Gaziantep {eri’i
Mahkeme Sicilleri, 5, 12–13, 94. In 1733, officials at Payas (Ayıntab’s port) were
ordered to build 123 new boats, each at a cost of 297 kuru{ 33 para. The rowers
and dümenci were to be paid 98 kuru{ per year.
120
Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks, 50–60. Masters, The Origins of Western Dominance,
118; Longrigg, Four Centuries of Modern Iraq, 79. Yusuf Halaço[lu, XVIII. Yüzyılda
Osmanlı (mparatorlu[u’nun (skan Siyaseti ve A{iretlerin Yerle{tirilmesi (Ankara: TTK Basımevi,
1991), 46–62, 78–80, 113. Cevdet Türkay, Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi Belgeleri’ne göre Osmanlı
(mparatorlu[u’nda Oymak, A{iret ve Cemaâtlar ((stanbul: Tercüman, 1979), 809.
68  

form of hegemony over much of its Asian and at least part of its
North African empire for most of the eighteenth century. The
Ottomans, in contrast to the Safavid shahs, possessed both an organ-
izational structure tempered by time and the indigenous sources of
silver needed to retrofit this structure.121 These relatively favorable
circumstances cushioned the state against the Mediterranean-wide
financial crises after 1695 and the sea change in the global mone-
tary system at the end of the New World silver boom.122 The con-
traction of precious metal stocks resulting from the technological
impasse in South and Central American mining overcame the Old
World’s reluctance to mine domestically.123 The Ottomans, as did
their neighbors in Central and Eastern Europe, began to rework
older mines in the Balkans and staked new claims in Anatolia, at
Gümü{hane, Keban, Ergani, and Espiye.124
Ottoman reserves never approached those of Russian Siberia, but
they did provide self-sufficiency.125 After a century of currency manip-
ulation, chipped and debased coinage, domestic supply finally sufficed
for the imperial mints: of some twenty-five to forty metric tons of
metal mined between the 1730s and 1760s, 80 percent was turned
into coins. Even as the grand vizier rallied the troops for war in
western Iran, he was completing the final phases of an overhaul of
coinage. The new standards for Ottoman specie emulated the most
stable currencies of oceanic commerce. Thus the new silver kuru{

121
See Willem Floor and Patrick Clawson, “Safavid Iran’s Search for Silver and
Gold,” IJMES 32 (2000): 345–68. Consider too, the global impact of the changes
in funding state debt: Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital
Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 46. Jack
Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991); for the critique, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Precious Metal
Flows and Prices in Western and Southern Asia, 1500–1750: Some Comparative
and Conjunctural Aspects,” Studies in History 7 (1991): 79–105.
122
Halil Sahillio[lu (“The Role of International Monetary and Metal Movements
in Ottoman Monetary History, 1300–1700,” in Precious Metals in the Later Medieval
and Early Modern Worlds, ed. J. F. Richards [Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic
Press, 1983], 269–304, 288–89) notes that Ottoman mines between 1640 and 1687
were inactive because of the abundance of silver arriving from the Americas. On
early modern monetary history, see also }evket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the
Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and generally, Pierre
Vilar, A History of Gold and Money, 1450–1920 (London: Verso, 1984).
123
Ian Blanchard, Russia’s ‘Age of Silver’: Precious-Metal Production and Economic Growth
in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routlege, 1989), 169–70.
124
Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire, 161–63.
125
Sahillio[lu, “International Monetary and Metal Movements,” 286–90.
      69

(from the German word groschen, also known as piaster) was mod-
eled on the Dutch thaler and fixed at the rate of 120 akçe. The
Venetian ducat served as the measure for a new series of gold coins.126
Despite opportunistic intervention in monetary markets, particularly
to boost receipts into the treasury, Ottoman administrators gener-
ally let the value of gold fluctuate in the market.127 The result of
this monetary policy was positive: a long period of stability for the
Ottoman monetary system and the kuru{, the principal unit of gov-
ernment accounting and market transactions.
Although one might interpret these reforms as evidence of an
increased conformity or even incorporation into the European mar-
ket, Ottoman policy continued to defy the conventional wisdom of
mercantilism.128 There were advocates of controlling imports, and
voices among the Ottoman elite who saw danger in the imbalance
in trade relationships with India, to be sure.129 However, the idea of
restricting imports or dissolving the institutions for procurement of
basic urban and military supplies remained anathema to the empire’s
administrative ideology: “provisionism,” as Mehmet Genç defines it,
prioritized urban consumption in the empire’s major administrative
cities. To assure levels of comfort for the elite as well as to promote
social peace among Istanbul’s working classes and the poor, it was
necessary to maintain a steady supply of goods and raw materials
from luxuries to food staples, regardless of cost or source.130
Although provisionism may well have affected the ability of domestic
manufacturers to compete with certain types of goods, particularly

126
Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire, 161–66. Sahillo[lu, “The Role
of International Monetary and Metal Movements,” 289.
127
Eldem, French Trade in Istanbul, 113–19, 199.
128
For the debate, see Halil (nalcık, “The Ottoman Economic Mind and Aspects
of the Ottoman Economy,” in Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East, ed.
M. A. Cook (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 207–18, and Fernand Braudel,
“L’Empire Turc est-il une économie-monde?” in Mémorial Ömer Lûtfi Barkan (Istanbul:
Bibliothèque de l’Institut Français d’Études Anatoliennes d’Istanbul, 1980); compare
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Of Imârat and Tijârat: Asian Merchants and State in the
Western Indian Ocean, 1400 to 1750,” 37 (1995): 776. M. N. Pearson, Before
Colonialism: Theories on Asian-European Relations, 1500–1750 (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1988); K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilization of the Indian
Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990).
129
Naima was particularly concerned about trade imbalance with India. Lewis
V. Thomas, A Study of Naima, ed. Norman Izkowitz (New York: New York University
Press, 1972), 144–45.
130
Genç, Osmanlı (mparatorlu[unda: Devlet ve Ekonomi, 68–86.
70  

the flood of cotton stuffs from India, as a theory of commerce, even

mercantilism bore increasingly little relevance to real trade practices,
interstate flows of bullion, and credit systems. Despite the growing
clout of London, Amsterdam, and Marseilles in the Mediterranean
and beyond, credit systems remained highly decentralized.131 Few
states could claim true monetary sovereignty; even Britain resigned
itself to the use of Spanish coin within its North American colonies.132
The Ottoman state, at the juncture of different market and mone-
tary systems, faced even greater difficulties. With or without Istanbul’s
massive trade deficit, as long as silver had a greater purchasing power
in India and China (and even in eastern Europe) than it did within
the Mediterranean—the ratio between gold and silver in Istanbul
was roughly equivalent to that in western European states133—it would
be impossible to prevent the escape of specie through its eastern
land frontiers, the Black Sea, or the Persian Gulf.134
In constructing a financial sphere of influence, Ottoman solutions
were ingenious and enduring. Currency reform entailed not only
minting coins with a high degree of metallic purity but also sharply
reducing the number of mints operating in the empire. Although
provincial cities continued to produce small coppers, the large silver
and gold coins that serviced major transactions were minted only in
Istanbul, Cairo, and for a time, it seems, Tabriz.135 Using the prin-
ciple of arbitrage to ensure the capital city’s preeminence in specie,
orders to Cairo set a standard for the silver content of coin that was
slightly inferior to that employed in Istanbul.136 Gradually, the Istanbul

131
On the bullionist tendencies, see Om Prakash, “Bullion for Goods: International
Trade and the Economy of Early 18th Century Bengal,” Indian Economic and Social
History Review 13 (1976): 159–87. On the copper coinage used in Europe and Eurasia
during the 1680s, Vilar, History of Gold and Money, 219–21; Neal, The Rise of Financial
Capitalism, 11–17; Sahillo[lu, “The Role of International Monetary and Metal
Movements,” 288; and Frank Perlin, Unbroken Landscape: Commodity, Category, Sign and
Identity: Their Production as Knowledge from 1500 (Aldershot: Variorum and Brookfield,
V.T.: Ashgate Publishing, 1994), 129.
132
Edwin J. Perkins, American Public Finance and Financial Services, 1700 –1785
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press), 13–28.
133
Eldem, French Trade in Istanbul, 117–18. The ratio in the Istanbul market aver-
aged 14:1, fluctuating between a high of 15:1 and a low of 12.5:1.
134
Ahmet Refik, Hicri On (kinci Asırda Istanbul Hayatı (1100–1200) (Istanbul: Devlet
Matbaasi, 1930), 39, 62–63.
135
Zarinebaf-Shahr, “Tabriz under Ottoman Rule,” 203.
136
Sahillio[lu, “The Role of International Monetary and Metal Movements,”
279. Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire, 180–89.
      71

kuru{ edged out rival currencies, both foreign and domestic, in the
cities of Syria, as well as in the Balkans, Anatolia, and parts of
Kurdistan and Iraq, though the Gulf managed to elude its financial
hegemony (as it did Britain’s).137
Yet it should be remembered too that a successful monetary hege-
mony complemented the fiscal system of empire, which was increas-
ingly dependent on private contracts for tax collection and cash
advances on high office, as we will read in the next chapter. Thus
the flow of silver linking Istanbul to an export entrepôt like Izmir,
constituted only part of a circuit of payments, in both bullion and
paper, that united the imperial center with its peripheries and, over
the course of the century, the empire as a whole to the global
financial hubs of Marseilles, Amsterdam, and London.138

Eurasia in Transition

The Ottoman courtiers who studied this map might have regarded
West Asia as slate upon which they could still redraw the lines of
empire. Three centuries later this map—witness to a past political
economy of space and the practices of sovereignty—invites us to con-
sider not only actual outcomes but also a counterfactual one: What
if the partition of Iran between the Ottoman Empire and Czarist
Russia had become permanent? Although the sultan and his advi-
sors might not have dreamt of reconstituting Alexander’s empire,
Azarbayjan was well on its way to becoming an Ottoman province.
Bureaucrats had carried out exhaustive cadastral surveys. Timars and
later, tax farms were distributed to Ottomans and local residents.
The third mint of the new monetary system was established in Tabriz
in 1725.139 If Iran’s division might have brought the czar one step

137
Basra was clearly a credit and monetary frontier, well integrated into the Indian
Ocean system (Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks, 90). }evket Pamuk (“The Recovery of
the Ottoman Monetary System in the Eighteenth Century,” in Kemal Karpat, The
Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000], 188–211) confirms the
strong linkages forged by this currency policy, especially within the Black Sea,
Eastern Mediterranean, and Balkans. However, as we shall see in the following
chapter, this is only part of a complex financial system, circulating paper (titles and
letters of exchange), tax, tribute, and remittances (endowments) in addition to coinage.
138
Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire, 188–90.
139
Zarinebaf-Shahr, “Tabriz under Ottoman Rule,” 115–20.
72  

closer to realizing a coveted southern port on the Indian Ocean, it

would have also allowed the Ottomans to achieve more immediate
goals. Istanbul could have shored up its position in the Black Sea
from the Caucasus, by relying on the Georgian principalities, rather
than on the erratic aid of the khans of the Crimea. Indeed, in 1774
at Küçük Kaynarca, while the Russians retreated from Moldavia,
Wallachia, Bucak, and Georgia, the Ghiray khan finally secured the
desired degree of autonomy. Or so he thought, because the treaty
was but a preliminary to the total annexation of the Crimea by the
czarina in 1783.
Yet Iran’s repeated resurrection precluded a Russo-Ottoman ter-
ritorial pact. Against all predictions, the old Safavid confederates—
the Afshars (1736–47), then the Zands (1750–79), and finally, the
Qajars (1779 –1924)—rallied and restored much of the Iranian
empire.140 Nadir Shah’s military adventures were felt across the
larger Indian Ocean system. The attack on Delhi in 1741 netted
him and his ally, the future Ahmad Shah Durrani of Afghanistan,
tremendous wealth but evisserated the financial center of the dis-
tended Mughal state. This blow crippled Delhi’s ability to defend its
frontiers or aid its commanders in the eastern province of Bengal.
After the East India Company’s victory at Plassey in 1757141 and
with the rival Dutch colony at Kharq Island and French estab-
lishments along the Indian coastline disbanded, the British fleet
dominated the sea. Carrying on where Nadir Shah’s “hit-and-run”
imperialism left off, British shippers took over not only long distance
transport but also the carriage or “country trade” in the western
Indian Ocean and Gulf. From bases in Bengal and Surat, its mer-
chant capitalism reached deeply into the internal market, infiltrating
distribution and manufacturing networks.142

140
Jos J. L. Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, c. 1710–1780 (Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1995), 99–101. For later developments, see John Perry, Karim Khan Zand:
A History of Iran, 1747–1779 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); Longrigg,
Four Centuries of Modern Iraq; and A. S. K. Lambton, “Persian Trade Under the
Early Qajars,” in Islam and Trade in Asia, ed. D. S. Richards (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1970), 215–44.
141
Gommans, Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, 29.
142
See Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, c. 1700–1750
(Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1979). Sudipta Sen (Empire of Free Trade: The East
India Company and the Making of the Colonial Marketplace [Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1998]) follows the impact of changing long-distance trade rela-
tionships on local distribution and production.
      73

Beyond reasserting suzerainty over Afghanistan and replenishing

his own treasury, Nadir Shah’s longer-term goals in South Asia
remain a mystery. One of them was certainly to gain formal recog-
nition as the head of a dynastic state in the eyes of their western
neighbor, the Ottoman Empire. The Afshar leader, recognizing
Ottoman weakness in the North and West, pressed negotiations with
the sultan. After a decade of wrangling over the terms of sovereignty
and the rights of adherents to the Afshar-championed Jafari sect in
Mecca and Medina, in 1746 the Ottoman divan ratified the Treaty
of Kurdan. A landmark piece of diplomacy, this agreement offered
the framework for the territorial state system within Muslim Asia: a
multilateral order that respected Ottoman religious paramountcy, its
caliphal leadership, while recognizing the autonomy and legitimacy
of other, Muslim dynastic polities. As a harbinger of modern rela-
tions between the two states, one increasingly shorn of sectarian over-
tones, Ernie Tucker’s argument that “the dynamic of conceptual
change [which] transcended the rise and fall of dynasties in Iran,”
may be correct. Nevertheless, Nadir Shah’s assassination the follow-
ing year had disastrous consequences for the region during the sec-
ond half of the eighteenth century. It rendered the treaty a dead
letter and threw Iran, once again, into turmoil.143
During the decades between the Treaty of Kurdan and the death
of Nadir Shah’s successor, Karim Khan Zand, in 1779, a palpable
asymmetry within Eurasia would emerge.144 The Treaty of Westphalia
(1648) and the Treaty Utrecht (1714) had been way stations on the
road to new terms of sovereign rule. However, it was the Treaty of
Paris (1763) that finally ended a half century of dynastic crises. It
sealed the edges of the early modern political map, including Prussia’s
critical annexation of Silesia in 1740.
Standing outside the general conflagration of the Seven Years War
brought mixed blessings to the Ottomans. Although spared the expense

143
Tucker, “The Peace Negotiation of 1736,” 35.
144
Neither reducing difference to matter of cultural perception and projection,
as Larry Wolf (Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization of the Mind of the
Enlightenment [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994]) nor essentializing cultural
and social forms, such as pastoral nomadism, as C. A. Bayly contends (Imperial
Meridian, 17–18) brings us closer to appreciating the growing imbalance between
European and Asian states during the second half of eighteenth century.
74  

and buffered by their enemies’ distraction between 1757 and 1768,

Istanbul also missed decades of rapid advances in martial organiza-
tion and technique. Nor did the final outcome favor the empire
within the new global balance, given France’s resounding defeat in
both the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. Despite the promise of an
alliance with Prussia, the opening of a new Habsburg and Russian
front in 1768 presented the Ottomans with an even more danger-
ous territorial accord in central Europe.145 At the height of the conflict,
after the loss of its navy at Çe{me in 1770 and in the face of coor-
dinated actions between the rebel Egyptian bey “Cloud-catcher” Ali
and Moscow in Syria, Prussia joined the czar and emperor in the
Poland partition of 1772–75.146
Preoccupation with the ever-sharper edges of the European state
system and the entry of the Russian fleet in the Black Sea may have
dampened the enthusiasm of Ottoman mapmakers for depictions of
Alexander’s Asia during the last quarter of the century. As British
and French adventurers and cartographers traced real and imagi-
nary lines in the legendary footsteps of Tamerlane and Nadir Shah
across Anatolia and Egypt to India, the Ottomans tried to secure
their western frontier. In addition to enlisting the support of the
lords of its agrarian heartlands, the derebey, Istanbul would muster
new resources and sponsor European advisors. To the east, goals of
reconsolidating its provincial structure along the long and fragmented
frontier of Kurdistan, seemed illusory. With Karim Khan Zand’s
siege of Baghdad and occupation of Basra in 1775, the Iranian war
again erupted into Ottoman lands and choked the vital commercial
channel that linked the capital with the Indian Ocean.
Although the Zand threat receded, it did not resolve the empire’s
fundamental dilemma: wedged between two increasingly incommen-
surate geopolitical systems, Istanbul sought other solutions. Ensnaring
provincial actors in a web of high finance and courtly networks, it
maintained the support of the urban gentry and rural lords while
anchoring its eastern perimeters by giving its tacit assent to the semi-
autonomous regimes that governed Egypt and Iraq.147

145
See Kemal Beydilli, 1780 Osmanlı-Prusya Ittifâkı (Meydana Geli{i-Tahilili Tatbiki)
(Istanbul: Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayınları, 1984).
146
Schroeder, European Politics, 1763–1848, 3–11.
147
Aksan, “Ottoman War and Warfare, 1453–1812,” 167.
 CHAPTER TWO

THE SUBLIME PORTE AND THE CREDIT NEXUS

As the Ottoman armies crossed into Azarbayjan, the court turned

its attentions to the pleasures of the capital seated on the shores of
the Bosphorus, the strait connecting the Black Sea to the Mediter-
ranean.1 Istanbul had been all but abandoned by Ahmed III’s brother
and father for bucolic Thrace. Now the sultan, his viziers, and his
princesses embellished the city with new palaces, fountains, fields of
tulips, and mosques. They transformed the waterways of the Golden
Horn and the crowded thoroughfares of the inner city into a open
air court. Festivals celebrated the rites of passage of the dynasty—
marriages of princesses, births of princes, and circumcisions. Public
ceremonies greeted the entry of foreign ambassadors and hailed the
birth of an heir to a Bourbon ally.2
Perhaps the most fabled of these public events was the fortnight
of feasting, parades, and entertainments that preceded the circum-
cision of the sultan’s sons in the fall of 1720. In his “Ceremony
Treatise” (Surnâme-i Vehbi ), the poet Seyyid Hüseyin Vehbi (d. 1736)
transcribed these festivities in verse.3 Court painters immortalized

1
On this period, see Ahmet Refik, Lâle Devri (Ankara: Pınar Yayınları, 1912);
Mary Lucille Shaw, The Ottoman Empire from 1720 to 1734: As Revealed in the Despatches
of the Venetian Baili (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944). For other European
paintings of courtly life in Istanbul, see Jean-Baptiste Van Mour (1671–1737) (Remmet
van Luttervelt, De “Turkse” Schilderijen van J. B. Vanmour en Zijn School [Istanbul:
Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut in het Nabije Oosten, 1958]), a pro-
tégé of the French Embassy.
2
Consider Voltaire, Candide or the Optimism (London: Penguin, 1947), 125. On
the concept of “civilization” under the old-regime and its discontents, see Norbert
Elias, The History of Manners (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 39–40.
3
TKSK MS A. 3593. See Esin Atıl and Omer Koc, eds., Levni and the Surname:
The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Festival (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2000); Esin Atıl, “The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Festival,”
Muqarnas 10 (1993): 181–211; E. Atil, “Surnâme-i Vehbi: An Eighteenth Century
Book of Festivals,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1969); in addition
to the many manuscript copies found in Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Library, see Seyyit
Vehbi, Sûrnâme: Üçüncü Ahmed’in O[ullarının Sünnet Dü[ünü, ed. Re{ad Ekrem Koçu
(Istanbul: Çigir Kitabevi, 1939).
76  

them as well. Before 1732, Levni, the sobriquet of the celebrated

court artist Abdülcelil Çelebi, and the members of his atelier recorded
this event in two lavishly illustrated albums (Plates 1–6). The cir-
cumcision of the young princes provided the pretext to freeze the
activities of the bustling city and turn the eyes of its thousands of
shopkeepers, artisans, merchants, scholars, housewives, and grandees
on the dynasty.
Parades, reviews of troops, and receptions regimented the actors
of the régime into clearly defined institutions. The solak, the bostancı
who patrolled the waterways and royal gardens, the armed silahdar
and peyk, and the mounted sipahi patrolled the line separating the
sovereign and his subjects. Surrounded by the eunuch-administrators
of the harem, pages, and chamberlains, the sultan, seated in his
palace, in a luxurious tent on the parade ground, or on a balcony
overlooking the Golden Horn, is the center of a swirling panorama
of activities. The populace, which peers from the sidelines at these
marvelous entertainments—fireworks, dancers, acrobats, jugglers, and
mock battles at sea—shares in the palace’s merriment as well as its
acts of piety.
In contrast to the tiered, rigorously hierarchical portrait of the
high-ranking statesmen, the rical-ı devlet, or to the depiction of the
carefully choreographed procession that led the princes to Topkapı
Palace, dispersed elements in Levni’s pictorial narrative also preform
what is known as the “circle of justice.” Ibn Khaldun had traced
this theorem of redistributive government to Aristole’s Politics.4 It is

4
Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, ed. and trans. Franz
Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 41, attributes the “circle of
justice” to the Sassanian king Khosraw I and Aristotle. Ibn Khaldun claims that
Aristotle in his Book on Politics “arranged his statement in a remarkable circle that
he discussed at length. It runs as follows: ‘The world is a garden the fence of which
is the dynasty. The dynasty is an authority through which life is given to proper
behavior. Proper behavior is a policy directed by the ruler. The ruler is an insti-
tution supported by the soldiers. The soldiers are helpers who are maintained by
money. Money is sustenance brought together by the subjects. The subjects are ser-
vants who are protected by justice. Justice is something familiar (harmonious) and
through it, the world persists. The world is a garden . . . and then it begins again . . .
They are held together in a circle with no definite beginning or end.” An Ottoman
translation of Ibn Khaldun’s Prolegomena was completed by the head of the religious
establishment, }eyh"ül-(slam Mehmed Sa"ib Pirizâde (d. 1749). On Ibn Khaldun’s
influence, see Cornell Fleischer, “Royal Authority, Dynastic Cyclism and ‘Ibn
Khaldunism’ in Sixteenth Century Ottoman Letters,” Journal of Asian and African
Studies 18 (1984): 218–37. Notable Ottoman versions of the “circle of justice” include
        77

“a circle with no definite beginning or end,” a circulation of oblig-

ations linking the longevity and prosperity of an agrarian state to
the quality of justice and protection that the sovereign offers those
whose toil creates the empire’s wealth.
The Ok Meydanı, the archery range by the Golden Horn served
as the stage for the dramatization of the ideal earthy order. Fittingly,
the farmer (Plate 1), who guides a pair of oxen and a plow—the
symbol of the çiftlik, the unit of land needed for a household’s sub-
sistence—leads the way. He is followed by master craftsmen, jour-
neymen, and apprentices of the trades that prepare food (butchers
and cooks) and those that process tallow and hide (candle makers
and tanners). Present too are barbers, grocers, quilt makers, and
finally, the dealers in luxuries—jewelers, makers of fine brocade,
and spice traders, all of whom bear samples of their wares, clever
and costly gifts for the sultan.
As the earthly magistrate, the sultan stands at the apex of social
hierarchies and at the nexus of the redistributive circuits of the realm.
He reciprocates his subjects’ gifts after his own manner. Ceremonial
banquets channel the empire’s bounty to those who render just deci-
sions on disputes and to the officials and officers charged with safe-
guarding order. The first round of feasts honors the ulema and the
jurists, the ilmiye, at whose head are the }eyh"ül-(slam and two juriscon-
sults of Anatolia and Rumelia. Another banquet is hosted for the
imams of important mosques and those who call the people to prayer,
the hatips. In subsequent paintings, we see the palace pages waiting
upon the seyfiye, the men of the sword, among whom sit viziers,
provincial governors, and the commanders of the imperial regiment.
Although the sultan does not dine with his servants, leading mem-
bers of the bureaucracy, the kalemiye, such as the defterdar efendi, the
imperial treasurer and the sultan’s deputy, the grand vizier, stand in
his stead.
Amid the political upheaval of the late seventeenth and early eight-
eenth centuries that roiled the city and overturned the regimes of
his father and brother, these masques of absolutism were not worn

the sixteenth-century Kınalızade Ali Efendi, Ahlâk-ı Alâi (Cairo: Bulak, 1248), vol. 3,
49 as well as that by the early-eighteenth-century imperial treasurer, Sarı Mehmed
Efendi, Ottoman Statecraft: The Book of Counsel for Vezirs and Governors of Sarï Mehmed
Pasha (Nasa'ih ul-vuzera ve’l-umera), ed. W. L. Wright (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1935), 118.
78  

lightly. Nonetheless, although the fall of Tabriz in 1730 would put

an end to Ahmed III’s reign as well as to the “Age of Tulips,” the
Ottoman dynasty rested on firm foundations. The dangerous cen-
turies of fratricidal struggles among princes had passed and dynas-
tic succession passed predictably to the eldest male heir.5 Ahmed
III’s reign of nearly three decades defined the basic institutional
modalities of the ancien régime. Under the watchful eye of the vizier,
the Sublime Porte emerged as the regulatory force that oversaw the
“circle of justice.” Yet rather than a single circulatory system sub-
ject to rise and fall, it was composed of numerous circuits that assured
the redistribution of privilege and power among an aristocracy of
service and the empire’s religious establishment. While allowing points
of entry for new elements drawn from the wider society, the old-
regime operated through an Istanbul nexus and the radiating spokes
of an empire-wide financial system.6

Palace, “Porte,” and Fiscal Patronage

The art historian Esin Atıl points to a shadow protagonist in Levni’s

storybook of the 1720 ceremonies. It is the Nev{ehirli (brahim Pasha
(1662?–1730), the probable patron of the manuscript, who often
shares the painter’s frame with the sultan.7 In these double portraits,
sultan and deputy are almost interchangeable, distinguishable less by
their features or dress than by the inferior position that the vizier
occupies on the page. (Plate 2)
The grand vizier’s notoriety owed to such presumptuosness: the
servant who dared to display his own image more frequently than
that of his sovereign, a deputy whose character and abilities are
extolled in the panegyric of Vehbi that adorns the large fountain

5
Mehmet IV was succeeded by his brothers, Süleyman II (r. 1687–1691)and
Ahmed II (r. 1691–1695) before his sons, Mustafa II (r. 1695–1703) and Ahmed
III (r. 1703–1730). Both of their reigns were cut short by janissary revolts. A. D.
Alderson, The Structure of the Ottoman Dynasty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 76;
Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993), especially 191–218.
6
Norbert Elias, The Court Society (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 91.
7
Atıl, “The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Festival,” 200. The grand
vizier appears in forty-four scenes; the sultan in only forty-one.
        79

standing before the Topkapı Palace.8 In reality, vizier and sultan

were only two faces of the state: they might be considered figureheads
of merging institutional and political currents, between the palace,
the “Gate of Felicity” (Dar üs-Saâde) with its complex of private pop-
ulations, pages, and patrimonial wealth, and the expanding resources
and personnel of the “Sublime Porte,” the Bâb-ı Âli (an abbrevia-
tion of the Saraya-ı Sadr-ı Âli Divanhane-i Bâb-ı Âli ).9
(brahim Pasha of Nev{ehir, the sultan’s son-in-law presided over
a decisive phase in the restructuring of state institutions.10 Like France’s
Jean-Baptiste Colbert, his tenure witnessed the consolidation of power
and especially the means of raising state revenues under the vizier-
ate.11 The imperial council (Divan-ı Hümayun), once the locus of pol-
icy-making lost its monopoly; its chief tasks were surrendered to the
executive officers who would take charge of both domestic and for-
eign affairs.12 The grand vizier, his chief of staff (kethüda) and the
director of the imperial treasury (ba{ defterdar or defterdar efendi ) were
empowered to draft edicts, decrees, and certificates and to render
judgment in the sultan’s name.13 Deliberations concerning war and
peace took place in the vizier’s chambers.
Under (brahim Pasha, the Sublime Porte realized even greater
oversight over the empire’s certificates, legal records, cadastral surveys,

8
E. J. W. Gibb, A History of Ottoman Poetry (London: Luzac & Company, 1967)
vol. 4, 111.
9
Tayyip Gökbilgin, “Bâbıâli,” (A 2:174–77. Carter V. Findley, Bureaucratic Reform
in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 47. For the com-
position of the Porte’s staff in the late seventeenth century, see the Anonymous
author of Anonim Osmanlı Tarihi (1099–1116/1688–1704) (ed. Abdülkadir Özcan
[Ankara: Türk Tarihi Kurumu Basımevi, 2000], 184–85), who follows Hezarfen
Hüseyin Efendi (Hezarfen Hüseyın Efendi Telhısü’l Beyan fı Kavanin-i Âl-ı Osman, ed.
Sevim Ilgürel [Ankara: TTK Basımevi, 1998], 132).
10
For an overview of the history of the bureaucracy, see Findley, Bureaucratic
Reform; idem., Ottoman Civil Officialdom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989);
and Virginia Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace, Ahmed Resmi Efendi,
1700 –1783 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 1–14.
11
Colbert’s 1681 consolidation of the largest French tax farms into a single insti-
tution was dissolved one hundred ten years later by the revolutionary government.
See Vida Azimi, Un modèle administratif de l’ancien régime: les commis de la ferme générale
et de la régie générale des aides (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique, 1987).
12
Ahmet Mumcu, Hukuksal ve Siyasal Karar Organı Olarak Divan-ı Hümayun (Ankara:
Ankara Üniversitesi Hukuk Fakültesi Yayınları, 1976), 69.
13
(smail Hakkı Uzunçar{ılı, Osmanlı Devletinin Merkez ve Bahriye Te{kilâatı (Ankara:
TTK Basımevi, 1984), 338–61; Halil (nalcık, “Re"is-ül-küttâb,” (A 9:672–83.
80  

records of complaints, foreign correspondence, and ledgers. The

palace had already begun to shed the archive. Süleyman I (r. 1520–
1566) ordered the physical removal of the registers of state lands
from the precincts of the imperial council to the imperial registry
(defter-i hakani ).14 Leaving the ceremonial head of the chancellery
(ni{ancı) behind in the palace, the official who had been the vizier’s
chief clerk (re"is ül-küttâb) emerged as a new secretary of state, charged
with maintaining the records of laws, treaties, and awards of certificates
to office. Rather than entrusting these records to the care of the
chief minister and thus, allowing them to pass from one adminis-
tration to the next, two years before his death, (brahim Pasha gath-
ered imperial records together in a permanent, central depository
located within the grand vizier’s chambers.15
As the vizierate grew, with its chancellery, the fisc, and the state
archive, so did the ranks of its minions: ushers, messengers, special
assistants, accountants, clerks, special guards and officers. Yet, Levni’s
paintings remind us that there was at least one formidable redoubt
of power beyond the Porte. Hac Be{ir A[a (1717–46), the senior
black eunuch (dar üs-saâde a[ası), who rarely leaves the sultan’s side
throughout the festivities, remained firmly in control of the palace’s
assets. He, as many of his predecessors in office, routinely intervened
in domestic and foreign affairs. Since the late sixteenth century, when
Habe{î Mehmed A[a succeeded in wresting control of both the posi-
tion of kahya of the sultan’s treasury and chief administrator of the
endowments from the other corps of eunuchs, those of Eurasian
extraction, the senior black eunuch controlled vast resources through-
out the empire.16 As protectors and heads of the harem staff and the
apartments of the sultan’s family and slaves, the eunuchs exercised
undiminished influence over members of the dynasty.

14
See D. A. Howard, “The Historical Development of the Ottoman Imperial
Registry (Defter-i Hakanî): Mid-Fifteenth to Mid-Seventeenth Centuries,” Archivum
Ottomanicum 11 (1988): 213–30; and Klaus Röhrborn, “Die Emanzipation der
Finanzbürokratie im Osmanischen Reich (Ende 16. Jahrhundert),” ZDMG 122 (1972):
118–39. In the 1750s, these documents were transfered to the palace of princess
Esma Sultan (R. Ekrem Koçu, “Bâbıâli,” (A 4:1446).
15
(smail Hakkı Uzunçar{ılı, Osmanlı Devletinin Saray Te{kilâtı (Ankara: TTK Basımevi,
1945), 173–77. On the lives and accomplishments of the senior black eunuchs liv-
ing between 1574 and 1752, see Ahmed Resmi Efendi, Hamiletü’l-Küberâ, ed. Ahmet
Nezihi Turan (Istanbul: Istanbul Kitabevi, 2000).
16
Ahmed Resmi Efendi, Hamiletü’l-Küberâ, 45; Uzunçar{ılı, Osmanlı Devleteinin Saray
Te{kilâtı, 173.
        81

Lest we reduce the dynamic of Ottoman polity to a perennial

contest between factions, or in this case, a tug-of-war between Porte
and palace, we must recall the similarities between the Ottoman
Empire and its counterparts in Europe and Asia. Notwithstanding
accounts of a relatively smooth and uncontested transition to abso-
lutism and a seamless relationship between religion and state, con-
solidation of the key state institutions was fraught and indirect.17
Early sultans, no less than their “feudal” European neighbors, strug-
gled mightily to subdue their allies as well as their enemies. The
religious aura surrounding the dynasty became an important com-
ponent in the transition between a frontier principality and an early
modern “tax state.”18 Like European monarchs who preferred the
lawyers trained in Roman statutes to dependence on churchmen, the
sultans Murad I (1362–89) and Beyazid I (1389–1402) drew new
personnel from a pool of Byzantine and Ilkhanid administrators who
began the process of bureaucratizing the military order.19 Specialized
in scribal cipher, siyakat, Persian “schoolmen” reduced the empire’s
wealth to cadastral records and converted the sovereign’s fifth of the
spoils of war into the salaries for an infantry of palace-trained slaves,
the janissaries.
Vehbi’s festival book was also an instrument of state making. Just
as the exploits of the religious knight, the ghazi, once inspired the
empire builders of yore, the “mirror of princes,” manuals drafted by
courtly advisers and bureaucrats, laden with well-honed adages, mor-
alizing verse, and allegories such as the “circle of justice,” were
integral to the ideology of a palace-centered state.20 The palace-state
in its most predatory form, during a period often associated with
the reign of Sultan Mehmet II (r. 1453–1481), enlisted such ideals

17
For two examples, see Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of
the Ottoman State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Linda Darling,
Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and Finance Administration in the Ottoman
Empire, 1560–1650 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996).
18
Compare Peter-Christian Witt, “The History and Sociology of Public Finance:
Problems and Topics,” in Wealth and Taxation in Central Europe: The History and Sociology
of Public Finance, ed. Witt (Leamington Spa, UK: Berg Publishing, 1987), 1–18.
19
Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, 111–13.
20
See Cornell H. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The
Historian Mustafa 'Ali (1541–1600) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986),
100–102; Abou El-Haj, Modern State; and Pal Fodor, “State and Society, Crisis and
Reform in 15th–17th Century Ottoman Mirror for Princes,” Acta Orientalia Academiae
Scientiarum Hungaricae 40 (1986): 217–40.
82  

to consolidate absolutism, to detach his commanders from conflicting

regional loyalties, and to radically curtail the accumulation of prop-
erty by statesmen.21
In centralizing state institutions, Mehmet II also brought into exis-
tence a new division of labor, first between the old and new palaces
and, later, among the orders composing the central state.22 Unlike
the oral compacts binding amirs and princes, the charters of incor-
poration and codes of administrative law, the Te{rifat-i Kanunnâme-i
Âl-i Osman were copied and revised. They did not simply detail pro-
tocol—duties, dress, ranks, and privileges—or reaffirm the division
between statesmen and subject. They also gave permanency to the
ruling estates and established a system of checks and balances between
them. It was the grand vizier, the bearer of the sultan’s seal and
deputy, who shared custody over state resources and tended its
finances alongside the chief treasurer, the defterdar efendi. Thus, despite
the seemingly impregnable fortress and, to outside observers, the her-
metically sealed orders residing in the Topkapı Sarayı, replete with
schools, atelier, financial apparatus, kitchens, supreme court, and
divan, these organizational charters planted the seeds of other sophis-
ticated hierarchies and established the basic parameters of privilege
and obligation for the ruling elite, as well as for other aspirants, indi-
viduals or groups, to state office.23
The Istanbul bureaucracy grew alongside the geographical expanse
of the empire. However, by the early seventeenth century their num-
bers stabilized. For every clerk, accountant, and scribe in the central-
state bureaucracy, there were approximately one thousand salaried
soldiers and ten harem staff members.24 Linda Darling attributes this
compactness to the changing nature of its duties.25 The labor-inten-
sive tasks of codification and cadastration had been accomplished.

21
Colin Imber, Ebu"s-su"ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997), 67.
22
Halil (nalcık, “Kânûnnâme,” EI 2, 4:562–66.
23
For the origins of the provincial treasuries, Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual,
312–13. On the financial foundations of the rebel Canbulado[lu’s mini-state in
Syria, see William Griswold, Political Unrest and Rebellion in Anatolia, 1000 –1020/
1591–1611 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Griswold, 1983), 122.
24
Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 1500–1700 (London: University of London
Press, 1999), 53; Peirce, The Imperial Harem, 122. Darling, Revenue-Raising and
Legitimacy, 70.
25
Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy, 62–65. In 1613, the high point in her
study, there were 188 clerks and accountants.
        83

A purely geographical division of bureaus and tasks gave way, to

greater standardization of process in terms of formulae, precedent,
universal forms of taxation, and contract. At its greatest extent, the
eighteenth-century the Istanbul civil service never seems to have
exceeded fifteen hundred individuals, only a fraction of comparable
administrations in France and Russia.26
To a large degree the size of the Ottoman administration was
illusory. Certainly, Cornell Fleischer is correct in emphasizing the
role that bureaucrats themselves played in inhibiting the expansion
of the Istanbul orders and restricting entry to clients and kin, par-
ticularly, as we shall see, when state service constituted the sine qua
non for its quasi-aristocratic claims, what Rifa"at Abou-el-Haj calls
the “sense of entitlement.”27 However, we must look beyond the
official cadres in Istanbul to the thousands of contractors, subcon-
tractors, and multi-tasking officials in the provinces who put these
orders into effect. Without conceding the honor of official title or
the security of inclusion in their charters, imperial bureaucrats, increas-
ingly specialized in communications and coordination of operations,
devolved many of the most labor-intensive duties, say, tax assess-
ment and collection, on the provincial gentry and resident janissaries.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the inordinately large number
of viziers may also have been product of this shunting of responsi-
bilities outside the official hierarchy.28
Comparing the number of “internal” to “external” state agents is
also a misleading gauge of institutional centralization. A more apt
measure might be found in the incremental merging of palace resources
and with it, the powers of patronage under the Porte.29 Rhetorically
the vast resources of the empire all belonged to the sultan, whether
from his personal wealth, from properties of the state and the com-
monweal (beyt "ül-mal ), or from taxation; But in practice Ottoman
finances had long been divided into two separate entities. On one

26
Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom, 22–23.
27
Cornell Fleischer, “Preliminaries to the Study of the Ottoman Bureaucracy,”
in Raiyyet Rüsumu, Essays Presented to Halil (nalcık (Special Edition of Journal of Turkish
Studies), ed. Bernard Lewis et al. 10 (1986): 140–41.
28
Findley, Ottoman Civil Officialdom, 22–23.
29
See Halil Sahillio[lu, “}ıvı{ Year Crises in the Ottoman Empire,” in Studies
in the Economic History of the Middle East from the Rise of Islam to the Present Day, ed.
M. A. Cook (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 230–33; Uzunçar{ılı, Osmanlı
Devletinin Merkez ve Bahriye Te{kilâtı; Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy, 81–119.
84  

hand, there was the purely patrimonial treasury of the sultan (hazine-i
enderun), who served as trustee of the commonweal and religious
endowments. On the other hand, there was the true forerunner of
the fisc, the operational treasury, called alternately, the hazine-i birûn
or, more commonly, the hazine-i amire, devoted to the running of the
state, war and the management of the empire’s vast latifundia.30
As controller of the harem, the senior black eunuchs oversaw
palace finances. In effect, the palace treasury received the sultan’s
share of imperial wealth. This included war booty and slaves, the
routine confiscation (müsadere) of the goods of former officials and
officers, gifts, profits from the mint, earnings from mines, the yearly
payment from Egypt, and the tribute paid by conquered or vassal
countries, in addition to a steady stream of gifts ( pi{ke{) that were
mandatory for those ascending the highest rungs of the state hier-
archy. The head of the harem possessed the ability to appoint and
dismiss scholars and preachers to posts in the pious endowments
(waqf/awqâf ) founded by members of the dynasty as well as those
established for the benefit of pilgrims to Mecca and Medina.
The vizier who retained the keys to both vaults, oversaw the oper-
ational treasury. Originally, it received the taxation created by statute
and much of the poll tax levied, usually in aggregate sums, from
Christian and Jewish communities. The vizier could draw upon rev-
enues that were received from miri (state) lands, whether assigned as
timars or collected by nonresident officials and tax farmers.31 In the
sixteenth century, the annualization of the first direct levies, under
the heading of the avârız and the nüzül bedeliyesi, brought in another
large stream of income into this treasury.32 Although established to
run the state and specifically to pay for the upkeep and outfitting

30
Ömer Lûtfi Barkan,”(1669–70) Mali Yılına ait bir Osmanlı Bütçesi ve Ekleri,”
(FM 17 (1955–56): 193–347.
31
Sahillio[lu, “}ıvı{ Year Crises,” 330–33; Uzunçar{ılı, Osmanlı Devletinin Merkez
ve Bahriye Te{kilâatı, 328–31.
32
For the history of the first direct tax, known generically as avârız, see Darling,
Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy, 81–118. On the application of the taille in France, see
James B. Collins, Fiscal Limits of Absolutism: Direct Taxation in Early Seventeenth-Century
France (Berkeley: University of California, 1988); and for the “Turk tax” in Austria,
Kersten Krüger, “Public Finance and Modernisation: The Change from the Domain
State to Tax State in Hesse in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. A Case
Study,” Wealth and Taxation in Central Europe: The History and Sociology of Public Finance,
ed. Peter-Christian Witt (Lexington Spa, UK: Berg, 1987), 49–62.
        85

of its military forces, the operational treasury continued to contribute

to palace expenses as well. Funds were set aside for the upkeep of
the royal household and for the “pocket money” of the sultan.
A summary of income and expenditures of the outer treasury
dating from 1669–70 helps us better appreciate the actual allocation
of imperial income. It reveals that the palace still commanded nearly
30 percent of the state’s total revenues, a little less than half of the
monies used to pay the salaries of infantry (both full-time salaried
corps and mercenaries), cavalry, sailors, and frontier guards, which
constituted 62.5 percent of total expenditures. Outright payment for
salaries due the civil bureaucracy amounted to less than 1 percent
of the imperial budget.33
Over the course of the seventeenth century, the operational trea-
sury far outstripped the sultan’s coffers in complexity of tasks and
sheer volume of transactions. The relentless demands of warfare
forced a steady expansion of the state’s economic claims on society
overall as well as on the sultanate. In addition to the new univer-
sal, direct taxes by the end of the seventeenth century, the Sublime
Porte imposed excise duties on formerly banned substances, such as
tobacco and coffee.34 Minorities, who also bore the brunt of new
legislation in Europe and Mughal India, were subjected to the refor-
mulated poll tax (cizye) of 1691, which would become one of the sin-
gle most important sources of Ottoman state revenues by the early
eighteenth century.35
Bitter experience taught Istanbul officials to choose their targets
with care. They staggered new taxation geographically, particularly
for peasants living close to the battle front or for residents of major
administrative cities.36 Yet many other types of taxation never reached
Istanbul. The central government turned a blind eye to the raising

