For a long time the Ottoman tax system rested on two foundations: the rules of Islamic law and the customary regulations issued by the sultan and the imperial council. Alongside the taxes prescribed by the sharia, the extraordinary levies imposed on the population as the need arose, known as avârız, were the state's main fiscal instrument in wartime. The sanjak of Amasya, a junction on the central route across Anatolia and part of the province of Sivas, was among the places where this burden was felt most directly. When an army marched east or an envoy travelled to Istanbul, the food, fodder and lodging of everyone passing along the road were first charged to the account of the districts on its path.

What Avârız Was

In dictionaries the word means something that arises later, as opposed to what is original and fixed, and in Ottoman finance it served both as a tax term and as a budget term. In the classical period the tax was collected when extraordinary needs arose, most often in wartime, on the proposal of the council and by order of the sultan. The obligations known in the sources as "avârız-ı dîvâniyye and tekâlîf-i örfiyye" were many and varied. The main ones were: selling fixed quantities of provisions at the way stations set up along the roads the troops would take; procuring and transporting war materiel, barley and straw; supplying laborers, carts and animals when required; furnishing auxiliary groups for the army under names such as oarsmen, azaps, surgeons and kavas; building fortresses; and finally paying money under the name of avârız akçesi or avârız bedeli. The tax predates the Ottomans. Similar obligations are known from the Anatolian principalities and the Ilkhanids, and in early Ottoman deeds of ownership and endowment, exemptions granted to owners of private property and to pious foundations included exemption from avârız.

Avârız could be paid in cash, in goods or provisions, and sometimes directly as labor. Because it was levied on Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the cost of war was spread over a wide part of society. What began as a burden peculiar to emergencies gradually became part of the ordinary taxes, as successive wars followed one another. Halil Sahillioğlu's entry in the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam records this change plainly: a tax meant to be collected in wartime had become a regular item once campaigns came one after another. Its method of calculation and collection was in any case complicated, and it worked differently in every district.

Household and Avârız Household

To understand how avârız was calculated, one must first look at the concept of the household (hâne) in Ottoman surveys. In the tax registers (tahrir defterleri), tax and population assessments were based on the family; only heads of families able to pay tax and unmarried men able to earn an income (mücerred) were recorded. In the registers the population was divided into two groups, "avârız hânesi" and "hâne-i gayr ez-avârız". The first designated households that were taxable or had actually been taxed. The second covered people bound to a particular service such as guarding mountain passes, salt-making, mining, livestock-dealing or falconry, officials such as judges, deputies, sipahis and teachers at madrasas, men of religion such as imams, preachers, muezzins, sheikhs and sayyids, and people with physical disabilities. These were exempt from all or part of the taxes.

The avârızhâne was an accounting unit across which the tax burden was shared, and it did not have to correspond to a household in the everyday sense. Several real households came together to form one avârızhâne and divided the share falling to them among themselves. How many real households made up one avârızhâne varied by place and period. The TDV entry speaks of four to fifty households, and for the tax collected under the name avârız it notes that four or five real households were generally counted as one avârızhâne. When oarsmen were demanded for the fleet, one oarsman was furnished per fifty households and the other households paid the oarsman's allowance. Because there was no single unit valid throughout the empire, the measure changed from district to district, and after determining the number of avârızhânes in a district the state fixed the amount per household afresh each year and collected the tax accordingly. Determining and collecting the avârızhânes was the responsibility of the judge. For this reason avârız surveys became a decisive kind of document for whether the tax was distributed fairly or unfairly.

The amount per household also varied from place to place. A study on Kastamonu records that in the first half of the eighteenth century 500 akçe was taken from each avârızhâne and that this sum never changed, whereas in places such as Amasya, Antep and Diyarbakır 400 akçe per household was collected in the same period. For Amasya the figure is attributed to Hüseyin Güneş's book Lale Devrinde Amasya.

Cash Conversion, Nüzül and Sürsat

The earliest forms of avârız were mainly obligations in kind. The people along the army's route had to give soldiers bread, meat, barley and straw, and to prepare pack animals and carts. As these obligations developed and became systematic, the names began to diverge. The provisions collected from certain regions for the army's supply were called nüzül, and the items taken in place of or alongside provisions, which had to be carried to designated places, were called sürsat. According to the TDV entry, bedel-i mükârî, bedel-i timâr, nüzül and sürsat were true avârız or taxes of the avârız type. Nüzül and sürsat were mostly collected in kind, as wheat, flour and butter, whereas avârız was collected in cash.

Over time, transport difficulties and the likelihood of provisions perishing on the road made it necessary to convert the burden in kind into money. Collecting provisions, storing them in designated places and carrying them was a costly chain of operations full of losses. For this reason the state fixed an official purchase price for sürsat provisions and collected their value at that price. With the conversion of avârız and nüzül into cash at the end of the sixteenth century, the sürsat practice began. The period in which nüzül began to be collected systematically is understood to be the reign of Selim the Grim. For the Chaldiran campaign of 1514, a levy of 688,428 kile of flour and barley was assessed on 422,846 households and 508,740 kile was collected from 312,734 households; this came to 1.62 kile per household, one third of it flour and two thirds barley. After Chaldiran, Selim spent the winter in Amasya, and on 19 April 1515 the army set out from there for the campaign against Kemah and the Dulkadirids. A levy was assessed on 318,167 households for this campaign as well, and 249,942 kile of provisions was collected, of which 83,314 kile was flour and 166,630 kile barley, roughly 0.78 kile per household. Already at this stage Amasya was within the state's logistical calculations as one of the army's assembly and departure points.

