The Tanzimat Edict, read out at Gülhane on 3 November 1839, opened a long era of reform that reshaped the administrative, legal and social life of the Ottoman state. Its promises were security of life, property and honour, taxation according to each person's means, and a regular system of military service. Writing these principles down in the councils of Istanbul was one thing; putting them into practice in the provinces was another matter altogether. Amasya on the banks of the Yeşilırmak, for centuries known as a city of princes, madrasas and silk merchants, was a long-established centre and offers a good example for following the course of reform in the provinces. With the Tanzimat the city became, for the first time, the subject of detailed censuses of population and wealth, began to be governed through councils, and came to know new courts and new schools.

The traces of reform in Amasya are seen most clearly in the archival registers. The population register of 1840, the temettuat (income) registers of 1844-1845, the jizya registers kept between 1842 and 1848, and the yearbooks of the Sivas province published from the 1870s onward record the city's quarters, households, trades and institutions in detail that is mutually complementary. These records also show a change in the way the state looked at the provinces; surveys once made only for the sake of tax revenue now sought to reduce the whole human and material wealth of the city to figures. The individual works of the mutasarrıfs who governed the sanjak, together with buildings such as the government house and the clock tower, are the subject of a separate article; here the general reflection of reform on the life of the city is considered.

Amasya on the Eve of the Tanzimat

Until the middle of the sixteenth century Amasya was one of the principal sanjaks in which Ottoman princes gained administrative experience. After the execution of Prince Mustafa in 1553 it lost this role and became a sanjak attached to the province of Sivas, governed by sanjak governors appointed from the centre. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the sanjak was at times administered by deputy governors (mütesellim), and for a while it was granted as an arpalık, a revenue grant, to statesmen holding the rank of pasha. By the nineteenth century the city had not grown much physically, but its population had become somewhat larger. The population estimated for this century lies between 25,000 and 30,000.

The administrative hinterland of the city was wide and changeable. In 1838 the kazas (districts) of the Amasya sanjak were listed as Amasya, Erbaa, Havza, Zünnun, Zeytun, Zile, Osmancık, Gelgiras, Köprü, Gümüş, Lâdik, Mecidözü and Merzifon. This wide area included, besides today's province of Amasya, parts of Çorum, Tokat and Samsun. In the district centres the qadis and their deputies (naib) handled judicial and administrative matters together, while in the city the families of local notables (ayan) and the stewards of the guilds played a weighty role in everyday order. Under Mahmud II a system of headmen (muhtar) had been established in the quarters and villages, adding to the quarter imams officials who would conduct business between the state and the people. The Tanzimat arrived upon this foundation.

The census of 1831, carried out just before the age of reform, was the first general census of the Ottoman Empire and recorded only males. According to it, 6,379 males lived in the central district of Amasya, 4,326 of them Muslims and 2,053 non-Muslims. The American Protestant missionaries Eli Smith and H. G. O. Dwight, who travelled through the region in the same years, wrote that the city contained 4,000 Turkish, 600 Armenian and 125 Greek households. After the census the state founded the Ceride Nezareti, a registry office, in 1831 to make population affairs a permanent institution; in the sanjaks, register offices (defter nazırlığı) were opened to record births, deaths and migrations and to issue travel permits (mürur tezkeresi) to travellers. The record-keeping order of the Tanzimat grew out of these institutions.

The Gülhane Rescript and Its Reach into the Provinces

Mustafa Reşid Pasha, regarded as the architect of the Tanzimat, wished to rebuild provincial government on the model of the French administrative divisions. His aim was to curb the excessive powers of governors, to bind them to the centre by making them salaried officials, and to involve the people of the provinces in government through consultation. The first step was taken in taxation. One of the edict's most important principles was that everyone should pay tax according to their means, which first required the property, holdings and income of every household to be established. The farming out of taxes to tax-farmers (iltizam) was to end, and revenues were to be collected directly in the name of the treasury.