33
Barkan, “Mali Yılına ait bir Osmanlı Bütçesi,” 224.
34
Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy, 67, 78–79. Ahmet Tabako[lu, Gerileme
Dönemine Girerken Osmanlı Maliyesi (Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 1985), 272–73.
35
Halil (nalcık, “Djizya,” EI 2, 2:563–566; Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken,
104–5, 136–43, 157–61, 180. The poll tax became the largest single component
of direct taxation during the eighteenth century; it yielded between 22 percent and
40 percent of the total. By contrast, avârız income sharply declined.
36
On the deteriorating conditions in the countryside, Bruce McGowan, Economic
Life in the Ottoman Europe: Taxation, Trade and the Struggle for Land (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), 54–55; Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken, 140–42,
274, 289; and M. Münir Aktepe, Patrona Isyanı (1730) (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi,
1958), 9–10.
86  

of extraordinary levies in the provinces, such as the sürsat bedeliyesi

and i{tira bedeliyesi, needed for military provisions or for salaries, as
well as to the arbitrary dues that commanders, sipahi, jannisaries,
and other officers demanded from rural populations.37
Perhaps the most powerful catalyst of growth in the state’s capac-
ity was debt. When tax receipts did not suffice, bureaucrats reversed
the predatory relationship that had prevailed between the two trea-
suries.38 The grand vizier, when need arose, could withdraw funds
to pay for state expenses.39 A time honored practice, reliance on the
palace treasury in early centuries was timed with the financial short-
falls occasioned by the leap months of the Islamic calendar.40 Although
the adoption of a solar calendar after 1710 for accounting purposes
remedied this particular problem, from the last decade of the sev-
enteenth century onward supplements drawn from the palace trea-
sury became a common occurrence in wartime. During the protracted
war with the Holy League (1683–1699), loans from the sultan’s trea-
sury to the fisc met about one-tenth of its annual expenses; during
the military campaign against Peter the Great (1710–1711), the palace
contributed nearly one-third of state expenses.41
Because little of these monies was ever repaid, the chief treasurer
devised subtler means of poaching upon palace wealth. A common
practice was for accountants to divide the revenues of receipts ear-
marked for the palace, such as the imperial mint, between the fisc
and palace treasury.42 The confiscated goods of former soldiers and
civil servants as well as intestate goods that were traditionally chan-
neled toward the beyt "ül-mal or commonweal (and thus entrusted to
the sultan’s keeping), also increasingly found their way into general
spending.43
Amid the worldwide financial crises of the turn of the century,
sovereigns scoured their realms and populations for the means to

37
Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken, 153–61.
38
See Ariel Salzmann, “An Ancien Régime Revisited: Privatization and Political
Economy in the 18th century Ottoman Empire,” Politics & Society 21 (1993): 393–423.
39
Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken, 36–39.
40
Sahillio[lu, “}ıvı{ Year Crises,” 330–33.
41
Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken, 16, 243.
42
MMD 9524:16.
43
Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy, 65. For a detailed study of the process
of expropriation, see Yavuz Cezar, “Bir Âyanın Muhallefatı: Havza ve Köprü Âyanı
Kör (smail-o[lu Hüseyin (Müsadere Olayı ve Terekenin (ncelenmesi),” Belleten 151
(1977): 41–78.
        87

meet fiscal exigencies.44 In the Ottoman Empire, the treasury deferred

cash outlays by bureaucratic sleight of hand: tagging the revenues
from agrarian sources to individuals in the form of retirement assign-
ments, pin (“shoe”) money for princesses, or ocaklık (the taxes of vil-
lages or rural communities), which were devoted to the upkeep of
infantry units or frontier troops. The dynasty’s crown lands or hass
revenues, which included the large fiscal estates reserved for gover-
nors and commanders in such regions as West Asia (particularly,
Syria, Eastern Anatolia, Kurdistan, and Iraq, where the timar system
had never been applied in a comprehensive fashion) were increas-
ingly reduced to fiscal units. These mukataât served as a quasi-
modular form of accounting; they afforded the bureaucracy a new
flexibility in the assignment of distant resources, as well as the means
to anticipate revenues through revenue contracting.45 At times a cen-
tral-state agent would be appointed to carry out the collection of
taxes; in many other instances, the fiscal bureaucracy would leave
beneficiaries to their own devices.46
Borrowing took many forms. Revenue contracting, as Yavuz Cezar
reminds us, was probably one of the most common means of man-
aging state debt. However, precisely because revenue farming entailed
a contractual relationship as well as a recycling of state resources
through multiple hands, the specific modalities merit closer exami-
nation.47 The edict of 1695, which authorized the use of leases for
life (malikâne mukataât) on such fiscal units brought into being distinctive
sociopolitical arrangements while fulfilling multiple financial and bu-
reaucratic purposes.48 For the potential contractor, the treasury offered

44
Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age
of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 11–17.
45
Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy, 123.
46
Mukataât were either assigned as salary to be managed by tax farmers (mül-
tezim), stewards (voyvoda), or revenue agents (emin) or directly to janissaries in lieu of
salary. Some were even awarded on a lifetime basis. Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine
Girerken, 126–28.
47
Yavuz Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım ve De[i{im Dönemi (XVIII. Yüzyıldan
Tanzimat"a Mali Tarih) (Istanbul: Alan Yayıncılık, 1986), 51.
48
The standard work on the subject remains Mehmet Genç, “Osmanlı Maliyesinde
Malikâne Sistemi,” in Türkiye (ktisat Tarihi Semineri, ed., Osman Okyar and Ünal
Nalbanto[lu (Ankara: Hacetepe Üniversitesi 1975), 231–296. One does not have to
search far to find reports of deteriorating conditions: KK 3105:11 (1721), for example,
concerns the plight of villages whose taxation, held in an ocaklık, had been farmed
out under short-term contracts. Given terms of contract, however, tax-farmers seemed
reluctant to assume all but the most lucrative contracts, such as Istanbul’s snuff tax
88  

revenues with quasi-proprietary rights, including administrative auto-

nomy and the possibility of passing shares to sons and male relatives.
For the treasury, the edit assured an immense infusion of capital.
Each successful bid brought in a large advance on future income in
the form of a surety (muaccele). Thereafter, the bureaucrats were
assured of regular installments of income (mal ) over decades.49 For
a strapped bureaucratic corps, it helped standardize procedure, lifted
the burden of repeated reassessment, and furnished longer-term agents
to collect revenues, particularly the many sources that formed the
oldest revenue bureaus, such as the ba{ muhasebe. Moreover, without
formal expansion of the Istanbul bureaucracy itself, the new con-
tract harnessed a labor force for the state as it extended its powers
of fiscal patronage.50
By providing very competitive terms of contract and, even, dig-
nifying the practice of tax farming, the malikâne system facilitated
the merging of the two treasuries. Within two years of its promul-
gation, provisions were made for the application of the life-lease to
resources that formed part of the palace income.51 They included
the enormous crown estates set aside for the upkeep of the queen
mother, royal consorts, princesses, the admiral of the Mediterranean
fleet, the grand viziers, the senior black eunuch, the steward of the
imperial stirrup (rikab-ı hümayun kaymakamı), and the khans of the

(mukataa-ı resm-i duhan), which sold quickly (Özcan, Anonim Osmanlı Tarihi, 20). By
contrast, another document (D.B}M 624) reveals that many other contracts, includ-
ing villages in Kars, the customs stations of Erzurum and Baghdad, crown estates
in Mar"a{, zeamets in Urfa, and a soap factory in Bosnia, found no bidders at a
1694–95 auction.
49
MMD 3423 (1695–98) contains copies of the certificates awarded to life-lease
contractors during the first years of auctions.
50
In addition the document reported by Ra{id Efendi, (Mehmed Ra{id, Tarih-i
Ra{id [Istanbul: Matbaa-i Miri, 1282/1865–66] 2:288–89), Genç (“Osmanlı Maliyesinde
Malikâne Sistemi,” 284–88) has located two important decrees in the archive (KK
5040:1–2). Although Avdo Su‘eska (“Malikane,” POF 36 [1986]: 197–229) may be
correct in attributing the edit itself to the reign of Ahmed II; however, as a pol-
icy, the life-lease system is testimony to a growing consensus among the elite of this
period concerning fiscal and administrative matters.
51
Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken, 194–96. Hass accounts are included in
the budget in 1690–91 and provides payments for the palace. On the malikâne-hass,
that is, havass-ı hümayun, awarded under malikâne contracts, see Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde
Bunalım, 39–44, 48–49, 66. Such estates constitute an important component of the
subventions given the Crimean khans. Among the many documents pertaining to
the estates of eighteenth-century princesses, see those for Safiye Sultan (CS 868);
Alem{ah Sultan (CS 4207); Ay{e Sultan (CS 5433); and Hadime Sultan (CS 2902).
        89

Crimea, to name only the some of the noble individuals involved.52

Once converted, the bureaucrats assumed the ultimate oversight of
these resources which allowed them to divert least part of the income,
from either the surety or annual remittance, toward general operat-
ing expenses.53
(brahim Pasha’s tenure, in particular, witnessed a marked expan-
sion of the life-leases.54 State auctions designated taxes and duties
throughout the empire, such as the Balkans and the Aegean, regions
that technically fell well outside the scope of the original edict. A
wide variety of agents—from personal stewards (kethüda), intendants
(voyvoda), revenue agents (emin), and financial agents (sarraf ), to provin-
cial soldiers and members of the gentry—acted as on-site adminis-
trators.55 Contractors paid the executive officers of the Porte and the
highest-ranking members of the judiciary special fees for awards and
transfers of shares in their contracts.56
Thus, the new contract added another weapon to the Porte’s insti-
tutional arsenal against the financial independence of the palace.
There were other attempts to pry away its powers of patronage.
Shortly before Be{ir A[a’s promotion to head of the harem staff,
Grand Vizier }ehid Ali Pasha succeeded in establishing two new
accounting bureaus to oversee part of the imperial household’s vast
endowments, particularly those involving agricultural and tribal taxes
in northern Syria and Anatolia.57 But many areas of palace finance
withstood this assault. The valuable grain lands in Egypt, which

52
Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım, 37, 48–49.
53
Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken, 104, 289. Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım,
328. Many if not most contracts were awarded from the large financial bureau of
the muhasebe-i evvel, which yielded between 18.8 percent and 38.7 percent of the
general income over the century.
54
Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken, 134.
55
Hüseyin Özde[er, “III. Ahmed’in Varidât ve Defteri,” Türk (ktisat Tarihi Yıllı[ı
(Istanbul Üniversitesi (ktisat Fakültesi Türk (ktisat ve (çtimâiyât Tarihi Ara{tırmaları
Merkezi, 1987), 1:305–52. Whether these are the sultan’s own estates or those of
his sons, such revenues as hass-ı Be[pazarı, hass-ı Haymana-ı Büzürk ve Küçük, hass-ı
Menemen, hass-ı Boynu (ncelü (taifesi), hass-ı Mukataa-i Malatya, hass-ı Esb-Ke{ân ve Boz-
Ulus) do form part of the inner treasury. For another example of shares in hass of
princes “veledân-ı sultan,” see CS 5287.
56
Mouradgea I. D’Ohsson, Tableau général de l’Empire Othoman (Paris: M. Firmin
Didot Imp., 1820–24) vol. 3, 175–76; 368–70. For registration the treasury charged
a 10 percent fee, two thirds of which was paid to the grand vizier and one-third
to the director of the fisc.
57
Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken, 90, 104; Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım,
100–101.
90  

supported pilgrims and the population of Mecca and Medina, would

resist reorganization until the 1740s.58 In other areas, the palace
gained ground. In 1716, the senior black eunuch assumed the over-
sight of nearly all of the endowments founded by members of the
palace, in addition to those of the eunuchs themselves. At his
Wednesday divan, Be{ir A[a discussed salaries, awards of revenue
contracts on the Egyptian villages, and appointments of professors
and imams at hundreds of mosques and religious institutions through-
out the empire, including the prestigious mosques of Istanbul, Edirne,
and Bursa.59
In countering this influence generally, and in an attempt to win
the hearts generally, of the empire’s ulema in particular, the Porte
summoned income from the largest revenue contracts, many of which
became life-leases, or later, state-managed bonds or esham.60 Stipends
( yevmiye) were allotted to three categories of recipients: pensioners
(mütekâ"idin), servants (hüddâm) and the ulema, or “those who say
prayers” (du"â-güyân). These allotments constituted either pensions or
rewards for unspecified “duties” (vazife). Over the century, although
the pool of pensioners and servants remained fairly stable, the pop-
ulation of du"â-güyân—scholars, imams, sayyids (descendents of the
Prophet), and leaders of Sufi orders, as well as members of their
families—living in Istanbul, Edirne, Izmir, Salonika, Mecca, Medina,
and Damascus multiplied.61 In 1738, for example, the tax farm on
the commercial tariffs of “greater” Istanbul, which included its sub-
urbs, such as Galata and the ports of Gelibolu and Mudanya, sup-
ported only 550 mütekâ"idin and hüddâm but disbursed stipends to
approximately 6,000 du"â-güyân.62 The yearly income from large provin-

58
Jane Hathaway, The Politics of Household in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazada[lı
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 139–64.
59
Uzunçar{ılı, Osmanlı Devletinin Saray Te{kilâtı. See also Jane Hathaway, “The
Role of the Kızlar A[ası in Seventeenth-Eighteenth Century Ottoman Egypt,” Studia
Islamica 75 (1992): 141–58.
60
See H. Veli Aydin, “Osmanlı Maliyesinde Esham Uygulaması (1775–1840)”
(Ph.D. diss., Ankara University, 1998).
61
The seventeenth-century Hezarfen Hüseyin Efendi (Telhîsü’l-Beyân, 98) states
that 136 yük 22,400 akçe from the mukataa revenues in the hazine-i amire were set
aside for this purpose. But the historian Naima (d. 1716) (Lewis V. Thomas, A
Study of Naima, ed. Norman Itzkowitz [New York: New York University Press, 1972],
104–5) insists that most ulema received stipends from endowments connected to
mosques and other religious institutions and that the customs revenues were used
for the salaries of other officials.
62
KK 4264; KK 4308.
        91

cial revenue contracts, such as Bursa’s silk tax, paid the salaries of
the ulema of the Holy Cities.63 Provincial tax farms, such as the
voyvodalık of Diyarbekir or the deftardarlık of Damascus, contributed
subventions in cash and grain to local professors and the members
of Sufi orders.64
One of the most important sources of ulema stipends were the
remittances from the excise tax on coffee and tobacco, the so-called
sin taxes (resm-i bid"at). In 1722–23, the coffee tax for Istanbul (includ-
ing income from other major ports such as Salonika) paid out stipends
to 728 pensioners of the palace and 1,160 members of the ulema
(du"â-güyân). Thirty years later the same tax farm made payments to
2,450 members of the ulema (of whom 665 were female relatives).65
As for the tobacco tax, awarded as a tax farm in 1691 and as a
life-lease in 1744–45, its revenues supported 1,586 individuals, of
whom 51 were women.66 In 1772–73, the 623 women who derived
stipends from this tax farm constituted more than one-third of the
total (1,761) number of those listed as members of the “ulema.”67
Naturally, the chief mufti of the empire also received his share: of
the tobacco regie’s annual income of 159,028.5 kuru{, 25,000 kuru{
was paid to him directly, in lieu of salary (bedel ).68
If the operational treasury under the supervision of the Porte was—
as it could be argued—the forerunner of the modern fisc, then it
was the rhizome of financial relations engendered by debt that
expanded and structured the social capacity of the emerging state.

63
A 1780 Summary (KK 4547) assigned 1.23 million akçe to stipend holders and
7.09 million akçe went for du"â-güyân stipends. In 1802, the tax on silk sales in Bursa
(KK 4198) supported ulema resident in Mecca and Medina.
64
D.B}M 2071:2–9 1150–1154 (1737–1741). Provincial tax farm budgets were
much the same; of the three-year income (mal) from the voyvodalık of Diyarbekir,
totaling 31,391,793 akçe, 1,396,461 akçe were devoted to pensioners and du"â-güyân.
65
In 1691, the coffee tax yielded 204 kese, or 10.2 million akçe according to
Tabako[lu (Gerileme Dönemine Girerken, 274); see KK 4520 (1722–23) and KK 4530
(1752–53) later income. In 1780 (KK 4557), 1.23 million akçe were subtracted from
it to support pensioners and 7.09 million akçe went to the ulema as “stipends.” They
included their wives and daughters such as Rakiya hanım (at 130 akçe per day) and
Ay{e hatun (80 akçe per day).
66
Özcan, Anonim Osmanlı Tarihi, 20–21; KK 4471.
67
KK 4484. The tobacco taxes involved in this farm were collected at many
ports, including Salonika, Drac (Durazzo), Bo[az, Tekfur Da[ı, (negöl, Edirne,
Tripoli, Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus, and Jaffa. In 1761–62, its gross income
for the fisc was 2900 kese rumi akçe or 145 million akçe/1.21 million kuru{ (CM
26,858).
68
CM 21,369.
92  

In many ways, the malikâne contract epitomized the indirect strategy

of centralization under the old regime. It was a particularly effective
tactic in wresting away palace funds and placing all or part of those
assets under the aegis of the Sublime Porte. Although it applied to
only a fraction of central-state revenues as a whole, the leasing sys-
tem generated a secondary apparatus consisting of thousands of con-
tractors across the empire who seconded a small bureaucratic corps
based in the capital. From its introduction in 1695 to its gradual
phasing out after 1789, it fostered a complex circuitry of redistrib-
ution and fiscal patronage that bound members of court, the ulema
and the ruling estate to one another.

Hierarchies of Service

In a snapshot of the imperial hierarchy, Levni records the digni-

taries and statesmen as they stand at attention in anticipation of the
sultan (Plate 3). Throughout the album, bureau chiefs, professors,
members of the divan, captains, ushers, the commander of the palace
doormen—are all distinguished by dress, textiles, furs, and the num-
ber of ceremonial horsetails and plumes. In such small details as
headgear, the painter conjures up the myriad gradations of political
status. The head eunuchs of the palace’s inner sanctum, the dar ül-
saâde a[ası and the bab ül-saâde a[ası (chief white eunuch), sport wide
conical hats (mücevveze). The tall, triangular-shaped hat bearing a gold
band distinguishes the vizier from the descendent of the Prophet,
who wears a large, round, green turban. The sultan himself bears
no crown. But, a confection made up of precious gems, the sorguc,
is clipped to the front of his kavuk, a cap encircled with precious
cloth.
It fell to the court to enforce these sumptuary distinctions.69 Displays
of status delimited the social borders between the “men of the state”
and the third estate, as well as between the Muslims, Jews, and
Christians of the city.70 Yet the display of rank took many forms.
The four governors, representing the provinces of Mosul, Aleppo,
Aydin, and Bursa, who will join the festivities later and who have

69
On this topic, see Donald Quataert, “Clothing Laws, State, and Society in the
Ottoman Empire, 1720–1829,” IJMES 29 (1997): 403–25.
70
Bekir Sitki Baykal, “Mustafa III,” A( 8:702.
        93

been diverted from their provincial posts for the occasion, demonstrate
another form of sociopolitical obligation. Their appearance at the
ritual is marked by the presentation of a lavish gift to the sultan.71
Far more intricate than mastering the details of status associated with
dress were the nuances of etiquette (te{rifat) that determined the value
and type of gifts exchanged between superior and subordinate.
Behind the curtain of ceremonial preformances, therefore, rank
and status are also revealed in the expense ledgers of pashas and in
entries under the terms “blandishments” (avaidat ), “honoraria” (caize),
and “presents” (hediye).72 A governorship in eighteenth-century Aleppo,
for example, demanded many such gratuities: to the secretary of
state, his purse-bearer, the chief usher of the Porte, and the direc-
tor of the chancellery, among many other officials and members of
court whose pockets were filled by his largesse. These payments were
over and above the enormous gifts to the grand vizier and his chief
of staff, personal accountant, and clerk.73 Not only did an incoming
governor pass out gifts up and down the Istanbul chain of com-
mand, he was also obliged to confer gratuities in cloth and cash on
the local commander of the fort (dizdar) and the sergeant of the
guard (karakullakina ba{), who in turn paid him homage in money
when seeking transfers or new appointments.74
In a hierarchy defined by service to the state and the presump-
tion of merit and ability, the introduction of such vast sums into the
process of promotion and political mobility produced a tension to
be sure. These exorbitant expenditures for etiquette’s sake, had become
the modus vivendi of the old regime, prompted contemporary observers
to voice their objections to practices that they felt transgressed the
boundaries between a “gift” and outright bribery or extortion.75 Yet

71
See Metin Kunt, “Dervi{ Mehmet Pa{a: Vezir and Entrepreneur: A Study in
Ottoman Political-Economic Theory and Practice,” Turcica 9 (1977): 197–214.
72
D.B}M 3546 (1759); M. Zeki Pakalın, Osmanlı Tarih Deyimleri ve Terimleri Sözlü[ü
(Istanbul: Milli E[itim Bakanlı[ı Yayınları, 1983), 2:58. Uzunçar{ılı, Osmanlı Devletinin
Merkez, 199–202.
73
D.B}M 5019 (1780–1781).
74
D.B}M 3546 (1759–1760). Registration fees included 8,467.5 kuru{ for the
grand vizier and 4,233.5 kuru{ for the imperial treasurer. Abdul-Karim Rafeq, The
Province of Damascus (Beirut: Khayats, 1966), 234–39.
75
See Ahmet Mumcu, Tarih (çindeki Genel Geli{imiyle Birlikte Osmanlı Devletinde Rü{vet
Özellikle Adli Rü{vet (Istanbul: Inkilâp Kitabevi, 1985); compare Natalie Zemon Davis,
The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 2000), 85–99.
94  

inflation of the concept of the “gift” was inevitable. But this, too,
was relative to status: what might be considered a criminal offense
for an individual of a lower station would be perfectly respectable,
even obligatory for his social superior. Facing the greatly increasing
costs of office and diminished incomes, most appointees to higher
office necessarily fell back on entrepreneurial skills.76
The eighteenth century was a point of transition in imperial hier-
archies. Nonetheless, it seemed for a time that despite the pressure
for material resources for entrance and promotion, good introduc-
tions and proper training could still propel a talented young man
into the orbit of the court and or the bureaucracy. Nev{ehirli (brahim
Pasha is a case in point. He found his way to the top through the
ceremonial helvacılar corps, a position that his father, an Anatolian
intendant for the palace, had secured for him.77 A good education
and eloquence must have brought the poet Hâmi of Amid (b. 1679)
to the attention of Muhsinzâde Abdullah Pasha, the grand vizier’s
chief of staff, in 1709.78 Selected to accompany Vizier Köprülüzâde
Abdullah Pasha on his tour of the poet’s native town in 1717, the
pasha entrusted him with the management of his mukataât.
Ultimately, it was business acumene that paid off. Hâmi invested
his own money in malikâne contracts. This income and experience,
must have eventually helped him, at the rather mature age of fifty-
two, to attain a tenured position in the financial department deal-
ing with such contracts, the malikâne halifesi. In reconstructing the life
of another talented man of provincial origin, Ahmed Resmi of Crete,
whose career began in 1730s, Virginia Aksan remarks on “the appar-
ent serendipity of many of the career paths, an elasticity at the upper
administrative levels in a system otherwise restrictive.”79
Fluidity and serendipity were an even greater factor in appoint-
ments to provincial office in the eighteenth century. In time of war,
the normal channels of promotion could be bypassed completely.
The distinguished field commander Çeteci Abdullah Pasha, whom
we encountered during the first decades of the Wars of the Iranian

76
Kunt, Bir Osmanlı Valisinin Yıllık Gelir Gideri, 48–49; for the income and expenses
of a pasha serving in the Balkans in 1714, see Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım,
50.
77
M. Münir Aktepe, “Nev{ehirli (brahim Pa{a,” (A 9:234–39.
78
Ali Amiri, Tezkere-i }u'ara-yı Amid (Istanbul: Matbu'a-i Amidi, 1328/1910) vol.
1, 187–93, 260; Gibb, A History of Ottoman Poetry, vol. 4, 111.
79
Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman, 14–15.
        95

Succession and who served valiantly in the Caucasus campaigns of

the 1720s as the captain of a mercenary battalion (levend ba{a[ası), rose
quickly to the rank of beylerbeyi of Sivas in 1739 and shortly there-
after to vizier-governorships in Diyarbekir, Damascus, and Erzurum.80
More extraordinary still was the fortune of Osman Pasha, a
Georgian slave in the household of the gentry-governor of Damascus
who succeeded his master, one of the members of the powerful 'Azm
clan, to this office between 1760 and 1771.81 This improbable situ-
ation came about after the disastrous pillage of the pilgrim caravan
in 1757, for which Grand Vizier Ragıb Pasha ordered the execu-
tion of As"ad Pasha al-'Azm and the exile of his palace benefactor,
Ebukuf Ahmed A[a (r. 1755–58), the senior black eunuch. By lead-
ing officials to the whereabouts of his master’s treasures, the slave,
Osman was rewarded with the governorship of Damascus, the rank
of beylerbeyi of Tripoli, and 150,000 kuru{ in malikâne contracts in
Hama and Hums. With his son’s elevation to the governorship of
Tripoli shortly thereafter, Istanbul’s intervention effectively turned a
gentry dynasty upside down.
Certainly this confusion of wealth and power, of rising provincial
stars and what appeared to be an unscrupulous central-state elite,
must have rankled the hardworking denizens of the central bureau-
cracy to whom we owe many court histories.82 After the overthrow
of Mehmet IV in 1687, internecine rivalries often took the form of
fiscal assaults by one chartered order on the privileges of another.83
In the decades of political upheaval and fluctuating coalitions between
palace, Porte, soldiers, and populace that followed, all parties were
suspicious of innovation and any tampering with the perquisites of
rank.84 In this setting the new contract appeared to undercut the

80
}evket Beysano[lu, Diyarbakır Tarihi: Anıtları ve Kitabeleri ile (Ankara: Neyir
Matbaası, 1993), 679–81. With the exception of a posting in Syria and in Erzurum,
his assignments were close to home: initially Rakka at the rank of beylerbeyi, then
as pasha (vali ) of Diyarbekir in 1744, 1750, 1752, and 1759.
81
Rafeq, The Province of Damascus, 234–39. D.B}M 3546 (1759–65) records
payments for office, tax farms, and gifts on the occasion of the appointment of
Osman Pasha “currently the Vizier of Damascus” (pp. 1–18); and expenses for his
son Mehmet to assume office in Tripoli (pp. 20–21).
82
Bekir Kütüko[lu, “Vekâyınüvis,” A( 13:271–87.
83
For more on the bedel-i timar, the special levy (cihet) on endowment income,
and other new impositions on wealth and privilege, Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine
Girerken, 207–12; 270–73.
84
On the nature of politics, see Halil (nalcık, “Military and Fiscal Transformation,”
and Rifa'at 'Ali Abou-El-Haj (The 1703 Rebellion and the Structure of Ottoman Politics
96  

exclusivity of the statesmen’s privilege and immunity. By establishing

public auctions throughout the empire, a Muslim man, whether states-
man or commoner, could tender bids on state resources. The malikâne
(from a Persian-Arabic compound meaning “as if to the owner”)85
seemed to promise proprietary rights: it offered a long-term invest-
ment, freedom from administrative interference, and the opportunity
for reputable male heirs to lay claim to the shares after the previous
contractor’s death.
Commenting on the grand vizier’s decision to retract most con-
tracts at the eve of the war with Venice in 1715 (an order that was
rescinded shortly before (brahim Pasha’s assumption of office),86 the
court historian Ra{id Efendi vented his frustration. He denounced
“those not deign of state resources and lacking even a trace of ‘nobil-
ity’ [literally, absolutely not belonging to the state ‘kati'an miri
olmiyan’]—[such as] a common porter or boatswain, [who] could
upon reaching the rank of shaykh of any guild whatsoever, obtain
a malikâne contract.” The historian lamented that while the new con-
tract was “spreading throughout the empire” it did not promote the
requisite sense of civic responsibility for the welfare of the empire’s
subjects. Rich men simply treated the malikâne as another business
venture, using state assets “as if they were their private property.”87
Although it strikes many familiar, anti-corruption chords, Ra{id
Efendi’s diatribe does contains some distinctly eighteenth-century ele-
ments. In his eyes, the problem with the life-lease was not simply
that it allowed commoners to trespass beyond estate lines or that it
relegated landed resources to armchair administrators instead of to
soldiers. Rather, by his unusual use of the term “miri ” (imperial) as

[Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut te Istanbul, 1984], 31);

compare Philip T. Hoffman (“Early Modern France, 1450–1700,” in Fiscal Crises,
Liberty and Representative Government, 1450–1789, ed. Philip T. Hoffman and Kathryn
Norberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 250–51.
85
F. Steinglass, Persian-English Dictionary 6th ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1977), 1143. The term also referred to the early “split-rent” agreements
between landlords and the Ottoman state. See Irene Beldiceanu-Steinherr, “Malikâne,”
EI 2 4:227–28; and Ömer Lutfi Barkan, “Malikâne-Divânî Sistemi,” Türk Hukuk ve
(ktisat Tarihi Mecmuası 2 (1939): 119–84.
86
Genç, “Osmanlı Maliyesinde Malikâne Sistemi,” 235 n. 34. For an example,
note the reinstatement of the farm held by a religious scholar in Mosul, Haydar
Efendi (MMD 6549:32–33).
87
“Rich individuals [kuvvet-i maliyesi olanlar] began taking malikâne contracts on
everything they saw, using these resources as if they were their own personal prop-
erty [kendü mülkü gibi mutassarif ].” Ra{id, Tarih-i Ra{id, 4:176–77.
        97

a qualifier of persons as well as things, he seems to express the fear

that this particular contract threatened the very principle of agency
upon which the bureaucratic orders were founded.88 The life-lease
represented a bought privilege that diluted the differences that dis-
tinguished the rical-i devlet from the third estate. While a commoner
gained quasi-official perquisites,89 officials and officers, the true ser-
vants of state, actually compromised their immunities when they took
up such contracts. Whether it was by paying the special enthrone-
ment tax (rüsum-u cülus) of 1703 or by contributing a percentage of
the surety as compensation for not taking up arms (cebelü bedeliyesi)
in years of war, officers and officials had became tax payers as well
as contractors.90
Perhaps most grating for the civil servant who had patiently climbed
the rungs of the state hierarchy, was the potential for commoners
to amass state resources in an unregulated manner. This was, after
all, a ruling class that was defined not only by its privileges and tax
immunities but by its liabilities, chief among which were the forfei-
ture of all personal wealth upon death or dismissal from office.91

88
Defterdar Sarı Mehmet Pasha (Wright, Ottoman Statecraft, 23) chastises con-
temporaries about the misuse of state resources. For other abuses, see Abou-El-Haj,
The 1703 Rebellion, 116; Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım ve De[i{im, 42, 51. The
perception of abuse is not unconnected to the rank and status of the actor. In the
sixteenth century, Mustafa Ali complained about the impudence of low ranking per-
sons (Andreas Tietze, Mustafa Ali’s Counsel for Sultans of 1581 [Wien: Verlag der
Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1979] vol. 1, 58). In the late eight-
eenth century, similar sentiments are expressed by Selim III’s advisor, Abdullah
Efendi Tatarcık (see “Selim-i Sâni devrinde Nizâm-ı Devlet hakkında mutâl"aât,”
Türk Tarihi Encümeni Mecmuası 8 [1333/1914–1915]: 17).
89
The usual formula to confer such immunity is “mefrüzü’l-kalem ve maktü’ül-
kadem”; Genç, “Osmanlı Maliyesinde Malikâne,” 239; for examples in diplomas,
MMD 9486:6 and DA III:153.
90
Michael Kwass (“A Kingdom of Taxpayers: State Formation, Privilege, and
Political Culture in Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of Modern History 70 [1998]:
300) suggests that privilege should have been incompatible with tax paying. The
Ottoman nobility of service had similar tax immunities but were forced to con-
tribute in periods of crisis. The new lease brought new obligations. Lease holders
contributed to the cülus bah{i{i, the ascension donation to the janissaries (Defterdar
Sarı Mehmet Pasha, Ottoman Statecraft, 104–5; Genç, “Osmanlı Maliyesinde
Malikâne Sistemi,” 247). In the years of war, they paid the cebelü bedeliyesi, a levy
assessed on contracts at the rate of 10 percent or 15 percent of the bid price.
91
J. R. Jones (“Fiscal Policies, Liberties, and Representative Government during
the Reigns of the Last Stuarts,” in Hoffman and Norberg, Fiscal Crises, 67–95) pro-
vides a useful discussion on the difference between liberties, such as property, and
privileges, such as tax farming.
98  

Although some courtiers and high officials may have welcomed the
loophole furnished by the malikâne edit which provided for some form
of intergenerational devolution,92 there was no reason to allow the
gentry and ulema to take advantage of this provision because they
had no legal barriers to inheritance. Every aspect of the new con-
tract seemed to assure that the third estate would benefit from such
special provisions or from any ambiguities arising from an overly
generous interpretation of Islamic laws on private property.93
The bureaucrat’s fears proved largely unfounded. Despite attempts
to conflate contract and property, ordinary contractors rarely suc-
ceeded in gaining state recognition of their claims.94 Whether as
beneficiaries of the income of high yielding revenue sources in their
lifetime or as a member of an elite network of shareholders, it was
the courtier and the high ranking officer who benefited dispropor-
tionately from this fiscal dispensation. They, too, had the best chance
of converting, often in stages, a public resource into private property.95
Rather than the cause, the new contract may have been another
symptom of the pronounced closing of state ranks to outsiders that
occurred in the eighteenth century. A clique of households and

92
D’Ohsson, Tableau général, vol. 3, 368–69. Although the principle of devolving
shares to a surviving male relative, the “evlâdiyet {urûtu,” was a well-established
practice, disputes (note MMD 9494:23 [1702–03]) did arise.
93
The Hanefite legal school recognizes overlapping but analytically distinct pro-
prietary claims on the usufruct and ownership of assets, according to Chafik Chehata,
Essai d’une theorie générale de l’obligation en droit Musulman (Cairo: Nury Publishers, 1936)
1:173.
94
For example, in 1696 (MMD 3426:56) the sons of a certain Yahya Beg (per-
haps a janissary or a timar holder) petitioned the Porte for the life-lease on the dye
house in Aleppo, arguing that they were entitled to the lease because their father,
the previous tax farmer, had made substantial capital investments in the building.
Indeed, the brothers seemed to have proprietary claims. Jean-Pierre, “Décentralisation
Ottomane et affirmation urbaine à Alep à la fin du XVIIIème siècle,” in Mouvements
communautaires et éspaces urbains au Machreq, ed. Mona Zakaria, et al. [Beirut: Centre
d’études et de recherches sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain, 1985], 129) came
across a complaint that had been brought against them in the court of Aleppo.
Craftsmen accused the sons of insisting that the new contract made them owners
outright of the dye house.
95
For the gradual privatization of the dye house of Çünkü{, originally a tax
farm, MMD 9519:81 and D.B}M 1069 (n.d.) For other instances of converting con-
tract into property, Abou-El-Haj, The 1703 Rebellion, 9, 51, 116. Of these attempts,
the conversion of contracts into endowments seems to have been the most secure
route: In 1710 Grand Vizier Ali Pasha converted a malikâne holding into a pious
endowment (waqf ) that supported the building of a mosque-imaret-dershane complex
in Istanbul.
        99

influential bureaucratic families would dominate the major branches

of government service.96 The lower rungs of state service may have
traded size for security and exclusivity.97 In addition to securing life
tenure in office, gedik (an analogue of the “slots” held by infantry),
which was conceded in 1732, bureaucrats were able to amend their
charter to assure that family members and protégés were given pref-
erence over apprentices in assignments for vacant posts.98
Although these developments did not preclude the possibility that
a Hâmi or an Ahmed Resmi might still enter the official hierarchies
of service, in the later decades of the eighteenth century most posi-
tions did fall to the descendants of rical families or, in the case of
the judiciary, the children of former muftis, the so-called mollahzâde.99
Wealth alone could not provide the insider’s edge; a general liter-
acy in the branches of state service and residence in the Istanbul
was also essential.100 Proximity to palace and Porte gave them access
to the most important tax-farm auctions, credit, and the officers who
could make or break a candidate’s career. Over the century, the
administration would grow top heavy with vizierial-level appointees.
Rather than a pyramid, the state hierarchy, with its narrow middle
of intermediate-rank positions, such as the coveted cadre of the
bureau chiefs, the hâcegân, grew hourglass shaped.101
Such assets also separated the Istanbul bureaucratic elites, who
assumed executive, military, and administrative provincial positions
with greater frequency, from the gentry-governors of the eighteenth-
century. One need only compare career paths to see the glaring
differences in opportunities. In comparison to the wide range of

96
See Abou-El-Haj, “The Ottoman Vezir and Pasha Households:” Tülay Artan,
“From Charismatic Leadership to Collective Rule,” Toplum ve Ekonomi 4 (1993):
53–94; Madeline Zilfi, The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Postclassical Age
(1600 –1800) (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1988); Suraiya Faroqhi, “Civilian
Society and Political Power in the Ottoman Empire: A Report on Research in
Collective Bibliography, 1480–1830,” IJMES 17 (1985): 109–17.
97
See Joel Shinder, “Career Line Formation in the Ottoman Bureaucracy,
1648–1750: A New Perspective,” JESHO 16 (1973): 216–37.
98
Shinder, “Career Line Formation,” 228–29, 233–35.
99
See Madeline Zilfi, “Elite Circulation in the Ottoman Empire: Great Mollas
of the Eighteenth Century,” JESHO 26 (1983): 318–20.
100
According to Aksan (An Ottoman Statesman, 14–15, n. 47) there was little or no
tracking within the civil bureaucracy allowing clerks to acquire expertise in a vari-
ety of fields.
101
In 1793, the Porte issued a new kanunname aimed at reducing the number of
the top tier of rical, the pasha elite. Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım, 344–45.
100  

appointments afforded the Istanbul-based aristocracy of service, the

Porte rotated a gentry-governor’s assignments within a restricted geo-
graphical radius, typically to regions adjoining to the appointee’s
place of origin. With the exception of tours of duty in Syria and
Erzurum, Çeteci Abdullah Pasha, an heroic defender of the empire,
spent most of his career close to his native town of Çermik, in gov-
ernorships in Rakka and in Diyarbekir (1744, 1750, 1752, and 1759).102
The practice of awarding the entire revenues of a province as a
“block” contract could only have reinforced this pattern, as well as
the tendency for gentry-governors such as the 'Azms of Syria, the
Jalilis of Mosul, and the Karaosmano[lu in the greater Izmir-Bergama
region, to pass these offices from one generation to another.103 To
the extent that the gentry’s own economic and political ambitions
were circumscribed regionally, they may not have even considered
these differences as inherent limitations. Gentry-governors reinvested
state-gained income in urban real estate, tax farms, plantations, loans,
and trade, a diversified portfolio of assets that remained well within
their political sphere of influence.104
The Istanbul insider remained closely tethered to the capital. Short
tours of duty throughout the empire discouraged concentrated invest-
ments in a single province, unless they offered, as did many Balkan
and Aegean commercial revenues, particularly high rates of return.
Maintaining a full-time household in the capital was essential. Sırrı
Selim Pasha paid 925 kuru{ a month to support his skeletal admin-
istrative household in the capital while on duty in Baghdad between
1777 and 1780.105 This staff managed his portfolio in his absence.

102
Beysano[lu, Diyarbakır Tarihi, 679–81.
103
The sons of Vizier Süleyman Pasha 'Azmzâde (d. 1743), pasha of Damascus,
shared title to tax farms valued at 52,330 kuru{.
104
On gentry accumulation during this period, see Margaret Meriwether, “Urban
Notables and Rural Resources in Aleppo, 1770–1830,” IJTS 4 (1987): 55–73; Yuzo
Nagata, Some Documents on the Big Farms (Çiftliks) of the Notables in Western
Anatolia (Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and
Africa, 1976); and Suraiya Faroqhi, “Wealth and Power in the Land of Olives:
Economic and Political Activities of Müridzâde Hacı Mehmed Agha, Notable of
Edremit,” in Landholding and Commercial Agriculture in the Middle East, ed. Ça[lar Keyder
and Faruk Tabak (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 77–96. For
an approach to accumulation in early modern South Asia, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam
and C. A. Bayly, “Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern
India,” in Merchants, Markets and the State in Early Modern India, ed. Sanjay Subrahmanyam
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), 242–54.
105
KK 786. I am grateful to Mehmet Genç for sharing this record with me.
        101

They recorded payments from the four corners of the empire: 42,060
kuru{ from Belgrade, sent by an agent, Osman Efendi; a down pay-
ment of 10,000 kuru{ on a tax farm from Kara Halil in Kütahya;
revenues from a plantation in Siroz, administered by Muhurdarzâde
Hasan Pasha; and income on the shares in the recently reorganized,
state-run tobacco regie in Istanbul, among many other holdings and
ventures.
By reinforcing a divided hierarchy, the market in malikâne leases
perpetuated the dominance of the Istanbul elite while, as we shall
see in the next chapter, extending a certain range of the benefits of
state office to the gentry. Such disparities were, however, build in
to the system. The initial commands establishing provincial auctions
explicitly restricted the type of tax contracts that could be sold out-
side the capital and discouraged provincials from obtaining shares
in another region. The most valuable commercial and aggregate tax-
grants remained in the hands of the state elite.106 Istanbul’s insatiable
demand for highly liquid revenues, such as customs and excise taxes,
undoubtedly dictated the extension of this form of contracting into
specific regions and economic sectors.107 By 1741, cumulative malikâne
investments in the empire (as measured in surety payments) reached
4.3 million kuru{, of which fully one-quarter were located in the
Morea and the Aegean islands. Another third of the investments
were located in the Balkans.108 As the number of Istanbul investors

D.B}M 4666 records deposits from Aleppo made by poliçe to Istanbul between 1776
and 1781.
106
MMD 10,143:164 (pertaining to Diyarbekir); in Damascus (MMD 3423:570)
the auctioneer was restricted from offering ocaklık mukataa as proprietary contracts.
107
MMD 1637; MMD 730 (copy). Of 1,442 new contracts in 1703, more than
half (871 contracts) were awarded on Balkan resources. There were 571 contracts
in Damascus, Malatya, Diyarbekir, Mosul, Adana, and }ehrizor; the remaining con-
tracts were held in the regions of Western Anatolia, Aleppo, and Tokat-Sivas. In
effect, of the 897,705 kuru{ taken in by the treasury in the form of cash advance
(muaccele) payments, less than half (361,835 kuru{) fell within the geographical zone
originally designated by the edit; one-third pertained to the Balkans (322,278 kuru{).
A little less than a quarter were on contracts in Anatolia (213,592 kuru{).
108
Forty-three percent were located in Anatolia, Syria, Kurdistan, and Iraq.
Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken, 134, and CM 5001 (1741) provide figures for
the Balkans (172,610,160 akçe); Anadolu, Damascus, Aleppo, Baghdad, Mosul, and
Diyarbekir (268,525,200 akçe); Morea, Crete, and other islands (79,732,320 akçe).
MMD 6981 provides a running tally of new contracts awarded between 1721 and
1723 for Aleppo (which rose by 67,905 kuru{); Tokat sales nearly doubled (15,181
kuru{, on top of an existing 16,391.5 kuru{ in contracts). Sales in Adana, Ayıntab,
Malatya, Diyarbekir, Erzurum, Mosul, and Baghdad increased at slower rates. For
sales within Crete see also MMD 9511.
102  

and partnerships rose from 771 in 1768 to 963 in 1789,109 their share
of the malikâne market as a whole rose from approximately two-thirds
of the total (65 percent) to nine-tenths (87 percent).110

“Corporate Patrimonialism” and the Reproduction of Power

The portrait painters of the imperial elite rarely allowed rumblings

of discontent to disturb the varnished surfaces of their compositions.111
In Levni’s paintings, the calvary parade gallantly; decorous officers
and well-disciplined foot soldiers march in tight formation. In a rare
instance or two, some indication of countercurrents does break
through. Violent disorder may be is represented by the janissaries
who break formation and race wildly toward their plates of saffron-
scented rice (Plate 4).112 It was the ritual overturning of the kettle
at the At Meydanı that sent up the signal for a military insurrec-
tion. During the Edirne Incident of 1703 and again in 1730 under
the leadership of Patrona Halil, janissaries and guildsmen took to
the streets to demand the execution of corrupt officials and an end
to oppressive taxation.113
Spectators at the circumcision ceremony in 1720 may not yet have
forgotten the ignominious fate of Feyzullah Efendi, who, after serv-
ing in two administrations, fell victim to the uprising of 1703. Feyzullah
Efendi was the tutor of the young Mustafa II (1695–1703) and served
as the nakib"ül-e{râf under his father. The janissary coup of 1687 ban-
ished him to his hometown, Erzurum. Once his former pupil came

109
Murat Çizakça, A Comparative Evolution of Business Partnerships: The Islamic World
and Europe, with Specific Reference to the Ottoman Archives (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 173.
110
Ibid., 174. MMD 9524:10. By 1734, central state investors held 633 kese and
9 kuru{ in contracts and the provincials had invested about half as much, or 334
kese and 460 kuru{ (50,000 akçe per kese). Genç, “Osmanlı Maliyesinde Malikâne
Sistemi,” 282. Note: the percentage (87) is based on records from 1789, not 1787.
111
See Serpil Ba[cı, Priscilla Mary I{in, and Selmin Kangal, eds. The Sultan’s
Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman (Istanbul: Tükiye ({ Bankası, 2000).
112
TKSA MS 3593: 22b–23a.
113
On the upheavals of the first half of the century, see Abou-El-Haj, The 1703
Rebellion; Lavender Cassels, The Struggle for the Ottoman Empire (London: Murray, 1966);
Robert Olson, “The Esnaf and the Patrona Halil Rebellion of 1730: A Realignment
in Ottoman Politics?” JESHO 17 (1974): 329–40; and idem, “Jews, Janissaries, Esnaf
and the Revolt of 1740 in Istanbul: Social Upheaval and Political Realignment in
the Ottoman Empire,” JESHO 20 (1978): 185–207; and M. Münir Aktepe, Patrona
Isyanı (1730) (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi, 1958).
        103

to the throne, however, the former tutor was recalled to Istanbul.114

Assuming the post of head of the religious establishment, the }eyh"ül-
(slam, but a few months after the rescript authorizing the new malikâne
contract, Feyzullah Efendi lost no opportunity to enhance his per-
sonal fortune. He seized gardens, farms, and villas in Edirne and
Istanbul for personal use. He laid claim to revenues from tax farms
on agricultural resources and villages across the empire, from Thrace
to the Caucasus.115 By the time of his death, his probate revealed a
fortune of 50 million akçe in cash alone.116
Such rapacity, as well as his bold trespass over clearly marked
lines of service, earned Feyzullah Efendi the dubious distinction of
being one of only three chief muftis to be executed in office.117
Though audacious and unbridled, his actions were far from impolitic.
Past experience had taught him the fleeting nature of power. Although
he exploited the full potential of his office, he also liberally handed
out positions and tax fiefs in Edirne, Rumeli, Sivas, and Çorum to
his retainers.118 He placed members of his family, even minors, in
important judicial posts; at one point, all of the top positions were
filled by relatives.119 Lacking money in hand, he prevailed upon other
members of the administration whenever a choice contract came to
auction.120
Because he was a member of the ulema, Feyzullah Efendi’s exe-
cution in 1703 and the subsequent confiscation of his patrimony
were extraordinary events. Nonetheless, he exemplifies the dilemma
of state elite as well as the breakdown of the boundaries between
privilege and property. For members of the military or bureaucracy,

114
Abou-El-Haj (The 1703 Rebellion) emphasizes this point. For other studies, see
Sabra F. Meservey, “Feyzullah Efendi: An Ottoman Seyhülislam” (Ph.D. diss.,
Princeton University, 1966); Suraiya Faroqhi, “An Ulama Grandee and his Household,”
JOS 9 (1989): 199–208; and Ahmet Türek and F. Çetin Derin, “Feyzullah Efendi"nin
Kendü Kaleminden Hal Tercümesi,” Tarih Dergisi 23 (1969): 204–8; Tarih Dergisi
24 (1970): 69–92.
115
Özcan, Anonim Osmanlı Tarihi, 221–27.
116
Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken, 297.
117
Mumcu, Osmanlı Devletinde Rü{vet, 232–33. See also idem, Osmanlı Devletinde
Siyaseten Katl (Ankara: Birey ve Toplum Yayınları, 1985).
118
Özcan, Anonim Osmanlı Tarihi, 224.
119
Ibid., 225. The author of this anonymous history attributes the origins of the
rebellion against Mustafa II to a squabble over a malikâne lease in Adana that
involved one of Feyzullah Effendi’s followers, Telhisi Mehmet A[a.
120
Ibid., 224. “He buys a malikâne for 1000 kuru{ at auction, paying only half
the price, explaining that the vizier or defterdar would pay the balance.”
104  

expropriation was the inescapable conclusion to even the most illus-

trious career. Once justified because of the servile status of the six-
teenth-century elite, the predominance of freeborn Muslims, including
many who were married to princesses, in state service may have
given pause to the administration in later years. Bureaucrats and his-
torians clearly disapproved of the vindictive and opportunistic uses
of forfeiture so common during Feyzullah Efendi’s tenure and dur-
ing the first half of the reign of Ahmet III.121 Nevertheless, as the
reams of records documenting the estates of officers found in the
probate section of the military court (kismet-i askeriye) of Istanbul and
other cities or the inventories of the possessions of officials and,
increasingly in the eighteenth century, prominent gentry and towns-
men, found in muhalefat registers of the central-state archive testify,
these rules were vigorously enforced throughout the century. Although
judges recognized the right of widows to reclaim their dowry and
even allowed children a fixed share of inheritance in accordance
with Islamic law, officials went to enormous lengths to ferret out
wealth and liquidate an officer’s worldly possessions—from home fur-
nishings, clothing, books, weapons, and beasts to gardens, outstand-
ing debts, and urban real estate.
In short, what makes Feyzullah Efendi’s example particularly inter-
esting to historians is not that his strategy for accumulating wealth
was unusual, but because it was considered unfitting for a member
of the ulema, the mufti’s practice of what we might call “corporate
patrimonialism”122 caught the attention of his contemporaries. Typically,
officials made the utmost of their time in office to insure the repro-
duction of family wealth and power. Given the restrictions on indi-
vidual patrimony, it was necessary for the ruling elite to distribute
these assets, position as well as property, widely among family and
associates in the hope that at least part of these investments would
outlive them. And, in this, few had been more successful than the

121
Deftardar Sarı Mehmed Efendi, Ottoman Statescraft, 70; Ra{id Efendi, Tarih-i
Ra{id, vol. 2, 100–1, 122, 301, 424; 4:30, 284. Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken,
296–98; Abou-El-Haj, The 1703 Rebellion, 12–13.
122
Charles Tilly reminds me that this form of accumulation is in many ways
analogous to guild practices in early modern England and Italy. For some thoughts
on how to rehabilitate the notion of patrimonialism, see Susanne Hoeber Rudolph
and Lloyd I. Rudolph, “Authority and Power in Bureaucratic and Patrimonial
Administration: A Revisionist Interpretation of Weber on Bureaucracy,” World Politics
31 (1979): 195–227.
        105

former chief mufti; although most of Feyzullah Efendi’s urban real

estate appears to have been seized and resold, at least part of his
wide-ranging investments slipped through the probate officer’s reach.123
Personal disgrace notwithstanding, he established his family as one of
the great ulema lineages of the eighteenth century.124 His sons Mustafa
and Murtaza served as the empire’s chief judicial authority under
Mahmud I (r. 1730–54) and Osman III (r. 1754–57), respectively.125
Rifa"at Abou-El-Haj’s research on political networks has brought
to light the fact that the social reproduction of power also depended
contacts and connections that reached across orders and the status
lines. The creation of lateral lines of accumulation of both capital
and connections was raised to a high art in the organization of an
official’s political household or kapı.126 Composed of family, associ-
ates and retainers, the kapı offered training to its members while
enhancing the political prospects of its head. In time of war, the
officer with a well-appointed household might lend a battalion of
men to the sultan. In peacetime, his retainers, who numbered from
one hundred to one thousand persons, furnished the basis of a provin-
cial administration as well as a permanent staff for his Istanbul base
of operations.127 In the end, the household was itself an insurance
policy and investment. Whether it took the form of seeding mem-
bers of his kapı through the bureaucracy and military, by distribut-
ing his wealth among them, or by offering a trusted associate his
daughter and making his servant a damad, the head of a household
created a party that extended his influence as well as a medium for
perpetuating wealth beyond his own lifetime.
As Feyzullah’s case also makes clear, corporate strategies for man-
aging and reproducing wealth and power required assets that were
fungible. Not only the narrowly defined rical-i devlet, but other groups

123
He did retain a cash foundation. (smail Kurt, Para Vakıfları Nazariyat ve Tatbikat
(Istanbul: Ensar Ne{riyat, 1996), 163.
124
Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken, 297.
125
Norman Izkowitz, “Men and Ideas in the Eighteenth Century Ottoman
Empire,” in Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History, ed. T. Naff and R. Owen
(Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1977), 19.
126
On the kapı, see Abou-El-Haj, “The Ottoman Vezir and Pasha Households,
1683–1703.”
127
Uzunçar{ılı, Osmanlı Devletinin Merkez, 207. Onik Jamgocyan (“Les finances
de l’Empire Ottoman et les financièrs de Constantinople, 1732–1853” [Thèse de
doc., Université de Paris I [Sorbonne] 1988], 231–32) concludes that the size of
pasha households actually increased over the century.
106  

including the court utilized these resources in building and main-

taining their networks. Princesses cultivated their own variation on
the political household, consisting of circles of intimates, including
nieces, husbands, children, and female slaves. Revenue contracts were
ideal forms of capital in that they could easily be subdivided in shares
and distributed among members of the household.128 In the case of
Esma Sultan, the Elder (1726–1788), one of Ahmad III’s daughters,
crown estates turned into malikâne contracts were divided among her
protégés and managed by agents and subcontractors.129 The name
of one of her male associates appears as contractor in his own right.130
Although extant lists of the Istanbul tax farming elite tend to reg-
ister shareholders or family partnerships separately, it seems likely
that many “individuals” were actually members of larger political
houses.131 Indeed, given the pervasiveness of corporate strategies of
accumulation, we might ask how many degrees of separation actu-
ally distanced the highest and lowest bidders in the Istanbul mar-
ket? An incomplete register of malikâne contractors who paid the
special war tax of 1737–38 lists 405 individuals, couples and part-
nerships, perhaps slightly less than half of the total investors in the
city.132 At first glance, aside from the decided underrepresentation of

128
See (smail Hakkı Uzunçar{ılı, “Üçünçü Mustafa’nın kızı }ah Sultan’a Borç
Senedi,” Belleten 25 (1961): 97; and idem, “Sultan III. Mustafa’nın Hüzün Verici
Bir Borç Senedi,” Belleten 22 (1968): 595–98.
129
According to CS 4051, a document that Michael Hickok kindly brought to
my attention, princesses also operated their own firms of tax farms, dividing shares
among female and male household members. For other examples, see MMD
9565:10–11, which contains the holdings of various royal women (Emine, Fatma,
and Zeyneb Hanım); TKSA D 4477 is the esham register of Hatice Hanım; TKSA
D 6573 is a register of Habibe Hanım, the wife of Moralı Ahmed. In Egypt,
Mamluk women played an important role in preserving household wealth (See Susan
Staffa, “Dimensions of Women’s Power in Historic Cairo,” Islamic and Middle Eastern
Studies: A Festschrift in Honor of Professor Wadie Jwaideh, ed. Robert Olson et al.
[Brattleboro, Vt.: Amana, 1987], 62–99). They invested in tax farms. In the rest
of the empire, however, local women were poorly represented. Only one woman
tax farmer appears in the local accounts for eighteenth-century Diyarbekir (MMD
9518:52) and she resided in Istanbul. The situation changes at the end of the old
regime. Between 1848 and 1860, three Diyarbekir women (MMD 9519:122, 130,
137) held shares in village tax farms.
130
MMD 9565, entry no. 655.
131
On the practice of assigning revenues to members of a rical’s household, see
Thomas, A Study of Naima, 105 and Kunt, The Sultan’s Servants, 88.
132
MMD 367 is undated. Internal evidence (Ne{e Erim identified Süleyman
Efendi as one of contractors on the customhouse of Erzurum) suggests that it belongs
to the 1736–37 war period. Süleyman Pasha, another individual, was governor of
        107

the ulema, the composition of contractors seems to reflect a cross

section of officialdom and palace staff.
Although subsumed under individual entries, it is still possible to
discern the outline, at times faint, of corporate strategies of accu-
mulation. Partnerships based on blood relationships are frequently
clearly spelled out. Such is the case of the household headed by
Hacı Mehmet Emin A[a, captain of the mounted palace guard, a[a-
ı silâhdar, who together with his sons and brother held 75,340 kuru{
in malikâne contracts.133 Others sought out investments for the pur-
poses of retirement.134 Perhaps this may help explain the “reverse
migration” in the eighteenth century, as central-state bureaucrats
relocated to provincial cities or towns where they had invested in
tax farms or real estate.135 Few members of the gentry find their way
onto the central-state rolls. However, the clan holdings of the brother
and sons of Vizier Süleyman Pasha 'Azmzâde (d. 1743), governor
of Damascus were substantial enough to merit an entry. Collectively,
these shares valued at 52,330 kuru{ suggest that tax-farming part-
nerships might have served as a deterrent to probate officers.
The vast majority of entries—involving the nine out of ten indi-
viduals who invested at levels of 10,000 kuru{ (equivalent to approx-
imately 2,500 Venetian ducats) or less136—are less forthcoming about

Damascus between 1734 and 1738 (Rafeq, The Province of Damascus, 119). 322 per-
sons held investments (based on their muaccele) of less than 10,000 kuru{; 51 per-
sons, between 10–25,000 kuru{; 26 persons, between 25–50,000 kuru{; three persons,
between 50–100,000 kuru{; and three persons, above 100,000 kuru{.
133
MMD 367. One son, Mehmed, held a quarter share in Anatolia (in the
Voyvodalık of Tokat) valued at 10,850 kuru{.
134
MMD 367. For example, the sons of former Vizier Ali Pasha, (smail Bey,
Selim, Ahmed, and Mehmed, held 34,475 kuru{ in shares on various malikâne farms,
principally located in the mainland Greece (the Morea). In the case of a civil bureau-
crat, Kasariyeli Hacı Ahmed Efendi, once head of a treasury bureau dealing with
accounts receivable (ruznamçe evvel ), held malikâne contracts valued at 57,650 kuru{
together with his son Ebü Bekir A[a, a nephew (or grandson) Mehmed A[a; a son-
in-law, Mehmed; and an unidentified individual, Ahmed A[a (perhaps his steward
or head of household).
135
For the social fluidity of the pool of “provincial” elites and return migration,
see Karl K. Barbir, “From Pasha to Efendi: The Assimilation of Ottomans into
Damascene Society, 1516–1783,” IJTS 1 (1979–80): 68–83.
136
Investment distribution continues to be extremely skewed. Only one in ten
individuals held shares valued at 25,000 kuru{ or higher; four out of five invested
far below 10,000 kuru{. A considerable sum of money, 10,000 kuru{ was the equiv-
alent of 2,500 Venetian ducats and represented many times the lifetime wealth of
an ordinary officer. Consider that the entire worldly goods of a low-ranking officer
of the Arsenal in 1766–67 amounted to 3,040 kuru{ (I}MS K-A, 293:2–3); Esseyyid
108  

their relationships to other investors. In some cases, however, the

clerk has noted the network. Belonging to a kapı is explicitly indi-
cated by such expressions as “the dependent of ” (tâbi-i ) or “from
among the followers of ” (ân etbâ-ı, ân hulefâ, or ân bâb).137
Splitting contracts among a household combined payment and col-
lective management. The size and distribution of shares may also
indicate the division of labor within a household. For example, the
household of the deceased director of the fisc, Halil Efendi, suggests
a close intermingling, even parity, between kin and clients. His son,
Hüseyin A[a (752.5 kuru{) and his personal attendant (mehter) Hasan
A[a (750 kuru{) possessed nearly equal allotments. Halil Efendi left
other retainers smaller portions in the same contracts: for his purse
bearer (kisedâr), there was a share valued at 683 kuru{; for his deputy
(kethüda), a 300 kuru{ share; for his ser mehterân, a 420 kuru{ share;
and his ser çuhadar (head chamberlain), a 160 kuru{ share. His rela-
tionship with a scholar, Kadızâde Elhac Süleyman, who possessed
the largest share (1070 kuru{) in these holdings, however, remains
undefined.
Over the century, the disparities among the roughly 1,000 malikâne
investors seem to mirror the stratification of wealth and power among
Istanbul political elite as a whole. A narrow group at the uppermost
tier of the shareholder pyramid appears to constitute the truly aris-
tocratic level of the Ottoman bureaucratic and military elite.138 In
1787–88, this group comprised the fourteen individuals and family
partnerships whose assets exceeded 100,000 kuru{. Although repre-
senting only 2 percent of the total number of individuals registered
in Istanbul (833 individual entries, of which 133 were explicitly part-
nerships), their combined wealth, which totaled 3,264,282 kuru{, made
up roughly 30 percent of the value of malikâne shares held by central-
state investors and 24 percent of the total investments in malikâne
contracts in the empire. The largest malikâne firm, that of Admiral
Âdet Hüseyin Pasha and his wife Emine, held shares that totaled

Ebübekir, the cavu{ a[ası, head courier of the grand vizier, left an estate of 26,604
kuru{ (I}MS 181:1–3); a deputy judge, a naib (Ibid., 11–12) in Rumeli owned goods
and a house together estimated at 9,498 kuru{.
137
MMD 367. For some examples: Ahmet A[a ve Küçük Mehmed A[a, ân
etbâ-i Sa"adullah Efendi, 4500 kuru{; Mustafa A[a, ân müteferrikân-ı gedikluyân ân
etbâ-i müteveffa Karakulak Ali A[a, 312 kuru{.
138
Çizakca, Business Partnerships, 173.
        109

829,201.5 kuru{ and was roughly equivalent to 8 percent of the total

malikâne investments in the empire.139 They held almost exclusively
commercial revenues, such as those pertaining to the tariff stations
at the ports of Chios, Iskenderiye, and Crete.140
Middle-range investors accounted for no more than 10 percent of
the total population of Istanbul contractors. It is conceivable that
the 26 (3 percent of the total) individuals who held shares valued at
between 50,000 and 100,000 kuru{ and the 62 individuals (7.4 per-
cent of the total) who possessed shares valued at between 25,000
and 50,000 kuru{ may have had a degree of autonomy with respect
to the true aristocracy of service. However, it seems unlikely that
the remainder, still nearly nine out of every ten individuals listed (88
percent), whose holdings fell far below a 25,000 kuru{ threshold, could
have functioned without affiliation to a larger corporate structure.
Without detailed studies, it is not possible to reconstruct their ties
to other shareholders.
As tax farming expanded over the century, so did the responsi-
bilities of the members of the larger households. Transactions between
shareholders and transfers of money were best handled through the
Istanbul courts, as were procedures of ceding shares from one party
to another (kasr-ı yed or fera[ ), demands for repayment, and loans in
arrears, as well as the petitions to devolve shares to sons.141 They
processed petitions, made appearances at court, and bid at auction,
in addition to protecting their patrons’ political interests broadly;142
they secured credit and subfinanced operations.143 The legal courts

139
MMD 9565:1–5.
140
Some of their shares might include crown estates. Many investments were
concentrated within discrete regions. For example, the shares of Vizier Gül Ahmed
Pasha and household members, including his kethüda-i harç, Mustafa A[a; his meh-
terdar, Süleyman A[a; and his children, Feyzullah Bey, Ali Bey, and (smail Bey,
were all held in the Aegean—the Morea, Crete, and Izmir.
141
For examples of ceding (kasr-ı yed ) shares, see MMD 9896:138; MMD 9494:23.
On the legal methods of transferring/relinquishing title ( fera[ ), see the judge’s hand-
book (circa 1784) Süleymâniye Library MS Izmir 782 no. 1, folios 66a–67b.
142
In 1705–6, a Diyarbekir seyyid re-registered his contract through an Istanbul
intermediary (MMD 9896:138).
143
On the difficulties of finance and credit in the provinces, see Araks }ahiner,
“The Sarrafs of Istanbul: Financiers of the Empire,” (M.A. thesis, Institute of Social
Sciences, Master of Arts in History, Bo[aziçi University, 1995), 30. Bartholomew
Plaisted, Narrative of a Journey from Basra to Aleppo in 1750 in The Desert Route to India
Being the Journals of Four Travelers by the Great Desert Caravan Route between Aleppo and
Basra, 1745–51, ed. Douglas Carruthers (London: Hakluyt Society, 1929), 104. Bruce
110  

furnished notarial documents (hüccet) attesting to payment and describ-

ing the ultimate recipient or recipients of the funds.144 As we have
seen, members of the Istanbul household coordinated the duties of
provincial employees, whether this involved a deputy on site,145 a
member of his household, a steward drafted from a prominent gen-
try family, or a subfarmer.146

Deyn-ü Devlet (Debt and State): Islamicate High Finance

For European visitors to the Ottoman Empire, even the seasoned

French and Russian diplomats whom Levni depicts enjoying their
special perch on the parade grounds, (Plate 5) Islamic society pre-
sented many oddities. There was the strange, that is, from the per-
spective of Western Europeans, relationship between din-ü devlet
(“religion and state”). On the one hand, there was no mistaking
Islam’s pride of place in the empire. At the ceremonies, palace
munificence allowed thousands of Muslim boys to be circumcised
along with the princes. Before greeting all others, the sultan pre-
pared a special reception for the dignitary representing the descen-
dants of the Prophet Muhammed. In architecture, calligraphic arts,
and ritual, religion permeated the life of the city. The call to prayer
that resonated in every quarter gave the days their rhythms.
On the other, for visitors from Christendom who were accus-
tomed to the sectarian rivalries between Catholic and Protestant that
not only segregated cities but had split entire countries, the relatively
unhindered interaction between religious majority and minority in

Masters,The Origins of Western Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilism and the Islamic
Economy in Aleppo, 1600–1750 (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 151–52.
144
Halil (nalcık, “Hawala,” EI 2 3: 284; D’Ohsson, Tableau générale, vol. 1, 248–49;
for examples of transfers of funds, see D.B}M 4666 (1776–80), a register belong-
ing to Lala Mustafa A[a whose income was sent from Syria. For an example of a
payment by local administrators through the judge in Diyarbekir, D}S 360:35
(1739–1740).
145
Telhisi Mehmet A[a, for example, entrusted his malikâne holdings to a sub-
farmer or his own deputy (suba{ı). Özcan, Anonim Osmanlı Tarihi, 225. On subcon-
tracting, see Defterdar Sarı Mehmet Efendi, Zubde-i Vekayiat (Süleymâniye Library,
Ms. Esad Efendi, No. 2387) folios 288b–289a, cited in Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine
Girerken, 132 n. 30.
146
HA IV:1 (1781–82); although a 1715 order attempted to restrict subleasing,
absentee contracting was commonplace. In 1767 orders were issued to standardize
the practice. Avdo Su‘eska, “Malikana.” Prilozi za orientalnu filologiju 36 (1986):
209; Genç, “Malikâne Sistemi,” 240, n. 17.
        111

Istanbul’s streets and marketplace could not have rendered Muslim

society more alien and repugnant. The preeminence of the religious
majority did not entail the banishment of the minority from much
of economic life or their confinement within walled ghettos. The lack
of ability in languages and protocol compelled Catholic and Protestant
missions to engage Armenian and Sephardic dragomen to conduct
their business with the Sublime Porte. The Greek translators of the
imperial divan were entrusted with the empire’s most delicate polit-
ical negotiations. In affairs of commerce it was the same: French,
Dutch, Swedish and English chartered companies in Izmir, Salonica,
Aleppo, Baghdad, or Cairo dealt with the Jew or Christian assigned
to the tariff station who held the venal of office of moneychanger
or broker.147 Along the Levantine coastline non-Muslim merchants
or bazirgân, including those special purveyors who worked for the
palace, the so-called beratlı tüccar, proved formidable rivals.148
Most shocking of all for the European was the conspicuous involve-
ment of Jewish and Christian bankers in public finances, the sinews
of state power.149 Every official or officer of any standing counted
on the backing of an Armenian, Greek, or Jewish financier, accoun-
tant, or banker (sarraf ).150 At every step up the ladder of higher office,
from the initial down payment on an office to the funds needed buy
the gifts befitting a princess, a rising candidate needed to borrow
ever greater amounts of money. Without a letter of guarantee from
a reputable financier, provided only after a thorough credit check,
it was impossible for him even to bid on a tax farm.151
Credit was the life blood of officialdom. A governor from Aleppo
spent 126,830 kuru{ for ten months in office over the years 1781
and 1782. Of this 2,102 kuru{ a month or 20 percent of his income,
was paid in interest.152 His expenses might escalate sharply if, as we

147
For their social backgrounds, see Onik Jamgocyan, “Les finances de l’Empire
Ottoman,” and }ahiner, “The Sarrafs of Istanbul.”
148
See Ali (hsan Ba[ıs, Osmanlı Ticaretinde Gayrı Müslimler: Kapitülasyonlar-Beratlı
Tüccarlar, Avrupa ve Hayriye Tüccarları (1750–1839) (Ankara: Turhan Kitabevi, 1983),
21–38.
149
Consider France, Janine Garrison, L’Edit de Nantes et sa révocation: Histoire d’une
intolerance (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1985).
150
Robert Olson, “Jews, Janissaries, Esnaf and the Revolt of 1740 in Istanbul:
Social Upheaval and Political Realignment in the Ottoman Empire,” JESHO 20
(1978): 199.
151
}ahiner, “The Sarrafs of Istanbul,” 24.
152
D.B}M 5019. Mouradgea d’Ohsson, (Tableau générale, vol. 3, 175–6) historian
112  

have seen, assuming office also meant taking the responsibility for
the large malikâne contracts.153
While the court was the focal point of status, and the Porte, the
source of patronage, the city itself furnished the personnel and services
for financial capitalism within the empire. Over the century there devel-
oped a degree of regional specialization among the financiers them-
selves. Greek influence held sway in the Aegean and the Black Sea;
Jewish firms rose to prominence in Syria, Iraq, and for at time, Egypt.154
Armenian companies dominated the financial hub of the empire. Mem-
bers of the upper strata or amira class of their community, the Arme-
nian financiers served as personal agents for the upper echelon of the
aristocracy of service.155 They filled almost every one of the seventy-
two fully accredited (gedik) posts allowed to deal directly with the fisc.156
Yet, this number does not begin to capture the scope of imperial
high finance. In addition to the gedik-holding financiers, a 1761 doc-
ument records another 137 individuals who practiced some form of
financial services (sarraflık) under the title of purchasing agents (mubayaacı),
silver dealers/silversmiths (gümü{ciyân), or as their apprentices (mülâ-
zimler) in Istanbul alone.157 These bankers preformed duties that

of the Ottoman Empire and son-in-law of the financier Abraham Kuleliyan, recorded
interest rates ranging between 12 percent and 24 percent. See }ahiner, “The Sarrafs
of Istanbul,” 33 and Jamgocyan, “Les finances de l’Empire Ottoman,” 285–86.
Ronald Jennings notes (“Loan and Credit in Early 17th Century Judicial Records,
The Shari"a Court of Anatolia and Kayseri,” JESHO 16 [1973]: 184, 190, 214)
that interest rates ran as high as 20–24 percent per year.
153
Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken, 134–35. Entire provinces—Adana, Tripoli,
Rakka (Urfa), and the entire tax farm apparatus of a region, such as the muhassılık,
of the Morea, Cyprus, and Aydin, were awarded to local gentry or incoming gov-
ernors. According to D’Ohsson (Tableau générale, vol. 6, 279), twenty-two sancaks (out
of sixty-three) were held directly as malikâne-i miri (imperial malikâne). For one exam-
ple, see D.B}M 3546 (1759–60).
154
The Carmona, Aciman, and Gabay family firms were associated with the
janissaries. For more on this connection, see Robert W. Olson, “Jews in the Ottoman
Empire in Light of New Documents,” Jewish Social Studies, 41 (1979): 75–88.
Syrian Christians served as bankers of the Egyptian elite, after Ali Bey who had
broken his Jewish bankers. See John William Livingston, “Ali Bey al-Kabir and the
Jews,” Middle Eastern Studies 7 (1971): 221–28.
155
Many sarraf families traced their origins to northeastern Anatolia, near the
cities of Van, Sivas and Harput, at the crossroads of the long-distance transit trade
in silk and proximate to the silver mines of Gümü{hane, Keban, and Ergani. Hagop
Levon Barsoumian, “The Armenian Amira Class of Istanbul.” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia
University, 1980), 90. D’Ohsson, Tableau générale, vol. 3, 175–76; Jamgocyan, “Les
finances de l’Empire Ottoman,” 285–86.
156
}ahiner, “The Sarrafs of Istanbul,” 71. CDp 193.
157
Ahmet Refik, Hicrî On (kinci Asırda Istanbul Hayatı (1100–1200) (Istanbul: Devlet
        113

ranged from money lending to keeping accounts. As bankers or mer-

chants who redeemed the transfer of funds in the form of bills of
exchange, or police, they were essential links in the chain of credit
throughout the empire.158
Sealed by shared risks, the relationship between banker and pasha
remained close. It is no wonder that officers and officials petitioned
for special privileges for their non-Muslim protegees.159 Yet, as else-
where, wealth and prominence made minorities the objects of scorn
and resentment. Muslim writers accused financiers of enriching them-
selves by fraudulent means, such as passing adulterated coin, and
disguising illegal investments in revenue contracts.160 There is no rea-
son to minimize their role in this system. With tax farming an inte-
gral part of the credit nexus within the empire and interest rates
running as high as 24 percent, they could be considered, after a
fashion, silent partners in most transactions.161 Nonetheless, given the
constraints under which they operated, non-Muslim financiers in the
Ottoman capital cannot be considered truly autonomous entrepre-
neurs or comprising a fully “private” sector.

Matbaası, 1930), 193–94. Credit for monetary reform in the eighteenth century
must also be given to the financiers. The Armenian Duzian family assumed the
position of intendant (emin) of the imperial mint in 1757.
158
(nalcık, “Hawala,” 283–85; M. Zeki Pakalın, Osmanlı Tarih Deyimleri ve Terimleri
Sözlü[ü (Istanbul: Milli E[itim Bakanlı[ı Yayınları, 1971) vol. 2, 58. Çizakca, Business
Partnerships, 141. See also Halil Sahillio[lu, “Bir Mültezimin Zimmet Defterine göre
XV. Yüzyıl Sonunda Osmanlı Darphane Mukataaları,” IFM 23 (1963): 145–218.
Jamgocyan, “Les finances de l’Empire Ottoman,” 308. After 1788 the state tried
to borrow directly from the financiers. Rates of interest varied (}ahiner, “The Sarrafs
of Istanbul,” 33, 55) according to the relationships between the parties. Financiers
also borrowed (or invested) monies from high officers and courtiers. On Selim III’s
policies concerning credit for contracts, see Yücel Özkaya, “III Selim’in Imparatorluk
Hakkındaki Bazi Hatt-ı Humayunları,” Ankara Üniversitesi Osmanlı Tarihi Ara{tırma ve
Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi 1 (1990): 341–42.”
159
CS 884 (1743) is a petition from Seyyid (brahim, cuhadarba{ı of the palace
requesting special exemptions for Mikail, son of Bo[az, in recognition of twenty
years of loyal service.
160
Özcan, Anonim Osmanlı Tarihi, 22. A century later we hear the same com-
plaints and accusations. Abdullah Efendi Tatarcık (“Selim-i sâni devrinde Nizâm-ı
Devlet hakkinda mutâl"aât,” Türk Tarihi Encümeni Mecmuası 8 (1333/1914–1915): 17),
an advisor to sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807), made a blanket accusation: “Every
Armenian from Kemah or E[in who possesses a few thousand kuru{,” uses a Muslim
front for their own operations; for this thousand they are able to milk the peas-
antry of “300–500 kese of akçe [125,000 to 208,000 kuru{] in an iltizam.” See also
Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım, 144–48.
161
D’Ohsson, Tableau général, vol. 3, 175–77. From 12 to 24 percent interest,
“depending on the circumstances.”
114  

In fact, Christian and Jewish financiers had lost ground in most

areas of domestic finance and tax collection over the course of the
previous century. Better armed and connected, the janissaries, who
had been redeployed to provincial cities during the seventeenth cen-
tury, outbid them on agrarian and commercial tax farms.162 A de
facto withdrawal from the tax-farming market was made official in
1714, when imperial decree barred non-Muslims from bidding on
malikâne contracts.163 Nonetheless, non-Muslim financiers continued
to perform indispensable services for the treasury. Minority financiers
helped liquidate probated estates.164 They furnished stop-gap loans
to the state, “interest” that appears in columns under the Persian
euphemism “güze{te” or the Turkish compound “senelik nemâ.”165
In the eighteenth century, they were often assigned to tariff stations
as official money changers, or as paymasters and forwarding agents
at the site of mining operations. Typically, the wartime cebelü bedeliyesi,
a heavy cash outlay for the statesmen and an urgently needed infu-
sion of cash for the state, was submitted by “the hand of the sarraf.”166
}emdanî-zâde Fındıklı Süleyman Efendi, a court historian writing
in the latter half of the eighteenth century,167 betrayed his own
ambivalence toward the credit system as a whole, as he weighed the
justness of the decision of }eyh"ül-(slâm Dürrî-zâde Mustafa Efendi
to execute four E[inli (Akn, present-day Kemaliye in Turkey) bankers
who had been convicted of bribing an official in 1765. He acknowl-
edged that their infraction would have been considered only a slight
breach of etiquette for a member of the Muslim elite and that their
“crime did not deserve the death sentence.”168 Because it did con-

162
Çizakca, Business Partnerships, 155–58.
163
Tabako[lu, Gerileme Dönemine Girerken, 131, n. 28. A 1714 rescript prohibited
the sale of malikâne mukataa to non-Muslims.
164
Ahmet Kal’a, Ahmet Tabako[lu, Salih Aynural, et al. eds., (stanbul Ahkâm
Defterleri (stanbul Finans Tarihi (1742–1787) (Istanbul: Istanbul Ara{tırmaları Merkezi,
1998) vol. 1, 61.
165
Hamilton A. R. Gibb and Harold Bowen, Islamic Society and the West: A Study
of the Impact of Western Civilization on Moslem Culture in the Near East (London: Oxford
University Press, 1950 and 1957) vol. 1, pt. 2,24, n. 4; Wright, Ottoman Statecraft,
77; Özde[er, “III. Ahmed"in Varidât ve Defteri,” 321, 331, 343.
166
MMD 9613 (1809–1810), “ân yed-i sarraf.”
167
Süleyman Efendi, }em"dâni-zâde Fındıklı Süleyman Efendi Tarihi Mur"i"t-Tevarih,
ed. M. Münir Aktepe (Istanbul: Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Yayınları,
1978) vol. 2A, 68–69.
168
Mumcu, Osmanlı Devletinde Rü{vet, 226, 237.
        115

stitute a serious breach of the boundaries of status, he agreed that

severe punishment was warranted lest other wealthy Christians and
Jews take to comporting themselves as if they were Muslims (“Lâkin
sarraflar murad etti[i i{i fi"ile ve vücûda getürdü[ünden çok kimesne
kavlen ve kiyâfeten gerçi müsülmandır”).
This was not, however, the real ethical dilemma. Finally, the his-
torian’s invective finds its true target. He cannot fault the Christians
alone. Didn’t the upper-ranking officials who encouraged such impro-
priety by their “delicate and deferential” (“mahrem ve dost ittihaz”)
treatment of social inferiors share the blame? Even the “greatest of
statesmen” (“ricâl-i devletin küberâsı”), brushed aside their indul-
gence with the excuse “[I do this] because he serves my interests”
(“zirâ i{ime yarar deyü”).169
Although Fındıklı Süleyman Efendi stopped short of condemning
the tax farming system itself, others did question its morality. Ottoman
jurist had in past centuries considered tax farming (iltizam) a neces-
sary evil. It was tolerated because Christians and Jews were the main
practitioners.170 Writing in the mid-seventeenth century as Muslim
involvement in tax farming increased appreciably, the Syrian Hanefite
scholar al-Ramli took a firm position again the practice, arguing that
because tax farming involved a speculative investment to gain an
undetermined amount of profit it was analogous to money lending.171
But, his objections were not shared by the juridical establishment
in Istanbul which was well disposed toward the reconciliation of
sharia with kanun. Without so much as a comment on the concept
of faiz (profit) with respect to long-term tax farming, the chief mufti
of Istanbul }eyh"ül-(slam Mehmed Sadık in 1694–1695, joined by the
jurisconsults of Anatolia and Rumelia, issued an opinion in Arabic
alongside the 1695 imperial edict. They placed their seal of approval
on the new malikâne contract “for the good order of the Islamic
state.”172 Malikâne contractors, it was said, could appeal their cases

169
“. . . Gerçi bu hususda bunlar {er"an katle müstahak de[iler-idi,” Süleyman
Efendi, Mur"i"t-Tevarih, 2A: 68–69.
170
See Joseph E. Matuz,“Contributions to the Ottoman Institution of the (lti-
zam,” JOS 11 (1991): 237–49; Bistra Cvetkova, “Recherches sur le systeme d’affermage
(Iltizam) dans L’Empire Ottoman au cours du XVIe XVIIIe s. par rapport aux con-
trées Bulgares,” Rocznik orentalistyczny 27 (1964): 111–32 and Bruce McGowan,
Economic Life in the Ottoman Europe, 61.
171
Khaled Abou El Fadl, “Tax Farming in Islamic Law (Qibalah and Daman
of Kharaj): A Search for a Concept,” Islamic Studies 31 (1992): 5–32.
172
KK 5040:2.
116  

to the chief mufti himself, who would represent their interests before
the sultan.173 Given ulema involvement at all levels in the tax farm-
ing system, by the time of the Hanefite scholar Ibn Abidin
(d. 1836–37) the very question had become moot.174
Formative, too, was the role of the religious establishment in cre-
ating the legal foundations for private finance in Istanbul and Bursa,
as well as other Anatolian and Balkan cities. The debate surround-
ing the innovation of vakıf al-nukud, that is, a foundation or trust
(waqf ) based on liquid capital remains one of the stranger chapters
in Hanefite jurisprudence. The debate raged between jurists and pro-
fessors during the first half of the seventeenth century. Here, the
contravention of Islamic law was scarcely a matter of interpretation.
The laws on endowments dedicated to pious or family ends specifically
dictate the use of rents from fixed capital, such as urban real estate
or agricultural lands.175 These discrepancies had not troubled Ottoman
elites and by the time the practice came to the notice of leading
jurists, the practice was widespread, particularly in Istanbul and
Edirne. In addition to pleasing their patrons, Istanbul ulema’s will-
ingness to bend the rules may also speak of a certain degree of altru-
ism. Coinciding with a period of rising taxation, the cash endowment
might have functioned as a type of credit union that offered crafts-
men, traders, and town residents needed loans as well as providing
support for orphans and widows.
Istanbul Muslims established an average of five new cash endow-
ments a year in the period between 1685 and 1781. Many, perhaps
most, of these endowments functioned as investment banks. They
realized “rents” by furnishing Jewish and Christian financiers with
capital at prime rates of interest, ranging between 6 and 15 percent.176

173
D’Ohsson, Tableau général, vol. 3, 175–76. On transfer of title or ceding shares,
the fees were set at 2 percent for the chief herald or çavu{ba{ı, 2.5 percent for the
kadıasker (chief judge) of the Balkans, and .75 percent for the kadıasker of Anatolia.
174
See Abou El Fadl, “Tax Farming in Islamic Law.” For an example of how
malikâne-iltizam contracts were used privately, Kal"a et al. eds., (stanbul Ahkâm Defterleri,
vol. 1, 147.
175
Jon E. Mandaville, “Usurious Piety: The Cash Waqf Controversy in the
Ottoman Empire,” IJMES 10 (1979): 291–98.
176
}ahiner, “The Sarrafs of Istanbul,” 32–33, 38–39, 45. After 1763, the rate of
interest offered by endowments appears to have been fixed at 7 percent. See also
Haim Gerber, “The Monetary System of the Ottoman Empire,” JESHO 25 (1982):
308–324.
        117

Many of the 1,624 cash endowments at the end of the century were
located in neighborhoods closest to the Porte and state offices.177
State debt involved the religious authorities in other ways. As
judges, the ulema were actively involved in many transactions between
lender and debtor.178 They ruled on disputes between financiers.179
Together with local military authorities, judges helped collect prin-
cipal and interest on “Islamically sanctioned loans” (cihet-i karz-i {er"îyle)
owed to non-Muslim bankers.180 In general, they carried out their
duties with fairness and stood by the credit system regardless of the
rank of the borrower.181 Whether it be the governor who owed 16,565
kuru{, the business transaction of the wealthy merchant (bazirgân)
named Sarkis,182 or far more modest debtors,183 the entire central-
state and provincial apparatus was set into motion to make sure that
some payment was made. Months of correspondence and investiga-
tion were often needed to disentangle layers of credit and debt com-
plicated by subfarming.184
Given state supervision of financial institutions and collection, it
should come as no surprise that Ottoman officials initially balked
when it came to accepting foreign instruments of credit and pay-
ment, despite having signed an article governing letters of exchange

177
Kurt, Para Vakıfları Nazariyatı, 91, 162. In a half century Istanbul added 886
new cash waqfs.
178
Jamgocyan, “Les finances de l’Empire Ottoman,” 226–33.
179
DA III:55. In 1763–64, orders were sent from Istanbul to collect funds in the
amount of 10,000 kuru{ from a Mardin resident, Sama"ano[lu Karbas Yorgi.
180
A hüküm (DA III:231) sent on behalf of two Armenian financiers in Istanbul
to officers overseeing the city of Mardin ordered the payment of balance 5,750
kuru{ on a debt that was being repaid in installments between 1757 and 1762. In
another case we find a certain Agop in pursuit of a Mardin resident by the name
of }eyhzâde Hacı Ahmed (DA IV:77 [1783–84]); the text speaks of an “Islamically
contracted loan” (cihet-i karz-i {er"iyle) of which 5,100 kuru{ remained outstanding.
For other examples of collection through the state, see DA III:267, DA II:6, and
DA II:282.
181
A hüküm (DA III:267) was issued in 1775 to the governor and the kadı of
Mosul on behalf of Anton, resident in Istanbul, who was seeking repayment of 1500
kuru{ from the probate estate of the former governor of Tripoli, Abdülfattah Pa{azâde
Mir Abdürrahman, who had been the borrower.
182
DA III:231.
183
DA II:6; DA II:282.
184
Ohannes and Mardus (DA II:191) from Istanbul demanded 9,485 kuru{ from
the voyvoda of Çar{ınacak, Osman A[a. The voyvoda in turn claimed his own remit-
tance was delayed because the subfarmers had failed to pay him; for examples from
Sivas and Aleppo, see respectively SA XIII:28 and HA IV:11, 72; for loans between
non-Muslims, see Kal"a et al., eds., (stanbul Ahkâm Defterleri, vol. 1, 25.
118  

in the Franco-Ottoman Treaty of 1740.185 Official reluctance notwith-

standing, the old-regime elite could not remain indifferent to foreign
creditors and instruments of exchange indefinitely. European letters
of credit circulated with greater facility and frequency in the empire,
particularly along the Levantine coastline, during the second half of
the century. Merchants balanced their accounts between the main
Ottoman ports of call in the Aegean, Syria, and Istanbul with a
combination of bullion and letters of exchange. Commercial capital
and state borrowing merged with the Mediterranean markets. Subject
to laws of demand, such instruments of credit also drew the Ottoman
treasury, minority bankers and pious Muslim investors, into the orbit
of global financial capitalism.186

Completing the Circle

Winding their way through the crowded streets of Istanbul, archi-

tects cleared a path for the procession of janissaries, judges, cham-
berlains, gatekeepers, surgeons, and the military band that heralded
the young princes, including the future Mustafa III (1717–1774) to
the Topkapı palace. In his final pair of paintings Levni captures the
Ottoman dynasts in the palace after the festivities have ended. The
grand vizier’s ministrations to the convalescing princes fill one scene.
Facing it is a last, lingering image: a full-length portrait of the sul-
tan (Plate 6). Standing before a pool of water, Ahmed III stares out
from the page. His left hand rests by his side. His right hand is
raised and clutches a fistful of gold. At his feet attendants and pages,
enderun a[aları, scramble to collect the tossed coins that roll across
the floor.187

185
Edhem Eldem, “The Trade in Precious Metals and Bills,” in V. Milletlerarası
Türkiye Sosyal ve (ktisat Tarihi Kongresi, ed. Hakkı Dursun Yıldız, Inci Enginün, and
Emine Gürsoy Naskalı (Ankara: TTK Basımevi, 1990), 579–89 and idem, “Le
Commerce Français d’Istanbul au XVIIIe Siècle” (Thèse de doc., University of
Provence, Aix-Marseille I, 1988), 131–37, 199. On letters of exchange, see also
Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money (London: Verso, 1984), 216–21, 242–43,
273–76.
186
See Edhem Eldem, “The Trade in Precious Metals and Bills,” 579–89.
187
Michael Gilsenan noted the parallels with the Roman “sparsio.” See Alain
Caille and Jean Starobinski, Critique de la Raison Utilitaire: Manifeste du Mauss (Paris:
La Découverte, 1989). For gold policy under Ahmed III, see Edhem Eldem, French
Trade in Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1999), 113–19; and Ekrem
        119

More than symbolic, Ahmed III’s reign did bequeath his nephew,
Mahmud I (r. 1730–1754), a state on solid financial foundations,
thanks in part to his vizier’s staggering fortune that passed into the
state’s coffers. Yet the solidity of the empire’s political economy was
not only the product of currency reform and good accounting. It
owed to the gradual merging of two treasuries under the aegis of
the Porte’s administrative apparatus. A complex system of contracts
and patronage helped orchestrated this gradual integration while del-
egating many duties to the upper-ranking members of the ruling
estate and, as we shall see in the next chapter, to the provincial
gentry.188
Fiscal patronage anticipated formal bureaucratization of the state.
The contracting system expanded rapidly over the first half of the
century, although oversight lagged.189 Under Ahmed III’s son Mustafa
III (1757–1774) and his vizier Koca Ragıp Mehmed Pasha (1757–1763),
the pace of financial consolidation picked up speed. One of the last
redoubts of palace autonomy, the crown endowments for the Holy
Cities, finally surrendered to the grand vizier’s oversight and the
once powerful kahya of the palace was banished. Yet the challenge
to the consolidation of the “state” remained: on the one hand, to
circumscribe the autonomy of those who controlled the privy purse
of the sultan and, on the other, to cultivate the financial ties among
and beyond the aristocracy of service all the while maintaining the
political subordination of the cadres, individuals, and clans who car-
ried out the tasks of provincial administration.190 With the pretext of
pressing military and financial needs, in the wake of the disastrous
defeat by the Russians in 1774, the bureaucracy would withdraw
some of the most valuable revenues from the malikâne market entirely.