In the first years of reform, inspection missions were sent to the provinces. In 1840 Çerkeşî Mehmed Raif Efendi of the Meclis-i Ahkâm-ı Adliye, the Supreme Council of Judicial Ordinances, was assigned to Anatolia and Arif Hikmet Bey to Rumelia. These missions set out to see on the spot how the new order was being applied, to guide governors and officials, and to prevent misunderstandings. In practice the expected result was not achieved; the laws were still new, statesmen disagreed about the pace of the Tanzimat, and the cost of the missions weighed heavily on the treasury. Even so, these inspections were a clear sign that the centre now wished to supervise the provinces on a regular basis.

The tax and military measures brought by the Tanzimat were not accepted with equal ease everywhere in the empire. In 1847 a revolt broke out in southern Albania, in the region known as Toskalık, against the new tax and conscription practices. After the revolt was suppressed, some Albanian beys and notables regarded as its ringleaders were settled with their families in Anatolian towns. Alongside Konya, Sivas, Çankırı, Bozok and Ankara, Amasya was one of these places; it was decided that İlbasanlı Derviş Bey and his brother Hasan Bey should be settled in Amasya. The decision provided that these men be allowed to acquire land and property, and that orders be written to the administrators of their new homes to prevent them from fleeing. Amasya thus also met the consequences of the reactions that reform had provoked in another corner of the empire.

The Muhassıllık and the First Councils

The first institution of the Tanzimat in the provinces was the muhassıllık. From 1840 salaried revenue officials were sent to the sanjaks with the title of Muhassıl-ı Emval, collector of revenues. The muhassıls were to determine the real tax capacity of their districts, record all sources of revenue belonging to the treasury, and distribute taxes according to the means of the people. While governors were assigned a salary of 75,000 piastres, muhassıls and police officials received between 7,500 and 10,000 piastres, part of an effort to end the old confusion between the income of an administrator and the income of the state. Because of these powers, Ortaylı and Tekeli describe the muhassıl as a kind of fiscal governor.

The muhassıl could not use his powers alone; he was obliged to act through the decisions of the muhassıllık council formed beside him. These councils included, besides the muhassıl, two clerks responsible for finance and for population and property, the qadi or his deputy, the mufti, a military officer, and four of the local notables, the vücûh-ı memleket. Where there was a non-Muslim population, spiritual leaders such as the metropolitan or chief rabbi and two kocabaşıs, community headmen, also joined the council. For the selection of members it was envisaged that fifty electors be chosen in cities and thirty in middling towns, although in some places no elections were held and members were appointed. In a city such as Amasya, with large Armenian and Greek communities, this composition meant an order that for the first time brought Muslim and non-Muslim notables together around the same official table.

The experiment with the muhassıllık did not last long. In 1840-1841 treasury revenues fell sharply; the muhassıls met difficulties in collecting taxes and had to contend with the resistance of the old ayan. In 1842 the muhassıllık was abolished, tax-farming was restored, and some of their former powers were returned to the governors. The councils, however, survived. Renamed memleket meclisleri (provincial councils) in 1842, they were known from 1849 as provincial and sanjak councils and also carried out judicial functions until 1864. Most of those elected to the councils were former ayan who had already taken part in government before the Tanzimat, and among the Christians the kocabaşıs and çorbacıs. Reform worked by drawing local men of power into the new institutions rather than by eliminating them.

The Population Register of 1840

The first major registration effort of the Tanzimat in Amasya is the population register dated 1840. Preserved in the population register series of the Ottoman Archives under number 2155, this register is a continuation of the 1831 census and records only males. Alongside each person's name and epithet, it gives a kind of physical description; heads of household are described with phrases such as "of medium height, with a sparse beard" or "short, with a young moustache". Next to those aged between fourteen and forty and fit for military service a separate "mim" mark was placed. Muslims were classified with regard to military service, non-Muslims with regard to the jizya.

The register offers a valuable picture of the city's quarters. In 1840 Amasya had 55 quarters; 23 of them were inhabited only by Muslims, and 32 were quarters where Muslims and non-Muslims lived together. In 21 of the mixed quarters Muslims were in the majority, in 11 non-Muslims. There was no quarter inhabited solely by non-Muslims. A total of 3,180 households were recorded in the city, 2,236 of them Muslim and 944 non-Muslim. The most populous quarter was Bayezid Paşa, with 112 Muslim and 104 non-Muslim households; the quarters of Mehmed Paşa, Üçler, Hacı İlyas, Köyceğiz, Çeribaşı and Şamiçe were also among the large ones.

These figures need to be read with care when compared with other numbers given for the same period. Some sources speak of about thirty-six quarters in nineteenth-century Amasya, whereas the population and temettuat registers give more than fifty quarter names. The difference is largely a matter of how a quarter was defined; some small units appear in certain records as separate quarters and in others as villages or as parts of a neighbouring quarter. Indeed, Kayabaşı and Sıraböcekhane, written as villages in the population register, were recorded as quarters in the temettuat survey a few years later.

The Temettuat Registers and the Quarters

The real instrument of the Tanzimat's tax reform was the temettuat survey. The temettü tax was to be levied on the earnings of each head of household, and to this end the property, land, livestock, occupation and annual income of every household were written down one by one. Farmers, craftsmen, merchants, carriers and day labourers were all entered with their earnings; even income of unknown origin was recorded under separate headings. In the short term the aim was to distribute the tax burden more fairly between regions and individuals, in the long term to gather the data for a broad fiscal reform. Most of the temettuat registers for Amasya were written in 1844.

The muhassıls were responsible for the registration, but the survey was carried out with the participation of local people. With the knowledge of the district councils, several of the city's notables were assigned, and headmen and imams were present in the quarters. In Muslim quarters the count was made by the first headman, the second headman and the imam; non-Muslims were counted by priests and kocabaşıs. In the Amasya registers each quarter was written in a separate register, and Muslims and non-Muslims living in the same quarter were entered in the same book. Muslim households were written first, then, after a blank page, the households of the reaya, and the totals of tax and earnings were added at the end. At the end of most registers are the seals of the headmen and the imam who carried out the count, which shows that the records are original registers kept on the spot.

The headings of the registers also record Amasya's administrative position in those years. The register of the Bayezid Paşa quarter opens with the title "register showing the property, land and earnings of the inhabitants of the Bayezid Paşa Quarter, one of the quarters of Amasya within the Kaymakamlık of Amasya, a dependency of the Province of Sivas". The section following the Muslim households shows the property and earnings of "the reaya residing in the said quarter". Completed village registers were sent to the district centre and checked by the district council, then passed on to the sanjak, from the sanjak to the provincial centre, and finally to Istanbul. This chain shows clearly how the new councils of the Tanzimat were used in matters of taxation.

In the temettuat survey 48 quarters appear in Amasya; 17 of them Muslim and 31 mixed. The total number of households is 2,709, of which 1,857 are Muslim and 852 non-Muslim. Compared with the population register of four years earlier, most of the difference of 471 households comes from seven quarters that do not appear in the temettuat registers. When the 368 households of these seven quarters are deducted, the real difference between the two counts falls to 103 households. It is thought that the registers of the missing quarters may have become mixed up with other classifications in the archives. In some quarters, however, marked changes took place within a short time; Acemali, which had no non-Muslim households in 1840, had 39 four years later, and Saraçhane 32.

When Selim Özcan compared the two counts name by name, he found that the names and occupations of heads of household largely failed to match. In the Bayezid Paşa quarter, the heads of household thought likely to be the same person in both counts number only about thirty, and some of these appear to have changed occupation in the meantime. Özcan explains this mismatch by suggesting that the population register may have been a copy drawn up at the centre rather than an original record kept on the spot. The temettuat surveys, by contrast, tied household earnings directly to taxation and were therefore carried out more carefully and in person. This debate also shows that in the first years of the Tanzimat the state's capacity for record-keeping was still in the process of formation.