Kolerkiliç, Osmanlı (mparatorlu[unda Para Tarihi (Ankara: Do[u{, 1958), 99–100; Anonim
Osmanlı Tarihi, 250.
188
The treasury was swollen with sureties from the malikâne. Tabako[lu, Gerileme
Dönemine Girerken, 298.
189
Already in 1698–99 (KK 4050:37–38) there were complaints about subad-
ministrators (muba{ir) who were remiss in their payment of the nominal mal, that
was due in three installments annually. A “münavebe” or “rotation” system was
adopted later in the century, making one of the largest shareholders responsible for
collecting the rents and dividing the profits among the partners. Mehmet Genç,
“Iltizam,” Islam Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, forthcoming), cited in
Çizakca, Business Partnerships, 174.
190
Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım, 100–101.
120  

In place of a few high bidders, hundreds of small shares were auc-

tioned to women, members of the ulema and ordinary Istanbul res-
idents while remaining under state management. A fiscal measure to
be sure, this new esham modality of borrowing again enlarged the
pool of investors in the state.191 By 1800, there were more than four
thousand investors of all backgrounds in the esham.192
Behind the luxurious textiles, costly entertainments, and exquisite
manners of the courtly life captured in Levni’s paintings, lay the less
familiar haunts of old regime rule. Only obliquely does the artist
betray the tensions between palace and the Porte; no mention is
made of the strategic blockage in the channels of promotion or the
collective means by which pashas secured their wealth and political
futures. Far beyond the Ok Meydanı and the parade grounds, were
the shops and offices of the Armenian, Jewish, and Greek agents
who tended the accounts of viziers, commanders, captains, and
increasingly many of the provincial gentry as well.193 Completely hid-
den from view, were the Islamic endowments that undergirded
Ottoman public finance and the foreign letters of credit that fur-
nished Ottoman officials with an additional means of remitting funds
to Istanbul for the fisc and their kapı.
Perhaps it was not the official face of the state but the dizzying
intricacies of the circulatory system convergent in the Ottoman cap-
ital that explain the continued popularity of the Surnâme-i Vehbi.
Although only the sultan and vizier possessed souvenirs of those mar-
velous days of festival in paint, the elaborate prose allegory of state-
society relationships continued to be recopied and enjoyed until the
twilight of the old order. Its reassuring allusions to redistribution of
wealth and social equity harmonized the disparate and often disso-
nant elements of court and society and cloaked an imperfect real-
ity. This enduring event provided a singular optic through which

191
Aydin, “Osmanlı Maliyesinde Esham Uygulaması,” 154–58. See appendices,
table XII.
192
Süleyman Efendi, Mur"i"t-Tevarih, vol. 2A, 31. Mehmet Genç, “Esham,” Islam
Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul: Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 1995), 11:375–80. Norman Itzkowitz,
“Mehmed Raghib Pasha: The Making of an Ottoman Grand Vizier” (Ph.D. diss.,
Princeton University, 1959).
193
Ms. Canay Sahin, a Ph.D. candidate at Bilkent University, is in the process
of editing the register of one of Istanbul’s financiers whose clients included mem-
bers of the gentry throughout the empire.
        121

the reader might discern the logic of rule and appreciate the bases
of the empire’s social cohesion. By bringing the reader into this
charmed circle, Vehbi also imparted a certain knowledge of the
whole, a view from the summit denied the ordinary subject.
Each reader might find something to suit his own tastes. The vis-
itor who brought a copy back to Cairo might have been captivated
by the descriptions of monumental candy gardens, the performances
of agile acrobats, or the marvelous products of the capital’s gifted
craftsmen. The memories of the drumbeat of the military band, the
parades of guards in formation, and the lavish banquets awaiting
the men of the state, may have inspired a commander (serasker) by
the name of Ali Pasha, to purchase a copy before leaving on assign-
ment to Diyarbekir. Auctioned along with his personal effects, the
manuscript eventually found its way back—hundreds of kilometers
from his last posting—to the imperial treasury.194

194
For the location of other copies of this work, see Atıl and Koc, Levni and the
Surname, 43. In 1744, Ali Pasha’s personal copy (TKSK MS. B 223) was confiscated
by the state.
 CHAPTER THREE

GOVERNMENT IN THE VERNACULAR

While the painters in the palace atelier were re-creating the candy
flowers and wreaths of court pageant long past, the clerks of the
Bâb-ı Âli tended another garden.
The imperial archive represents the “art of governing” writ large.
Through its reports, orders, certificates, requisitions, and audits, the
state ruled over many peoples and provinces. Yet where chapter 1’s
map and chapter 2’s festival book crack open a window on a read-
ily discernible (if nonetheless misleading) visual order, the ledgers of
the empire’s eighteenth common era, or twelfth century after the
Hijra, seems to slam shut a dialogue with modernity.
Indeed, in the mirror of one of its many registers—say, a page
drawn from a master accounting of malikâne revenue contracts in the
“province of Diyarbekir” (figs. 3 and 4)—the archive seems less a
garden than an overgrown thicket: a chaotic jumble of entries inscribed
across a now-tattered and worm-eaten Venetian folio. Its caption,
the names of a pair of villages, “Kürd Hasan” and “Meslahî,” cor-
responds to no designation on the contemporary map.1 Nor does it
follow firmly in the tradition of cadastration perfected in the empire’s
earlier centuries; in place of neat rows describing crop types and
yields, we see knots of scribal shorthand, or siyakat, tangled refer-
ences, notations, and the minutiae of dates and formulae that overflow
the page.2 Rather than an exhaustive accounting of rural population
or current income from crops on a sancak-by-sancak basis,3 nearly an

1
MMD 9518:17. Only one of the two settlements bears some type of spacial ref-
erence (to the district of Çermik, a town some fifty kilometers northwest of present-
day Diyarbekir).
2
MMD 9518. This is but one of many “master” registers for the networks of
provincial tax farming: for Tokat, MMD 9543, 9559; for Athens, MMD 9512; for
Mosul, MMD 9611; for Damascus, MMD 9530, 9538; for Erzurum, MMD 9517;
for Crete, MMD 9503; for Bosnia, MMD 9520; for Aleppo, MMD 9482.
3
For an exhaustive treatment of Ottoman diplomatics, see Mübahat S. Kütüko[lu,
Osmanlı Belgelerinin Dili (Diplomatik) (Istanbul: Kubbealtı Akademisi Kütür ve San"at
Vakfı, 1998). For facsimiles of the classic register, see L. Fekete, Die Siyaqat-Schrift
in der Türkischen Finanzverwaltung (Budapest: Akademiai Kiadó, 1955), esp. vol. 2.
     123

Fig. 3 Detail of the malikâne mukataa “master” register. (MMD 9518:17).

The four tax-farming partnerships registered concern villages in the Diyarbekir
province, including the judicial districts of Amid, Çermik and Savur. For
a translation of the entry in the upper right hand corner, see Fig. 4.
124  

Village of Kürd Hasan in the Judicial District of Çermik 1,202 akçe

Village of Meslahî el-Ma"ruf bi Suphan [ ] 2,285 akçe
3,485 akçe
increase in 1708 8,513 akçe
Annual Payment 12,000 akçe

Seyyid Ahmed Seyyid Ali Mehmed Emin Seyyid Ahmed

¼ share ¼ share ¼ share ¼ share
1710 1710 1710 1712

Son, Seyyid
Sons, Seyyid
Ömer
Salih & Elhac Ibrahim
1724
Seyyid 1726
Feyzüllah
1725

Seyyid Yusuf son, Hüseyin

& ⅛ share ⅛ share
[date?] [date?]

Ahmed A[a [name?]

1743 1744
Mehmed A[a in Istanbul
Seyyid
1760 Abdullah
1757

Seyyid Osman &

Mehmed Emin & Sons,
Yusuf [date?] Seyyid Bekir
& Seyyid Hüseyin & son,
Ahmed Ibrahim
[ayan?] 1775 1780
Haci Ahmed
1791

Fig. 4 The Devolution of Shares in a Diyarbekir Tax Farm (1710–1791)

     125

entire century’s worth of tax revenues from two villages (or likewise,
tribes and commercial revenues scattered throughout town and coun-
tryside) is subsumed in a perfunctory table: the initial amount of
3,485 akçe is rounded up to 12,000 akçe in 1708–9, after which there
is no further reassessment of value.4
Like the “obscure, ill ordered, incomplete, and slovenly” pages of
the tax registers that greeted Tocqueville in his foray into the ancien-
régime archive, these unseemly documents might strike us as evi-
dence of the “progressive decay” that brought low a great empire.5
Yet such an idealized vision of a classical age past and a naive appre-
ciation of the bright future of transparent government only further
confound our passage through the tangled forests of the Ottoman
old regime archive.6 Enlightenment authors did advocate a new sci-
ence of statecraft, a “governmentality,”7 they bequeathed to the
Physiocrats and Prussian statisticians. Most, like Colbert, who in 1679
dreamt of a comprehensive cadastral map that would document the
agrarian state of France in its entirety, found it impossible to real-
ize their projects. Foreign conquest and colonialism did unfetter the
bureaucrat’s imagination. Without the impediment of a potent aris-
tocracy or deference to local custom, colonial administrators, such
as William Petty, deployed “political arithmetic” to reduce the sev-
enteenth-century Irish economy to numbers, just as Lord Cornwallis
would annex eighteenth-century Bengal with his surveyors.8

4
My initial assumption was that these registers were kept in the provinces by
provincial treasurers, or even local voyvodas and muhassıls because their period coin-
cides with the Nizam-ı Cedid (1793–1807) and the Tanzimat (1839–76). For provin-
cial record keeping, Yavuz Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım ve De[i{im Dönemi (XVIII.
Yüzyıldan Tanzimat’a Mali Tarih) (Istanbul: Alan Yayıncılık, 1986), 331.
5
Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1955), 16.
6
Cf. Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a
Muslim Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
7
See Graham Burchell and Colin Gordon, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in
Governmentality: With Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991).
8
Although the short leases on the Great Farm of the English customs were
phased out in the early seventeenth century, Britain continued to farm revenues in
Canada until the mid-nineteenth century and in India until the “Permanentment
Settle” with Bengal in 1793. See Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay
on the Idea of Permanent Settlement (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), and Anthony
Pagden, “Dispossessing the Barbarian: The Language of Spanish Thomism and the
Debate over the Property Rights of the American Indians,” in The Languages of
Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. A. Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), 79–98.
126  

However, it is possible to forget that in an age that considered

adherence to standard orthography optional, statesmen did not mis-
take the diligence of excise agents or bookkeepers for the mettle of
a nation.9 Quite the contrary; a contemporary observer, such as Sir
James Porter, who served as British ambassador to the sultan between
1746 and 1762, might find peculiarities of chancellery style intrigu-
ing. Indeed, Sir James marveled at the singular efficiency of the
Ottoman clerk’s techniques of compiling and retrieving data. No
tedious plugging of information into columns and categories here.
Sir James remarked upon a collocation of entries that, as in our reg-
ister, pirouetted instead around date and transaction.10
Without such guidance we would surely miss the economy and
sophistication of our master register of tax farms.11 Though scant on
coordinates in space, the information condensed in this half page
furnishes a schematic: the essential details of the fiscal and political
history of two villages at a distance of more than a thousand kilo-
meters from the Ottoman capital. Each flourish refers us to another
generation of contractors who pass shares by auction, cession, or
default. The page introduces us to partnerships such as those of
Seyyid Ahmed and Ali, ulema who share their holding with their
sons Salih, Feyzullah, and Ömer; to members of the Diyarbekir gen-
try; and to soldiers like Mehmet A[a, who continued to reside in
Istanbul. This is no static roster of names or mere register of quan-
tities of goods. The Ottoman old regime recorded power as a process,
as a chain of relations tying persons, to places, and resources.

9
Article 22 of the Treaty of Paris (1763) specified the fate of French archives,
allowing for “Tous les Papiers, Lettres, Documens, et Archives, qui se sont trouvés
dans les Pays, Terres, Villes, et Places qui sont restituté et ceux appartenans aux
Païs cédés, seront délivrés, ou fournis respsectivement, et de bonne Foy, dans le
mêmes Tems, s’il est possible, de la Prise de Possession . . .” See Zenab Esmat
Rashed, The Peace of Paris, 1763 (Liverpool: University Press, 1951). Theodore M.
Porter (The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 [Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1986], 25) attributes the peculiarities of the pre-modern archive to an epis-
temology fixed on status rather than economics and social stratification.
10
“Papers of the remotest date, if singly the year of the transaction is known,
may be found at the Porte; every command granted at that time, and every reg-
ulation then made can be immediately produced.” Observations on the Religion, Law,
Government and Manners of the Turks (Dublin: Printed for P. Wilson, 1768) vol. 2, 131.
11
See Mehmet Genç, “A Study on the Feasibility of Using Eighteenth-Century
Ottoman Financial Records as an Indicator of Economic Activity,” in The Ottoman
Empire in the World Economy, ed. Huri Islamo[lu-Inan (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987), 345–373; and Ariel Salzmann, “Measures of Empire: Tax Farmers and
the Ottoman Ancien Régime” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1995), introduction.
     127

No matter how comprehensive the document, even this register

of seventy-odd pages, the archive yields no more than jagged slices
of the past. Nonetheless, with judicious supplements,12 this particu-
lar ledger may furnish an alternative point of perspective from which
to consider a form of governance that has slipped into the recesses
of the old and new regimes. It forces us to consider the state as a
work in progress and the quotidian facets of rule as an compound
that I call vernacular government. Such forms of governance took
shape in the shifting jurisdictions within and between provinces and
as a by-product of a land or, better, labor regime that was contin-
uously remapping itself against the demands and resistance of tax
lords, peasants, peasants and herders. It also opens a window on the
city as locus of contractual relationships linking Istanbul with the
urban elites. Even as certain figures, such as great gentry, loom larger
than others, our register helps us to situate both these families and
prominent individuals within a complex system of checks and bal-
ances that anticipated the age of reforms.

Questions of Jurisdiction

As one turns the first pages of the register, the eye searches for a
signpost, a label. The round, clear script employed for cataloging
promises a “Register pertaining to the Life-leases here-indicated
[ located] in the [ jurisdiction] of the province of Diyarbekir” (“Defter-i
Mukataât-ı Malikânehâ-i Mezkûre der Eyâlet-i Diyarbekir”).
Yet like much else of the old regime, this register is not exactly
what it appears to be. The province, or eyalet, which we first encoun-
tered in chapter 1, was as much an historical as a territorial notion
of space. The jurisdictional lines produced in the empire’s first decades
in this region were buffeted by the political, economic, and social
tempests of later centuries. While retrofitting its administrative archi-
tecture, Istanbul clung to the formalities of a command structure
that bound cavalry to district captains, governor-commanders, and

12
For more on the city of Amid (today’s Diyarbekir/Diyarbakır in Turkey) and
the province of Diyarbekir, see Yılmazçelik, “XIX. Yüzyılın ilk Yarısında Diyarbakır
1790–1840,” 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., Fırat University, 1991) (hereafter, “XIX. Yüzyılın
ilk Yarısında”), and his monograph XIX. Yüzyılın ilk Yarısında Diyarbakır, 1790–1840
(Ankara: TTK Basımevi, 1995) (hereafter, Diyarbakır).
128  

viziers. Even as new officials came to fill the gaps between older
forms of administration and the new, or simply to carry out mun-
dane functions of governance, the Porte continued the convention
of issuing directives (hüküm) to the vali or beylerbeyi on such issues as
security at the frontier, policing the province, the collecting of debts
and taxes, and the enforcing of land administration.
Older jurisdictional forms would continue to cast long shadows
over the archive. However, the bureaucrat who consulted this reg-
ister must necessarily have been apprized of another reality on the
ground. The caption on the first entry brings us to the point: it is
not, as one might have expected a summary of the administrative
code of a district or the income accruing to the governor’s estate.
Instead, an expanding column of taxes, dues, and levies is subsumed
below the heading “The tax units [that form part of ] the voyvodalık
of Diyarbakir and dependencies and [values] current from the first
of Mart 1149 (1737).”13 Beneath this is the sum of the annual remit-
tance (10,352,231 akçe) and a table listing multiple adjustments and
additional revenues. Income from a Sufi lodge, special dues from a
battalion of soldiers ( gilman), unassigned imperial estates in Arabgir
and Çemi{gezik, an unassigned timar in Mardin, and, after 1776, a
share in the import tax on tobacco, magnify the jurisdictional space
and enlarge the range of contractual relationships represented within
this single tax farm.
The term voyvodalık does not only signify a large and aggregate
malikâne contract with an intendant of its own or a valuable resource
that attracted some of Istanbul’s most prominent rical. As a kalam
or eklâm, it was also a provincial fiscal bureau that had absorbed a
considerable portion of the state-designated wealth of this province,
but particularly the interstitial dimension of its fiscal and political
structure as well as most of the life-leases awarded within this region.
Its etymology contains a microhistory of a polyglot, Eurasian regime.
Whereas eyalet traces its roots to the Arabic lexicon and Islamic prece-
dent, the term voyvodalık derives from a Slavic noun. A voyvoda refers
to a subcommander. In the sixteenth century, it was the title of the
civil governor of the Black Sea states under Ottoman suzerainty.
Recycled through the machinery of the imperial administration from
the Balkans to northern Anatolia and Kurdistan, the title stuck to

13
MMD 9518:1–2.
     129

those who served as intendants of tax farms or as on-site stewards of

an officer’s revenues. Its transformation into an fiscal locution or cat-
egory, the “voyvodalık”14 (an Ottoman hybrid formed by the addition
of a Turkish suffix), introduced to its meaning sufficient administra-
tive elasticity to embrace scores of separate revenue contracts.15 The
voyvodalık of Diyarbekir, like that in Tokat or its analogues, the
muhassılık of Aleppo or the defterdarlık of Damascus, carved new admin-
istrative lines within and through the classical chain of command
and between military and civil-juridical authority.
Over the eighteenth century, the jurisdictional range of the Diyar-
bekir voyvodalık waxed and waned (Fig. 5). It could not but respect
the operating reality of the province, which lay in the upper Jazira
(the Tigris and Euphrates region) at the edge of the high Anatolian
plain and in the depression before the Zagros mountains. From the
provincial capital of Amid, itself 1,400 kilometers southeast of Istanbul
via Sivas and Malatya, the province in its successive incarnations
had once subordinated cities such as Harput, 160 kilometers to the
north, the mines of Keban and Ergani to the northwest, and smaller
fortified cities such as Palu and Hisnkeyf. It included a vast agri-
cultural hinterland that stretched eastward across the fertile region
of Miyafarikin as far as the town of Siirt and westward to Siverek
on the Tigris. Its southern limits were fixed by the arid land between
the provinces of Urfa, Baghdad, and Mosul.16

14
This is but one of many names for an analogous phenomenon: provincial trea-
suries largely made up of revenue contracts that are supervised by intendants. These
provincial treasuries are called, alternately defterdarlık (for Damascus), muhassıllık (for
Aleppo), and nezaret (in Silstre and Rusçuk). For the state of many of these tax
farms in Diyarbekir before this reorganization under new provincial bureaus (eklâm),
see Rhoads Murphey, Regional Structure in the Ottoman Empire: A Sultanic Memorandum
of 1636 A.D. Concerning the Sources and Uses of the Tax farm Revenues of Anatolia and the
Coastal and Northern Portions of Syria (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1987), 181.
15
MMD 10,143:233. Phraseology reproduces this ambiguity, referring to tax
farms “within and outside the jurisdiction of the voyvodalık, that is in the judiciary
districts of Ergani, Siverek, Çüngü{, Hani and Barzani [Birazî] . . .” (der canib-ı
Diyarbekir harec-i voyvodalık ve dahil-i voyvodalık).
16
The number of constituent districts (sancak) in the eyalet grew from 19 in 1733,
to 27 in 1747, and finally to 30 in 1797 (Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır, 128–29). D}S
360:50 (1736) adds the districts of Mihrani and Çe{ke. See also Mouragea D’Ohsson,
Tableau général de l’Empire othoman, divisé en deux parties, dont l’une comprend la législation
mahométane; l’autre, l’histoire de l’Empire othoman (Paris, Imp. de monsieur [Firmin Didot]
1787–1820) 6:300; and F. Akbal, “1831 Tarihinde Osmanlı Imparatorlu[unda Idari
Taksimat ve Nufus,” Belleten 15 (1951): 621–22 which records the following sancak
 130
 
Fig. 5 Shifting jurisdictions in Ottoman Asia. After (brahim Yilmazçelik, XIX Yüyzıllın (lk
Yarısında Diyarbekir (1790–1840) Ankara Türk Tarih Kurumu. 1995 appendix 4.
Courtesy of Türk Tarih Kurumu.
     131

Given its proximity to the Kurdish edge, indeed the absorption

of most of the Sunni confederates in the initial configuration of the
eyalet17 and the strategic goods produced by its inhabitants, Diyarbekir’s
importance to imperial defense remained undiminished in the sec-
ond half of the eighteenth century. Although the region did not suffer
the threat of invasion, as did Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra, it paid
dearly for the Wars of the Iranian Succession. The general insecu-
rity of the countryside caused a hero of the Iranian campaigns such
as Çeteci Abdullah Pasha—as well as his successors to the gover-
norship and the office of voyvoda in Diyarbekir—to spend months on
campaigns suppressing roving bands of “vagrant [ba{-ı bo{] levend
(mercenaries) and other bandits” who preyed upon traders and peas-
ants.18 Although spared the direct burden of the Russo-Ottoman wars
or the rebellions of Ali Bey in Egypt and the Zadaniyya in Palestine,
Diyarbekir still felt the ripple effect of crises brought by Karim Khan
Zand’s incursions into Iraq (and occupation of Basra in 1776) and
the uneasy succession within the pashalik of Baghdad that preceded
the restoration under Suleyman “the Great” (1780–1802). Each
conflict generated fresh waves of unemployed soldiers armed with
pistols made in Erzurum or Russia.19
Soldiers were not the only actors who violently reshaped the con-
tours of the eyalet, especially at its southern margins.20 Turn-of-the-
century efforts to resettle local tribesmen had not so much cleared

in 1831: Amid, Hani, Mazgird, Mifarkin, Harput, Sincar, Isiirt, Siverek, Ergani,
Anade (?), Hısnkeyf, Çemi{gezik, Nisiybin, Çapakçur, Sa[man, Çermik, Kulp, Iklis,
Penbek, and Pertek, in addition to the hükümet of Palu, Genç, Cizre, E[il, Hazzo,
Tercil, and Savur.
17
On the back and forth of branches of the Milan tribe between 1711 and 1724,
see Halaço[lu, (skan Siyaseti, 52, 114. For later efforts, see the “Tribal Settlement
Registers” of 1146/1733 published by Cevdet Türkay: Ba{bakanlık Ar{ivi Belgeleri"ne
göre Osmanlı mparatorlu[u"nda Oymak, A{iret ve Cemaâtlar (Istanbul: Tercüman, 1979).
18
Mustafa Cezar, Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler (Istanbul: Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi,
1965), 434–35. For events in neighboring provinces of Mosul, see Kemp, Territoire
de l’Islam; and Yasin al-'Umari, al-Durr al-Maknûn fî al-Ma"âthir al-Mâdiya min al Qurun,
3 vols., critical ed. by Sayyar Kawkab 'Ali al-Jamil (Ph.D. diss., University of St.
Andrews, 1983); Herbert L. Bodman, Political Factions in Aleppo, 1760–1826 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963); T. Niewenhuis, Politics and Society
in Early Modern Iraq, Studies in Social History (The Hague-Amsterdam: International
Institute of Social History, 1982).
19
Cezar, Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler, 294, 434–35.
20
Xavier de Planhol, “L’évolution du nomadisme en Anatolie et en Iran. Étude
comparée,” in Viehwirtschaft und Hirtenkultur. Ethnographische Studien, ed. L. Földes
and B. Gunda (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1969), 69–93. These were the quasi-
132  

the region of pastoralists as opened the door to new waves of nomadic

herdsmen from eastern Arabia. No longer strong enough to block
their path, the remaining Turkmen, Arab, and Kurdish tribes who
frequented the southern districts of Diyarbekir and the eastern fringes
of Aleppo yielded to the Arab tribes who migrated from Najd toward
the middle routes of the Euphrates. In northern Iraq, local tribes
found a way to recover an autonomy lost. Intraprovincial competi-
tion crystallized into geopolitical realignments between cities and
tribes. The Tayy tribe of Nisibin threw in its lot with the heredi-
tary gentry-governors of Mosul, the Jalilis, and the Kurdish Milan
(in Turkish, “Millü”) allied with Baghdad.
Over the century, as our register’s thirty-three tribal entries tes-
tify, local administration adapted the contracting system to this restive
population. Tax farming, particularly through the life-term contracts,
proved an effective instrument of harnessing branches of tribes with
mixed economies, such as the Kara Ulus, who were targeted for
new agrarian taxation.21 Alternatively, contracts reconfirmed the title
and authority of a tribal shaykh. In the process, the Sublime Porte
carved out new claims against tribal income—dividing it, as hap-
pened in the case of the nine villages “in Mardin Mountain,” in
which 388 peasant-tribesmen were registered—unequally between the
imperial treasury (24,033 akçe) and the head of the tribe (mir), whose
take (of 11,900 akçe) was less than half.22 The award of contracts to
different shaykhs, such as Faruk, head of the Cemaleddin branch
(a{ireti ) of the Milan, whittled away at the larger Milan confedera-
tion. With it thus fragmented, the clerk needed only to transfer a
contract from one heading to another when, in 1733–34, the eight
branches of Milan left with Ali Pasha for resettlement in Urfa.23
Nonetheless, the large contracts awarded at the margins of the pro-
vince betray the state’s resignation before the fluidity of jurisdiction

independent governments within the original province of Diyarbekir: Hakkari, Ima-

diyye, Bitlis, Hisnkeyf, Cizre, Sohran, Çemisgezek, Mazgird, Pertek, Sa[man, Palu,
E[il, Çermik, Hazzo, Sasun, Erzen, Zirkan, Gurdukan, Atak, Tercil, Mihrani, Hizan,
Hançuk, Genç, Çapakcur, Kulp, and Mifarikin (Van Bruinessen, Evliya Çelebi in
Diyarbekir, 18–21). In the eighteenth century (according to Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır,
317), there were the “a{iret” of the Kikî and the Resî, as well as the “cemaat ” of
Dögülü Alucî, the Karaciya, Izolu, Karabe[an, Kirmanî, (Millan), and Karapınar.
21
MMD 3677:9–11; MMD 9518:60–75. Different headmen, called kethuda or mir
asiret, figure in this account book.
22
MMD 9518:65–75.
23
MMD 9518:71.
     133

over the great arid and mountainous spaces between provinces.

Relying on either tribal elites or combined tribal-urban partnerships,
the awards of enormous malikâne contracts captured valuable but oth-
erwise elusive revenues from herds and the avâriz tax in Kurdish
Çemi{gezek, Sa[man, and Mazgerd (yielding in 1717 a yearly payment
of 723,996 akçe).24
If the state was scarcely able to provide security for cultivators in
the vicinity of Diyarbekir’s capital district, Amid, where tribes were
known to raid villages for food, livestock, and even women,25 the
authorities were even less likely to defend cultivators in the lands
south of Mardin, a zone of annual tribal migration between winter
and summer pastures.26 Already in 1694 Mardin and Nisibin (128
kilometers from Amid) recorded the highest losses in the number of
tax fiefs: only 55 of 311 timar and zeamet holders paid their cebelü
bedeliyesi (dues paid in lieu of military service). Of the remainder, 120
did not pay and 141, one-third of all units, were officially declared
totally ruined (harabe).27 The lower districts continued to experience

24
MMD 9518:73.
25
DA III:50, 164; IV:71–72.
26
Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır, 170. These “tribes” were officially recognized in the
province of Mardin in 1747: the Mihi, Tausi, Piran-o-Zencir, Karadar, Ri{ail,
Kabalı, Maski, Birnek, Cevzat, Hindülü, Telermen, Karacahisar, Ihrahimiye, Bilali,
Kalemtra, }eyhhan-i Zencir, Kültülü, Selah, Tekük, }i[levan, Kavus, Telfeyyaz,
Makbele, Kiki, Ömeriyan, Milli (Milan) }arkiyan, Kalenderan, Mir Sinan, Bayraklı,
Araban, Büyükhan, and Behdire.
27
Timars and Zeamets in the province of Diyarbekir

1609 1694 1694 1694 1694

Total Total Paid Unpaid Ruined
Amid 176 176 138 38
Harput 201 n.d. n.d.
Ergani 124 128 75 10 43
Siverek 67 60 47 13
Nisibin 6 21
Mardin n.d. 316 55 120 141
Hisnkeyf 28 38 13 25
Siirt 6 n.d.
Çemi{gezik 9 n.d.
Kulb 27 78 37 41
Tercil 28 n.d.
Çapakcur 35 37 37
Çermik 0 31 1 30

Sources: 'Ayn-i 'Ali Efendi, Kavanin-i Al-i Osman, ed. M. Tayyib Gökbilgin (Istanbul, 1960); KK
493:1–30.
134  

considerable dislocation of their agrarian populations during the eight-

eenth century. In 1783–84, Göksu, once a flourishing, largely Armen-
ian agricultural district south of Diyarbekir on the Tigris, had lost
nearly three out of every five timars. The district of Savur, also south
of the provincial capital, retained only six functioning of the twenty-
one timars recorded in the previous census.28 One contract auctioned
in the district of Mardin aptly expresses a pervasive reality. It is cap-
tioned: “villages that are ‘off the books’ and without resident cav-
alry officers.”29
Yet Mardin’s inhabitants could employ the shifting use of land to
their advantage. At 95 kilometers from Amid, the city had long
rivaled the provincial capital in textile manufacturing and, in par-
ticular, as a transit point on trade routes between Iraq and Syria.
Although wartime may have necessitated accepting the embrace of
the “province” anew (in 1734–35 and 1747–51, Mardin reverted to
the eyalet of Diyarbekir),30 the city remained a dependency of Baghdad.31
It was governed by a voyvoda who paid two hundred purses for his
office and commanded both the janissary garrison and a battalion
of troops. The city’s tax farms, though entered within the voyvodalık
bureau, also reflected Baghdad’s de facto annexation of the district.
The large contract over an aggregate block of revenues (possibly for-
mer crown estates) within Mardin and Nisibin had been held by the
founders of the pashalik, Hasan Pasha (d. 1724) and a son, Ahmad
Pasha (d. 1747), and continued to be awarded as contracts to officials
based in Baghdad.32

28
Cti 4668.
29
MMD 9518:75.
30
M}S 195:12. Although in 1764 the governor of Diyarbekir apparently made
the rounds of Mardin to collect his “salyane” (see also DA III:276); typically, how-
ever, Istanbul deferred to the local administrators. See DA III:221 addressed to the
Mardin judge and voyvoda concerning the claims of a sipahi in a canton still within
Amid sancak in 1771.
31
On the extension of the province of Baghdad to the east and north, Niewenhuis,
Politics and Society in Early Modern Iraq, 240; also Suavi Aydin, Kudret Emiro[lu,
Oktay Özel, and Süha Ünsal, Mardin A{iret-Cemaat-Devlet (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı,
2000), 164–65. For a travel account from 1766, Carsten Niebuhr, Reisebeschreibung
durch Syrien und Palästina nach Zypern und durch Kleinasien und die Türkei nach Deutschland
und Dannemark (Hamburg: Friedrich Berthes, 1837) vol. 2, 395–96.
32
Niewenhuis, Politics and Society in Early Modern Iraq, 24. MMD 9518:101. The
contracts on these farms were ceded in 1751 to Suleyman Pasha; and in 1769 for
110,000 kuru{ to Ömür Pasha, also of Baghdad. Other contracts were administered
directly by Mardin’s voyvoda (see MMD 9518:103 [1731]).
     135

Unable to prevent the transfer of power to members of Ahmad

Pasha’s largely Georgian household after his death, the Porte still
relied on Baghdad to protect its interests at the frontier. Nonetheless,
in matters concerning domestic commerce, especially the lifeline of
coffee, spices, and cotton stuffs destined for Istanbul from the Gulf,
the Porte turned to the authorities of the intermediate provinces,
such as Urfa and Diyarbekir, for reinforcements.33 Unrest in the
Milan regions brought this intraimperial rivalry to a head in 1791.
The governors of Malatya and Aleppo and the voyvoda of Diyarbekir
hunted down the shaykhly elites and confiscated their wealth. One
of the survivors, Timur Bey, found sanctuary in Baghdad. His brush
with the gentry-administrator of Diyarbekir in particular would add
a level of personal enmity to the geopolitical rivalry between tribal
clans and the prominent family of Amid, the }eyhzâde.34
Throughout the century, rural insecurity continued to exact a
heavy toll on agricultural settlements.35 Even in the two judicial dis-
tricts (kaza) immediately surrounding the provincial capital, docu-
ments indicate a decrease in the numbers of both tax fiefs and villages
during the first half of the century. In 1739, Amid’s court clerk
recorded the names of 111 villages in Eastern Amid, of which one
in ten (eleven), he noted, were “ruined” for the purposes of tax
assessment.36 A series of natural disasters struck the province in mid-
century. The troubles began with crop failures in dry-farmed lands
of Diyarbekir and Mosul; locusts and an unseasonably cold winter
followed. With starvation driving near-naked beggars as far as the
city of Aleppo in search of food, the region was ripe for a pandemic.37

33
DA II:243.
34
Aydin et al., Mardin A{iret-Cemaat-Devlet, 182–83, 197.
35
Van Bruinessen, Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir, 122–23. For eighteenth-century infor-
mation relative to the reassignment of timar, see also DA IV:45; DA III:191. In
1795–96, 624 timars and zeamets paid 177,000 kuru{ (Cezar, Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler,
464).
36
D}S 360:35–38. The number of avârız hanes (an accounting unit representing
a number of fiscal “houses”) dropped from 2,022 in 1701 (808,900 akçe) to 2015.5
in 1723–24; however, income rose to 999,600 akçe. (MMD 1347:2; MMD 5781:8;
MMD 10,166:231). As for the avariz in Diyarbekir in the sixteenth century, see
MMD 7637:2–4 for the year 1003 (1594–95); the rate was 2 kuru{ per household
in the city, and 3 kuru{ per household in the district (kaza); ciziye was based on
70,000 persons.
37
On the famine of August 1758, see MMD 10,200:230; for later occurrences,
see Süleyman Efendi, Mur"i"t-Tevarih, vol. 2A, 25; Charles Issawi, ed., The Fertile
Crescent, 1800–1914: A Documentary Economic History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
136  

The scars of the bubonic plague, known as the “Great Dying” of

1762, were still visible on timar holdings in 1783–84, a generation
later. In Western Amid, nearly half of the agrarian settlements were
no longer capable of supporting cavalry officers (of a total of 98
timars, 35 were considered ruined and 17 no longer existed).38 Although
Istanbul continued to assign timars in deference to the logic of the
eyalet for another half century,39 given the sipahi’s increasingly mar-
ginal role in defense, there was no compelling reason, other than
rural administration, to restore the system to its former glory. Indeed,
in many respects the original timar hierarchy had become all but
vestigial. Central-state officers whose names are recorded in our reg-
ister and whose agents made payments on their behalf through the
court of Amid held contracts on the estates belonging to the trea-
surer and secretariat of local timars, the hass-ı defterdarlık-ı timar ve
kethüdalık-ı defter-i vilâyet-i Diyarbekir.40
Such scant and scattered indices of the health of the agricultural
economy must be handled with care. However dire conditions may
have been during these decades, population rebounded and perhaps
relocated between bouts of war and famine. Cash crops such as cot-
ton were produced in Harput, Çermik, and Çemi{gezik.41 In addition
to the staples of life—wheat, millet, barley, lentils, and sesame—
there were luxury goods: wine from Siirt and rice and melons from

1988), 96; and Antoine Abdel Nour, Introduction à l’historie urbaine de la Syrie Ottomane
(Beirut: Publication de l’Université Libanaise, 1982), 70.
38
Cti 4668. In Amid’s eastern district ({ark-ı Amid), the toll was somewhat less:
of 75 timar, 15 were ruined and another 17 “no longer existed.”
39
On the drastic decline of timar holdings in Aleppo, compare Jean-Pierre Thieck,
“Décentralisation ottomane et affirmation urbaine à Alep à la fin du XVIIIème
siècle,” in Mouvements communautaires et espaces urbains au Machreq, ed. Mona Zakaria
et al. (Beirut: Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain,
1985), 129.
40
MMD 9518:3. In 1719–20, it was assumed by the former inspector of the
imperial mint, Suleyman Efendi, together with Seyyid Abu Bakr Efendi, for 1,200
kuru{. Typically, there was a “local” partner, such as Mustafa A[a from Erzurum
in 1726–27 and later Huseyn A[a, who, we are told, was a member of the retinue
of (brahim, the former voyvoda of Diyarbekir, 1728–29. Another contract regarding
the defunct estate of the provincial treasurer (mukataât-ı hass-ı defterdarlık-ı hazine-i Diyarbekir
nam-ı di[er çeske). This too was in the hands of central-state officers (see TKSA E
10,129). They also relied on local subcontractors: in 1740–41 (D}S 360:35), three
Diyarbekir residents, Elhac Ali A[a, Huseyin A[a, and Halil registered, making
their payments to Istanbul partners.
41
Thus Çermik, which held no timar in 1609, recorded thirty-one at the end of
the century. See n. 27 above.
     137

Western Amid.42 Grain cultivation seems to have shifted eastward

toward the Silvan Plain, a region that would earn the title “granary
of Kurdistan” in the nineteenth century.43 In fact, whereas military
requisitions of grain targeted regions in the immediate vicinity of the
capital in the first half of the sixteenth century, a century later, in
1741, the levy was more evenly distributed. Now, much of the grain
supply came from Hani, a small town to the northeast (in which
many of the city’s gentry would purchase tax contracts), from the
well-irrigated land surrounding the city of Harput, and from Ergani
(including Çunku{), Palu. and Siirt. More surprising is the fact that
tribal regions that had few or no timars in the sixteenth century, such
as Çapakcur, Savur, Atak, and Tercil, now provided a quarter of
the total wheat requisition.44
Paradoxically, the declining number of timars and the retrench-
ment of the eyalet structure are also the symptoms of a new eco-
nomic vitality. This was certainly true for the mining industry. The
copper, silver, and iron mines in the province’s northwestern corner
were linked by roads to the smelting factory of Amid, thirty hours,
or 73 kilometers away. To tighten their grip over production, Istanbul
bureaucrats turned over the administration of the northwestern por-
tions of the eyalet, including Palu, Çar{anıcak, Harput, E[in, Arapgir,
Siverek, and Çunku{, to the intendant of mines at Ergani.45 Carrying

42
DA III:14 (1758–59); MMD 3677:11 (for rates of rice in 1697); Van Bruinessen,
Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir, 40, 167–79, 193; D.B}M 5508; DA III:78 (1764–65); DA
II:92.
43
Charles Issawi, ed. An Economic History of Turkey (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980), 218–20. Wheat was sown in the early fall and barley from November
to February, both were harvested in June and July; they were milled and stored in
August.
44
Van Bruinessen, Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir, 23. In the seventeenth century, Amid
provided about 50 percent of the levies; Harput, 11 percent; and Ergani, 10 per-
cent. According to MMD 9891:224 in 1741, a century later, the distribution of
wheat levies was as follows: of 1 million kilos of flour (39,300 kile/25.64 kilos)
requested, the capital district provided approximately 10 percent (99,996 kilos or
99.9 metric tons); Hani and Çermik furnished 76,920 kilos; Harput, Ergani, and
E[il, nearly 20 percent (184,608 kilos); Hisnkeyf (205,120 kg); Siird (128,200 kg);
Çapakcur, Palu, Savur, Atak, Mihrani, and Tercil provided more than a quarter
of the total (284,604 kg). On the basis of the cizye of 1797 (D.B}M 6292, 81,950
kuru{), one finds that non-Muslim populations, presumably the largely Armenian vil-
lagers and town-dwellers, were particularly concentrated in the central districts of
the province (Eastern and Western Amid and in Amid itself ) and to the west and
north in the districts of Harput, Palu, and Çar{ınacak.
45
MMD 9518:93.
138  

the rank of kapıcıba{ı, between 1740 and 1774, the intendant of mines
actually superseded the governors of Sivas and Diyarbekir in mat-
ters pertaining to production and supply in the mine.46 Within his
districts, he resettled miners and requisitioned carters. He comman-
deered wood for firing into coal, wax for candles to illuminate the
shafts, beasts of burden for hauling, and grain for fodder.47
Few examples illustrate more vividly the complex and overlapping
lines of jurisdictional control under the old regime, or the total inver-
sion of prior categories of rule, than the role of the Ergani complex
with respect to the eyalet hierarchy. As a member of the aristocracy
of service with access to the Istanbul auction, the intendant of mines
might hold a share in Diyarbekir’s voyvodalık, the large, composite
tax farm administered by the province’s voyvoda. By awarding short-
term tax contracts, subfarming his own, confirming guild appoint-
ments, recognizing members of the gentry, and encouraging members
of his own family and household to acquire tax farms in the dis-
tricts under the command of the governor of Diyarbekir, the mine
administrator built his own sociopolitical infrastructure in the region.48
In a final episode that turned the military and administrative hier-
archy of the sixteenth century on its head, in 1794 Yusuf Ziya Pasha,
whose tenure as intendant of mines was one of the longest, absorbed
the governorship of Diyarbekir itself.49 Shunning the provincial cap-
ital, he ruled from Ergani, while consolidating his control over the
industry by acquiring shares in the valuable life-lease on the smelt-
ing factory of Amid.50