Non-Muslims in the Jizya Registers

In the first period of the Tanzimat the jizya, the poll tax levied on non-Muslims, was not abolished, but the manner of its collection changed. In collecting this tax the state began to make use of community leaders; in Istanbul the patriarchates, and in the provinces the kocabaşıs and bishops, took on responsibility for it. Jizya payers were divided into three classes according to their economic standing; under the tariff set in the reign of Mahmud II, the upper class (âlâ) paid 60 piastres, the middle (evsat) 30 and the lower (edna) 15. Six jizya registers belonging to the central district of Amasya, kept between 1842 and 1848, are today found in the Ottoman Archives.

The most detailed of these are the Armenian and Greek registers of 1847. They record 838 Armenian and 205 Greek households; using a multiplier of five persons per household, Galip Eken and Hanife Şen calculate from these figures a non-Muslim population of about 4,190 Armenians and 1,025 Greeks, some 5,215 people in all. Some of the Greeks lived in villages outside the city; there were 35 Greek households in Zana, 24 in Ziyere and 2 in Fındıklı, and nearly all of those in Zana and Ziyere made their living from market gardening. The registers contain no entries for Jews or any other community, although some travellers who came to the city in earlier centuries mention a small Jewish community.

In 1847, 30 Armenian taxpayers paid the jizya in the upper class, 777 in the middle and 343 in the lower; for the Greeks the figures are 13, 189 and 55. The total jizya collected in Amasya that year was 39,300 piastres, of which 30,255 piastres were collected from Armenians and 7,275 from Greeks. The average tax per person was slightly higher among the Greeks, suggesting that Greek taxpayers were economically somewhat better off than the Armenians. Eighty-five Armenians and sixteen Greeks paid their jizya outside Amasya, in places such as Istanbul, Samsun, Taşova, Köprü and Lâdik, where they had gone to work.

The registers also show the occupational world of Amasya's non-Muslims across a wide range. Among the Armenians, 127 different occupational names have been identified. The largest occupational group was the tailors, with 102 people; they were followed by day labourers, cotton fluffers, butchers, tinsmiths, bath attendants, millers, grocers and pedlars. Among the Greeks, cotton fluffing, market gardening and the making of coarse woollen cloth (aba) stood out. Jewellers, druggists, cloth merchants, print-cloth makers, dyers, rope makers and merchants point to the lively life of the city's bazaar. Seventy-seven of the Armenian taxpayers were recorded as apprentices in various crafts, with apprentice tailors, tinsmiths and barbers foremost among them.

The jizya registers also give clues to the city's commercial connections. In 1847, 70 foreign reaya staying as guests in the inns of Amasya and paying their jizya there were recorded. Most had come from Kayseri and Tokat, but there were also those from distant cities such as Diyarbakır, Istanbul, Sivas, Van and Aleppo. The records name nine inns: the Taş Han, Serdar Hanı, Zeyneloğlu Hanı, İki Kapılı Han, Kapan Hanı, Galaşoğlu Hanı, Tabutçuoğlu Hanı, Hasan Ağa Hanı and Saraçoğlu Hanı. These inns, where mostly merchants lodged, were the centres of the city's commercial life. After the Reform Edict of 1856 the jizya was abolished and replaced by a military exemption tax, and this detailed series of registers came to an end.

Silk, Cotton and the Fair

In the Tanzimat years silk was the backbone of Amasya's economy. British consular reports of 1840-1841 present silk production and trade as the city's most important economic activity. From the middle of the eighteenth century mulberry orchards and silkworm houses had multiplied around the city, and Amasya had changed from a market for Iranian silk into a centre producing its own. Some researchers regard Amasya's sericulture as coming immediately after that of Bursa, perhaps even comparable with it. In Ottoman documents, too, Amasya is usually mentioned right beside Bursa whenever silk is concerned.

The figures given for the scale of production differ considerably. W. J. Hamilton, who visited the city in the 1840s, writes that annual production exceeded 50,000 okkas and that an okka was worth 120 piastres, which corresponds to more than sixty tons. In 1844 the Amasya customs and the silk tithe, together with the market dues and goods customs of Tokat, were farmed out for 620,000 piastres to Mehmed Pasha, mutasarrıf of Sivas. Mordtmann, who knew the region in the 1860s, states that 20-25,000 kilograms of raw silk were produced each year in and around Amasya, rising to some 30,000 kilograms in good years. The gap between the figures stems partly from differences of method and partly from the decline that set in after the 1860s.

The chief cause of this decline was silkworm disease. The diseases known as pébrine and muscardine reached Anatolia after Europe; the first document on the disease in Amasya dates from 1866, and the epidemic is thought to have taken effect after 1864. Yet only a few years earlier the city had been so strong in silk that between 1867 and 1869 instructions were still being written for mulberry saplings to be sent from Amasya to other places such as Samsun. Documents show that in 1861 a tax on silkworm eggs called "tohum-ı harir rüsumu" was levied in the sanjak of Amasya, and that a French subject named Kolon traded in cocoons and silkworm eggs in Amasya. Even the fact that the burning of silkworm houses was taken to the courts shows how profitable the business was. The state fought the disease by opening silk schools (harir darü't-talimleri) that taught the raising of healthy eggs.

The Tanzimat state also embarked on new experiments in agriculture. In the years when the American Civil War shook the cotton market, Amasya was among the pilot regions chosen in 1863 for growing cotton seed brought from Egypt, and attempts at cotton cultivation were made there. In view of the city's commercial vitality and its proximity to the coast, a fair was established in 1864; it was to open every year on 15 December and last until the end of the month. Weaving also retained its importance. Vital Cuinet, who described Amasya at the end of the century, writes that there were nearly 2,500 weavers in the city. Grain and fruit growing were fields that supported the city's livelihood in every period.

From Madrasa to Rüştiye

In the nineteenth century Amasya was still a city of madrasas. The French traveller Georges Perrot, who came to the city in 1861, described Amasya as "the Oxford of Anatolia" and wrote that nearly 2,000 students studied in its madrasas. Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi, who wrote a work on the city at the beginning of the same century, also refers to Amasya as a city of students. Yet this picture belonged to a period in which the institutions were quietly weakening. From the 1800s many madrasas had been neglected, some had fallen into ruin, and others had been damaged by fires and floods.

The basic innovation of the Tanzimat in education was to place beside the madrasa the rüştiye, a state-run middle school. In Amasya this transformation took place directly on the sites of old madrasa buildings. The Alaca Yahya Bey Madrasa, built by Şadgeldi Pasha in 1373, was demolished and a rüştiye school was built in its place. The date and agent of this work are given differently in the sources; according to one account the Ministry of Education (Maarif Nezareti) had the madrasa pulled down and the rüştiye built in 1864, according to another it was the mutasarrıf Ziya Pasha in 1865. The Narlı Bahçe Madrasa, built of timber in 1754, was also demolished by Ziya Pasha in 1865. The passage from madrasa to school in Amasya's educational life thus left a concrete mark on the fabric of the city as well.

The Sivas provincial yearbook of 1870 gives a numerical snapshot of this period of transition. In Amasya 718 Muslim pupils attended twenty-seven primary schools; an Armenian elementary school had 195 pupils. The city's thirty-one madrasas recorded twenty-six preachers, twenty-three imams, forty-four teachers (müderris) and 278 students. Compared with the figure of 2,000 students given by Perrot nine years earlier, this number suggests either that the traveller exaggerated or that madrasa education suffered a great loss within a short time. The difference between the two sources cannot be explained with certainty.