46
DA III:52 (1774–75). Instructions are sent to the Ergani intendant to track
down a “bandit” living in Amid itself.
47
Fahrettin Tızlak, Osmanlı Döneminde Keban-Ergani Yöresinde Madencilik (1775–1850)
(Ankara: TTK Basımevi, 1997), 15; see the register of the Intendant of Mines edited
by Hasan Yüksel, 1776–1794 Tarihli Maaden Emini Defteri (Sivas: Dilek Matbaası,
1997), 108–9, 121, 126–28.
48
Tızlak, Osmanlı Döneminde Keban-Ergani, introduction, 76; Yüksel, 1776–1794
Tarihli Maaden Emini, 109; a former intendant of the Keban Mine, Mehmed A[a,
held a quarter share in 1723.
49
Mehmed Süreyya Bey, Sicill-i Osmanî; yahut Tezkere-yi Me{ahir-i Osmaniye (Istanbul:
Matbaa-i Âmire, 1308–15/1890–97), vol. 4, 670–71. Ali Emiri, Tezkere-i }u"arâ-i
Amid (Istanbul: Matbua-i Amidi, 1328/1910–1911) vol. 1, 141. Yusuf Ziya Pasha
began his career as a clerk in 1789. He was promoted to the position of mir-i miran
in 1793–94 as intendant of mines. In 1798, he was promoted to grand vizier and
then returned to Ergani as intendant of mines in 1807. The income of the inten-
dant of mines between 1795 and 1802 was 117,776 kuru{ (Tızlak, Osmanlı Döneminde
Keban-Ergani, 58–63). See also n. 206 below.
50
MMD 9519:9 (1795).
     139

At the Interstices of Rural Administration

The crisscrossing of jurisdictions is evident in the tug-of-war between

the intendant of mines and the governors of Diyarbekir. It was also
inherent in the very structure of smaller agrarian fiscal units that
made up the province. As a bureaucratic convention, an umbrella
sheltering most of the life contracts awarded within the boundaries
of the historic province, the voyvodalık adopted stray fiscal categories,
balanced power relationships in the countryside, and bridged town
and country. It acknowledged the lapses that had occurred in the
administration of space. Yet the contractors who filled the interstices
in the fiscal landscape might reside not locally but in Istanbul or
Baghdad. The revenues in question might derive from widely dis-
parate sources, such as the eleven aggregate malikâne mukataa awarded
on villages and fields in both Hani and Savur, districts located at
opposite ends of the province.51
The overwhelming majority of contracts within our voyvodalık reg-
ister pertain to taxes owed by peasants and herdsmen in villages
scattered throughout the older and newer jurisdictions of the eyalet.
A determined researcher might painstakingly combine this informa-
tion with data from other extant sources to reconstruct a true agrarian
survey of the province during the eighteenth century.52 Our register
does not, however, make this task easy.53 For scores of mukataât and
maktû (forty-two in the register of 1799), we find no more information
than the phrase “within the jurisdiction of the sancak of Amid.”54

51
Traian Stoianovich, “The Segmentary State and La Grande Nation,” in Geographic
Perspectives in History, ed. E. Genovese and L. Hochberg (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989), 258–59. D’Ohsson, Tableau général, vol. 7, 299, translates nahiye ( judi-
ciary districts) as canton as well.
52
When I first showed these registers to Nejat Göyünç, one of the foremost
authorities on land tenure in this region, he threw up his hands in despair, com-
menting that the term “nahiye” had a very elastic meaning. For lists of villages in
the eighteenth-century district of Amid (both Eastern and Western), see Yılmazçe-
lik, Diyarbakır, 151–60. Register MMD 9518 includes tax farms in different desig-
nations, including villages in the judicial districts (kaza) of Garb-ı Amid (2), }ark-ı
Amid (6), Amid (16), }ark-i and Garb-i Amid Mixed (6), Savur (16), Hani (30),
Hani and Savur (11), Kaza-yı Çermik (17), Barzani (13), Birecik (1), Atak (1), Kulp
(7), Ergani (30), and Kuh-i Mardin (2). In addition, there were 45 unidentified
“makataât” and one “maktuât ” as well as 33 tribes (a{iret).
53
The large imperial estates created in the original administrative division of
Syria and Kurdistan account for many of these tax farms. Barkan, “Timar,” 288,
estimates that 31 percent of the land in Diyarbekir itself was set aside in crown
estates.
54
For the lists of villages in the eighteenth century, see Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır,
140  

Some appear on the earliest surveys of the province. The village of

Beyano[lu, for example, is found on the cadastral record of Diyarbekir
carried out in 1518.55 As tax farms and later as proprietary con-
tracts, such villages might have slipped through the cracks of later
surveys. Others live a ghostly existence in extant documentation, like
the villages of Ali Daraklu, Hanebazar, and Dervi{ Hasan, which
figure on the judge’s list for 1733 but vanish thereafter.56
If many of these agricultural settlements remain specters in the
successive accounts of provincial revenues for us today, local investors
knew where they were located and whether they merited invest-
ment.57 Of course there were preferred regions: Hani and Savur, as
well as Çermik to the west and the former tribal area of Barzani/Birazi,
were among the most desirable. Yet bidders were also prepared to
take a risk. Gentry from Amid, Ergani, and Harput attended the
1721 auction of the villages that made up the “ruined” ocaklık (agrar-
ian revenues designated as salaries) in Harput. These villages’ taxes
had paid the stipends of the defenders of the fortress at Van, but
their cultivators had fled because of the oppressive practices of a
series of short-term tax farmers.58
In a changing countryside, the malikâne contract addressed a peren-
nial problem: the gaps in the land regime. Once the state’s agent,
presumably the voyvoda himself, identified a village as being “off the
books and without an owner” (harec ez defter ve bilâ saheb), the cen-

144–60. The 46 or more villages under proprietary contract represent in the aggre-
gate a considerable percentage of the district composed of 154 villages in 1758.
55
Both Hanebazar and Dervi{ Hasan do appear on the nineteenth-century map
prepared by Yılmazçelik in his Diyarbakır, appendix. A great many may be within
two kilometers east of the provincial capital. For lists of villages from 1518, see
Ibid, 144, 149; Monla Kuçuk, in Western Amid, figures in the cadastral survey of
1565.
56
We might attribute this disappearance to the very fact of their being “priva-
tized” (bilcümle serbest olma[la) and hence no longer subject to bureaucratic oversight.
But this does not explain registration of the village of }ukru"llah (in Western Amid)
on the lists for 1733, 1747, and 1797, though not in 1738 or 1755; similarly,
}evketlü in 1797 (also Ali Bardak, due north of Amid; Develü in Western Amid
in 1797; Akviran in Eastern Amid, appears on the list for 1747, as two villages,
“upper” and “lower”; and Nureddin in Western Amid, which appears only in
1738–39). Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır, 151–62.
57
At present, our purpose is not to map the province, particularly given the flux
in settlement and the inconsistent use of geographical descriptions, but to sketch
out the basic political relationships that emerged from these overlapping jurisdic-
tions and the contractualization of property and rent relations.
58
KK 3105 (1721); MMD 9518:90 (1734–35).
     141

tral administration went into action.59 Initially “repossessed” (mirice

zapt),60 so to speak, some villages, such as Misr Kendü, which had
been removed from the responsibility of the voyvoda of Çermik, would
become the foster child of the voyvoda of Diyarbekir, under his own
designated aggregate tax farm, the voyvodalık.61 There is little expla-
nation why others might be awarded to a malikâne contractor or a
sipahi. In all cases, it was necessary to act quickly and decisively. In
the countryside, the operating principle of “nulle terre sans taxe”
meant that every unit of land overlooked by the fiscal system, absent
a revenue agent or resident lord, would soon be annexed by another
claimant, such as the zaim in the district of Eastern Amid who,
finding no sipahi in sight, merely added the surplus of the nearby
village of Timur Han Abbas to his own estate, the village of Timur
Han Eyüp.62
From the distance of the Bosphorus, “the land” in Diyarbekir’s
rural districts was an intangible without the peasants and herders
whose rents were collected by revenue agents. In an age when many
of these relationships had been reduced to short-term and lifelong
contracts rather than the older military hierarchy, establishing a chain
of fiscal responsibility required the mediation of a resident fiscal
administrator, a broker between Porte and province. In Diyarbekir
that role fell most often to the voyvoda of Amid. He still oversaw the
aggregate block of revenues, both urban and rural, for contractors
who generally resided in Istanbul.63 Over time he became responsi-
ble for most fiscal affairs of the province beyond the purview of the
timar system: he collected the universal taxes on households, the avarız
and bedel-i nüzül, as well as the poll tax.64 Although a special officer

59
MMD 9518:75. Regarding timars in the canton of Mardin, which originally
turned over to the voyvoda of Diyarbekir. In 1777, the miralay of Mardin, Seyyid
Abdullah, purchased the contract on these villages for 150 kuru{.
60
Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım, 41–42.
61
MMD 9815:77 (1781).
62
DA IV:19; DA II:97; DA I:52, 68.
63
There was not always a distinction between post and resources. During the
years 1689–94 (TT 831:38 (1689–94/1100–1105) the voyvodalık was held twice as
a two-year tax farm by other tax farmers by the names of }ahban A[a, Uzun Ali
A[a, and Mehmed A[a, quite probably local janissaries. Uzun Ali had a guaran-
tor named Ahmed A[a.
64
MMD 10,168:252 (1725–26). The number of “hane” (a fiscal unit, or household)
in the eyalet of Diyarbekir was 2015.5 for the avarız and 2704 for the bedel-i nüzül,
which yielded 20,788 kuru{ esedi. See also MMD 9518:73, a lump sum farm (maktu)
of the avarız and the bedel-i nüzül for villages “East and West in Diyarbekir which
are off the register.”
142  

from Istanbul carried out a roll call of contractors to collect the spe-
cial wartime levy demanded of all malikâne holders, it was the voyvoda
who handled much of the day-to-day management of the tax farms.
He must have supervised auctions, requested adjustments or new
certificates.65 He handled the retration (refi, zapt, ibka) of shares or
entire contracts that had been improperly awarded or were poorly
managed.66
As violence escalated in the countryside, the voyvoda’s coercive abil-
ities must have grown apace. His personal guard could not have
been inferior to that of the voyvoda of Siverek (technically subordi-
nate to him), who, we are told in a 1742 judgment against him,
routinely sent his deputy (vekil ) and scribe (kâtib) with “thirty or forty
horsemen” to villages to demand 5 to 10 kuru{ in special gifts ( pi{ke{),
in addition to legitimate requests for avârız, the imdad-ı hazariyye, and
the imdad-ı seferiyye.67 Indeed, in 1777 the voyvoda (smail, of whom I
will speak again, raised two thousand mercenary troops for the defense
of Iraq against the Zand armies, a number equal to that raised by
the governor of Mosul.68
Beyond the chain of payments and certificates that linked them
to the voyvoda or to high-ranking partners or benefactors in Istanbul,
contractors were fairly autonomous. By 1717, 156 individuals were
listed as holders of malikâne mukataât in Diyarbekir. This was far fewer
than in the larger and wealthier district of Aleppo but still greater
than the number of contractors in Damascus. In 1717, local con-
tractors held 179 tax farms in Diyarbekir (venal offices, villages, fields,
and tribal resources). In 1730, that number reached 205.69 In 1787,
the global value of sureties paid on malikâne contracts in the region
had risen to 147,863.5 kuru{ approximately double that of 1717
(78,029.5 kuru{).70 Yet the agriculture sector, especially the small con-

65
MMD 4748:2; MMD 9518:50, “by request of the voyvoda” (“ba arz-ı voyvoda”);
MMD 9518:44, 50.
66
DA I:127 (1747–48). A tax farm on a settlement with seventeen peasants who
were growing cotton in the vicinity of Western Amid was retracted by order of the
treasurer to the Diyarbekir voyvoda Elhac Ahmad. The period of the 1730s and
1740s saw the highest rate of repossession. Of these, the Suvidî a{iret (“tevâbi
Mehmed ve Hasan kethüda”), valued at 1,150 kuru{, was revoked in 1740 and again
eight years later. MMD 9518:21, 22, 28, 33, 42, 43, 50, 51, 64, 71, 73.
67
DA I:17.
68
Cezar, Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler, 454–57. Each soldier was paid 36.8 kuru{.
69
Central-state investors’ bids outstripped those of locals four to one (MMD
4748:75, 48, 16, 76).
70
MMD 3677:2–3, 12–16.
     143

tracts scattered around the voyvodalık, remained overwhelmingly dom-

inated by local investors. By the end of the century, 268 individu-
als had invested in 129 different village contracts in Hani, Amid,
Savur, and other villages.71
Changing relationships of administration and property were not
restricted to Diyarbekir.72 Here, however, the gentry had long exploited
private gardens along the Tigris on the outskirts of the city.73 Outgoing
orders make frequent mention of private landholdings in the form
of fields (mülk çiftlik) and gardens (mülk ba[çe and ba[ ), often in the
area of old tribal hükümet.74 Although the new life-contract gave the
gentry a means of entering into the agrarian economy of the provin-
cial interior, their proprietary aspirations were contained by a cadas-
tral map crowded with other claimants to rents and taxes. Officials
respected the existing map of claims. Using a common locution, the
certificate awarded to a central-state officer for a malikâne mukataa in
the district of Mardin spoke of a plot of land whose “boundaries
were well known and were not the benefice (dirlik) or concern of
anyone else.”75 Yet as a relative newcomer, the tax farmer provided
Istanbul with an unwitting surveyor to update its registers. In some
cases, that meant discovering that the resource in question was val-
ueless: a marginal note in our register tells us of a contractor who
upon arriving at his designated area, found that there were no cul-
tivators remaining to tax.76
From this perspective, the state ruled by default. Conflicting
claims between tax agents inevitably drew central authority into the

71
MMD 9566 (1787) (excluding those in Ergani).
72
The need for codes and a new cadastral survey was noted in a preface to a
register on Sivas and Tokat (MMD 9481:1–2, 34 (1692–1717). Land sales in the
“vicinity of the city” were subject to a 10 percent surcharge.
73
Van Bruinessen, Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir, 177–79.
74
A peasant çiftlık ranged from 80 to 150 dönüm in Diyarbekir depending on land
quality. (Halil (nalcık, “Osmanlılarda Raiyyet Rüsûmu,” Belleten 23 (1959): 582, n. 27).
However, the meaning of the çiftlık in the following contexts is far from clear: one
reads of three “çiftlik bagçesi ” belonging to a member of the ulema, Seyyid Hacı
Osman; DA I:50; in 1744–45 a çiftlik in Sa[man district; a mülk çiftlik (“ma"alum al-
hudud ”) in 1767–68 (DA III:173); Mustafa Kasem and Isa petitioned in the same
year concerning 5 mülk çiflik (DA III:176); in 1755–56, Fatma Hatun in Çemisgezik
claimed a çiftlik bequeathed by her father, DA II:52; Yuzo Nagata, too, notes that
a çiftlik can be any tract of land (Tarihte Âyânlar: Karaosmano[lulları üzerinde bir (nceleme
[Ankara: TTK Basımevi, 1997], 98).
75
DA I:206. A 1750 rescript given to a central-state officer (Mehmed Silahsôr)
in the district of Mardin; similarly D}S 360:57, a plot awarded because it was not the
“imperial estate, zeamet or timar or vakıf of anyone, [but] off the books (harez az defter).”
76
MMD 9518:75.
144  

agricultural landscape. All sorts of agents and property holders turned

to the Porte for deliberation of the relative merits of their titles or
to reconfirm the terms of tenure.77 Thus the sipahi, Hüseyin, who
argued that the taxes of the village of Kakulu and its state/common
field or mezra, valued at 15,540 akçe, had long been part of his fief
in Göksu and not, as the malikâne contractor Abdulrahman asserted,
part of a newly contracted lot, demanded consultation of the cadas-
tral registers and reconfirmation of his claim with an imperial order
(hüküm-ü hümayun).78 Malikâne contractors frequently appealed to Istanbul,
invoking their rights to administrative immunity and freedom from
local interference in accordance with the 1695 imperial script.79 The
Istanbul administration and high court remained the ultimate arbiter
of property rights, of which tax farming was one point on a con-
tinuum of claims: it adjudicated inheritance conflicts (often brought
by women, whose rights were usurped by family and stranger alike),80
determined the status of peasants’ deeds of usufruct (tapu), and set-
tled questions of irrigation, cultivation rights, and personal property
within villages.81
We might detect a certain bias in judgments in favor of revenue
agents generally and timar holders in particular.82 The timar system,
indeed, still furnished the prevailing model of relationships between
tax lord and peasant. As the “possessor” (mutassarıf ) of the contracted
rights over tax collection in a designated village, the tax farmer was
entitled to that which was due the sipahi, as described in ancient
registers (tahrir-i âtik defterleri ).83 These rents included income from
fines on criminal offenses, such as the penalty for causing acciden-
tal death (resm-i cürm-i cinâyet), from the feudal tax on marriage (resm-i
arûsâne), and from varieties of cash and converted labor dues bun-
dled together under the so-called bâd-i havâ (wind-of-the-air) taxes.84

77
Nonetheless, there were many cases of overlapping jurisdictional rights involv-
ing malikâne, timar, vakıf, and ocaklık. DA II:279; DA I:68; DA III:173.
78
DA I:134, 199, 206, 219; DA II:97.
79
MMD 9486:6.
80
See also DA II:94; DA III:141; and DA III:143, which concerns a certain
Emine Hatun petitioning Istanbul over a çiftlik in a village in Pertek in 1766.
81
DA III:195; DA II:192; MMD 9486:6.
82
DA II:315. In 1760–61, this included a mülk çiftlik and ninety-one peasants,
which the state declared a crown estate, part of the havass-ı hümayun and not pri-
vate property (mülk).
83
Genç, “Osmanlı Maliyesinde Malikâne Sistemi,” 284–88.
     145

The peasant paid taxes on the produce of vegetable gardens (ba[ât)

and fruit and almond trees.85 On land producing cotton, the tax lord
collected a tithe, or ö{r, of one-tenth the weight of the raw cotton
harvested.86 Commonly, the tithe on grains was either one-fifth or
one-sixth of the harvest.87 So-called large fields (at times called çift-
lik) were usually taxed at the higher rate of one-fifth.88
If decentralization often left peasants to the mercy of tax farmers
and landlords or to fend for themselves against marauding bandits
and rapacious revenue agents, it also allowed them to eke out minimal
advantages from momentary lapses in the state’s attention. Villagers
fought hard to retain certain forms of autonomy or rights of com-
mon use that landlords attempted to wrest from them. In the Aegean
region, the struggle with landlords revolved around the status of com-
mon fields (koru).89 In Diyarbekir, peasants defended time-honored
methods of paying taxes. In one petition, a malikâne contractor, Molla
Musa, pleaded for state backing in his dispute with villagers. The
peasants had refused his demands for tithes, insisting that they would
continue to “pay on the basis of the old lump-sum payment (maktu)
and not on the basis of the tithe.” Undoubtedly, they preferred the
lump sum as a means of distributing the burden as they saw fit.
Because harvests had not been assessed for some time, the lump sum
probably represented a smaller amount than tithe rate. Despite the
peasants’ resistance, Istanbul issued a decision favoring the tax farmer.
The tithe was fixed at the rate of one in five.90
Peasants such as the villagers of Ak Viran in the district of East-
ern Amid turned to the courts too for remedies against illegal tax-
ation and exorbitant rates demanded by malikâne contractors.91 They
complained of arbitrary imposts, redundant demands for avârız and
other illegal payments (salyâne) by subcontractors such as the agent
of Shaykh Mahmud, one of three shareholders in a village in the

84
DA II:23.
85
DA III:141.
86
DA I:127; DA III:4.
87
Compare Göksu canton (DA II:214) in 1760 with Savur (DA I:199) in 1750
and the çiftlik in Ergani (DA I:134) in 1748.
88
DA II:16.
89
Nagata, Tarihte Âyânlar, 100.
90
DA II:26; also in Tokat (1714) MMD 3139:188.
91
DA I:244. On the maktu see also Halil (nalcık, “Military and Fiscal Transforma-
tion in the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1700,” Archivum Ottomanicum 6 (1980): 334.
146  

district of Çapakçur,92 by heads of tribal hükümet,93 or by provincial

authorities and officers.94 Yet justice did not come quickly for peas-
ants. In 1754, the state finally responded to complaints made by the
villagers of E[il against two malikâne holders, Tosyalio[lu and Mustafa
A[a, who had been taking duplicate taxes since 1729.95 In another
case, orders from Istanbul simply arrived too late to protect the vil-
lagers in a district of Paul. Six men met death and nine women
were raped at the hands of their aggressors.96
Given Istanbul’s poor record, what prompted peasants to continue
to seek redress through the kadı’s court in Amid, Harput, or Mardin?
Did the benevolent image of the sultan from afar disassociate him
from his immediate representative, the revenue collector, and give
villagers the illusion that imperial intercession might protect them?
Outgoing judgments suggest that peasants might find a champion in
the courts. However, without discounting their impulse to render a
just decision, we must also remember that by restricting fiscal inter-
lopers, judges and bureaucrats also safeguarded the rights of con-
tractors and property holders.97 An injured party in Istanbul might
tip the scale of justice in the peasants’ direction. A çavu{ at the Porte
for example, obtained a judgment against the Göksu secretary (kâtib)
Elhac Hüseyin, the on-site subcontractor of his 65,123 akçe estate,
who had been collecting taxes in “contravention of the imperial reg-
ister.”98 Hüseyin, another Istanbul officer, brought suit against the
kethüda of Siirt, Elhac Ahmedo[lu Hüseyin, whom he accused of ille-
gally taking taxes from his aggregate mukataât, officially valued at
10,000 kuru{ a year.99 In any event, to an Istanbul bureaucrats who
believed that every other provincial officer was a bandit, no stretch
of the imagination was required to believe the cultivators’ complaints.100
Competition over peasant surplus was fierce, not only because of
a surfeit of armed actors in the countryside but also because of the

92
DA II:241.
93
DA II:250; DA III:141; DA I:16.
94
DA III:434; DA II:218; DA I:160.
95
DA II:42.
96
DA I:160.
97
DA II:93; DA I:26.
98
DA II:21; DA I:108.
99
DA II:216.
100
DA II:23. Be{ir, also of Istanbul, accused the entire provincial administration—
from the mir-i mirân, the mir alayı, the mütesellim, and the voyvoda, to the alay beyi—
of routine, illegal intervention in his contracted villages.
     147

narrow margin between legal taxes and subsistence. Even in the best
of times legal taxation represented only the tip of the iceberg of
quasi-legitimate payments cultivators paid to those holding land as
contract or tax fief. The private accounts of an Istanbul courtier
from 1728 to 1737 concerning “our share-croppers” (bizim ekiciler)
for villages, apparently in coastal Anatolia, provide some idea of this
burden: farmers paid not only annual revenues from olive oil, bar-
ley, and wheat but also special fees such as the pi{in akçesi, taken in
cash or in kind, in addition to payments of interest on previous
loans.101 Peasants were often unable to meet their annual taxes and
required loans of seed, animals, or equipment to make the next
planting. Money lending by tax farmers trapped the peasant in a
cycle of debt. It also anchored the contractor’s claims for genera-
tions because Ottoman judges recognized villagers’ debt and held
them liable for repayment of principal and interest even after the
contract lapsed or passed to another party.102
Such conditions might drive cultivators to take drastic actions. We
know the names of the inhabitants of Misr Kale village in the dis-
trict of Ergani who declared a strike, refusing to pay tithes during
the famine years of 1759, 1760, and 1761. Bilalo[lu Ali, (brahimo[lu
Mustafa, }eyho[lu Kara Ali, Kurt Hüseyino[lu Ali, Mecnuno[lu
Mecnun, and Osmano[lu Hasan all suffered the consequences: beat-
ings and even death.103 Others voted with their feet, fleeing tax-lord
oppression and debt.104 Not a few, like the peasants of the district
of Hani who headed toward so-called askerî çiftlikler (perhaps some
form of ocaklık?) may have sought the promise of better soil and
lower rents.105 In response to two military officers who complained
that the villagers from their malikâne holdings under the jurisdiction

101
D.B}M 1624:65–66. Compare Abdul-Karim Rafeq, “Changes in the Relationship
between the Ottoman Central Administration and the Syrian Provinces in the
Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” in Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History,
ed. Thomas Naff and Roger Owen (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1977), 53–77.
102
Compare Margaret Meriwether, “Urban Notables and Rural Resources in
Aleppo, 1770–1830,” IJTS 4 (1987): 69–72; Abdel Nour, Introduction à l’historie urbaine
de la Syrie Ottomane, 394–95.
103
DA III:9. A peasant who was accused of rebelliousness in Ergani was sen-
tenced to exile. Yüksel, 1776–1794 Tarihli Maaden Emini Defteri, 113–15.
104
In the district of Savur in 1746, peasants had already deserted a maktû settle-
ment of 2,000 akçe awarded as a malikâne. DA I:261–62.
105
DA III:283.
148  

of the Diyarbekir voyvodalık had fled to so-called military estates,

Istanbul ruled pragmatically. The deputy justices of neighboring towns
and the kadı of Amid were instructed to inform landlords in the
region to return all peasants who had been “resident in their new
villages for less than ten years and were still not registered in the
avârız lists for that region.”106 In one of the more dramatic incidents,
a 1765 order alerted authorities at the Mediterranean port of Isken-
derun to be on the lookout for peasants who, having fled from Be{ir,
a janissary who held the malikâne mukataa on the village of Kara
Ceylan, might attempt to seek passage to Thrace by ship.107
Peasant flight, in addition to the terrifying impact of the plagues
of 1762 and 1800, put labor at a premium during the second half
of the century.108 The need to exert new forms of social control in
order to assure a stable labor force in agriculture also helps explain
the high tolerance for local tax farmers, particularly in the West
Asian provinces. The holders of life-term contracts in Diyarbekir
made up a socially heterogeneous group that included members of
the ulema, local officers, and town gentry or âyan.109 If we follow
transactions in a sample of contracts found in our register—fourteen
tax-farm villages in the districts of Hani, Amid, Çermik, Savur, and
Tercil—we see as well a tendency to retain shares within families
over several generations.110 Notable, too, in the last decades of the
eighteenth century and first decades of the nineteenth, is the appear-
ance of a new locution, “resident in the village,” which follows the
name of the last generation of contractors.111

106
DA II:222. They fled to former tribal lands, in Hani, Tercil; the state con-
tacted the deputy judges of Mehranî and Atak, as well as Eastern and Western
Amid, with descriptions of the former inhabitants of the village of Cevre named
Musa, Osman, Resul, another Osman, and the “sons of the Circassian” who had
left to settle in “some towns and villages and askerî çiflikler,” and ordered that “in
whatever region they were found they should be removed and sent back and reset-
tled in their own villages.” (See DA III:116; DA III:132; DA IV:84.)
107
DA III:129.
108
Flight was a problem throughout the Asian provinces. See Yucel Özkaya,
“Osmanlı Imparatorlu[unda XVIII. Yuzyılda Göç Sorunu,” Ankara University DTC
Fakultesi, Tarih Arastırmaları Dergisi 14 (1983): 171–203.
109
Salzmann, “Measures of State,” 173–75. MMD 1637:730; MMD 3677:4–8.
In 1703, 195 individual contracts were awarded in Diyarbekir; 259 in Aleppo; and
210 in Tokat. In contrast, only 222 were awarded in all of the Balkans.
110
Villages in Diyarbekir over the period 1714–91 (MMD 9518:14, 15, 18, 20,
27, 38, 40, 42, 45, 50; not all of these entries had sufficient data to include in this
analysis).
111
Our register does not tell who these individuals are—were they townsmen
     149

In contrast to the social makeup of contractors in the Balkans,

Cyprus, and Anatolia, where janissary officers predominated, Diyar-
bekir’s ulema made a strong showing among the ranks of smaller
rural contractors.112 Religious officials and dignitaries maintained a
parallel administrative network far into the countryside, serving as
village imams and deputy judges (naibs) or participating in lodges of
various tarikat in smaller towns.113 Forty-one of the 268 sharehold-
ers in villages located in Hani, Amid, and Savur carried the title of
seyyid in 1787–88.114
Although the ulema might have found it more difficult to sum-
mon force to defend their interests, moral authority often weighed
on their side.115 Knowledge of the intricacies of both Ottoman and
Islamic law made them better able to take their battle to the courts.
Indeed, failing to find justice in the provincial court circuit or even
at the Porte, they often appealed their cases to the }eyh"ül-(slâm.116
We can appreciate the value of such legal standing in a dispute
over the legitimate title to a contract that pitted one of the city’s
gentry families against the sons of the leading Shafi"i dignitary. A

who had resettled in the countryside, yeoman farmers, or village heads? However,
their presence in the villages themselves during the last decades of life-term con-
tracting coincides with the emergence of the class of village strongmen (the “agha”
or “a[a”) who figure in subsequent Kurdish agrarian history. Haim Gerber, The
Social Origins of the Modern Middle East (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1987), 114.
112
For the ulema in Aleppo: Mohammad Tahazâde, a former nakib"ül-e{râf (rep-
resentative of the descendants of the Prophet), alone possessed 18.5 percent of the
total state contracts, much in the fertile district of Jabal Sima'an. The recent cat-
aloging of provincial finance records holds must promise. See, for example, D.B}M-
MLK 1:13 (Hazine-i Musul) berat awarded to Dervis Seyyid Mehmet “from among
the ulema” for half a share in a field (mezraa) (1730–31).
113
DA IV:168 concerns the appointment of an imam in a town outside Diyarbekir
in 1786–87.
114
MMD 9566 (1786–87).
115
DA II:104. Three Naqshbandi shaykhs named Mustafa, Mehmed, and Sadrullah
put a better-armed sipahi, Osman, on the defensive, forcing him to turn to the state
to ascertain whether their contract on Kırk Paykar, with its twelve registered peas-
ants and two çiftliks (valued at 8,811 akçe) in Ergani, overlapped with his own 11,450
akçe timar at Tuna Viran.
116
A certain seyyid, Mühiddin of Palu (DA II:237), insisted on his rights con-
cerning an iltizam, bolstered by a fetvâ (religious opinion) issued in his favor by the
}eyh"ül-(slâm. Molla Seyyid Hüseyin, who held a malikâne mukataa in the eastern
district of Amid, was granted permission to pass these rights to his son, along with
a fruit tree grove (DA I:17). A woman named Sofiya Hatun appealed to the state
for protection against the demands of a certain malikâne holder who claimed her
private field; she received an opinion that was to be put into effect by the state
authorities (DA I:237; DA II:35).
150  

1786 report (takrir) sent to the treasurer in Istanbul tells of Ömer

Pa{azâde Elhac Mehmed Ref "i Bey’s contract on the taxes of the
village of (drislü. He had purchased it at auction on behalf of him-
self and his sons Mustafa, Nurullah, (brahim, and Salih Bey. His
bid of 2,500 kuru{ also included shares in another malikâne contract
in Hani, all of which came to auction after the death of its former
owner, Seyyid Mehmed Efendi Piranizâde.117
Notwithstanding the award of new certificates, Piranizâde’s sons
successfully reclaimed their patrimony. They contended that the auc-
tion had been made improperly. The court should have informed
them, as children of the deceased contractor, of the impending resale.
Now they requested, according to the terms of the malikâne—or in
the words of another member of the ulema, “these Islamic malikâne
contracts” (mezkûr el-(slâm olan malikâneler)118—first option on the shares
and, accordingly, invalidation of the earlier sale.119 Their request was
granted. Of course it was not inconsequential that the petitioners
included none other than Seyyid Mahmud, the Shafi’i mufti, per-
haps the most influential member of the ulema in Amid.120 He and
other members of his family enjoyed special stipends from the provin-
cial treasury.121

Government in the Vernacular

Although our register does little to aid us in our search for coordi-
nates and addresses, auction records and ledgers of new certificates
do provide the names and a few other pertinent details about new
contractors. Among the first to purchase tax farms in the Diyarbekir
region was Shaykh Kasim Efendi, one of the two muftis of Amid,
who invested a sizable sum, 310 kuru{, for the lease on a village,
Monla (molla, in Diyarbekir’s dialect). Mustafa and his partner, Ebu
Bekir, acquired a village contract, as did Sa"ad Shaykh Ahmed,

117
CM 28,020.
118
CM 14,147.
119
CM 28,020.
120
In addition to the quarter share in (drislü village in Eastern Amid, he also
held the contracting rights to another three villages in the district of Hani for a
total investment of 753 kuru{ at the time of death. CM 14,147.
121
D.B}M 6772. His share was half an Amidî mud (220 cubic decimeters) of
wheat flour, as was his sister Rakiye’s (Raziye?) and his two brothers Mesud’s and
     151

Shaykh of the Gül{eni order, based in Mardin. Members of the gen-

try, the local bureaucracy, and the janissary corps appear in the reg-
ister: Mehmet Emin and (brahim ibn Abdelrahman of Amid; “Black”
Ali, a scion of the Milan tribe; Murtaza A[a, captain of an auxil-
lary infantry unit (sekban), and Mehmet, the clerk of the local tariff
station. Some, like Ahmed and Mustafa traveled to Amid from the
town of Çermik; others, like Abdullah and Suleyman, lived in the
quarter near the Ulu Mosque in the provincial capital.122
The first auctions in Amid, in 1696 and 1697, took place under
the direction of the “sales agent” Abdulkader A[a, a kapıcıba{ı dis-
patched from Istanbul.123 Despite rivalries over trade routes and
administrative preeminence, the provincial capital—a city of some
fifty thousand inhabitants—still overshadowed the other towns of the
upper Tigris-Euphrates in size and wealth.124 Having served as the
capital of medieval Islamic dynasties, Amid retained the major cul-
tural institutions of the region, including mosques, academies, churches,
charitable foundations, and a new library founded in 1769.125 It was
home to two muftis, a Hanefi, who represented the official Ottoman
school, and a Shafi’i scholar who ministered to the large Kurdish
population. Christian leadership represented several denominations,
including the Armenian Orthodox; the Syrian ( Jacobite) rite; the
uniate Nestorians, or Chaldean Church; and Catholics. By the early
nineteenth century, a dwindling number of Jewish households lived
there as well.126 These workmen, merchants, traders, artisans, spin-
ners, and manufacturers made the city one of Ottoman Asia’s major
manufacturers of textiles and refined copper.

Mehmed’s, among thirty-six other distinguished members of the ulema and broth-
erhood or tarikat. In the same year (1799–1800), total payments in local salaries,
stipends, and subsidies from the local budget came to 5255.5 kuru{ or 630,660 akçe.
122
MMD 3677:1–3, 12–15.
123
MMD 10,143:233.
124
Van Bruinessen, Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir, 33–34.
125
Yılmazçelik, “XIX. Yüzyılın ilk Yarısında,” 208.
126
The first Carmelite mission in Basra was established by the Portuguese in
1622; a Catholic Presbyter was found in Diyarbekir by 1730. (Herman Gollancz,
ed., Chronicle of Events between the Years 1623 and 1733 Relating to the Settlement of the
Order of Carmelites in Mesopotamia [Bassura] [London: Oxford University Press, 1927],
634.) Walter J. Fischel, ed. and trans., Unknown Jews in Unknown Lands: The Travels
of Rabbi David D’Beth Hillel (1824–1832) (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1973),
72–74. It is difficult to gauge the size of the Christian population in the eighteenth
century. After the 1819 uprising, which devasted the population, the survivors were in
roughly equal numbers Muslim and Christian. M. Fahrettin Kırzıo[lu, “Kara-Âmid’te
152  

During the eighteenth century, whenever special envoys from

Istanbul entered the city, perhaps as Elhac Süleyman A[a did in
1787–88, to investigate the status of malikâne holdings and to collect
the special tax due for the war effort before moving on toward
Mosul,127 they must have repaired to the governor’s compound. It
sat protected in a citadel nested inside the city’s massive basalt ram-
parts. The envoy might have called the city’s notables and officers
to the reception hall of the palace, where they also gathered to wel-
come a new governor on the first Friday after his arrival.128 Despite
its grandeur, with rooms for the hundreds of retainers who awaited
the governors appointed from Istanbul, for much of the eighteenth
century the palace remained vacant. Turnover in appointed candi-
dates was highest at the turn-of-the eighteenth century. Subsequently,
although appointments were made more regularly, governors fre-
quently arrived late. In their place, governors themselves would des-
ignate a deputy (mütesellim) who frequently served out much of the
one-year term of office.129
Even without the governor and perhaps much of the complement
of hundreds of clerks, servants, and guards who accompanied him
to his post, city government continued to function.130 The residences
of the kadı, the mufti, the captain of the local gendarmerie (the janis-
sary serdar), and the voyvoda, along with a jail, were all located inside
the citadel.131 Many of the leading gentry—the }eyhzâde, Müftizâde,

1819 da A"yandan }eyhzâdeler"in Öncülü[ünde Milli Deli-Behram Pa{a"ya Kar{ı

Ayaklanma Ve Sonucu,” Kara Âmid Dergisi 2–4 (1956–58): 351. Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır,
105–7.
127
MMD 9565:1.
128
See Hrand D. Andreasyan translation of P. G. Iniciyan (1758–1833)’s travel-
ogue, XVIII. Asır’da (stanbul (Istanbul: Istanbul Fethi Derne[i, 1956). Yılmazçelik
(Diyarbakır, 353) was able to locate a copy of Abdulgani Buldak’s unpublished his-
tory of Diyarbekir, “El-Cezire"nin Muhtasar Tarihi,” in a private collection.
129
Diyarbekir Salnamesi, 25–29. (brahim Metin Kunt, Bir Osmanlı Valisinin Yıllık Gelir
Gideri: Diyarbakır, 1670–71, No. 162 (Istanbul: Bo[aziçi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 1981),
36. Only two (Bigalı Mehmed Pasha, 1699–1701, and Topal Yusuf Pasha, 1702–3)
of nineteen candidates appointed actually served out their full tenure. There are
some exceptions: Köprülüzâde Abdullah Pasha’s wife and daughter, Zübeyde and
Leyla, were buried in Diyarbekir in the Nebi mosque in 1718. See Metin Sözen,
Diyarbakır"da Türk Mimarisi (Istanbul: Ara{tırma Enstitüsü, 1971), 189–90.
130
Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır, 20–23. Among the residents were the divan efendisi,
voyvoda, mütesellim, tütüncü a[ası, kapıcılar kethudası, {amdan a[ası, ba{ çavu{ a[a, iç çukadar
a[a, kaftan a[ası, silahdar a[a, alemdar a[a, hazinedar a[a, miftah a[a, pe{kir a[a, ibrikdar
a[a, kahya, imam efendi, delilba{ı, haytaba{ı, ba{ çukadar a[a, ikinci kavvas, and mühürba{ı.
131
Compare Jean-Pierre Thieck, “Décentralisation ottomane et affirmation urbaine
     153

Kadızâde, Çinarzâde, and Gevranlı-zâde132—had two-story mansions

in neighboring quarters.133 The gentry formed a pool of candidates
for government offices, including that of deputy governor (mütesellim),
voyvoda, nakib"ül-e{râf, and {ehir kedhüdası.134 Together with the local
religious authorities and elders of the guilds, these men and organi-
zations carried out the day-to-day functions of state: the adminis-
tration of justice, collection of taxes, regulation of the economy, and
policing of the city’s quarters and surrounding countryside.
Whereas rule was fragmented in the countryside and subject, as
the state entered contests over rents and landed resources as a dis-
tant party, in the city there developed a more synthetic version of
home rule. Like a dialect that consists of an imperial syntax and a
local vocabulary, vernacular government entailed a gradual trans-
formation of the character and content of rule that differed depend-
ing on which branches of urban administration were affected.135
In some instances, vernacular government involved relinquishing
key duties and offices to local appointees. Imperial justice serves as
a case in point. Officially, the judge (kadı), leading professors (müder-
ris), and muftis were appointed by the religious authorities of Istanbul.
The judgeship in Amid was a prestigious one. It was one of the top
forty posts in the empire.136 Occupying the first rung up in fairly
prominent circuit of appointments, Mektûbi-zâde Nûrullâh Efendi,
who died in office in Diyarbekir, had also held important positions
in Manisa, Baghdad, Kütahya, and Filibe.137
Despite the fact that this judgeship was a mahrec-level appointment,
Istanbul ulema grew increasingly reluctant to follow Nûrullâh Efendi.
The road across Anatolia was long, arduous, and dangerous for a

à Alep à la fin du XVIIIème siècle,” in Mouvements communautaires et éspaces urbains au

Machreq, ed. Mona Zakaria et al. (Beirut: Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur le
Moyen-Orient Contemporain, 1985),” 125.
132
Ibid. Kunt, Bir Osmanlı Valisinin Yıllık, 52.
133
For a plan of the city, see Mükrimin H. Yınanç, “Diyarbekir,” (A 1: 603–4.
134
For a detailed description of the both the military-administrative and judicial-
religious hierarchies in the city, see Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır, 185–244.
135
See Barbir, “From Pasha to Efendi.”
136
On these positions, see Zilfi, The Politics of Piety. In the seventeenth century,
a position in the medrese was at the top of the hierarchy and its teacher was paid
a 30–40 akçe daily salary. Van Bruinessen, Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir, 46.
137
Çesmi-zâde Mustafa Re{id, Çesmi-zâde Tarihi, ed. Bekir Kütüko[lu (Istanbul:
Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi, 1959), 46, 59, 81, 26; Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır,
225.
154  

man and his family. Moreover, Amid did not lack for well-trained
scholars and lawyers who had graduated from its many fine religious
academies. Thus, Istanbul appointees began to delegate their author-
ity and duties, albeit at the lower rank of deputy judge, naib, to local
dignitaries.138
Graduates from the Amid academies also held temporary and full-
time positions in other municipal offices, including clerkships in the
courts. Occasionally, as we saw in chapter 2, a talented and ambitious
man might make his way into the ranks of the central-state bureau-
cracy. Perhaps the increased opportunity for service within the province
contributed to a lack of “outward” mobility. The Porte certainly rec-
ognized the substantive contribution of the ulema to the order of
urban life, and it rewarded Amid’s scholars and the leaders of the
local Gül{eni and Naqshbandiyya brotherhoods with special stipends
and honoraria. This was a regular part of the voyvodalık budget under
the heading of du"â-güyân, guardians of local morality.139 Their tax-
exempt status was reconfirmed by the }eyh"ül-(slâm, who also verified
claims of membership in the e{râf, descendants of the Prophet.140
Rather than being strictly representatives of the central state, the
provincial officers who staffed the citadel and the fortresses of the
province and who acted as the urban gendarmarie functioned as a
bridge between Istanbul and Amid. Although there is no evidence
of a parallel corps of janissaries the so-called yerli recruits, as in
Damascus or Aleppo, the members of Amid’s corps cultivated con-
nections in many directions. On one hand, they maintained close ties
to central authority, through the governor, who could recommend
promotions to the rank of fortress captain (kale kethüdası, dizdar). Local
officers remembered to offer the captain of the janissary corps in
Istanbul “gifts” (câize) to obtain new postings, such as Cairo.141 Not