The schools of the non-Muslim communities also multiplied in this period. Besides the Armenian Bartevian College, Catholic Frenchmen also opened a school in the city; in 1883 a French Jesuit mission founded a church and a school and began missionary activity. The state was wary of the influence of these schools on Muslim children and in 1892 forbade Muslim families to enrol their children in them. The process the Tanzimat had started in education continued under Abdülhamid II with the opening of an idadi (upper secondary school); the Amasya Mekteb-i İdadisi was founded in 1895 and formed the basis of today's Amasya Anatolian High School.

The Regulations of 1864 and 1871

The most comprehensive arrangement of the Tanzimat in provincial government was the Provincial Regulation (Vilayet Nizamnamesi) of 7 November 1864. First tried in the Danube province under the governorship of Midhat Pasha, the system then spread to Anatolia, and with the General Regulation on Provincial Administration (İdare-i Umumiye-i Vilayet Nizamnamesi) that came into force in 1871 it began to be applied in all provinces. Under the new order the country was divided into provinces (vilayet) governed by a governor, sanjaks or livas governed by a mutasarrıf, districts (kaza) governed by a kaymakam, and villages governed by headmen. The 1871 regulation also inserted the nahiye, a sub-district, between the districts and the villages. Within this system Amasya was organised as a sanjak centre attached to the province of Sivas, and it kept this status until it became a province in its own right in the first years of the Republic.

The boundaries of the sanjak changed frequently throughout the Tanzimat. The records of 1844 list the districts of central Amasya, Merzifon, Lâdik, Havza, Çorum, Osmancık, İskilip, Saz, Köprü, Gümüş, Hacıköy and Gelingiras. In 1855 the list also includes Vezirköprü under the name Kedağra, Mecidözü, Zeytun, Aşiret-i Çorum and İskilip. After the 1871 regulation the sanjak was arranged to consist of the districts of Amasya, Osmancık, Zile, Lâdik, Merzifon, Maden-i Sim, Mecidözü, Köprü and Erbaa, and twenty-four nahiyes were established under these districts. The separation of Çorum and İskilip and the addition of Zile and Erbaa show that the sanjak's centre of gravity had shifted to the Yeşilırmak basin. Today's Gümüşhacıköy was known in those years as Maden-i Sim.

The order of villages and quarters was also redefined. Under the 1871 regulation, villages of fewer than twenty households were to have one headman and larger villages two elected headmen, who would take office by order of the kaymakam. Councils of elders of three to twelve members, depending on the size of the village, were to be formed, and in villages where Muslims and non-Muslims lived together each community was to have its own council of elders. Imams and non-Muslim clergy were ex officio members of these bodies. The headmen were responsible for collecting taxes and for maintaining fountains, schools and places of worship; the councils of elders apportioned the tax falling on the community, settled minor disputes by conciliation, and chose watchmen and rural guards.

Councils and New Courts

The 1864 regulation provided for an administrative council in the sanjak centre under the presidency of the mutasarrıf. This council was to include the judge, the director of accounts, the director of correspondence, the mufti, representatives of the non-Muslim communities, and two Muslim and two non-Muslim members elected by the people. It was to discuss the sanjak's administrative, financial, public works, educational, agricultural and commercial affairs and to settle administrative disputes. The regular functioning of the sanjak administrative council in Amasya from 1870 onward can be followed in the yearbooks. In 1870 the council shows, alongside the mutasarrıf, the naib, the mufti, the accountant and the director of correspondence, one elected Muslim and one elected non-Muslim member; by 1875 the number of elected members had risen to four, two Muslims and two non-Muslims.

Change in the judicial sphere also began with the same regulation. In the first years of the Tanzimat the provincial councils heard certain cases; after 1864 the task of adjudication was given to separate bodies. In every district a deavi council, a court of first instance composed of Muslim and non-Muslim members under the presidency of the sharia judge, was established, and in the sanjak centres a temyiz council with three Muslim and three non-Muslim members. Criminal and civil cases that the district council could not hear, or that came on appeal, were heard by the sanjak temyiz council. In 1879 the names of these bodies were changed to courts of first instance (bidayet) and courts of appeal (istinaf). In Amasya, while the sharia court continued to hear family and inheritance cases, the court of first instance and the commercial court took their place in the yearbooks as the city's new judicial institutions. Two separate legal orders thus began to operate side by side in the city.

The New Face of the State in the Provinces

The most lasting result of the Tanzimat in the provinces was the multiplication of offices representing the state in the sanjak centre. The institutions listed for the Amasya sanjak in the Sivas provincial yearbooks of the last quarter of the century show this expansion clearly. Among them were commissions for land registration and for refugees, the justice office, the courts of first instance and of commerce, the clerk's office of the sharia court, the education commission, the population office, the municipal office, the land registry, the tithe and sheep-tax office, the accounting and tax bureaus, the pious endowments office, the commissions for public works and roads, the revenue collection office, and the telegraph and post office. Some offices were added as the need arose; the Public Debt Administration office appears in 1891, and the branch of the Agricultural Bank, the Régie, and the gendarmerie and police offices in the records of 1903.

Alongside Muslims, a considerable number of non-Muslim officials worked in these offices. In 1903 the number of non-Muslims serving in official departments was 19 in Amasya, 12 in Merzifon and 11 in Lâdik. This picture shows that the principle of admitting non-Muslims to state service, set out in the Tanzimat and the Reform Edict that followed it, found a response in the provinces as well. The exact year in which the municipal organisation was founded in Amasya is not clear in the sources; the municipal office appears in the yearbook lists, and the city's first known mayors appear in the 1880s.

The age of reform also witnessed changes in Amasya's population structure. Father Boğos Natanyan, sent by the Armenian Patriarchate in 1877 to examine on the spot how the Armenian National Constitution of 1863 was being applied, writes that Amasya had 1,000 Armenian, 40 Greek and 10 Protestant households, and about 3,000 Muslim households. At the end of the century Vital Cuinet gives the city a population of 30,000, consisting of 20,000 Muslims, 9,760 Gregorian Armenians and 240 Catholics. The establishment of a separate commission in the sanjak for the refugees who arrived after the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-1878 shows that the administrative apparatus built by the Tanzimat also tried to respond to new social problems.

The administrative structure established in the Tanzimat period continued, with minor changes, until the last years of the Ottoman state. The districts of the sanjak were rearranged towards the end of the century; in 1881 Erbaa and Zile were attached to the sanjak of Tokat, in 1883 Havza became a district, in 1894 the district of Maden-i Sim took the name Gümüşhacıköy, and in 1896 Osmancık passed to Çorum. When the administrative divisions of the country were reorganised under the Constitution of 1921 as province, district, sub-district and village, Amasya's status as a sanjak attached to Sivas came to an end and the city became a province in its own right. The new province's districts of central Amasya, Havza, Lâdik, Vezirköprü, Merzifon and Gümüşhacıköy were largely a continuation of the sanjak boundaries drawn by the Tanzimat. When Vezirköprü, Lâdik and Havza were attached to Samsun in 1926, Amasya came close to its present boundaries.

Chronology

1831: First general census; 6,379 males recorded in the central district of Amasya. The Ceride Nezareti was founded.

1838: The Amasya sanjak consisted of thirteen districts.

3 November 1839: The Tanzimat Edict was read out at Gülhane.

1840: The muhassıllık system and muhassıllık councils were established; the Amasya population register (55 quarters, 3,180 households) was drawn up.

1840-1841: British consular reports recorded silk as Amasya's most important economic activity.

1842: The muhassıllık was abolished and the councils were renamed memleket meclisleri. The earliest known jizya register of the Tanzimat period for Amasya was kept.

1844-1845: The Amasya temettuat registers were written (48 quarters, 2,709 households). The Amasya customs and silk tithe were farmed out for 620,000 piastres.