138
Yılmazçelik, “XIX. Yüzyılın ilk Yarısında,” 436–37, 431. Other court posi-
tions, such as ba{katıp, also appear to have been filled by local appointees.
139
D.B}M 6772; 7336; 1814; MMD 19,080. Compare with Damascus: Barbir,
Ottoman Rule in Damascus, 81; Van Bruinessen, Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir, 51; Hamid
Algar, “The Naqshbandi Order. A Preliminary Survey of Its History and Significance,”
Studia Islamica 44 (1976): 123–52.
140
DA III:216; DA III:158; DA III:153–54; DA III:55; DA I:16. This in part
explains the ambiguous role of the local ulema during this period; they actively
sought perquisites like tax farms and malikâne and yet often seconded petitions by
peasants against spurious taxation. DA I:25.
141
Jane Hathaway, “Years of Ocak Power: The Rise of the Qazdagli Household
and the Transformation of Ottoman Egypt’s Military Society, 1670–1750 (Egypt)”
     155

a few of Istanbul’s kapıkullar may have traced their ancestry to the

region, including Emin Mehmed A[a and his brothers (brahim,
Mustafa, and Mehmed, sons of Abdülvehab A[a, who bid success-
fully on the office of the registrar (kitaplık) of Diyarbekir (1,230 kuru{);
Ahmed and Mehmed A[a who won an aggregate mukataât in the
district of Siirt (3,200 kuru{); and Ömer A[a, son-in-law of the head
of the mounted janissary corps (sipahi a[ası), who placed a 750 kuru{
bid on another provincial tax farm.142 On the other hand, janissaries
posted to Diyarbekir became well integrated in the urban and rural
fabric. Participating in the life-lease system in town and country-
side,143 they must have passed at least some of these shares and
investments, along with their connections to the military establish-
ment, to their male offspring.144
The contracting of agrarian revenues generally and urban offices
specifically was another way in which Amid’s government took on
a vernacular cast. Yet not all of the city’s key offices were sold off.
Many officials continued to be chosen directly by the central-state
authorities or in consultation with the urban population. This included
some of the key positions overseeing the urban market, such as the
gümrük emini, director of the local tariff station; the ihtisab nâzırı, who
was in charge of collecting of guild taxes; the muhtar, who was respon-
sible for public security and decorum within the city; and the {ehir
kethüdası, who helped adjudicate urban and rural tax burdens and at
times aided in recruiting part-time soldiery.145
The nature of the position voyvoda of Amid, chief intendant of the
province, defies simple classification.146 Over the century, the voyvoda

(Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1992), 82–83; and (. H. Uzunçar{ılı, Osmanlı

Devleti Te{kilatından Kapıkulu Ocakları. Acemi Oca[ı ve Yeniçeri Oca[ı (Ankara: TTK
Basımevi, 1943), vol. 1, 329–30.
142
MMD 4748:79–80.
143
MMD 3677:1–3, 12–15. MMD 9518:67, 101. Two janissaries within the inner
court, perhaps from Amid or certainly relying on their local connections, accepted
the contract on the excise tax on coffee (tahmis-i kahve-i Diyarbekir) in the city in lieu
of salary as well as the secretariat of the janissaries of Diyarbekir (kitabet-i gilmanân-ı
Amid ).
144
Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır, 23, 208. There were about three hundred soldiers
posted to the citadel. Compare with Abdul-Karim Rafeq, “The Local Forces in
Syria in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” 304. An expropriation order
for Ahmad b. (brahim, a janissary from Amid who died on campaign between
Belgrade and Nish in 1739 (D}S 315:20–23).
145
Musa Çadırcı, “Tanzimat’ın Sıralarında Türkiye"de Yönetim (1826–1839),”
Belleten 51 (1987): 1215–40.
146
In 1670, the position was held by a certain Kurd Mehmed A[a, who turned
156  

absorbed many of the functions of the executive in urban adminis-

tration, in addition to his tasks within the larger agrarian economy.
The position was held by both central-state and local appointees,
generally for periods of two to three years. Although the exact com-
position of his charges changed over the century, among his chief
responsibilities were the local tariff station, the main dye house, the
wheat scales, the black stamp tax on cloth coming into the city, and
many villages and fields. Some voyvoda derived their income from a
share of the profits on the aggregate tax farm as subfarmers; others
were salaried employees of the central state. In 1797–98, the salary
allotted to the voyvoda was 22,500 kuru{ per year. According to the
state’s calculus, this equaled the profits on a quarter share of the
contract itself.147
In truth, the central state was particularly loath to delegate its
authority to the gentry in the area of regulation of the local mar-
ket. The Porte directed the officer who conducted the first sale of
contracts in Amid to withhold the revenues from the tariff station,
stamp tax, dye house, and market dues and other urban duties from
the local public auction.148 Although military officers and Diyarbekir
gentry did obtain some prized commercial revenue contracts, Istanbul’s
motive was not only to reserve such high-yielding contracts for the
privileged central state market;149 it was also to retain direct control
over the urban market itself.
Despite such concerns, contracting did affect the organization of
economic life and, by extension, touched the many workers and
tradesmen who populated the city. The primary modality of mem-

the income (voyvoda kalemiyesi ) over to the governor. At this time, the voyvoda was
responsible for collecting the avârız and the bedel-i nüzül; he received fees for the
military district (sancak) and military appointments (tahvil ); the son, Yunus Bey was
appointed the revenue agent (emin) of the stamp tax on cloth (damga) as well as
supervisor of the çeske (once the estate of the provincial defterdar). Kunt, Bir Osmanlı
Valisinin Yıllık Gelir Gideri, 42,49, 53, 70, 204, 255, 280–81, 329, 159, 144; CD 2819
(1777) suggests a three-year appointment. See also Cezar, Osmanlı Tarihinde Levendler,
454–56; Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır, 200–3.
147
D.B}M 6538 (1798) audit of the income of the voyvodalık from 1797 onward.
148
MMD 10,143:233.
149
Nonetheless, local bidders were successful in this sector. They included Küçük
Ali, whose large farm on the excise tax (bac-ı ubur) was later rescinded; an associ-
ate of Hadarzâde, Mehmed Emin the janissary Mustafa, the çavu{ a[ası Kara Ali;
as well as a merchant (bazirgân) and Kasim Efendi one of the two muftis of Amid.
MMD 3139:247, 369. For registers of certificates see the kalemiye register, MMD
777:21.
     157

bership in the urban community was not only the mosque or the
church but also the trade association, or esnaf.150 Craftsmen, shop-
keepers, and small-time traders all participated in such associations.
Although we lack a complete roll of all such professions or a full
description of their organization, a 1792 register of taxes carried out
the kadı lists forty-two individual associations. They include whole-
sale and retail businesses such as coffee sellers and cotton whole-
salers ( pembeçiyân), dealers in ready-made goods (oturakçı), and associations
that come closest to the notion of a guild, such as the manufactur-
ers of mixed cotton and silk cloth (bezzazân). At this time, the high-
est dues were paid by the wealthiest tradesmen, such as the grocers
(bakkalân) and dyers (boyaciyân), and by a guild whose trade was prob-
ably the most widely practiced in the city, the weavers (hallacân).151
A traveler who visited the city in 1815 estimated that there were
some 1,500 workshops, among them 500 were devoted to cotton-
stamping, 300 to leather working, and 100 to ironsmithing.152
The contracting of guild dues affected both guild leaders or shaykhs
and the rank and file in unpredictable ways. To the extent that it
turned the position of head of the guild into a venal office, it may
merely have given official sanction to a preexisting trend toward con-
centrating the position of shaykh, and therefore power within the
guilds, among certain families.153 This seems to have been the case
with the position of maktuât of the cotton-fluffers (cullahân). It was sold
in 1715 for 100 kuru{ to two men wealthy enough to have made
the pilgrimage to Mecca, residents of the quarter named for the
Iskender Pasha Mosque, and their nephew, who lived near the Mardin
Gate. The family retained at least a 25 percent share of the contract

150
Gabriel Baer, “Ottoman Guilds: A Reassessment,” in Türkiye"nin Sosyal ve Ekono-
mik Tarihi (1071–1920), ed. Osman Okyar and Halil (nalcık (Ankara: Meteksan/
Hacettepe University, 1980), 96; Haim Gerber, “Guilds in Seventeenth-Century
Anatolia Bursa,” Asian and African Studies 11 (1976): 59–86. Compare this case with
Manisa; see M. Ça[atay Uluçay, XVII inci Yüzyılda Manisa"da Ziraat, Ticaret ve Esnaf
Te{kilâtı (Istanbul: Resimli Ay Matbaası, 1942).
151
MMD 9519:81; see also D.B}M 1069:4. In 1717, the total protoindustrial
installations in Çünkü{ yielded 10,200 kuru{ in taxes; the dye house alone was worth
1,025 kuru{. See Yılmazçelik, (Diyarbakır, 605–10) for another list.
152
Buckingham, Travels in Mesopotamia including a Journey from Aleppo, 80, 195, 214.
153
In an important manufacturing city such as Aleppo, the intrafamilial nature
of guild appointments in this period is very pronounced; for empirewide trends, see
Tuncer Baykara, Osmanlı Ta{ra Te{kilatında XVIII. Yüzyılda Görev ve Görevliler (Anadolu)
(Ankara: Vakıflar Genel Müdürlü[ü Yayınları, 1990), 118–37.
158  

until 1780.154 More research is required to determine the status of

the contractors involved in the guild dues (müstahak) of the weavers
and dyers, both quite substantial, which were auctioned as malikâne
in 1715 and 1725, respectively.155
In other cases, the sale of offices, particularly those affecting whole-
sale distribution, might have sped the transition of military officers
into tradesmen. Three janissaries—Mehmed Emin A[a, Mustafa A[a,
and another officer in the retinue of an Azizzâde—held the title to
the venal office of “head of the brokers of linen and red cotton cloth
and other stuffs” as a malikâne mukataa in 1721, for which they pledged
a surety of 200 kuru{, and committed themselves to an annual pay-
ment of 10,000 akçe.
Precisely because of the high return on many of these urban con-
tracts, they also attracted central-state investors. However, Istanbul
elites who purchased contracts on Amid’s guild offices needed to be
wary: they had to contend with the politics of the provincial city
and with the elders of the association who enjoyed the backing of
their fellows in the esnaf.156 Indeed, investments from Istanbul raised
new concerns about the autonomy of the esnaf.157 Although the court
might rule in favor of a high-ranking member of the Istanbul elite,
the judge could not entirely ignore their opinion without risking a
reaction from tradesmen. For example, members of the association
of weavers of kutnu, a costly fabric of mixed fibers complained that
the subfarmer who administered the farm on their taxes for the
Istanbul malikâne holder, Seyyid Ali, had overstepped his authority,
committing “cruelty and injustice” by interfering in guild affairs.
Championed by the voyvoda and the judge, the guildsmen sought a
change in staff. They were granted their wish: the office was restored
to a local contractor.158

154
MMD 9518:68; MMD 9519:102.
155
MMD 9518:62, 68; MMD 9519:95, 102.
156
CM 14,097. One of Istanbul’s müderris, Seyyid San"allah Efendi, petitioned in
1786, complaining that his share on the weavers’ association dues was being mis-
managed by his local partner, Süleyman “so and so,” who engaged in pilfering
monies and illegally collecting duties ( fuzulî ahz ve kabz). Despite holding a smaller
share (only one-fifth), the local partners’ familiarity and proximity gave them unde-
niable advantages. The complaint prompted an audit by an officer from the palace,
the silah{ör Abdullah A[a, and a ruling in favor of the Istanbul partner.
157
A malikâne contract conferred upon the position of head shaykh ({eyhlik ) of the
guilds was awarded in 1743.
158
CB 1375. Elhac Osman had held the office of kethüda or steward of the mar-
     159

Although the state was wary of relinquishing direct control over

offices that regulated the urban market as a whole, over time select
contracts did come to auction. Among them were the venal office
of the secretariat of the tariff station (kitâbet-i gümrük) and the “direc-
torship of the market and other [whole] sellers in the market.” In
1777, the position of “second” registrar of the Diyarbekir customs
(kitâbet-i sani gümrük-ü Diyarbekir) was sold to a local bidder, Seyyid
Hüseyin Efendi, who later passed it to a son, Dervi{ Ali.159
Among urban tax farms, the tariff system not only stands out as
one of the single most important sources of revenue within the large
block of tax farms administered directly by the voyvoda. It was also
a retaining wall of rights that ringed the urban economy. Lacking
city charters or official recognition of their corporate status, varia-
tions in tax liabilities and rights to private property separated the
town from countryside.160 Even villagers within the capital district of
Amid recognized their long-standing subordination to the city. Although
they were exempt from the higher rates of the interurban tariff, the
gümrük, town officials charged them market taxes on the sale of their
grain, animals, and garden vegetables.161 So, too, weavers and spin-
ners who lived in the villages and towns immediately surrounding
Amid (Savur ve Genç ve Çermik ve sair kasabât ve kurâ) were forced to
pay duties on a cheap, unfinished cloth called “yuban” (ham yuban
bezi ), also a tax farm auctioned in the city.162
An annotated tariff schedule dating to the period between 1793
and 1814 illustrates the manner in which vernacular government
rested on a fundamental compromise among central-state, regional,
and urban interests.163 Traders in bulk consumer commodities such

ket (bedestan) as a three-year tax farm or iltizam with an annual payment of 25 kuru{
until the farm was converted into a malikâne contract.
159
MMD 9518:62, 77; MMD 9519:111.
160
On this point, see Baber Johansen, “Amwal Zahira and Amwal Batina: Town
and Countryside as Reflected in the Tax System of the Hanafite School,” in Studia
Arabica and Islamica Festschrift for Ihsan 'Abbas on his 60th Birthday, ed. Widad al-Qadi
(Beirut: American University of Beirut, 1981), 247–63.
161
Ömer Lûtfi Barkan, XV. ve XVI. inci Asırlarda Osmanlı Imparatorlu[unda Ziraî
Ekonominin Hukukî ve Malî Esaslari (Istanbul: Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi
Türkiyat Enstitüsü Ne{riyatı, 1943) vol. 1, 549–52.
162
CM 12,742, “maktû dellâllık-ı yuban bezi der Diyarbekir.”
163
KK 5249. The document consists of two main sections: a lengthy itemized
section dating from the 1790s and an appendix dating from 1807–13, when }eyhzâde
(brahim became the de facto ruler of the city. The annotations, which were added
by the judge, appear to have been made after (brahim Pasha’s death in 1814.
160  

as coffee, tobacco, aloe, fragrances, and sugar, and even sundry

Indian cotton textiles and twist that were destined for the Istanbul
market, paid low rates of taxation. They were spared all but a min-
imal transit tax, taken in kind as a percentage of weight.164 By con-
trast, merchants of specialty goods, which included the most famous
textiles manufactured within the empire itself and which were listed
in a lengthy itemized list within the schedule, paid particularly stiff
tolls: ad valorem duties (amediyye) of 5 percent against current value.
Although burdensome for distributors and importers, such taxes
shielded urban artisans. Profit margins were narrow, and it was high-
quality, local raw materials and regional specialties that helped pre-
serve the artisans’ share in a highly competitive domestic market.165
Because the conversion of taxes and tariffs into contracts served
to anticipate revenues without changing the form of the taxation
itself, contracting did little to alter the basic premises of the region’s
political economy. Indeed, by reflecting older fiscal jurisdictions, the
award of mâlikane leases may have actually helped freeze long-standing
patterns of interaction between town and country, shoring up the
urban monopoly over labor-intensive and value-added specialties.
Tax farmers and the guilds shared interests in maintaining standards,
in “collective” bargaining for raw materials, and in establishing prices
for goods and services.166
This was particularly true for value-added techniques such as the
dyeing and stamping of cloth. One of the more prestigious and cer-
tainly wealthier esnaf, the dyers’ association, was particularly vigilant
about maintaining its monopoly over dyeing. It had need to be; even

164
Ibid. Indian generic cotton stuffs (metâ"i ) (and perhaps yarn) were taxed in
bulk. Kurdistani and Syrian goods warehoused in the city and taxed by animal-
load (donkey load, 68 para [60 para equaled one kuru{]; camel-load, 820 para; and
horse-load, 34 para), such as soap, mazu dye, henna, and possibly Mosul cloth, and
in the late eighteenth century, the copper processed in the local refinery (kalhâne),
which was exempt from such taxation. A. S. K. Lambton (“Persian Trade Under
the Early Qajars,” in Islam and Trade in Asia, ed. D. S. Richards (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1970), 221) estimates a camel load as 400 pounds, a mule load
at 240, and a horse load at 130.
165
For the scale of proto-industrialization, see Peter Kriedte, Peasants, Landlords
and Merchant Capitalists: Europe and the World Economy, 1500–1800 (Warwickshire: Berg
Publishers, 1983), 70–76. On the specificity of the regional market in manufactures,
see comments by James Brant, “Journey through a Part of Armenia and Asia Minor
in the Year 1835,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society 10 (1841): 383.
166
J. S. Buckingham (Travels in Mesopotamia, 84, 214), notes that stamping cotton
“renders the cloth in that state nearly double the price it bears when white.”
     161

the hamlet of Çünkü{ boasted an active proto-industrial base, includ-

ing a tannery and a dye house large enough to warrant its own
stamp tax (damga) on cloth.167 There were dye houses in Çermik,
Palu, Harput, and Hazzo as well, and important manufactories in
the neighboring cities of Mardin, Ayıntab, and Urfa. So, too, cen-
tralization of value-added types of industries suited revenue con-
tractors; in 1726, both the dyers’ association and the voyvoda (whose
charge included the tax farm on the dye house itself ) requested a
rescript from Istanbul to shut down the dye houses that had been
opened in the countryside by “bazı kurâ eshabı” (some “owners” of
villages).168
In privileging the city’s manufactures or, alternatively, penalizing
“foreign” manufactures “whether or not they were sold within the
city,” as the tariff schedule puts it, participants in the tax-farming
systems were of one accord. City artisans produced many fine tex-
tile products, including alaca as well as stuffs destined for mass con-
sumption such as the imitation cotton “chafarjanis,” printed textiles,
tent canvas, and a specially dyed red cotton yarn.169 Even as a lively
trade in cotton cloth exported to Europe (import substitutes for Indian
fabric) spurred thread and textile production far into the country-
side,170 the tariff system to some degree stanched the spread of weav-
ing beyond the city and lessened the profitability of goods produced
in smaller towns within the province where costs might have been
lower. A 5 percent import tax was imposed not only on the prod-
ucts of Iran or on those coming from the famous workshops of
Ottoman Aleppo, Damascus, and Bursa but also on the most humble

167
MMD 9519:81; see also D.B}M 1069:4. In 1717, the total protoindustrial
installations of Çünkü{ yielded 10,200 kuru{kuru{kuru{ in taxes yearly; the dye house
alone was worth 1,025 kuru{.
168
MMD 9916:110.
169
The kadı’s glosses above the itemized section of KK 5249 already show con-
siderable discrepancy between the “official” prices and current prices upon which
ad valorem taxes (of 5 percent) were based. In an 1814 report (MMD 10,262:219),
administrators noted that the gross underestimation of tax on Indian cloth resulted
in an eight to ten times underpayment (at the rate of 30 para per batman of goods).
Already in the last decade of the eighteenth century, the actual rates of internal
gümrük stations were subject to much variation, depending on local agreements and
rivalries between regimes. Also, Issawi, The Fertile Crescent, 178–79.
170
Katsumi Fukasawa, Toilerie et commerce du Levant au XVIII e siècle d’Alep à Marseille
(Marseille: Groupe de Recherche et d’Ètudes sur le Proche Orient Centre Regional
de Publication de Marseille, 1985).
162  

cottons woven in towns like Mardin, Çermik, Hazzo, Palu, and Har-
put, all within Diyarbekir province itself.171 When entrepreneurial
janissaries attempted to purchase cotton manufactures or perhaps to
engage in forms of putting out in the surrounding countryside,172 the
guilds had no need to rise to the occasion. Instead, the tax farmer
defended the interests of Amid’s weavers, objecting to the fact that
the janissaries’ actions allowed them to evade payment of the black
stamp tax (damga-ı siyah).173
The main impact of tax farming seems to have been to reinforce
the hierarchy of wealth, power, and influence within the esnaf and the
primacy of the urban market. The privilege of holding such con-
tracts was restricted to Muslims, a symptom of the progress of ver-
nacular government generally. Did this privilege accentuate the
differences between confessional groups? In economic terms, proba-
bly not. By early modern standards, Amid was a fairly integrated
city; one of every three of its townsmen lived in a confessionally
mixed neighborhood.174 Both Muslims and Christians were counted
among the largest esnaf, though they reported to different masters,
shaykhs and ostads, respectively.175 Both groups benefited from the
protectionism afforded by the tariff system and the emphasis on
maintaining the city’s monopoly on value-added, higher-skilled occu-
pations in manufacturing. Contracts embracing aggregate resources
spread liabilities among ordinary tradesmen, whether Muslim, Chris-
tian, or Jew. For example, the farm on the taxes on the sale of bees-
wax and leather (mahsül-ü rusumât-ı bal-ı mum ve çarm) actually affected
primary materials for two different guilds, one dominated by Muslims
(leather workers), and the other, by Christians (candle makers).176
The question, however, was not merely an economic one. In addi-
tion to reinforcing the trend toward the inheritance of offices such
as guild shaykh, which widened the political and economic gap
between rich and poor tradesmen, tax farming must have altered
the expectations of Muslim elites toward government generally. By

171
KK 5249; see also C( 432 (1797–98), a malikâne on the damgha for cloth pro-
duced in Çar{ınacak and Palu.
172
CM 12,742.
173
MMD 10,246:119. In 1804, this tax, combined with the ihtisab, commanded
a bid of 32,000 kuru{.
174
Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır, 30–31, 46–47, 115–17.
175
CZ 1364.
176
MMD 9518:62, 67.
     163

becoming contractors themselves, the Muslim gentry interacted, albeit

long distance, with powerful persons in Istanbul and established them-
selves within local governing circles. Furthermore, although a tax
farm might involve a seemingly insignificant sum, its actual political
clout must be measured in terms of the number of people it affected.
Considering that the majority of Diyarbekir’s urban population, male
and female, worked in cotton weaving, as did a large percentage of
the province’s villagers and peasants who spun thread, the small tax
farm on the weighing scales of white cotton twist (maktuât-ı vazınlık
ri{te-i beyaz der Diyarbekir), which netted the state a mere 25 kuru{ a
year, nevertheless yielded considerable dividends, in terms of influence
and reputation, for the family who held it for three decades from
1726 to 1757.177 How much more so for the contractors of the stamp
tax on colored silk (mahsül-ü damga-ı harir-i elvân), the tax farmer of
cloth produced in the “mountain” and Sa[man (damga-ı kûh ve Sa[man),
the revenue agent who collected the taxes from the leather market
(bazaar-ı çarm-ı Amid ), or the operators and tax farmer of the tannery
of the city (debba[hane-i Amid), all of whom were local Muslims? If
contracting fostered a new sense of civic partnership especially among
a middle class of Muslim tradesmen-contractors, janissary-brokers,
and hereditary guild shaykhs-revenue collectors, at best it brought
ordinary workers and non-Muslims along in a paternalistic fashion.

Checks and Balances

In reshaping our notion of “center” and periphery,” our ledger casts

a wide net over contractors, claimants, and tax payers. In doing so,
it aids us in resituating the larger-than-life individuals who figure so
prominently in the narratives of the late eighteenth century. Certainly
the emergence of the gentry and magnates—the derebey, or rural
lords, of Anatolia, the magnates of the Balkans; the tax farming gen-
try of Syria and the Aegean; and the quasi-autonomous regimes of
Cairo and Baghdad at the geopolitical fringes of the empire—was
also a product of the overarching rhythms of imperial history.178 The

177
MMD 9518:68; MMD 9519:102.
178
Halil (nalcık (“Military and Fiscal Transformation,” 331–32) considers them
a “well-defined” group. See also Albert Hourani, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics
of Notables,” in Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century,
164  

contracting out of rural taxes in the form of iltizam or malikâne mukataât

facilitated their ascent.179 Grand Vizier Muhsinzâde Mehmet Pasha
tried, from his first term in office in 1765 and again in 1771, to
forge a direct link between the provincial elite and the state in the
area of military recruitment, food provisions, and munitions.180
If central-state policymakers and historians failed to make finer
distinctions among the gentry, the so-called ayân ve e{râf, modern
researchers, as Engin Akarlı argues,181 cannot ignore the fact that
magnates, such as the 'Azms of Damascus and the Jalilis of Mosul,
whose roots lay outside the cities in which they came to power,
served the strategic interests of the state in a different manner than
a home-grown urban gentry. Damascus and Mosul were “frontier”
posts where military might was of paramount concern. By contrast,
in a trading city like Aleppo, rival clans, the Shayhbandaris, the
Hunkârlızâde, and the Tahazâde, vied over the stewardship of the
main “block” of tax farms, the muhassıllık. These great families were
part of an oligarchy of some one hundred families who held many
of the offices and tax farms in their city and province.182

ed. William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1968), 41–67. (smail Hakkı Uzunçar{ılı, “Çapan O[luları,” Belleten 38 (1974):
216–65.
179
Genç, “Osmanlı Ekonomisi ve Sava{,” 55. In many sectors before 1768, returns
amounted to 35 percent or even 40 percent, and though they declined after 1770
to 18–22 percent, this was still a handsome profit (Genç, “Osmanlı Maliyesinde
Malikâne Sistemi,” 252). The 'Azm clan could fall back on tax farming networks
as a source of influence within Damascus and the countryside of Syria and espe-
cially in their places of origin in Ma'arrat al-Nu'man and Hama. Abdul-Karim
Rafeq, “Economic Relations between Damascus and the Dependent Countryside,
1743–71,” in The Islamic Middle East, 700–1900, ed. Abraham Udovitch (Princeton,
N.J.: Darwin Press, 1971), 654–55.
180
Yuzo Nagata, Muhsin-zâde Mehmed Pa{a ve Âyânlık Müessesesi (Tokyo: Study of
Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa Monograph Series, 1982), 5, 28–31.
Nagata disputes the date of this event; differences, however, might be attributable
to administrative forms in the Balkans and Anatolia.
181
Akarlı, “Provincial Power Magnates in Ottoman Bilad al-Sham and Egypt,”
43. For an overview of economy of the city of Mosul, see Dina Rizk Khoury, “The
Political Economy of the Province of Mosul, 1700–1850” (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown
University, 1991), 68–77. And generally, Necdet Sakao[lu, Anadolu Derebeyi Ocaklarından
Köse Pa{a Hanedanı (Ankara: Yurt Yayınları, 1984), 59–60; and Özcan Mert, XVIII.
ve XIX. Yüzyıllarda Çapano[ulları (Ankara: Kültür Bakanlı[ı, 1980).
182
See CM 25,002 1760–61; MMD 9740:82. For the links between Aleppo gen-
try and central-state rical, see the accounts of the court banker, Musa covering the
period from 1769 to 1775 (D.B}M 4047); also Margaret L. Meriwether, The Kin
Who Count: Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770–1840 (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1999), 43.
     165

The gentry government in Amid seems closer in form to Aleppo’s

oligarchy than the one-family rule of the Jalilis in Mosul. Yet each
city responded to the shifting patterns of provincial power during
the second half of the eighteenth century in its own fashion, infus-
ing a distinctive type of local leadership into the amalgam of claims
and counterclaims making up vernacular government. Among the
families of the ulema and dozens of members of the great gentry,
the }eyhzâde clan stands out.183 Although the clan’s name suggests
a link to individuals holding provincial offices from the seventeenth
century onward, convention traces their lineage to Shaykh Yusuf
Veli.184 Yet it was only in the second half of the eighteenth century,
and particularly with (smail (d. 1799), who repeatedly held the posi-
tion of Diyarbekir’s voyvoda, that the clan attracted the attention of
authorities in Istanbul and Baghdad.185 (smail’s son, (brahim (1747–
1813), followed his father into provincial office, assuming the posi-
tion of voyvoda in 1787–88, at the rank of kapucuba{ı.186 (brahim’s
career led beyond his native city to deputy governor (1789–90) and
later governor of Urfa in 1797. One of a few dozen officers to answer
the call for soldiers to fight Napoleon in Egypt,187 he returned to
take up the post of governor of his native province of Diyarbekir
for the first time in 1799–1800. Local biographers remembered him
as the quintessential gentry-pasha—“both a man of the state (rical-ı
hükümet) and native of the region (ahali buldan).”188
}eyhzâde father and son cut their teeth on the office of voyvoda.189
As we have seen, the Diyarbekir voyvoda emerged as the chief fiscal

183
MMD 2931:122. A certain }eyhzâde Ebu Bekir, who took the office of voyvoda
in 1683 with the financial backing of a certain Abidin (based in Istanbul?).
184
Ali Emiri, Tezkere-i }u"arâ-i Amid (Istanbul: Matbua-i Amidi, 1328/1910–1911)
vol. 1, 222–30, 239, 253–54, 115–17, 368–69. Thanks to David Waldner, I was
able to obtain a copy of M. Fahrettin Kırzıo[lu’s “Kara-Âmid"te 1819 da A"yandan
}eyhzâdeler"in Öncülü[ünde Milli Deli-Behram Pa{a"ya Kar{ı Ayaklanma Ve Sonucu,”
Kara Âmid Dergisi 2–4 (1956–58): 350–378, which refers extensively to Abdulgani
Bulduk’s (1864–1951), El-Cezire"nin Muhtasar Tarihi, an important source that was
otherwise unavailable to me.
185
(nalcık, “Centralization and Decentralization,” 33.
186
CZ 541; CM 25,214 (December 1813) pertains to the expropriation order of
(brahim among others.
187
Sakao[lu, Anadolu Derebeyi Ocaklarından Köse Pa{a Hanedanı, 105. The voyvoda of
E[in also volunteered according to Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır, 108.
188
CZ 541 (1790–91); Mehmed Süreyya Bey, Sicill-i Osmanî; yahut Tezkere-yi Me{ahir-i
Osmaniye (Istanbul: Matbaa-i Âmire, 1308–15/1890–97), 1:151; Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır,
43–44, 91.
189
MMD 2931:122. The evolution from tax farmer to intendant occurs over the
166  

officer of the province and the main intendant overseeing a valu-

able set of revenue sources within the city. Unlike the position of
voyvoda of Ayıntab or Mardin190 which was subordinate to the com-
mand of a larger administrative city, by the eighteenth century, the
voyvoda residing in Amid at times performed duties that made him
all but indistinguishable from a deputy or civil governor.191
It was this range of responsibilities over territory and government
that made the position far more than the sum of its fiscal parts.192
During the last quarter century, such duties included those of mili-
tary recruiter and chief probate officer, the latter responsible for con-
ducting an inventory of the property of officials who died in office.
Each of these duties brought the voyvoda political preeminence in the
city and region, and he did not hesitate to use his powers against
his rivals.193 As the inventory and wide-ranging investments of one
former voyvoda, Mustafa A[a ibn Abdulveheb A[a ibn elhac Hüseyin,
in 1739 demonstrate, the office also brought its holder into contact
with the financial, economic, and political nexus of the empire.194
In Diyarbekir, there is little doubt that the growing coercive force
and multiple institutional hats of the voyvoda increased the potential

second half of the seventeenth century. In 1683, Ebu Bekir needed a guarantor, a
certain Abidin (based in Istanbul?), to take charge of three-year iltizam. His duties
included collection of revenues totaling 19,607,908 akçe, of which 2,430,180 akçe
were the avârız and bedel-i nüzül (100 akçe/kurus) In 1689–94 (TT 831:38 [1689–
94/1100–1105]), the voyvodalık (both the position and its revenues) was held twice
as a two-year tax farm by other tax farmers, {ahban A[a, Uzun Ali A[a, and
Mehmed A[a, all of whom were probably local janissaries. Uzun Ali had a guar-
antor named Ahmed A[a.
190
In other cases, such as eighteenth-century Ayintap, the position of voyvoda was
venal and held as a three-year iltizam. See Güzelbey, Gaziantep {eri’i Mahkeme Sicilleri,
103–4. MMD 2931:122 (1683).
191
DA I:151. Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır, 200.
192
Van Bruinessen, Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir, 124–27.
193
Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır, 238.
194
D}S 315:73–80. He owed money to Vezir Mime{ Pasha, and Çeteçi Abdullal
Pasha of Kerküt; he left his wife 28,454 kuru{. For the follow-up investigations, see
D.B}M 12,532 (1741). For some of the financial networks in Diyarbekir, see the
case of Halil, a former voyvoda at the rank of kapucuba{ı, who lent 7,625 kuru{ to
Mahmud, the sancakbeyi of Çermik (DA I:151). Compare with MMD 9740:82
(1782–83) concerning the former muhassıl Hunkârlizâde elhac Ahmed A[a and his
son Mehmet. MMD 10,000:368 (1768–69) is an example of subfarming of a share
in the voyvodalık by the voyvoda. Compare Suraiya Faroqhi, “Wealth and Power in
the Land of Olives: Economic and Political Activities of Muridzâde Haci Mehmed
Agha, Notable of Edremit,” in Landholding and Commercial Agriculture in the Middle East,
ed. Ça[lar Keyder and Faruk Tabak (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1991), 77–96.
     167

for abuse. But even a voyvoda could not operate with impunity. He
came under the scrutiny, on one side, of a variety of contractors,
venal officeholders, and provincial authorities; on the other, of the
shareholders in the super-tax farm for which he served as either an
employee or intendant. As a contractor himself, he could see his
lucrative holdings retracted and reassigned to others.195 Overall, this
division of labor between shareholders and administrators in the
peculiar type of tax farm known as the voyvodalık provided an addi-
tional firewall against a monopolization of legal, financial, and coer-
cive control.196 But the system of checks and balances worked only
so long as the largest shares remained in the hands of central-state
investors. It broke down, in 1784, for example, when the voyvoda
(smail A[a and a son, (brahim, obtained half the shares themselves.197
It was the inherently divergent interests in the institution of tax
farming, as Jürgen Habermas has opined, that provided an opening
for the “public” in local governance.198 Petitions to Istanbul and
records of subsequent investigations document the misdeeds of then
voyvoda (smail }eyhzâde, who had conspired with the janissary com-
mander (serdar) Gavuro[lu in Diyarbekir to extort money from many
of the city’s residents, including its most prominent citizens.199 Accord-
ing to a final resolution in 1777, their operations had apparently

195
Meriwether, “Urban Notables and Rural Resources in Aleppo,” 69. The for-
mer nakib"ül-e{râf of Aleppo, Muhammad Tahazâde, who held nearly one-fifth of
all malikâne lands in the surrounding districts in the last quarter of the century, pro-
vides an apt example. He was exiled and his holdings were expropriated in 1775;
reinstated a decade later, he was shorn of many of his tax farms.
196
In this way it functioned better than Aleppo’s muhassıl: On his “bankruptcy,”
Ahmed Efendi Vâsıf, Mehâsinü "l-Âsâr ve Hakâikü "l-Ahbâr, trans. and ed. Mücteba
Ilgürel (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Basımevi, 1978), 189. In 1798–99, Aleppo’s
muhassıllık farm was placed in the esham system.
197
MMD 9896:29–30. An early account of the malikâne on the voyvodalık gives its
value as 764,334 kuru{ tâm. In 1700–1701 (MMD 19,080:1), the annual payment
(mal) totaled 13,023,123 akçe; in 1781, the annual remittance from the farm was
10,928,630 akçe (MMD 9518:1, MMD 9519:1–4). The voyvoda held shares in the
voyvodalık during the following years: 1697; 1700–1704 (MMD 1637:152); 1705–6
(MMD 9896:29). Naturally, the entire family, in the case of a local notable might
benefit from these political connections. In 1777, while his father served as voyvoda,
(brahim himself took hold of five-eighths of the total shares in the highly valued
contract on the tobacco taxation (MMD 9519:22).
198
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into
a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1991), 16–19.
199
CD 2819 (1777). On the plague of 1799–1800, which took the life of (brahim
Pasha’s father (smail A[a (as noted by our Baghdad-based historian), see Yasin al-
'Umari, al-Durr al-Maknûn fî al-Ma"âthir al-Mâdiya, 487.
168  

continued for quite some time before Amid’s enraged citizenry de-
nounced both men for collusion and oppression of local taxpayers.200
Townsmen not only brought their prestige to the prosecution of
their case against the voyvoda but also took advantage of personal
experience and involvement in Amid’s system of vernacular govern-
ment. As we have seen, more than a hundred of the city’s residents,
including the leading members of the ulema, were contractors them-
selves. They understood the conditions placed on those who held
contracts. They were familiar with the apparatus in Istanbul and
had personal links to members of the religious and administrative
hierarchy. Having identified the parties and interests involved, the
townsmen pursued their greivance. They addressed a petition to the
Istanbul bureaucracy. They also sent separate letters ( ferdân ferdân)
to Abdul Rahman Efendi, Mehmed Tahir A[a, and Ahmed Efendi,
the aristocratic shareholders of the malikâne in Istanbul.
Their strategy worked well enough. The malikâne contractors, who
had invested a very large sum—78,512.5 kuru{ to be exact—as surety,
were naturally concerned about the management of their investment.
The voyvoda was already in arrears in payments.201 The contractors
joined their voices to those agitating for the dismissal of the gentry-
voyvoda, (smail A[a. He was replaced by a certain Seyyid Ahmed
Bey who hailed from nearby Ergani.202
The treasury, however, in the throes of fiscal crises brought on
by the conclusion of the Russo-Ottoman war, including the huge
war indemnity demanded under the treaty of Küçük Kaynarca of
1774, used the uproar as a pretext to take over the tax farm and
reassess its value. A revenue agent was dispatched from Istanbul.203
In what turned out to be the beginning of a more activist posture
by the state, at least once in every decade (1777, 1785, 1786, 1798,
and 1802) the central treasury intervened and replaced local agents
with salaried central-state employees. In doing so, the bureaucracy
acted as a trustee of the voyvodalık, dividing the “earnings” among

200
Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır, 113–14.
201
That is not to say that the system in Diyarbekir was trouble free. See CM
29,248 (1761), addressed to Mustafa Pasha and the kadı of Diyarbekir regarding
collection of 30,386.5 kuru{ arrears.
202
MMD 10,190:170.
203
Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır, 198. The voyvodalık was an emanet in 1777, 1785, 1796,
1802, 1803, and 1819.
     169

the imperial treasury and the contractors who held the malikâne.204
The tenacity of vernacular government was proven in the face of
the Nizam-ı Cedid, “New Order,” a program of military and fiscal
reforms initiated after 1793. One of its aims was to reintroduce state
control by the appointment of rical to provincial offices or by reshuffling
local magnates within the larger region of Syria, Eastern Anatolia
and Kurdistan.205 In Diyarbekir, gentry-pashas and appointees from
the aristocracy of service alternated the office of governor. The mobil-
ity of gentry-pashas continued to be circumscribed regionally. After
a brief tour of duty as governor of his native province,206 }eyhzâde
(brahim, one of the former voyvoda (smail’s sons, was assigned to
other posts within West Asia, including the governorship of Jidda in
1800, before returning to Diyarbekir again in 1801. Diyarbekir’s gov-
ernorship was also awarded to other provincial elites, including lead-
ers of the Kiki and Milan tribes, members of the Köseo[lu clan of
Sivas, and (brahim A[a, a retainer of Muhmamad Tahazâde of
Aleppo.207 The differences in career paths remained striking. A cen-
tral-state appointee like Yusuf Ziya Pasha, who rapidly rose from
clerk to intendant of mines, to grand vizier, and to provincial gov-
ernor, might dabble in both center and periphery—indeed, his sons
and associates purchased many village contracts in Diyarbekir dur-
ing his tenure.208 Where Yusuf Ziya Pasha’s investments spanned the
empire, (brahim Pasha made his investments locally. Where Yusuf
Ziya Pasha climbed to the grand vizierate, only with the interreg-
num between 1807 and 1813, could (brahim Pasha aspire to rule
uncontestedly in his native province.209

204
Ibid.
205
To name but two: Cezar Pasha in Sidon who resisted Napoleon; the reform-
oriented Capano[lu of Central Anatolia who countered the Canıkli of Trebizond
and Erzurum.
206
CZ 541 (1205); Sicill-i Osmanî, vol. 1, 151; See also Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır,
43–44, 91–92, 112–13, 172–73, 191–96, 200–202, 250–53.
207
Meriwether, The Kin Who Count, 61.
208
Ali Emiri, Tezkere-i }u"arâ-i Amid, vol. 1, 141. Mehmed Süreyya Bey, Sicill-i
Osmanî, vol. 4, 670–71. His sons and associates held numerous tax farms in the
region, beginning with his first tenure in office. (For holdings of sons Mehmet Beg
and Sabit Yusuf Beg, MMD 9518:27, 28, 33, 38, 57, 78, 98, 104, and 106; and
of his retainers, 84, 85, and 91.) For his income as grand vizier, see D.B}M 7016
(1802–5). He also held a half share in the copper refinery in Amid in 1795–96
(MMD 9519:9). For his earlier career see n. 49 above.
209
Mehmed Süreyya Bey, Sicill-i Osmanî, vol. 1, 151; Diyarbekir Salnamesi (1286/
1869–70), 26; CM 25, 214 (1813).
170  

The Sublime Porte’s new policies toward vernacular government

failed to take local conditions into consideration. The program of
centralization found the city and province of Diyarbekir in the depths
of a severe economic crisis. Imperial demands for emergency sup-
plies and manpower had increased during the last two decades of
the eighteenth century to pay for the wars with Russia and France.210
New impositions burdened the urban marketplace. Textile produc-
ers—spinners, weavers, cloth printers, and dyers—who formed the
core of Diyarbekir’s artisan class, faced increased taxation on cotton
thread, dyes, and cloth, as well as on chemicals such as alum, which
were vital to treating and dyeing textiles.211 Plague stuck the region
again in 1799–1800 and took the life of the former voyvoda, (smail.212
Increasingly bold attacks by the Wahhabis on southern Iraq, includ-
ing the sack of the Shi"i shrines in the cities of Najaf and Kerbala,
delayed the caravans traffic that transited the city and neighboring
towns.
The combination of new forms of state intervention, natural dis-
asters and empirewide economic stresses and strains eroded the
separation of powers that had contained the impact of poor admin-
istrators.213 Suffering from the rapaciousness of a deputy governor
left in place by (brahim Pasha himself, townsmen regarded the arrival
and billeting of 1,602 troops belonging to the 31st battalion (orta) of
the Nizam-ı Cedid army, as the final straw. In the best of times, the
introduction of a new political group into the city—in this case, sol-
diers whose number equaled that of Amid’s gendarmerie, guards,
and janissaries combined—would have heightened tensions. But in
1802, the town’s precarious economic circumstances made the prospect
of assimilating a new social, economic, and political element into the
urban fabric unthinkable.
Vernacular government had been based on a careful balance of
force, taxation, and historic rights and forged over a century of nego-
tiation between guildsmen, janissaries, and contractors. By violating
the century-long compact between state and society, the soldiers’ bul-
lying, threats, and outright violence in the streets of Amid sparked

210
Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır, 208.
211
CD 2173. In May 1801, increases in the alum tax were announced in the
Asian provinces Karahisar-ı }ark, Aleppo, Damascus, Arabia, Van, Kars, Tokat,
Erzurum, Sivas, Diyarbekir, Rakka, Beyrut, and Iskenderiye.
212
Süleyman Efendi, Mur"i"t-Tevarih, vol. 2A, 25.
213
Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır, 110–13, 247–51.
     171

the great ihtilal, or insurrection of 1802.214 That summer, townsmen

did not assault the troops. Instead, they vented their anger at a par-
ticularly egregious symbol of the state’s new fiscal program. Chanting,
“Destroy them [the mengene, the presses],” and “They have no prece-
dent and are illicit [muhadis deyü]),”215 the largely Muslim crowd surged
against the building that housed both the machine that pressed and
sized textiles and the station that levied the taxes on the export-
quality cloths produced in the city.216 In three days of rioting, the
crowd leveled the presses and razed the entire Haci Osman quar-
ter of the city, including shops, manufactories, and homes.217
Could the crowd have known that main contractor of the presses
was none other than (brahim Re{id Efendi,218 one of the architects
of the program of centralization and the controller of the New
Order fisc?
The state’s response was swift. The ninety-eight guildsmen who
led the rebellion did not await the deputy governor’s reaction but
immediately fled the city. Amid’s Hanefite mufti, Mesüd Efendi, was
immediately exiled to Cyprus. Thirty-one members of the ulema
were also threatened with expulsion. (brahim Pasha, though away on
campaign, was held responsible for his deputy’s dereliction of duties
and his inability to control the city.219 With a new governor appointed,
the state planned to take the local gentry to task for this incident
and prevent further provincial “interference” in urban governance.
Intentions notwithstanding, it should not surprise us that Porte
found it difficult to reach a final agreement without reconvening

214
CZ 1364 (30 July 1803) contains a summary of events and includes a copy
of the deposition.
215
Ibid. In his dissertation (“XIX. Yüzyılın ilk Yarısında,” 221 [based on D}S
336:79–80]), Yılmazçelik notes that there was only one non-Muslim among the
ninety-eight “rioters” involved.
216
MMD 9518:62, 77; MMD 9519:111. The malikâne contract dates to 1755. On
the mengene taxes, see MMD 9519:10; Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım, 325. In
May of 1797 (CI 199; CM 14,123), and repeated on October 1804 (MMD 10,246:230):
all cloths—alaca, beyazlı, kutni, gazi, and atlas—were to pay at 30 akçe per bolt.
217
Yılmazçelik (Diyarbakır, 113–14) describes this event in detail, referring not
only to the relevant court documents (D}S 536:79–80) but also to the memoirs
and papers of an early-nineteenth-century administrator, (brahim b. Muhammed
(“Diyarbakır Mutasarrıfı (brahim b. Muhammed"in Hatırat ve Mektupları,” found
in the Elazı[ Museum Archive [Ms. 137]).
218
CM 8741; C( 697. In 1800–1801, (brahim Re{id Efendi, held three-quarters
of the contract; one-quarter was in the hands of the voyvoda Halil A[a.
219
Yılmazçelik, Diyarbakır, 238, 255.
172  

vernacular government. Negotiations continued for a year. The depo-

sition that was drawn up in August 1803 required considerable medi-
ation. The imperial court solicited the signatures of the city’s five
leading professors (müderris), the clerks of the court, the chief bailiff,
and the court translator, presumably for those who spoke Kurdish
or Armenian. The notarial document named twenty-five Muslim
shaykhs and master guildsmen along with twenty-three non-Muslim
ostad responsible for payment of a fine of 30,000 kuru{ to “restore
the presses to their former state.” Those damages compensated the
presses’ main investor, the chief treasurer, for his losses. In addition,
guildsmen promised to share a bond of 389,000 kuru{ guaranteeing
the banning of those who had fled the city.
It was a harsh punishment. Yet local society also scored a pyrrhic
victory: the 31st battalion had been withdrawn from the city in July
1803. The guilds would comanage the presses in the capacity of sub-
farmers.220

Final Entries

Conserving space in the half page allotted him in our register, a

clerk entered the last transaction under the tax farm on two villages
in the province of Diyarbekir in 1791. The entries grow sparser in
the register during the last decade of the eighteenth century.
The clerks in Istanbul were determined to put Diyarbekir’s accounts
in order. In 1799 they opened a new set of books. An unusual atten-
tiveness to form may be discerned in a summary of the malikâne con-
tracts under the voyvodalık that was drafted on a series of unbound
folios (Fig. 6).221 In place of the swirl of notations, dates, and frac-
tions of shares that marked the diachronic approach to which have
referred thus far, this new register presents its documentation in a
strictly synchronic and synoptic fashion. The tax farms are entered
neatly side by side; each row repeats the same form of entry, with
the name of the type of revenue preceding the name or names of
the contractors. Its historical sweep has gone; its accounts are cur-

220
Ibid., 219–20. In 1804, the esnaf split the cost with the contractor for the
repair of the building (MMD 9519:10).
221
D.B}M 14,094.
     173

Fig. 6 Note the difference in the style of a Nizâm-i Cedid register. The top
entry on the last page records the maktu (lump sum tax) owed by several
villages in the kaza of Hani. The lower two entries furnish names of con-
tractors holding various urban offices, including the kethudalık of the bedesten
of Diyarbekir, the delalba{ılık of the “black” bazar and the delallık of the city’s
beyt’ ül-mal. In his summary, the clerk disparages local authorities.
174  

rent only for a given year. Written in the well-formed nesih script,
its pages are free of shorthand, siyakat, the bane of the modern
researcher. Despite the remarkable clarity and uniformity of his
expression, the clerk concludes on a sour note. He complains that
he was forced to write the contents out in full: provincials “are unable
to read siyakat,” the trademark of a properly trained bureaucrat.
Feigning mutual unintelligibility, the Istanbul clerk distances him-
self in culture and in social status from his provincial counterparts.
He too was complicit in the denial of a system of government that
had existed with the full approval of the statesmen in Istanbul.
Without formal redrafting, provincial boundaries were redrawn
by combinations of economic and social pressures. Throughout the
Balkans, Anatolia, Syria, and Kurdistan, the treasury awarded hun-
dreds of small contracts on villages and commercial taxes. The con-
tractors, by default, assumed their place in provincial government;
brokers expanded their networks across the province and cultivated
links to larger, transimperial circuits of credit and finance. Although
unwilling and probably unable to assume their duties, clerks and
bureau chiefs in Istanbul used reports and marginalia to vent their
accumulated resentment toward the “petty oligarchy” of local gen-
try, ulema, and officers who constituted the de facto vernacular gov-
ernment.222 In his audit of the finances of Aleppo in 1776, another
Istanbul bureaucrat commented that “for many years, [the tax farm
on the muhassıllık] has been assigned to persons living in the region;
the greatest part of the holders of mukataât being âyan-ı memleket, their
relatives, and their clients (taâllukât) who are chiefly concerned with
their own interests and not with the affairs of the muhassıllık itself . . .”223
Not only are the gentry unworthy of their responsibilities and devoid
of civic virtue, it is impossible to ascertain the true state of affairs
because “the records of the muhassıllık in Aleppo are unreliable and
full of falsification.”224
Indeed, in 1785 the treasurer ordered a full-fledged investigation
of provincial accounting. He targeted provinces with “müfrez” (inde-

222
Tocqueville (The Old Régime, 43) expresses essentially the same sentiment.
Municipal government was run by a “petty oligarchy,” who kept “a watchful eye
on their own interests, out of the sight of the public and feeling no responsibilities
toward less privileged citizens.”
223
Cited in Thieck, “Décentralisation ottomane et affirmation urbaine à Alep à
la fin du XVIIIème siècle,” 125.
224
Ibid.
     175

pendent) treasuries, such as Crete and Damascus, or voyvodalık types

of administrations, such as Tokat and Diyarbekir.225
More than an intractable reality in the provinces or evidence of
the collapse of the imperial economy, the utterances of contempo-
raries should remind us of the parallax that was setting in between
the state bureaucracy and the actors in vernacular government. It
was stamped in the changing paleography of a register in the mold
of the old regime and one produced in the first flush of the new.
Buried between formulae and routine entries was the evidence of a
growing semantic distance between the modern, unitary state and
the compromised capacities of the past. In the countryside, tax farm-
ers filled in the gaps in the rural order as the timar system receded.
In cities such as Amid, gentry participation in local governance helped
forge an underlying consensus in the key areas of the economy, such
as manufacturing, that affected the vast majority of townsmen. Even
the malikâne system, which stamped diverse societies with the terms
of a single charter, offered channels for transmuting conflicts into
alliances between parties and avenues of redress for pursuing protests
through the imperial judiciary or to the Sublime Porte itself. But as
the bureaucrat, pressed to find new resources for war, as much as
to reorder society itself,226 began to dismantle vernacular government,
what would happen to the tacit compact about the limits of state
power?