1847: Detailed Armenian and Greek jizya registers were kept (838 Armenian, 205 Greek households). It was decided to settle in Amasya some Albanian notables who had taken part in the Toskalık revolt.

1849: The provincial councils were reorganised as provincial and sanjak councils.

1856: The Reform Edict was proclaimed; the jizya was abolished and replaced by a military exemption tax.

1861: Georges Perrot visited Amasya. A tax on silkworm eggs in the sanjak is documented.

1863: Amasya was included among the pilot regions chosen for Egyptian cotton seed.

1864: The Provincial Regulation was issued (7 November); an annual fair was established in Amasya. A rüştiye was built on the site of the Alaca Yahya Bey Madrasa (1865 according to some sources).

1866: First document on silkworm disease in Amasya.

1870: According to the Sivas yearbook, Amasya had 27 primary schools and 31 madrasas; the sanjak administrative council begins to appear in the records.

1871: The General Regulation on Provincial Administration came into force; the Amasya sanjak was organised into nine districts and twenty-four nahiyes.

1877: Report of Father Boğos Natanyan on the communities of Amasya.

1879: The deavi and temyiz councils were converted into courts of first instance and appeal.

1883: A French Jesuit mission opened a church and school in Amasya.

1895: The Amasya Mekteb-i İdadisi was founded.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Özcan, Selim. "H.1256 (1840) Tarihli Amasya Nüfus Defteri ile H.1260-1261 (1844-1845) Tarihli Amasya Temettuat Defterlerinin Karşılaştırmalı Değerlendirilmesi". Studies of the Ottoman Domain, 6/11 (2016), pp. 97-118.
  • Gür, Fevzi - Kahriman, Salih. Amasya Nüfus Defteri 1840. Amasya Municipality Cultural Publications, Amasya 2012.

Academic studies

  • Eken, Galip - Şen, Hanife. "Tanzimat Dönemi Cizye Defterlerine Göre Amasya'da Gayrimüslimler". Gaziosmanpaşa Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Araştırmaları Dergisi, 11/1 (2016), pp. 105-132.
  • Genç, Sabit. "Amasya Sancağının İdari Durumu ve Nüfus Yapısı (1880-1915)". Kırıkkale Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 11/1 (2021), pp. 57-80.
  • Yılmaz, Özgür. "Tanzimat Döneminde Osmanlı Taşra İdare Meclisleri (1840-1871)". Journal of History Studies, 6/6 (2014), pp. 253-280.
  • Eryiğit, Burak Hamza - Kalafat, Cansu. "Osmanlı Devleti'nde 1840-1858 Yılları Arasında Taşra Yönetimini Düzenleyen Nizamnameler Üzerine Bir Değerlendirme". Strategic Public Management Journal.
  • Durdu, Mustafa. "İsyanları Sebebiyle Bazı Arnavutların Anadolu'ya Sürgün Edilmelerine Dair Sosyo-Politik Bir İnceleme (1847-1851)". Selçuk Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi, 43 (2020), pp. 410-427.
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  • "Nizâmiye Mahkemeleri". TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi. https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/nizamiye-mahkemeleri

Official sources

Other sources

  • Yücekaya, Hüsnü. "Amasya İpekçiliği Üzerine (1750-1900)". Akademik Bakış, 7/13 (2013).
  • Karadeniz, Yılmaz. "Amasya". Türk Maarif Ansiklopedisi (2022). https://turkmaarifansiklopedisi.org.tr/amasya
  • Çadırcı, Musa. Tanzimat Döneminde Anadolu Kentlerinin Sosyal ve Ekonomik Yapısı. Turkish Historical Society, Ankara 1997.
  • Ortaylı, İlber. Tanzimat Devri'nde Osmanlı Mahalli İdareleri (1840-1880). Turkish Historical Society, Ankara 2000.
  • Perrot, Georges. Souvenirs d'un voyage en Asie Mineure. Paris 1864.
  • Cuinet, Vital. La Turquie d'Asie. Vol. I, Paris 1892.

Online sources