225
Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım, 331–33 (CM 12,343, document dated June
24, 1785). A year before the announcement of the New Order Treasury (Irade Cedid
Hazinesi ) in 1793, the director of the fisc circulated a summary of an investigation
that claimed that the largest portion of the new share-system (esham) had passed
into the hands of “obscure ladies” and “unidentifiable men” resident in the provinces
(see MMD 11,669:2).
226
Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım, 156, 169; Stanford Shaw, Between Old and
New: The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim III 1789–1807 (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard
University Press, 1971), 19.
 CHAPTER FOUR

CONCLUSION: THE PATHS NOT TAKEN

Hardly were we masters of Algiers than we hastened to gather up

every single Turk, from the dey to the last soldier of his militia, and
transported the lot of them to the coast of Asia. In order to make the
vestiges of the enemy domination disappear, we first took care to tear
up or burn all written documents, administrative records, and papers,
authentic or otherwise, that could have perpetuated any trace of what
had been done before us. The conquest was a new era . . .

Alexis de Tocqueville, “Second Letter on Algeria,” August 22, 1837.

By the time Tocqueville gathered his notes for The Old Régime and
the French Revolution, a tidal wave of images, words, and armies had
washed away many of the semblances between the old regimes of
Europe and Asia.1 The ideological and material forces unleashed by
the French Revolution, the Empire, the Bourgeois Monarchy, the
revolutions of 1848, and finally, Louis Napoleon’s power seizure had
all but submerged reliable if largely descriptive and chronological
narratives of the Ottoman past written at the turn of the century.2
The bureaucratic state appeared triumphant in the West while the
government of the Ottoman Empire, once the paragon of despotic
centralism, seemed to shatter against the shoals of modernity. Blending

1
Orientalist painting played a role, to be sure. Eugene Delacroix’s “Collection
of Arab Taxes” (1863), today in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., might
illustrate Tocqueville’s notion that the Ottomans were a “government by conquest.”
A horseman, with drawn sword, is ready to pounce on a hapless peasants. See also,
Henry Laurens, Les origines intellectuelles d’expédition d’Égypte, l’orientalisme Islamisant en
France (1698–1798) (Istanbul: Isis, 1987); Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European
Fantasies of the East (New York: Verso, 1998); and M. S. Anderson, The Eastern
Question, 1774 –1923, A Study in International Relations (Houndmills, Basingstoke,
Hampshire: Macmillan Education, 1987).
2
Mouradgea D’Ohsson, Tableau général de l’Empire othoman, divisé en deux parties, dont
l’une comprend la législation mahométane; l’autre, l’histoire de l’Empire othoman (Paris, Imp.
de monsieur [Firmin Didot] 1787–1820) 12 vols.; Joseph Freiherr von Hammer-
Purstall’s (1774–1856) monumental Geschichte des osmanischen Reiches (Histoire de l’Empire
ottoman depuis son origine jusqu’a nos jours), 18 vols. [Paris, Bellizard, Barthes, Dufour
& Lowell, 1835–43) was to be republished in 1859 in Tours by the Bibliothèque
de la jeunesse chrètienne (Ad Mame).
 :     177

the revolutionary strains of Volney with a new imperialist fervor, in

his speech on “The Eastern Question” the deputy from Valognes
weighed the dangers of a great-power conflagration over Ottoman
lands against the new opportunities for territorial expansion offered
by Mehmet Ali’s occupation of Syria.3
Among many draftsmen, Alexis de Tocqueville lent his hand to
the redrawing of the modern historical map. From his youthful enthu-
siasm for the colonization of Ottoman Algeria to his last diplomatic
mission in Rome where he negotiated the fate of the Polish and
Hungarian refugees of 1848 with the representative of the Sublime
Porte, his political career was deeply intertwined with France’s Middle
Eastern and North African policy.4 If the monarchy saw the colo-
nial project as a means of diverting public opinion and a way to
relieve its Malthusian burden, Tocqueville regarded colonialism as
more than a land grab. It was France’s manifest destiny. Empire
restored the great-power status of a nation defeated and secured its
naval hegemony over the central Mediterranean. A century after the
loss of its Indian Ocean and Atlantic colonies, the “American” exper-
iment would again. The colon would bring “civilization” to the
“wilderness” and build a new democratic community free of the inhi-
bitions of the Old World’s social and economic inequality.
In his letters and reports, written after official tours of the European
enclave in Africa, Tocqueville expressed outrage over the heavy-
handiness of the military administration. He decried the wanton des-
truction of Ottoman archive as a loss to efficient colonial administration.

3
His involvement in Algerian politics dates to 1828. André Jardin, Tocqueville: A
Biography (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1988), 62, 322–34. See also Alexis de
Tocqueville, Oeuvres compléte: Écrits et discours politique, ed. Jean-Claude Lamberti (Paris,
Gallimard, 1991) 2: 288–309; compare, C. F. Volney, The Ruins, or Meditation on the
Revolution of Empires: and The Law of Nations (Baltimore: Black Classics Press, 1991),
49. M. Alexandre Laya (Études Historiques sur la vie Privée politique et Littéaire de M. A.
Thièrs [1830–1846] [Paris: Chez Furne, 1846] 2:133) the political biographer of
Thièrs, Tocqueville’s archpolitical rival, considered this moment a watershed in
Europe’s perspective on Ottoman sovereignty, commenting that “no more could the
Ottoman Empire be regarded as eternal, as [an entity] that could not die, or even
that it must be saved . . .” For English perspectives on Mehmet Ali Pasha, see
Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, his Army, and the Making of Modern
Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
4
Jardin, Tocqueville, 66, 249–250, 267, 322, 334–335. For a selection of his
writings on these subjects including the epigraph on the previous page, see Alexis
de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001).
178  

As for the Algerians themselves, his attitude wavered between pater-

nalism and ruthless expedience. At times he opposed the military’s
scorched-earth policies toward peasants and herders;5 on other occa-
sions, he urged brute force to repress the rebellion of 'Abd al-Qadir
and to sendentarize nomadic populations.6 While abhorring the reduc-
tionist and race-based logic of his contemporaries Alfred de Gobineau
and Ernst Renan, Tocqueville remained firm in his belief that rep-
resentative government was the exclusive right of a small number of
the world’s peoples.7 Thus, although he rejected calls for the ethnic
cleansing of the Arab population in its entirety, he proposed, instead,
the creation of native ghettos among the European settlements. This
liberal colonial plan prefigured not only the dualism of Algerian soci-
ety for the next century but settler-colonial policies elsewhere, from
the Bantustans of South Africa to contemporary Israeli settlement
policy in the West Bank and Gaza.8
‘Cantonnement’ is also an apt metaphor for Tocqueville’s vision
of Europe’s early modern past. Like many of his Enlightenment men-
tors, he zealously maintained the vigil before the frontier of Western
Europe, as both a religious and civilizational crusade. However, de-
spite his unmistakable debt to the political philosophy of Montesquieu,
his approach to the relative evils of absolutism and the global land-
scape of power, including colonialism, differed importantly from the
eighteenth-century’s perspective.9 Why, unlike Voltaire and Edward

5
His interest in Algerian affairs dates to 1828. Jardin, Tocqueville, 62. Andre
Jardin’s comments (Tocqueville, 322–34) on his attachment to colonial project are
balanced but unsparing.
6
Jardin, Tocqueville, 318. In De la Démocratie en Amérique I (1835) (Oeuvres Complètes,
ed. Jean-Claude Lamberti and James T. Schleifer [Éditions Gallimard, 1992], vol.
2, 104). Tocqueville argued that “Turkish populations never took part in the direc-
tion of the affairs of their society; had they not witnessed the triumph of the reli-
gion of Mohammed with the conquests of the sultans they could have accomplished
great things. Today, religion is gone; all that remains is despotism.” For the some
of the key texts, see Pitts, Writings on Empire as well. Melvin Richter, (“Tocqueville
on Algeria,” Review of Politics [1963]: 362–98) is of the opinion that Tocqueville’s
colonial politics are in flagrant contradiction to his theories of democracy.
7
Pitts (Writings on Empire, “Introduction,” xxxiii) notes that although Tocqueville
at the outset disagreed with J. S. Mill on the need for despotic government to con-
trol “barbarism,” he does not seemed to have opposed the 1848 provision that
demanded Algerians renounce Islam in order to gain French citizenship. See Uday
Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
8
Jardin, Tocqueville, 334–35.
9
In 1848, Algerians who wanted to gain French citizenship were forced to
 :     179

Gibbons, whose wide-angle lens on the Roman Empire placed the

Ottoman conquest of Constantinople at the birth of modernity, did
Tocqueville simply dispense with the eastern portions of the empire,
as if Asia and Africa were so much ballast to the Europe’s soaring
trajectory?
Absent too is the philosophe’s admiration of the religious toler-
ance within Muslim world and his appreciation of the meritocracy
of the Asian bureaucracy. As Voltaire noted, Ottoman “military
democracy” permitted even the humblest servant to rise to the rank
of a general or prime minister.10 Indeed, more disturbing than the
figure of the Oriental despot who still merits mention, albeit as the
butt of the denigrating satire of the Enlightenment, is the banish-
ment of Eurasia’s most powerful state from the early modern land-
scape. It is by refusing to utter the name of the Süleyman I in
conjunction with Francis I, that Tocqueville’s silence achieved a rup-
ture with the West’s longtime rivals that the Enlightenment could
never conceive. By appropriating the origins of the modern state, he
laid one of the cornerstones of the great conceptual wall of European
social science, encircling its past, present, and future.

The Common Origins of the Modern State

Rewriting the eighteenth century was not a uniquely Western European

preoccupation. Unbeknownst to Tocqueville, his slightly younger con-
temporary, the Ottoman historian Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, also pressed
the old regime in his twelve-volume historical suit for the Tanzimat
reforms (1839–76) and the building of a unitary state.11 Where

renounce Islam. Compare, Ann Thomson, Barbary and Enlightenment: European Attitudes
toward the Magreb in the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987). Sudhir Hazareesingh,
From Subject to Citizen: The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 232.
10
Voltaire criticized Montesquieu’s indiscriminate application of the term despo-
tism to all Asian governments. (“Commentaire Sur l’Esprit des Lois”) Oeuvres com-
plètes de Voltaire (Paris: Chez Th. Desoer, Libraire Rue Christine, 1817) vol. 6, 968;
see also comments in Vol. 4, 79. In History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, Francis
I’s alliance with the Ottomans became an act of betrayal that Leopold von Ranke
held against the French in particular.
11
Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, Tarih-i Cevdet (Istanbul: Matbaa-yı Osmaniye, 1309/1893)
vol. 2, 256. The loosening of the reins over state and government in the periphery
was a constant worry of the bureaucracy as Ya{ar Yücel, (“Osmanlı (mparatorlu[unda
Desantralizasyona (Adem-i Merkeziye) Dair Genel Gözlemler.” Belleten 38 (1974):
180  

Tocqueville sought institutional continuity in the endurance of tra-

ditional social values and vestigial social hierarchies—Cevdet took a
different tack. Staring unflinchingly at the less admirable traits of the
past century, he blamed the impasse of the late eighteenth century
on the ills of decentralization: the usurpation of state power by the
gentry and janissaries, the desperate plight of the peasantry, the greed
of tax farmers and the unreliability of gentry armies. The anarchy
of the eighteenth century and the vulnerability of disunion are tropes
that carry over into his successors. For the Turkish, Armenian, Balkan,
and Arab nationalists of the first decade of the twentieth century, it
was the dangerous disintegration of the old regime or simply the
decay left by the “Turkish yoke” that served as the premise for their
programs of political and cultural renewal.
Yet neither the Ottoman bureaucrat nor sultan needed to cor-
respond with the philosophes to discern the waning of the old regime
geopolitical order in the eastern Mediterranean.12 French retrench-
ment from eastern Europe and the Sublime Porte’s failure to win
Prussian support as a counterweight to the Habsburgs left Istanbul
isolated.13 Unimpeded, the czarina expanded into the Black Sea and
Mediterranean. Long before Campo Formio (1797) crowned France’s
arrival at the Adriatic, Russian navies had twice destroyed the Ottoman
fleet. Over the course of the next half century, Russia courted dis-
content among the Ottomans’ Muslim and Christian subjects along
its outlying provinces, from Ali Bey al-Kabir (d. 1773) of Egypt,
Kara George and the Serbian rebels of 1802–1806, to the magnate
of Trabizon, Caniko[lu Tayyar Pasha.14 The principalities of Moldavia,

149–52, 657–708) points out. For his advocacy of the policies of the New Regime,
see Christoph K. Neumann, Das indirekte Argument: ein Plädoyer für die Tanzimat ver-
mittels der Historie. Die geschichtliche Bedeutung von Ahmed Cevdet Pa{as Ta"rih. Münster:
Lit Verlag, 1994.
12
On the impact of Küçük Kaynarca on political and military thinking see
Virginia Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace, Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 1700–1783
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995); and Mariia Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997).
13
Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994), 5–23; Stanford Shaw, Between Old and New: The Ottoman
Empire under Sultan Selim III 1789–1807 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1971), 55–73; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Ancien Regime: A History of France,
1610 –1774 (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1996), 447.
14
See Norma Saul, Russia and the Mediterranean, 1797–1807 (University of Chicago,
1970).
 :     181

Wallachia, and Bessarabia became stepping stones for their advance

on the Bosphorus Straits.
In many respects the empire’s institutional predicament was not
unique. If the second partition of Poland among Prussia, Austria,
and Russia in 1792 provided an object lesson in the perils of decen-
tralization,15 it was the cudgel welded by France’s citizen army, as
well as the threat of contagion by the new ideas of popular sover-
eignty that hastened the consolidation of its neighbors in Central
Europe.16 Successful adaptation of the techniques of bureaucratiza-
tion and direct government did not only preserve them. These orga-
nizational tools also furthered the aims of the new imperialism. The
French troops who disembarked in Alexandria in 1798–99 bore one
variant of the modern state apparatus. Across the Indian Ocean, the
charter-company system of government had outlived its utility for
Britain. The final battles of conquest against the last autonomous
governments of Mysore set the stage for a radical reorganization of
Indian agricultural taxation beginning with the new British property
code for Bengal.17
Teetering on the precipice of bankruptcy and frantically rebuild-
ing its navy, the Sublime Porte could offer little other than sympa-
thy to Tipu Sultan’s ambassador who made his way to the court
from Basra in 1786.18 In comparison to the new imperialism and
Prussia’s forced-march program of administrative reorganization,19

15
After the second partition of Poland, Carl von Clausewitz (On War, ed. and
trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret [London: Everyman’s Library, 1993],
449–450) asks: “Could Poland really be considered a European state, an equal
among the European community of nations . . .” No, he concludes. It was for that
reason that Europe “yielded Poland like the Turks yield the Crimean Tatar state.”
On Ottoman-French relations during the republican period, see Ismail Soysal, Fransiz
(htilâli ve Türk-Fransiz Diploması Münasebetleri (1789–1802) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu
1999) and the special issue of RMMM 52/53 (1989) entitled, “Les Arabes, Les Turcs
et la Révolution Française,” ed. Daniel Panzac.
16
See Brendan Simms, The Impact of Napoleon: Prussian High Politics, Foreign Policy
and the Crisis of the Executive, 1797–1806 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997).
17
See Ranajit Guha, A Rule of Property for Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent
Settlement (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1996).
18
Ahmed Efendi Vâsıf, Mehâsinü"l-Âsâr ve Hakâikü"l-Ahbâr, transcr. and ed., Mücteba
Ilgürel (Istanbul: Edebiyat Fakültesi Basımevi, 1978), 367–368; Abd al-Rahman
Jabarti, Napoleon in Egypt: Al-Jabarti’s Chronicle of the French Occupation, 1798, ed. and
trans. S. Moreh (Princeton, NJ: Marcus Wiener Publishers, 1993), 64.
19
Simms, The Impact of Napoleon, 305–312.
182  

the Ottoman planners contended with the sheer scale of its territo-
ries and the multiplication of potentially hostile fronts, especially with
the escalation of British and Russian expansion in Asia.20 Istanbul
had lost suzerainty over the restive Crimean khans and was forced
to concede Russian sovereignty over Georgia. While countering British,
French, and Russian overtures to the magnate-governments of Ali
Pasha in Albania and Pasvano[lu Osman Pasha in Bulgaria,21 the
new sultan’s advisors looked nervously across the Kurdish frontier
to Iran, where the last of the Safavid’s tribal offshoots, the Qajars,
had begun to install a more enduring ruling structure. With uncer-
tainty hanging over the succession to pashalik of Baghdad as well,
a leading religious intellectual, Tartarcık Abdullah Efendi tendered
a new administrative map of Iraq. He foresaw the subdivision of the
province into smaller administrative units to contain the Kurdish
tribes and to prevent concentration of powers in Baghdad. Istanbul-
appointed governors would take charge of provincial finance and
military recruitment, duties that had long been delegated to the local
lords and gentry.22
It is such plans for sweeping organizational change that have led
nineteenth-century the regime of scholars, like Cevdet Pasha to com-
pare the regime Sultan Selim III (r. 1789–1807) with the enlight-
ened policies of earlier sultans, including Ahmed III.23 Attentive to
military training, the sciences and engineering, the new sultan also

20
André Raymond, Les commerçants au Caire au XVIII e siècle (Damas: Institut Français
de Damas, 1973–74) vol. 1, 43–50. See also Shaw, Between Old and New, and François
Crouzet, “Wars, Blockade and Economic Change in Europe, 1972–1815.” Journal
of Economic History 24 (1964): 567–88.
21
See Katherine Elizabeth Fleming, The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism
in Ali Pasha’s Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
22
Abdullah Efendi Tatarcık, “Selim-i Sâni Devrinde Nizâm-ı Devlet Hakkında
Mutâla"ât,” Türk Tarihi Encümeni Mecmuası 8 (1333/1914–1915), 18–19. The coun-
cil, as Uriel Heyd (“The Ottoman 'Ulemâ and Westernization in the Time of Selim
III and Mahmud II,” in Studies in Islamic History and Civilization, ed. U. Heyd
[ Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1961] vol. 9, 83) points out frequently met in the
villa of the }eyh"ül-Islam. Istanbul could not, however, prevent Davud Pasha’s rise
to power 1816 and enlistment of European advisors for his military. Rabbi David
D’Beth Hillel, Unknown Jews in Unknown Lands: The Travels of Rabbi David D’Beth Hillel
(1824 –1832), ed. and trans. Walter J. Fischel (New York: Ktav Publishing House,
Inc., 1973), 83; and generally, T. Niewenhuis, Politics and Society in Early Modern Iraq
(The Hague-Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History, 1982).
23
Avigdor Levi, “Military Reform and the Problem of Centralization in the
Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century,” Middle Eastern Studies 18 (1982): 227–49.
 :     183

shared his grandfather’s love of music, poetry, and evening soirées

amidst lanterns and tulips.24 However, Selim’s financial policies could
scarcely be more different from those of his gold-scattering ances-
tor. The timing of reform was not surprising. Although the Swedish
subsidy of 1789 had staved off imminent financial collapse,25 the
combined impact of a large war indemnity to Russia, the upheaval
in global financial markets following the French Revolution, the rapid
devaluation of Ottoman currency, and finally the continental block-
ade, put the imperial treasury in a perpetual state of crisis.26
Indeed, if comparisons are made, the Ottoman dilemma of 1793–
1807 mirrored the plight of the Bourbon Louis XVI in 1788–92.27
The gradual consolidation of financial oversight and policy-making
under the grand vizier and the military reforms of Mustafa III (r.
1757–74) gave way to more concerted efforts. As we have seen in
the last chapter, the announcement of new infantry units in 1793
the Nizam-ı Cedid (“c’est-à-dire, le nouveau réglement”) was a part
of a multi-faceted program that promised an overhaul of taxation,
new forms of military training and recruitment, as well as increased
central state oversight of provincial government.28 Responding to
fiscal emergencies domestically and upheaval in global financial mar-
kets,29 neither sovereign foresaw the consequences of pulling the warp

24
Cevdet, Tarih, vol. 6, 143.
25
See Alan Fischer, Russian Annexation of the Crimea 1772–1783 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1970).
26
In Egypt (Raymond, Les commerçants au Caire, vol. 1, 43) the silver para lost half
of its value between 1770 and 1798; Edhem Eldem (“Le commerce Français d’Istanbul
au XVIIIe siècle,” Ph.D. Diss. Université de Provence-Aix-Marseille I, 1988, 188)
notes that Istanbul witnessed an equivalent devaluation a decade later: between
1800 and 1812 the kuru{ fell from two francs to one.
27
Gabriel Ardant (“Financial Policy and Economic Infrastructure of Modern
States and Nations,” in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles
Tilly [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975], 216–7) in many ways concurs
with Tocqueville, noting that “the French Revolution manifested itself by the dis-
integration of the state due in large part to the illusion of reformers.”
28
Mouradgea D’Ohsson, Tableau général, vol. 3, 367; As Kemal Beydilli points
out (Ignatius Mouradgea D’Ohsson [Muradcan Tosunyan]: Ailesi Hakkında Kayıtlar,’
“Nizâm-ı Cedîd’e dâire Lâyihası ve Osmanlı Imparatolu[lyndaki Siyâsî Hayatı” in
Prof. Dr. M. C. }ehâeddin Tekinda[ Hatıra Sayısı (Special issue) ed. M. Cavîd
Baysun, Tarih Dergisi (Istanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi 34 (1983–84): 247–314)
remained an Ottoman patriot.
29
On the impact of the French Revolution on financial markets throughout
Europe: Larry Neal, The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the
Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 180–214.
184  

of fiscal privilege from the social fabric woven by the old regime.
The state pressured its creditors. It exacted forced loans from non-
Muslim bankers and compelled them to assume direct financial
responsibility for provincial audits and accounts.30 To raise funds for
the Irade-i Cedid treasury and pay the salaries of the new army, the
Sublime Porte redirected agricultural revenues from the resident cav-
alry and tapped into the life-lease market. Proceeding cautiously at
first, the bureaucrats of the new treasury recycled revenue revenues
into general funds upon the death of the contractor or by attrition.
But there was no mistaking the ultimate aim of the New Order:
to phase out both the classical organizational infrastructure of the
empire, particularly the old-regime military orders, the timar-cavalry
and the janissaries, and to dissolve the semiprivatized revenue sys-
tem that structured of vernacular government.31
Across empire, Nizam-i Cedid policies provoked mistrust, conster-
nation, dissatisfaction and protest. The creation of new military units
and alterations to organizational charters threatened long-standing
immunities of the military corps, such as the janissaries.32 Expropriation
of life-leases over and above a general decline in the income of
shares that had once yielded returns of 35 to 40 percent per annum
as well as increased state fees, struck at the very foundation of the
corporate patrimonialism of the Istanbul elite.33 In provincial cities

30
Sultan Selim III’s decree (Yücel Özkaya “III. Selim"in (mparatorluk hakkında
Bazı Hatt-ı Hümâyûnları,” Osmanlı Tarihi Ara{tırma ve Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi 1
(1990): 341) refers to the “rural gentry and magnates (derebey)” as “usurpers who
fleece the peasantry as tax-farmers . . . [and the] voyvodas and police . . . [as those
who] oppress the poor and have come to have the power of viziers and military
commanders.”
31
Yavuz Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım ve De[i{im Dönemi (XVIII. Yüzyıldan
Tanzimat "a Mali Tarih) (Istanbul: Alan, 1986), 155–7; 302–9. See also Joshua M.
Stein, “Habsburg Financial Institutions Presented as a Model for the Ottoman
Empire in the Sefaretname of Ebu Bekir Ratib Efendi,” in Habsburgisch-osmanische
Beziehungen (Colloque sous le patronage du Comité international des études pré-
ottomanes et ottomanes, Vienna 26–30, Sept. 1983), ed. Andreas Tietze (Vienna:
Verlag des Verbandes der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften Österreichs, 1985),
233–242.
32
By 1804–1805 (KK 4499), the number of beneficiaries in the tobacco tax dis-
cussed in chapter 2 fell from 1,586 (in 1774–5; KK 4484) to 763 individuals; more
than half (386) were wives and daughters of religious figures.
33
Mehmet Genç, “Osmanlı Maliyesinde Malikâne Sistemi,” in Türkiye Iktisat Tarihi
Semineri, ed. Osman Okyar and Ünal Nalbanto[lu (Ankara: Hacetepe Üniversites
Publishers, 1975), 246, 252. On the decline of tax-farming rents in Egypt after mid-
century, Kenneth M. Cuno, The Pasha’s Peasants: Land, Society and Economy in Lower
Egypt, 1740 –1858 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 44.
 :     185

like Diyarbekir, rising prices for raw materials and loss of markets,
and a variety of taxes, including special wartime levies, pushed arti-
sans into outright rebellion.
While the specific conditions varied widely across Europe and Asia,
ultimately, key aspects of the old-regime impasse remained the same:
an enormous gap in capacities and powers that left the “state” unable
to extract the wealth necessary to pay for its military upkeep or to
subdue the many vernacular governments of the provinces.
With no history of aristocratic assemblies, Selim III could not sum-
mon the third estate to Istanbul to ratify its his program. Instead,
court and bureaucracy steered a course of contradictory policies. On
one hand, they tried to undercut local power by the abolishment of
gentry-held offices, such as the city-steward and the army-recruiter,
and by transferring important tax contracts to in-coming governors.
On the other, still undermanned militarily and administratively,
Istanbul encouraged the powerful magnates along its perimeters, such
as Cezzar Pasha who controlled the Lebanese coastline, Mehmet Ali
Pasha of Cairo, and Bayraktar Mustafa Pasha, heir to Tir{inikli (smail
in Thrace and Rusçuk, to built up private armies.34 Both Suleyman
Pasha in Baghdad and Cezzar Pasha in Sidon trained modern mil-
itary units.
These appeasements notwithstanding, the advocates of state con-
solidation found their fiercest critics in the capital. A janissary coup
d’état overthrew the new regime in 1807.35 Although the Istanbul
barracks fired the first shots, many parties in the Ottoman court and
in the mosques who feared the end of fiscal privilege and actively
encouraged the soldier’s actions.
From the provinces this turn of events seemed ominous. Many
gentry and not a few townsmen who had embraced the New Order
with reservations realized they had more to fear from a janissary-
controlled state and the reassertion of a rigid estate hierarchy. Rural
magnates and the urban gentry of Anatolia and the Balkans rallied
in Rusçuk under the leadership of Bayrakdar Mustafa, one of the

34
Bruce McGowan, “The Age of the Ayan,” in An Economic and Social History of
the Ottoman Empire, ed. Halil (nalcık with Donald Quataert, Cambridge UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 666. Amnon Cohen (Palestine in the Eighteenth Century [ Jerusalem:
Magnes Press, 1973], 163) estimates that agriculture provided much of Cezzar
Pasha’s wealth.
35
Shaw, Between Old and New, 23.
186  

leading commanders on the Russian front. Using the pretext of paying

homage to the new sultan, the janissaries’ candidate, Mustafa IV,
an army loyal to the former sultan entered the city. By midsummer
1808, Bayrakdar Mustafa’s army had put down the insurrection.
The loyalists, who failed to save the life of Selim III, replaced
Mustafa IV with his last surviving male cousin, Mahmud II (r. 1808–
38). The gentry assumed ministerial positions. With the new sultan
still in his minority, the direction of the state apparatus fell fully on
the shoulders of the new grand vizier, the upper-ranking rical, and
the bureaucracy.36
That autumn, two decades after the famous appeal to convene
the Estates General brought delegates to Paris, Istanbul was itself
the scene of an extraordinary gathering of the third estate. Gentry-
intendants and magnates came to the capital from western Anatolia
and the eastern Balkans in the company of their militias. Although
those from more distant provinces such as Egypt and Syria were
unable to attend in person, their agents represented their interests
at court. In a reversal of roles, the Ottoman court prepared the
pavilions of the Golden Horn for the festivities to receive the gen-
try. The sovereign feted his guests and conferred robes of honor on
his subjects. In an unadorned speech to those assembled, the grand
vizier, Bayraktar Mustafa, appealed for unity. Stressing the common
origins of the great gentry and the men of the state, he implicitly
established the equality of the second and third estates.37 Together
with the members of the religious establishment, the captains of the
chartered military units, and the bureau chiefs of the Sublime Porte,
the gentry hammered out new principles of unity in the form of a
short agreement, the Sened-i (ttifak, the Charter of Federation.38
Contemporary historians have debated the meaning of this docu-
ment and its role in the transformation of imperial governance.39

36
Ibid., 397–98; Anatolii F. Miller, Mustafa Pasha Bayraktar (Bucarest: Association
International d’Études du Sud-Est européen: 1975), 298–99.
37
(smail Hakkı Uzunçar{ılı, Me{hur Rumeli Âyanlarından Tirsinikli (smail Yılık O[lu
Suleyman A[a ve Alemdar Mustafa Pa{a (Istanbul: Türk Tarıh Kurumu Yayınıları, 1942),
141–42; note the variation in texts found in Ataullah Mehmet }anizade, Tarih-i
}anizade (Istanbul: Ceride-Havadis Matbaası 1290/1873) vol. 1, 63 and Cevdet,
Tarih, vol. 9, 5.
38
Halil (nalcık, “Sened-I (ttifak ve Gülhane Hatt-ı Hümâyunu,” Belleten 28 (1964):
607–69. The text is found in }anizade, Tarih-i }anizade, vol. 1, 66 and Cevdet, Tarih,
vol. 9, 178.
39
Shaw, Between Old and New, 90; compare. Bernard Lewis, “Dustûr,” EI2 2:
 :     187

Some consider the agreement to be a step backwards. Certainly, a

century of decentralized administration and vernacular government
provided precedents and geared the participants’ expectations. Its
formulation in the terminology of contract (sened ) may harken back
to the language of the life-lease edit of 1695, which also established
a parity of fiscal agency between gentry and rical. Yet it would be
a mistake to reduce the Charter of Federation to a simple restora-
tion of the status quo ante, much less equate it to a type of feu-
dalism. The agreement between subject and sovereign reflected a
sense of partnership. In exchange for mutual defense, past privileges
were elevated to permanent rights. Moreover, as Halil (nalcık notes,40
the devolution of powers was explicitly conditioned on respect for
the overarching framework of imperial law. Signatories were obliged
to protect the state-mandated rights of all subjects, Muslim, Christian,
and Jew.

A Federalist Alternative?

From the perspective of world history, the experiment in federalism

in the Ottoman Empire, a brief interlude between two attempts to
implant a unitary state apparatus, has not been given the attention
it deserves. Certainly the reflexive segregation of Asia from the polit-
ical time line and the poverty of the modern political lexicon are
partially responsible. For Tocqueville, the failure of federalism was
a foregone conclusion. The success of the government depended on
the cultural community itself and could only be the expression of
the religious, social and economic exceptionalism of Anglo-North
America.41 Yet Tocqueville never understood that the system of decen-
tralized administration that he had encountered in North America
was itself an interim agreement. In many ways the Ottoman civil
wars of the period between 1812–40 did not resemble the counter-
revolution of the Vendée so much as foreshadow the more violent

640–47; and Kemal Karpat, “The Transformation of the Ottoman State, 1789–1908,”
IJMES 3 (1972): 252–54.
40
(nalcık, “Sened-i (ttifak,” 610.
41
Jardin, Tocqueville, 208–9. Sudhir Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen: The Second
Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1998), 182–83.
188  

stage of state integration of the American Civil War of 1861–65.42

Whatever its shortcomings, a Philadelphian compromise might
have proven better suited to the Ottoman dilemma.43 Like all such
agreements, the Charter of Federation brought together unequal par-
ties possessing widely divergent political and economic agendas. Its
principles of unity were narrow and the problems of enforcement,
legion. The powers allotted to the center were too limited to restrain
the most exploitative and violent provincial actors, whose oppression
of the tax-paying population continued unabated. Once again, Istanbul
relaxed its grip over provincial revenues, relinquishing malikâne offices
and rural resources to the gentry; clerks who had begun to compile
audits anew, returned to registering transactions in the old-regime
style.44 Nevertheless, these deficiencies might be considered the price
for the incremental bridging of the institutional chasm between “state”
and “government” across such a vast territorial polity. In retrospect,
the contradictions resulting from the bargains struck in Istanbul in
1808 must be judged in their context or in relation to a constitu-
tion crafted two decades earlier in Philadelphia, a document that in
one breath declared the equality of all men while legalizing the
enslavement of tens of thousands of inhabitants of African and native
American ancestry.
Unfortunately, what little that we know about the practice of fed-
eralism in the Ottoman Empire has all too often been gleaned from
the Mediterranean coastline, where military elites supported by for-
eign merchants and rival European powers exerted monopolistic con-

42
See Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority
in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
43
Miller, Mustafa Pasha Bayraktar, 318.
44
Although this did not mean that attempts to consolidate the fisc stoped entirely
(Cezar, Osmanlı Maliyesinde Bunalım, 243), Mehmet Genç (“Osmanlı Maliyesinde
Malikâne Sistemi,” in Türkiye (ktisat Tarihi Semineri, ed., Osman Okyar and Ünal
Nalbanto[lu [Ankara: Hacetepe Üniversites Publishers, 1975], 282) calculates that
the percentage of overall investments held by provincial life-lessors rose from a low
of 19.8% in 1801 (during the New Order) to 23.6% in 1810. Note the trends in
provincial investments in life-leases:
1787 1800 1812
Diyarbekir 147,864.5 103,332 155,375.7
Aleppo 198,271.5 178,888.75 273,120.5
Tokat 234,393.5 286,238 366,340.5
Sources: MMD 9561:109–115; KK 5161:29, 77, 53, 18–29, 18; MMD 9624:182,
309, 307, 218. (Figures in kuru{).
 :     189

trol of rural production and the flow of trade. Urban politics in

Syria, Palestine and Western Kurdistan, though not free from inter-
party violence, were of a qualitatively different character. Here the
federalist opening allowed for the emergence of new forms of rep-
resentation. As Elizabeth Thompson points out, the citizens of
Damascus appeared well prepared for self-governance with the arrival
of formal administrative councils, under both Egyptian rule in the
1830s, and later, Istanbul’s Tanzimat (1839–78) programs.45
In Diyarbekir the declaration of federalism did not bring into being
parliament or male suffrage. But it did result in a stable, responsive,
albeit oligarchic government under the leadership of one of Amid’s
foremost families. Following the 1808 meeting, (brahim of the }eyhzâde
clan sent a deputy to lay claim to the governorship, a position he
would hold until his death in 1814. Although he did not have an
unblemished record as a civil servant, many years in state service
within the city and in tours of duty in neighboring provinces, includ-
ing a stint with the Ottoman army that routed the French from
Egypt, had seasoned (brahim as an administrator and commander.46
Politically, too he may have learned the value of appeasement, if
not consensus. A petition for clemency that (brahim forwarded to
the Sublime Porte on behalf of those accused of participation in the
1802–3 riots might have helped repair relations with townspeople
and earn him begrudging respect from rival clans.47 His family con-
nections were not limited to the city. With their extensive tax farms
in the fertile farmlands around Hani, the }eyhzâde had a following
among rural communities as well.48
Although lacking channels for direct representation, Amid’s towns-
men could count on (brahim’s government to champion the city’s
interests. The interurban trading system was arguably the most impor-
tant of these concerns. Throughout his tenure, the pasha refused to
capitulate to Baghdad or Istanbul on the question of manufactured

45
Elizabeth Thompson, “Ottoman Political Reform in the Provinces: The Damascus
Advisory Council in 1844–45,” IJMES 25 (1993): 457–475.
46
On the life and times of }eyhzâde (brahim Pasha, CZ 541 (1789); CZ 1298
(1795); CZ 3392 (1812); CM 30,953. Ali Emiri, Tezkerei, 1:222–230; Mehmed Süreyya,
Sicill-i Osmanî; 1:151. M. Fahrettin Kırzıo[lu, “Kara-Âmid’te 1819 da A’yandan
}eyhzâdeler’in Öncülü[ünde Milli Deli-Behram Pa{a’ya Kar{ı Ayaklanma Ve Sonucu.”
Kara Âmid Dergisi, 2–4 (1956–58): 356.
47
Yılmazçelik, “XIX. Yüzyılın ilk Yarısında,” 484.
48
MMD 2931:122.
190  

imports. His tariff agents continued to impose the full gümrük tax
(and not simply a fee, the bac) on the transit trade that passed through
the city.49 In a particularly troubled decade, when Wahhabi incur-
sions into Najd and the resulting disruption of traffic through Basra
cost Baghdad some quarter million kuru{ in customs revenues, his
militias policed the highways leading southward and guarded traffic
from the depredations of Kurdish tribes.50 Personal wealth was invested
in infrastructure. (brahim dedicated one of several large family waqf
to the building of a forty-one room caravansaray complete with sta-
bles within the city walls.51
The ruling elite’s portfolio of assets, private and public, also sug-
gests a certain balance in policies and a vested interest in reconcil-
ing the concerns of the city’s long-distance and regional merchants
with those of its artisans and tradesmen. The pasha, his family, and
members of his advisory council, the divan, maintained their hold-
ings in contracts on local and regional products. In addition to agri-
cultural rents and revenues, they possessed contracts on local manu-
facturing taxes, such as the fees on white cotton twist.52 Since his
first public office as intendant in 1796, (brahim had held the lucra-
tive malikâne on the excise tax on the interregional trade in snuff.53
That is not to say that (brahim opposed opening the town’s mar-
ket to long distance goods. A notarized appendix to the Diyarbekir
tariff lists the new commodities that the governor’s “own traders”
introduced into the city. Most were European goods, including
Flemish, presumably, manufactured cotton thread.54

49
On inter-urban rivalries over tariff: MMD 10,241: 230 (1798); CD 3582 (1811);
CI 990 (1815).
50
(brahim Yılmazçelik,” XIX. Yüzyılın ilk Yarısında Diyarbakır 1790–1840,” 2 vols.
(Ph.D. diss., Fırat University, 1991), 216–217; (brahim }eyhzâde 1784–85 merited
an entry in Yasin al-'Umari’s contemporary history of Iraq (al-Durr al-Maknûn fî
al-Ma"âthir al-Mâdiya min al-Qurun, critical ed., Sayyar Kawkab 'Ali al-Jamıl (Ph.D.
diss. University of St. Andrews, U.K.), 443; CD 9713.
51
Yılmazçelik, “XIX. Yüzyılın ilk Yarısında Diyarbakır,” 178.
52
MMD 9519:102,80,23. One of the shareholders in 1816–1817 was Ishak Efendi,
“müderris (scholar) and the secretary of the administrative council (divan) of the defunct
}eyhzâde (brahim.”
53
MMD 9519:22. MMD 9722:43. }amlu Ebü Bekir (d. 1793–94) was an appointee
as tariff keeper ( gümrükçü) as early as (brahim Pasha’s tenure as voyvoda.
54
KK 5249:18. Stamped by the judge of Amid, Seyyid Mehmed, it lists the
goods transported by “his [}eyhzâde’s] merchants.”
 :     191

Despite these extensive regional powers, (brahim Pasha remained

a loyal public servant of the empire. Upon his death, the family sur-
rendered the pasha’s accounts and wealth to the probate office for
assessment and expropriation. His malikâne contracts and household
effects were auctioned for the benefit of the fisc. But the bureau-
crats in Istanbul did not touch other assets. The pasha’s consider-
able endowments, including the family villas and a caravan saray,
remained intact.55 Members of his family would continue to play a
significant role in local government and enjoy the political and eco-
nomic fruits of privilege through their malikâne contracts and city
offices.

The Diyarbekir Commune of 1819

As this brief history of Amid’s interregnum history suggests, vernac-

ular government might have provided the basis for a type of feder-
alism within the empire. But the agreement was short lived. In fact,
the Istanbul elite may never have regarded the charter as a bind-
ing agreement and certainly did not consider it the forerunner of a
constitutional monarchy.56 After Bayraktar Mustafa Pasha’s death, it
did serve to temporize with the gentry until such time as bureau-
crats and statesmen could mount the next phase of state centraliza-
tion. Freed from other commitments with the conclusion of the war
with Russia in 1812 and buffered by Western Europe’s preoccupa-
tion with the Napoleonic Wars, Mahmud II initiated a series of cam-
paigns to install central authority in the Asian provinces. Fanning
out across Anatolia, by 1818, his commanders contemplated the east-
ern frontier. One of their major targets was the regime of Mehmed

55
CM 25,214.
56
On the Young Ottomans, see }erif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought:
A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1962); and (lber Ortaylı, Tanzimattan Cumhuriyete Yerel Yönetim Gelene[i (Istanbul:
Hil Yayınları, 1985); idem, (mparatorlu[un En Uzun Yüzyılı (Istanbul: Hil Yayınları,
1987). For later variations, see Yusuf Akçura’s Osmanlı Devletinin Da[ılma Devri (XVIII
ve XIX asırlarda) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1988). For more on decen-
tralization, see Niyazi Berkes, Türkiye’de Ca[da{lama (Istanbul: Do[u-Batı Yayınları,
1978), 102. The emphasis on centralization in late Ottoman and Turkish Republican
political thought is often attributed to Durkheim. See also, Bertrand Badie and
Pierre Birnbaum, The Sociology of the State, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1983), 12.
192  

Dervi{ Pasha, the lord who controlled the critical leg of the transit
route between the Iranian frontier and Diyarbekir, on one side, and
the Black Sea region on the other.57 His regime was well entrenched.
Troops from Erzurum, Mu{, Çıldır, Sivas, Bozuk (Yozgat), Trabzon,
and Diyarbekir were needed to carry out the final assault on the
fortified city of Van.
The province of Diyarbekir lay south of Van. According to the
strategic map of the modern state drawn by the sultan’s advisors, its
capital, Amid, was next on the list of governments to be brought
back into the imperial fold. Here, however, the state was forced to
consider other tactics. Unlike Van, Diyarbekir’s government was not
merely one-man rule. Undoubtedly fearing popular resistance, Istanbul
searched for a pretext for intervention. It found one in a contro-
versial candidate for the governorship. Behram Pasha, the new gov-
ernor, was a member of the Deli branch of the Kurdish Milan tribe
and a sworn enemy of the house of the }eyhzâde. His appointment
seems to have been calculated to incite the urban elite. His mission,
as the historian }anîzade sanitizes it, was to put “in order” (tertib
edüp) Diyarbekir’s urban affairs, ending, once and for all, gentry’s
hold on the deputy governorship.
Although official and provincial accounts differ widely, there is no
dispute over the scale and intensity of popular resistance to Behram
Pasha. In the official annals the city’s opposition to the new gover-
nor was no long a matter of rebellion (ihtilal ) as it had been recorded
in 1802. In 1819, the town’s defiance constituted outright civil war
( fitna).58 Absent local testimony, there might be no means of chal-
lenging the Istanbul version of the last days of federalism in Diyarbekir.
Fortunately, one witness’ account is preserved in a later provincial
history.59 Its author, Hacı Ragıb Bey, who suf-fered exile because of
his involvement, described the denouement of the rebellion: The new
governor entered the city’s basalt portals on July 18, 1819. Behram

57
Local opinions on the government of Van prior to the campaign of 1818 were
not unfavorable to the lord according to James Brant, “Journey through a part of
Armenia and Asia Minor in the Year 1835,” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society
10 (1841): 395.
58
}anizade, Tarih vol. 3, 54.
59
The manuscript has been lost. Kırzıo[lu’s source (“Kara-Âmid’te 1819’da
A’yandan }eyhzâdeler,” 350–58, 375–76) is the manuscript of Abdulghani Bulduk,
an early twentieth-century historian of the city of Diyarbekir, who cites from it
extensively.
 :     193

Pasha summoned the urban leadership to hear his mandate. “I was

sent [by the state] to destroy you,” he proclaimed to Amid’s towns-
men, “to scatter your belongings [to the wind] and to burn your
houses [to the ground].” With this declaration of war, he beat a
hasty retreat to the citadel. From this heavily fortified position, troops
began an artillery assault on the city, raining death and destruction
on the villas of the gentry as well as the workshops and residences
of artisans in the adjoining quarter.
In self-defense, townsmen attacked the citadel. Merchants and
craftsmen withdrew goods from the market and stopped paying taxes.
The gentry coalesced under the leadership of a member of the
}eyhzâde clan, Mehmed. They blockaded the external door of the
citadel. For a time, these actions prevented the governor from obtain-
ing fresh supplies from the Tigris or from summoning help from the
Ergani mine. Yet word eventually reached its intendant, Nurullah
Pasha, who dispatched troops to the governor’s aid southward along
the main highway bisecting the province.
For three months this city of some forty to fifty thousand inhab-
itants repelled the sultan’s armies at its gates. In addition to the
horsemen of the Milan Kurds and troops from Ergani, reinforce-
ments and armaments poured into the province from the northern
Anatolian cities of Erzurum, Van, and Çıldır, as well as from Aleppo,
Adana, and Sivas.
A brutally long siege and the superior firepower of the army finally
brought the city to its knees on October 26, 1819. The rebellion
exacted a staggering toll on the city which would be felt long into
the century. Nearly a third of the population suffered casualties.
Seven to eight hundred families were sent into exile. The }eyhzâde
themselves took refuge in the outskirts of Hani while many other
leading townsmen, master craftsmen, and merchants resettled in
Baghdad, Damascus, and Basra. With the communards defeated,
Behram Pasha’s successor could easily complete the task of extir-
pating local government. The new governor expropriated the tax-
farms and retracted the venal offices from the rebellious gentry. After
Diyarbekir, Istanbul’s campaign of consolidation would move on to
northern Syria.60

60
See Cemal Tukin, “Mahmud II. Devrinde Halep Isyanı: 1813–1819,” Tarih
Vesikaları 1 (1941): 256–264.
194  

Of Democracy and the New Despotism

The Diyarbekir commune represented one of unfinished revolutions

at the end of the old regime. Cevdet Pasha’s History faithfully recorded
the Charter of Federation and devoted pages to the 1819 Diyarbekir
rebellion. The Tanzimat historian betrayed no sympathy for the griev-
ances of provincial city. Instead, his account suggests that factional
struggles, specifically blood feuds between local gentry and the Kurdish
tribes, were the root cause of the violence.61
Hindsight left little room for another explanation for the surge of
resistance to state centralization. By the mid-nineteenth century, the
historian’s vantage point was transfixed: Selim III and his successors
had begun to “bring everything into order;” they reconstructed a
state that the gentry and magnates had nearly torn apart.62 The
wages of decentralization in the context of a newly emerging political
order based on unitary states seemed all too clear: in the course of
the first four decades of the nineteenth century, Greece, Algeria, and
ultimately Egypt had all but been lost to the empire. The Tanzimat
programs of 1839–76, premised on top-down administrative reforms,
seemed to succeed where the loose federalism of the previous cen-
tury had failed. Bureaucrats and state officials made new institutional
inroads into provincial governance; they implanted new land codes
and uniform urban administrations from Bulgaria to Iraq.63
While the trappings of culture, the imbalance of power and blind-
ers of ideology severed the ties between adjoining regions and gave
European thinkers the illusion of a chronology all their own, Tanzimat
bureaucrats were also collaborators in the theory and praxis of the
modern state.64 Where the Ottoman elite blamed late centralization
and disunity for their vulnerability in the face of European military
power and colonial expansion, French intellectuals tied the question
of centralization to domestic struggles over the extent of popular sov-

61
Cevdet Pasha (Tarih, vol. 11, 65, 67–9, 83) refers to (brahim’s brutal repres-
sion of the Viran{ehir branch of the Milan tribe and his repeated reprisals against
the Deli Milan during his long tenure between 1807–8 and 1814.
62
Cevdet, Tarih, vol. 6, 221.
63
See Huri Islamo[lu, “Property as a Contested Domain: A Reevaluation of the
Ottoman Land Code of 1858,” in New Perspectives on Property and Land in the Middle
East, ed. Roger Owen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 3–63.
64
A point taken up Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the
Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998).
 :     195

ereignty, particularly in the wake of the revolutions of 1789 and 1848.

In contrast to the French Legitimists, including Arthur de Gobineau
and Ernst Renan, who sought institutional decentralization and the
restoration of feudal privilege as means of restraining France’s team-
ing masses,65 Tocqueville believed in the dialectic evolution of democ-
racy and institutional centralization. Increasing state centralization,
he argued, would yield stable government and economic prosperity.
If this formula had failed elsewhere, Tocqueville maintained, it was
due not to race or climate, as Gobineau claimed, but to religion
and civilization.
Christianity played a critical role in Tocqueville’s political theory.
Repeatedly in The Old Régime he reminds his readers of the need for
the counterweight of the Church against the ever-present threat of
despotism. Religious difference also allowed him to reconcile his belief
in human equality with his advocacy of colonialism. Dispensing with
a thorough study of Islamic history and thought, a cursory reading
of the Qur’an was sufficient to construct a world contrary to Western
civilization. For Tocqueville, Islam constituted a polity out of kilter,
an unforgiving and unyielding ideology that pitched societies between
the extremes of super-centralized authority and destructive anarchy.
In Kantian terms, Muslim society did not exemplify “stasis,” but
rather the absolute terror of social regression (a “step backward from
paganism”) and a generalized threat to civilization (“deadly” to
mankind). As such, Tocqueville’s ideas are very much in harmony
with the segregation practiced by French colonialists in Algeria.
Membership in the republic might not demand a single national or
racial origin, but it did require a common religious affiliation.66
Despite the underlying religious prejudices that sustained his polit-
ical philosophy and practice, Tocqueville was well aware of the per-
ils and pitfalls of the modern state. From his first explorations in
North America, where he sought to elucidate key relationships between
cultures and systems of government, he scanned the world for evi-
dence and comparative cases. He offers analyses on states from Russia
to Mexico and from Britain to the Ottoman Empire.67 Even at this
early stage of his career, Tocqueville was well aware that the uni-
tary state had proliferated far beyond its prototype in revolutionary

65
Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen, 96–7, 130–31; 171–72; 191.
66
Jardin, Tocqueville, 203, 208, 318–22.
67
Ibid., 248; Tocqueville, Oeuvres compléte, vol. 3, pt. 1, 29–253.
196  

France. With it, came the dangers of despotism: the full, unmedi-
ated force of the world’s most dangerous weapon on the individual
was no longer blunted by the peculiar government-state relationship
of the old regime or the aristocratic hierarchy. At one extreme the
modern state could be a prison, like Czarist Russia. In a country of
pashas and paupers, like Mehmet Ali’s Egypt, the state could become
forced-labor factory.68 Although Tocqueville regarded these examples
as a travesty of modern polity and assured himself that only the
most extraordinary conditions, such as a state of total anarchy or
revolution, could bring despotism to Western Europe,69 he realized
that Europeans had reason to be wary. The future of democratic
government would rest more heavily on the individual. As in nine-
teenth century Britain, it could be corrupted by the passivity of its
citizenry or the excessive influence of money.
With the 1851 coup d’état that suspended the bourgeois consti-
tution and brought Napoleon III (r. 1852–1870) to power, Tocqueville
confronted the perils of the modern state close at hand. Although
he retired from active participation in the political arena, his biog-
rapher André Jardin notes that his voluminous correspondence between
1851 and his death in 1859 continued to run the gamut of domes-
tic and foreign policy.70 Despite poor health, he eagerly awaited
Gobineau’s letters from Iran and continued to condemn slavery as
a violation of the most basic concepts of Christianity.71
On one topic, however, Tocqueville is inexplicably silent. For a
politician who had been consumed by colonial affairs for decades,
it is remarkable that he ceased to comment on France’s colonial pol-
icy in Africa. Was he frustrated by the character of colonial rule
after the defeat of 'Abd al-Qadir in 1847 and the incorporation of
the colons as citizens after 1848? Did his inclusion of an appendix
on Canada in The Old Régime merely express nostaglia for empire
lost or was the comment “colonies bear the imprint of the metro-
pole,” in fact a pointed reminder to his countrymen that posterity
would judge the nation by its legacy of imperialism in North Africa?
Or had his political philosophy itself been altered? One might ask
whether his silence might have signaled that the neat, binary divi-

68
Jardin, Tocqueville, 69–70; 375, 266. Tocqueville, Oeuvres compléte, vol. 2, 300–13.
69
Jardin, Tocqueville, 267–68.
70
Jardin, Tocqueville, 333.
 :     197

sion between European states and their non-Western rivals had begun
to disintegrate. Recent experience had given him reason for pause.
In contrast to the cooperation of the Ottoman representative in Rome
who readily agreed to take in the refugees from 1848, a down pay-
ment on their obligations as a future member of the Concert of
Europe, there was the utter intransigence of the Vatican. While
Istanbul embraced reforms, the Papacy rebuffed even the most minor
effort toward political change. And then there were the events in
France itself: in what way did the caudillismo of Latin America differ
from Bonapartism? Although the Congress of Vienna had insured
France’s territorial integrity, did not the rocky transition from the
old regime, the radical swings between revolution, monarchy, repub-
lic and empire, mirror to an uncomfortable degree, the decades of
civil war, restoration, and the quasi-constitutional sultanate of the
Ottoman Empire?
Tocqueville might have reassured himself with the thought that
barring extreme conditions, European societies could not produce a
despotism like that of Russia or the “Turks.” However, in the wake
of the Revolutions of 1848 and the putsch of 1851, such confidence
in the internal regulating principles of Europe’s political society was
no longer firm.72 In his last political essay, The Old Régime and the
French Revolution, he turned away from the present to search for the
roots of modern institutions and social relationships in the last cen-
tury of the ancien régime. By turning the clock backward, long before
the French Revolution, he may have hoped to find in those cahiers
evidence of the enduring virtues of the nation, to cast a conceptual
anchor amid the turbulent nineteenth-century political sea.
In writing the first of what was planned to be two volumes on
the history of the French Revolution, Tocqueville carefully demar-
cates the geographical limits of his inquiry. Despite furnishing ample
evidence to the contrary, he repeatedly reminds his readers of the
inevitable emergence of the modern state from the baroque cocoon
of the old regime. In rehabilitating the eighteenth-century, he admits
many of the paradoxes while creating an overarching sense of order,

71
For his correspondence with Arthur de Gobineau from Switzerland and Iran,
after 1851 see Tocqueville, Oeuvres complètes, 9: 157 ff.
72
Hazareesingh (From Subject to Citizen, 231–32), calls this the “liberalism of fear.”
John Keane, “Despotism and Democracy,” in Civil Society and the State: New European
Perspectives, ed. idem (London: Verso, 1988), 65.
198  

a vision of political progress amidst the anticipated upheaval of

revolution and the hubris of empire. In such an ideologically-moti-
vated treatise, it should be expected, therefore, that he purge any
embarrassing connections between the Bourbons and their long-stand-
ing Muslim allies. Although he credits the Physiocrats, only grudg-
ing mention is made of the profound influence of Asian statecraft
on Europe’s political imagination.73
Yet even in text that consciously eschews all of the barbed com-
parison between the Bourbon monarchy and “Oriental despot” that
was signature of the Enlightenment critique of absolutism, Tocqueville
makes but one, albeit highly evocative, reference to Islam. Oddly,
the lone reference occurs in an introductory passage in which the
author takes on one of the intellectual ghosts of his own age, Edmund
Burke, on the place of the French Revolution in modern history.
He defends the necessity of the Revolution within the larger scope
of Western political development even as he distances itself from its
radicalism and admits the exceedingly dangerous combination of
mass mobilization with the machinery of the modern state. Even as
he lays claim to his national heritage, he grasps at the rhetorical
means of separating himself from the fury its ideologies of equality
and the violence of its citizen armies. It is as if the author cannot
bear the thought that roots of the Terror and Napoleon’s European
empire might reside within French society or the centralized state.
Reaching for an historical analogy with which to denounce
Jacobinism, as well as to blame its ideological contagion on a world
beyond France, momentarily, Tocqueville looks across the Mediter-
ranean.74 In a metaphor that he will repeat again in the notes to
the second volume of this study, he transforms these ideologies of

73
Tocqueville, The Old Regime, 197, 204–5.
74
“Because the Revolution seemed to be striving for the regeneration of the
human race even more than the reform of France, it lit a passion which the most
violent political revolutions had never before been able to produce. It inspired con-
versation and generated propaganda . . . it itself became a new kind of religion, an
incomplete religion, it is true, without God, without ritual, and without a life after
death, but one which nevertheless, like Islam flooded the earth with its soldiers,
apostles, and martyrs. The Old Régime, 101. He repeats this metaphor. Tocqueville,
Notes on the French Revolution and Napoleon, The Old Regime and the French Revolution
(L’ancien régime et la Révolution), ed. François Furet and Françoise Mélonio, trans. by
Alan S. Kahan (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998) vol. 2, 180, 263, 446, 459.
As Furet and Melonio (ibid., 459) point out, for this metaphor as well, he is indebted
to a royalist writer, Mallet du Pan.
 :     199

liberation into an alien religion. Instead of crediting Napoleon with

building the modern state or praising his advocacy of religious tol-
erance, he casts the First Consul as a “Rights of Man” thumping
missionary who wins converts with the promise of equality, a sword-
bearing prophet who respected neither the integrity of borders nor
the differences between civilizations. Above all, he betrays his fear
of the unfathomable power of the modern state and a revolution
that had not yet run its course but, which had “like Islam flooded
the earth with its soldiers, apostles and martyrs.”
This page intentionally left blank
COLOUR PLATES
This page intentionally left blank
 terminal histories and arthurian solutions 31

Plate 1. The procession of the esnaf (guilds) began with the farmer, the miller and the
bread maker. A young man reads verses from the Qur}an on camel-back. From Levni’s
illustrated Surnâme-i Vehbi (TKSK Ms. A 3593, fol. 72a). Courtesy of Topkapæ Sarayæ
Museum.
 60 chapter two

Plate 2. Sultan Ahmed III and his son-in-law, Grand Vizier `brahim Pasha view the
festivities. From Levni’s illustrated Surnâme-i Vehbi (TKSK Ms. A 3593, fol. 71b).
Courtesy of Topkapæ Sarayæ Museum.
 terminal histories and arthurian solutions 31

Plate 3. A vision of order: the Øeyh} ül-`slam, jurists and ulema are at the top rung; they
are followed by viziers, ministers, generals, members of the divan-æ hümayun, and finally
the treasurers. Janissaries guard the perimeter. From Levni’s illustrated Surnâme-i Vehbi
(TKSK Ms. A 3593, fol. 21a). Courtesy of Topkapæ Sarayæ Museum.
 60 chapter two

Plate 4. A vision of disorder: the janissaries trip over themselves and one another in a
mad dash to claim their plates of rice. From Levni’s illustrated Surnâme-i Vehbi (TKSK
Ms. A 3593, fol. 23a). Courtesy of Topkapæ Sarayæ Museum.
 terminal histories and arthurian solutions 31

Plate 5. The French ambassadors seated in front of the stern faced Russian emissaries
seem to be amused by the scene of raucous firemen, clowns, and the float of the
weavers of gold cloth. From Levni’s illustrated Surnâme-i Vehbi (TKSK Ms. A 3593, fol.
140a). Courtesy of Topkapæ Sarayæ Museum.
 60 chapter two

Plate 6. The sultan has returned to the palace at the conclusion of the festivities. He
rewards his servants with a distribution of gold coins. From Levni’s illustrated, Surnâme-
i Vehbi (TKSK Ms. A 3593, fol. 175a). Courtesy of Topkapæ Sarayæ Museum.
 GLOSSARY

Akçe Small silver coin (or asper)

A[a Military officer or landlord
Askeri Belonging to the tax-exempt estate
Âyan Gentry, town fathers
Bab-ı Âli Sublime Porte, the state apparatus
Bac Toll, market tax
Berat Diploma, certificate.
Beylerbeyi Provincial commander, military governor
Beyt"ül-mal Public weal, trust of the Muslim community
Cebelü Bedeliyesi Wartime payment in lieu of military service
Cizye Poll tax
Çiftlik Unit of plowland, field, or plantation.
Defter Register, any type of bound record
Defterdar Controller, imperial treasurer
Divan Advisory council
Du"â"güyân Religious dignitaries receiving state stipends
Dar üs-Saâde A[ası Senior Black Eunuch
Efendi Title for high-ranking official or dignitary
Esnaf Occupational or artisanal association
E{râf Descendants of the Prophet
Eyalet Province (also vilâyet)
Fatwa Religious opinion issued by a mufti
Gedik Bureaucratic or military post, life tenure
Gümrük Taxes on inter-urban and interstate commerce
Hass Crown estate or benefice (also, hass-ı hümayûn)
Hatt-ı Hümayùn Imperial rescript
Hükümet Hereditary, semi-autonomous estate
Hükm Judgement on a petition, an order
(lmiye Judiciary, the state ulema
(ltizam Revenue contract
Kadı Ottoman judge
Kalemiye Bureaucracy, clerks
Kanun Imperial statute
Kanunnâme Code, charter, or compilation of statutes
Kâtib Secretary, clerk, or scribe
202 

Kaza Judicial subdistrict within a sancak

Kapı Household, retainers and staff
Kapıkulu Salaried military corps
Kapıcıba{ı Palace chamberlain
Kuru{ Silver coin equivalent to 120 akçe
Malikâne Mukataa Tax contract for the life of the contractor
Maktu Tax paid in a lump sum by a group
Miri Pertaining or belonging to the state
Muaccele Surety or down payment on a malikâne mukataa
Mukataa Fiscal unit (pl. Mukataât)
Mufti Leading Muslim religious authority
Mülk Personal or private property
Mültezim Tax farmer
Müsadere Expropriation of an official
Mütesellim Deputy governor
Nahiye Canton, a subcomponent of a kaza
Ocaklık Revenue “tagged” for an individual or group
Poliçe Letter of credit
Reaya Tax payer, the third estate
Re"is"ül-Küttâb Secretary of state
Rical-ı Devlet Ranking officials and officers
Sancak Military district, also known as liva
}eyh'ül-(slam Chief justice of the empire
Sipahi Ordinary cavalry officer/administrator
Tanzimat Ottoman reform programs of 1839–76
Timar Tax benefice of an ordinary sipahi
Ulema Muslim religious scholars, lawyers
Vali Provincial governor-commander
Voyvoda Financial agent, tax-farm supervisor
Voyvodalık Block of tax farms supervised by a voyvoda
Waqf Endowment established under Islamic law
Zeamet Intermediate-sized tax fief or benefice
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 INDEX

Abou-El-Haj, Rifa"at 6 n. 8, 18, 44, Auction, of tax farms 26, 88–9, 96,
88, 104–105, 194 99, 101, 103, 109, 134, 138, 140,
Abdulfattah, Kamal 58 n. 81 150–1; (in provinces) 26, 134, 138,
Adana 67 140, 150–1; of esham 119; of
Afghan 37 personal effects. See Müsadere
Ahmad Shah Durrani 72 Ayan. See Gentry
Ahmed II 88 n. 50 Ayıntab 53
Ahmed III 30, 39, 75–78, 118–19, Azarbayjan 34, 35, 38, 39, 71
179, 182 Abbas III, Safavid Shah 41
Ahmed Cevdet Pasha 30, 180, 182, 194 Azov 40
Ahmed Efendi Vâsıf 181, n. 18 Azam (also 'Azamzâde, clan of
Ahmed Resmi Efendi 94, 99 Damascus) 95, 107
Akarlı, Engin 164
Aksan, Virginia 79, 94, 180 n. 12 Bab-ı Âli. See Sublime Porte
Albania 47 Baghdad 11, 13, 48, 50, 61, 65–67,
Aleppo 10, 59, 61, 63, 65–67, 92–93, 74, 100, 111, 129, 131–35, 153,
111, 122 n. 2, 129, 132, 135, 142, 163, 165, 182, 185, 190, 193
148 n. 109, 161, 164, 169, 174 Ba[çı, Serpil 33 n. 9
Algeria 176–8, 195 Bandits 131, 145–6
Ali Bey al-Kabir 49, 74, 112 n. 154, Balkans 7, 8, 37, 47, 49, 55, 68, 71,
180 89, 101, 186
Amid, city of 12, 127 n. 12, 129, Barbir, Karl 18, 58 n. 82, 59 n. 87,
134–40, 146–51, 154–75; sancak 107 n. 135
of 133 n. 27, 135–6, 141, 145; Basra 66, 74
(eastern) nahiye of 135, 139 n. 52; Battle, of Çe{me 74; of Plassey 72;
(western) nahiye of 136–7, 139 n. 52 of Pruth 38
Amsterdam 71 Bengal 61, 72, 125
Alexander the Great 33 Bessarabia 181
Anatolia 128, 129, 147, 149, 153, Bandar Abbas 62
163, 169, 174 Bayraktar Mustafa Pasha 185–8, 191
Ancien régime (old regime, old order) Beyazid I 81
12–17 Black Sea 33, 35, 40, 45–46, 54, 56,
Ankara 62 62, 70, 72, 74, 75, 112, 128, 180,
Arabia 34 192; Principalities of 45, 72. See also
Archives 7; of Algeria 7, 176; of Moldavia and Wallachia
France 126 n. 9; of Harput 171 Borders 44–45
n. 217; of Prussia 7; Ottoman Bosnia 47
79–80 Britain 70
Aristocracy of Service 26. See also Bucak 72
Rical-i devlet Bureaucracy 29, 78, 82–85, 92–102
Armenia 51 Bursa 54, 63, 161
Armenian 27, 111–13, 117 n. 180, Byzantine Empire 81
120, 134
Asia 33, 53, 61, 151, 176, 176, 179. Calendar 86
See also West Asia Canada 197
Asia Minor 36. See also Anatolia Cartography 31–34
Atıl, Esin 78 Caspian Sea 33, 38, 39, 61–62
236 

Cebelü Bedeliyesi 97, 114, 133 Diplomats 110

Celali 57 Divan-ı Hümayun 34, 73, 79, 82,
Centralization (state) 3–5, 9, 14–16, 111, 190
83, 133, 191–95 Diyarbekir, province of 9, 11–12, 29,
Çermik 100, 122, 136, 140, 141, 50, 54, 58, 59–60, 65, 66, 95, 100,
148, 151, 159, 162 121, 122–75, 185, 190; commune of
Çeteci Abdullah Pasha 94–95, 131 191–4
Cezar, Yavuz 8 n. 17, 86–87 D’Ohsson, Mouradgea 27
Charter of Federation. See Sened-i (ttifak Du’â-güyan, of Diyarbekir 151; of the
China, trade of 62. See also Manchu empire 90–91
Chios 109 Dye houses (boyahane) 156–7, 161
Christian, craftsmen 162; dragoman
27; financiers 111–17 Ebu Bekir al-Dimi{ki 32
Christianity 15 Ebu Su"ud Efendi 55
Christendom 31, 37 Edirne 90, 101, 103, 116
Churches, in Diyarbekir 151 Egypt 24, 34, 49, 53, 55, 74, 84, 90,
Circle of Justice 76–77, 81 112, 154, 163, 165, 180, 186, 189,
Circumcision, ceremonies 75–76, 196
102, 120. See also Surnâme-i Vehbi Eldem, Ethem 18, n. 49
Cizye (poll tax) 8–48, 141 Emanet 168 n. 203
Clement XII 41 Empire, theory of 3, 13–18
Colbert, Jean-Baptiste 3, 79, 125 Enlightenment 6, 14, 16, 178–80
Colonialism 44, 72, 177–78, 194–96 Epidemic 148, 170
Commerce 60–71 Erim, Ne{e 61
Contract (concept of ) 88, 92, Ergani 130, 132 n. 21, 137–39, 143,
96–101, 187 145 n. 87, 147, 149 n. 115, 168
Corporate Patrimonialism 102–110 Erzurum 51, 54, 59, 61, 63, 65, 95,
Cossacks 45 100, 102, 130–31, 192, 193
Crusade 41 Esma Sultan the Elder 106
Crimea 40; khanate of 46, 72, 89 Esnaf (guilds) 77, 102, 143, 145–49,
Crete 94, 175 157–62, 168, 173
Croatia 47 E{râf ve âyan. See gentry
Cyprus 149, 171 Eunuch, senior black (dar üs-saâde
a[ası) 75, 80, 84, 88, 90, 92, 95;
Çunku{ 137 senior white (bab ül-saâde a[ası) 92
Çorum 103 Euphrates 50
Eurasia 13, 14, 21, 29, 31–36, 71–73,
Damga (stamp tax) 156, 161–63 128. See also Asia
Damascus, city of 48, 62, 65, 90, Expropriation. See Müsadere
161, 189, 193; province of 91, 95,
107, 122 n. 2, 129, 142, 154, 161, Famine 135
164, 175 Faroqhi, Suraiya 166 n. 194
D’Anville, Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon 32 Fars 51
Darling, Linda 82 Federalism 187–88, 191–92, 194. See
Dar üs-saâde a[ası. See Eunuch also Sened-i (ttifak
Debt, personal 111–17; state 87–89, Feyzullah Efendi 103–5
110–18, 128, 183; peasant 147 Finance, domestic 10, 110–18;
Decentralization 145 interstate 118, 183
Defterdarlık, of Damascus 129 Financier (sarraf or banker) 3, 89,
Delhi 61 111–18, 184
Denmark 40 Findley, Carter 26 n. 68
Derebey 74, 163 Finkle, Caroline 59 n. 84
Deringil, Selim 194 n. 64 Fisc. See Treasury
Diplomacy 73, 110–11 Fitna 192
  237

Fleischer, Cornell 14 n. 33, 83 Ibn Khaldun 76

France 3–5, 7, 14–16, 20–23, 26–27, Imam Reza 47
40, 47, 65, 74, 79, 83, 177, 181, India 22, 32, 36; products of 62, 65.
195–99 See also South Asia
Frontier 42–52 Iran 22, 47, 50, 59–60, 61, 68, 71–74
Furet, François 16 n. 41 Iraq 131–3, 134, 142, 170
Israeli policy 178
Georgia 35, 39, 42, 72 Izmir 62–63, 71, 90, 100, 111
Gift 92–93
Ghalzai Afghans 38, 61 (brahim Müteferikka 33
Gelibolu 90 (ltizam. See Tax Farming
Genç, Mehmet 9–10, 18, 69 (nalcık, Halil 17–18, 187
Gentry 10–12, 17–18, 26–27, 29, 60,
74, 83, 89, 95, 100, 101, 107, 120, Jalilis (or Abdül -celilzâde, clan of
132, 135, 137, 140, 148–53, Mosul) 60, 100, 132, 164, 165
152–53, 156, 163–69, 175 Janissaries 3, 55, 57, 60 81, 83, 102
Gobineau, Alfred de 178, 195, 118, 180, 184, 186; in provinces
196 142, 151, 152, 154, 155, 158, 162,
Goffman, Daniel 62 n. 99 166, 170, 171
Goodrich, Thomas 32 n. 6 Jews, financiers 111–112, 115; in
Government, vernacular (definition) Diyarbekir 151
25–26; practice of 170–75, Judge (kadı) 12, 27, 52, 72, 104, 117,
188–91 118, 140, 146, 147, 148, 149, 152,
Governorship 49, 50, 93, 95, 100, 153, 157, 158, 159
131, 138, 169, 189, 182
Guilds. See Esnaf Kadı. See Judge
Gujarat 66 Kadı Sicils 9
Gul{eni 151 Kafadar, Cemal 81 n. 17
Gümrük. See Tariff Kaht 42
Kahya 80
Habermas, Jürgen Kalmyk 39
Habsburg Empire 40 Kanunname 53, 82, 115
Hama 95 Kapı 105–110
Hami of Amid 94–95 Karaman 53
Hamedan 34 Karaosmano[lu clan 100
Hanagan, Michael 24 Karahısar-ı }arkı 60
Hanefi (legal school) 55, 98, 115–116 Karim Khan Zand 72–74, 131, 142
Hani 129 n. 14, 137, 139–40, 143, Kars 60
148–50 Kerman 51
Harput 129, 131, 136–7, 140, 146, Kermanshah 34
161–2 Khuzistan 67
Hass-ı Hümayun 56, 87 Körprülü viziers 3
Hassan Pasha 50 Kurdistan 50–51, 56, 60, 67, 71, 74,
Hickok, Michael 106 n. 129 87, 189,
Hierarchy 77, 92–102, 107–109 Kütahya 53
Haj. See Pilgrims
Hijaz 38, 48, 63, 73 Latin America 197
Himalayas 33 Lattimore, Owen 45 n. 42
Homs 95 Lebanon 47
Hourani, Albert 17–18 Lewis, Bernard 3 n. 3
Hungary 22 Levni (Abdülcelil Çelebi) 76. See also
Hüseyin II 38 plates 1–6
Hüdevendigar 60 Life-lease. See malikâne
Hükümet 51 London 71
238 

Louis XIV 3, 14 Mukha 66

Louis XVI 4, 183 Mukataa (pl. mukataât) 28, 57, 87,
Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) 186, 126–7, 139, 142, 143, 146, 155,
196 158–64, 174. See also Tax farming
Luristan 34, 38 Murad I 81
Murphey, Rhoads 58
Magrib 46–47 Musqat 66
Mahmud I 105, 119 Mustafa II 102
Mahmud II 186, 191 Mültezim 57. See also Tax farmer
Malikâne (or Life-lease) 2, 18, 27–29, Müsadere 84, 86, 96–97, 191
87–92, 95–102, 114–15
Malatya 51 Nadir Shah Afshar (also Tahmasp Quli
Makran 35 Khan) 41, 47, 60, 61, 72–74
Manchu (China) 34 Napoleon 6, 23, 191, 198
Mann, Michael 5 n. 8 Napoleon III 196
Mara{ 51 Naqshbandiye 149 n. 115
Mardin 128, 132–35, 139, 141, 143, Nasihatname 76, 81–82
146, 151, 157, 161, 162, 166 New Order Army 170
Marseilles 71 New Order (Nizâm-ı Cedid) 4,
Marsigli, Luigi Fernando (Count) 184–85, 170; New Order Treasury
32–33 ((rade-i Cedid) 4
Mecca 35, 48, 72, 84, 90 Nev{ehirli (brahim Pasha 3, 34,
Medina 35, 48, 72, 84 78–80, 89, 94, 96
Mediterranean, geopolitics of 3, 6, Nogay Tatars 45
29, 31, 36, 40, 53, 55, 88, 177, Nile 62
180, 188, 198; trade of 61–63, 66, Nisibin 132–4
68, 70, 118
Mehmet Ali Pasha 177 Ocaklık 51
Mehmet II 81–82 Oman 35, 61
Mehmet IV 177, 185 Orientalism 28 n. 73
Mengene (cloth presses) 171
Menzil (post system) 48–51 Palace (Ottoman court and dynasty)
Military, band 118; elite 108; 12, 25, 28, 55, 75, 76–92, 94, 95,
French 177–78; insurrection of 99, 107, 110, 111, 118–120
102; Ottoman 18–19, 23–25, 26, Palestine (Filistin) 11, 40, 56, 131,
29, 32–39, 54–55, 60, 67–69, 81, 189
86, 97, 102–03; reform 183–88 Palu 129, 137, 149 n. 116, 161–2
Mines (in Ergani and Keban) 137, Parson, Talcott 13
138, 139 Partnerships, in tax farms 106–08
Mufti, Hanefi in Amid 151; Shafi"i Peasants 3, 26, 80, 127–63, 175
in Amid 151 Perlin, Frank 27 n. 71
Modernization, theories 5 Persian Gulf 22, 35, 51, 67, 70–72
Mohammed (Prophet) 35 Peirce, Leslie 78 n. 5
Moldavia 45, 72, 181. See also Black Petition (to court) 109, 132, 150, 157,
Sea Principalities 168
Monetary Policy 68–71 Peter the Great 38, 39
Moore, Sally Falk 19 Phanariote 46
Morea 100 Pilgrims (on Haj) 32, 62–63, 84, 90
Mosul 132, 135, 143, 152, 160, 164–65 Pinto, Karen 34 n. 10
Mudanya 90 Poland 15, 22, 23, 37, 45, 46, 74,
Mufti (chief ), in Diyarbekir, 151. 181
See }eyh"ül-(slam Porter, James 126
Mughal Empire 39 Portugal 43
Muhassılık, of Aleppo 129 Property 19–21, 92–98, 103
  239

Provincial Administration 8–18, Sub-contracting (or sub-farming) 136,

23–30, 54–60. See also Voyvoda and 138, 145, 146, 156, 158, 166, 172
Governorship Sublime Porte 12, 18, 29, 78–92
Princess 75, 87–88, 104, 106, 111 Sufi Orders 90, 91, 149, 151
Privatization 11 Süleyman I 14
Ptolemy 33 Sumptuary Codes 92
Surat 72
Qajars 22, 38, 182 Surnâme-i Vehbi 75, 120
Qizilbash 28, 47 Sweden 40
Syria 134, 139, 169, 174
Ragıb Pasha 95
Rakka (Urfa) 67 }ahiner, Araks 109 n. 142
Ra{id Efendi 96–97 }anizâde, Ataullah Mehmet 192
Rebellion 96, 102, 171 }emdâni-zâde Fındıklı Süleyman Efendi
Ranke, Leopold von 7 114
Reaya 26. See also Peasants }ehrizor 60
Red Sea 40 }eyhzâde Ibrahim 165, 167, 189–193
Renan, Ernst 178, 195 }eyhzâde Ismail 165–170
Revolution, French 6, 9, 14, 16 }eyh"ül-(slam 91, 99, 104–05, 115–16
n. 41, 197–99
Rical-i Devlet 11, 26, 76, 97, 99, Tabriz 71, 78
109, 186–87. See also Aristocracy of Tahmasp II 41
Service Tariff ( gümrük) 3, 38, 64–65, 90, 109,
Roman Empire 31 111, 114, 151, 155, 156, 159–162, 190
Rumeli 33 Tanzimat 179, 189, 194
Rusçuk 185 Tapu 144
Russia 22, 38–44, 45, 46, 62–63, 68, Tatarcık Abdullah Efendi 182
71–74, 83, 110, 119, 180–186, 196, Taxation, avarız and bedel-i nüzül 84;
197 cizye 85; coffee 85; history of 52,
60, 81–92; tobacco 85, 145–7. See
Safavid 22, 32, 37–42, 51, 61, 68, 182 also tariff and damga
Said, Edward 28 n. 73 Tax Farming 10–11, 15, 20–21, 56,
Salonika 62, 90 106–115; comparative 17 n. 44.
Saray. See Palace See also Iltizam and Malikâne
Sarraf. See Financier Territorial scale 22–23
Scot, James 29 n. 76 Thieck, Jean-Pierre 10, 18
Selim III 14, 182–86 Thompson, Elizabeth 109
Sened-i (ttifak 186–87 Tibet 34
Shafi"i (legal school) 149 Tiflis 41
Shaykh, tribal 132, 135; of guilds Tigris 50
or esnaf 158–9. See also Ustad Tilly, Charles 5 n. 6, 15 n. 37, 17
Siberia 68 n. 44, 21 n. 56, 104 n. 122
Silk trade 61–62 Timar 28, 54–57, 71, 84, 87, 128,
Silver 68–69 133–37, 143, 144, 175, 175, 184
Sırrı Selim Pasha 100 Timur Bey (Milan Kurds) 135
Sivas 53 Tipu Sultan 181
Siyakat 81, 122 Tocqueville, Alexis de 1–30, 176–80,
South Africa 178 187, 195–98
Sovereignty 13, 19, 24, 28, 42–44, Tokat 29 n. 75
47, 52, 70–73, 181, 182; popular Trabzon 65, 192
194–95 Trade 62–67
Spain 43 Treasury (hazine) 4, 57, 61, 69, 73,
State, definition of early-modern 25, 83 79–91, 84–86, 114, 121, 183.
Stiglitz, Joseph 19 See also New Order Treasury
240 

Treasurer (defterdar efendi) 77–82 Vatican 6, 41, 42 n. 30, 177,

Tribes, (Central Asian) Ça[atay 35; 197
Kalmyk 39; (Ottoman) 'Anaza 67; Vienna 38
Ka"b 67; Khaza"il 67; Kiki 000; Voltaire 14, 178, 179
Kurdish 51–52; Milan 125, Voyvoda, of Diyarbekir 125, 128,
131–3, 139 n. 52, 169; Munafiq 135, 138, 141–3, 165–70; of
67; Türkmen 35, 132; Tayy 132 Çermik 141; of Mardin 134; of
Transylvania 45 Tokat 175
Treaty, of Belgrade 40, 48, 62; of Voyvodalık, of Diyarbekir 91, 128,
Karlowitz 38, 44, 47; of Küçük 135, 138–41, 143, 148, 154,
Kaynarca 47, 72; of Kurdan 73; 167–68, 172, 175
of Nantes 47; of Paris 73; of
Tordesilla 43; of Utrecht 37, 73; Wallachia 45, 72, 181
of Vienna 197; of Westphalia 44, Waldner, David 5 n. 6
73; of Zuhab 28 Waqf 28, 89–90, 116, 190,
Turan (zemin) 34 War, of the Holy League 87; of the
Tripoli (Syria) 95 Iranian Sucession 22, 37, 47, 59,
Tucker, Ernest 73 74, 192; Seven Years 74
West Asia 3, 22, 37, 39, 30,
Ulema 26, 28, 29, 56, 77, 90–92, 38–40, 49, 50, 53, 59, 61, 71,
98, 103, 104, 105, 107, 116, 117, 87
119, 153, 154, 163, 168, 171, 174; White, Jenny 26 n. 66
as tax farmers 143, 149–50
Ukraine 45 Yemen 19, 49
United States 177, 187, 188, 195 Yerevan (Revan) 51
Urfa (Rakka) 100 Yılmazçelik, (brahim 12
Uzbek 35, 39 Yusuf Ziya Pasha 138, 169

Vehbi Hüseyin Efendi 75, 81, 120 Zagros Mountains 129

Vassals (Ottoman) 45. See also Black Zarinebaf-Shahr, Fariba 38 n. 17
Sea and Crimea Zilfi, Madeline 99 n. 99