Place in the Budget and End of the Tax

In Ottoman budgets avârız was one of the principal items among the irregular revenues (vâridât-ı gayr-ı mukarrere). Many taxes of this kind were collected under the name avârız and, in some collection decrees, as bedel-i avârız. Two budget examples in the TDV entry are striking for what they show about the weight of the tax. In the 1692 budget of 828 million akçe, the share of avârız was 188 million akçe. In the 1715 budget, which exceeded one billion, the share had fallen to 134 million; the imdâd-ı seferiyye tax collected in the same years probably played a part in this decline. The avârız tax was abolished with the Tanzimat.

The Sanjak of Amasya within the Province of Sivas

In the eighteenth century the sanjak of Amasya was attached to the province of Sivas and stood at an important crossing on the central route of Anatolia. Armies and couriers heading east, toward the Iranian and Caucasian fronts, followed this road. As a result, the sanjak's tax burden was determined not only by its population and income level, and lying on the route brought a burden of its own. In wartime, demands for soldiers, provisions, animals and lodging (menzil) were written against the districts along the road; some were met as services and some were converted into money and paid in cash.

Gürkan Cevger, in his article in the Amasya University Journal of Social Sciences, set out the avârız tax paid by the districts of the sanjak of Amasya between 1691 and 1798 as a series covering a hundred years. The main source of the study is the Maliyeden Müdevver registers in the Ottoman Archive of the Presidency; the Mevkufat Kalemi registers and the Amasya court registers were also used in support. With the data obtained, the districts of the sanjak could be compared with one another, and the amount of avârız in the sanjak of Amasya in the eighteenth century was compared with the other sanjaks of the province of Sivas. The abstract of the article also stresses that distributing, collecting and transferring the tax to the treasury took place under the responsibility of many officials, and that the collection stage in time caused many problems in daily life.

The starting year 1691 and the closing year 1798 cover a critical period of Ottoman finance. The long wars that began with the siege of Vienna in 1683 had exhausted the treasury and forced the state to look for new sources of revenue. Within the same century similar obligations such as avârız, nüzül, sürsat and imdâd-ı seferiyye became intertwined, and the burden on the people of the sanjak was often experienced as the sum of these items.

The Campaigns of 1730-1731 and the District of Amasya

The volume of the Amasya court registers covering 1730 and 1731 collects orders showing how the Safavid campaign reached this district. Jülide Akyüz Onat's study, based on these documents, shows in detail that taxes were imposed not only as money but also as soldiers, provisions, animals and transport. The struggle between the Ottomans and the Safavids had flared up again after 1722; the war that began in the reign of Ahmed III ended with the agreement signed in 1736 under Mahmud I, after the Patrona Halil rebellion of 1730 and the removal of the sultan from the throne. These were the years in which orders charging the needs of the army marching east to the districts on its route entered the registers in great numbers.

The state's first need was to find soldiers able to fight. The orders asked for men who were experienced, capable and seasoned, and stated from which districts their bread, meat and barley along the road were to be met. In July 1730 the enrollment of 500 exempt infantry levies (müsellem piyade levend) was requested from the sanjak of Amasya and other suitable places. For the retinue of Ahmed Pasha, governor of Baghdad, the gathering of 1,000 armorers (cebeci) from Hendek, Bolu, Kastamonu, Kangırı, Amasya, Sivas and other places was ordered. The soldiers' travel expenses, transport fees and food were to be offset against the obligations of the people of the district concerned, that is, deducted from the avârız account. The state also promised bonuses, pay and allowances as incentives. One order states that each man would receive a bonus of 12 kuruş, a monthly salary of 2.5 kuruş for six months and three months' allowance, and that a total of 18,310 kuruş would be paid from the treasury. In 1738 it was decided that each man of the state levies gathered in twenty banners of fifty men from Kayseri, Bolu, Kastamonu, Çorum, Boğazlayan and Amasya would be given a bonus of 30 kuruş and six months' pay at 2.5 kuruş per month, and a total of 58,396.5 kuruş was set aside. It was also promised that after the survey of the lands taken in the war, those who took part in the campaign would be granted zeamet and timar.

In purchasing provisions the state took the Istanbul kile as its basis and entered the figures in sealed and signed registers. In June 1730 it was announced that a total of 110,000 kile of provisions would be bought from the province of Sivas for the campaign: 30,000 kile of wheat, 20,000 kile of flour and 60,000 kile of barley. A price per Istanbul kile was set at 28 akçe for wheat, 40 for flour and 20 for barley, in sound akçe. The value of the provisions reached 23,066.5 kuruş and it was decided to add it to the avârız and nüzül of the province of Sivas. Under this order, 3,753 kile of wheat, 2,502 kile of flour and 7,508 kile of barley were bought from the district of Amasya; the town of Amasya alone was assigned 843 kile of wheat, 562 kile of flour and 1,686 kile of barley. The bread needed for the army at Erzurum was also bought from Tokat, Turhal, Amasya and Zile and sent there; the price was set at two akçe per pair of loaves, and the cost was met from the revenues of the tax farms of the Tokat voivodeship.

Transport was an equally heavy burden. The center ordered that 500 mule carts be built for the campaign from the provinces of Sivas and Karaman; of these, 350 fell to the province of Sivas and 150 to the province of Karaman. The order described the cart in detail: an ox-cart able to carry the load of three camels, with its two wheels clad in iron and its shaft and yoke made of timber. The estimated cost of one cart, with the blacksmith's and builder's fees, was 15 kuruş, and with straps and ropes it came to 18 kuruş and one rub'. The share of the province of Sivas reached 13,335 kuruş. The portion falling to the district of Amasya was 46.5 pairs of buffalo, 46.5 sets of cart materials, 46.5 cart drivers and three cart builders; this service was converted into cash, drawn on the 1143 account of the province of Sivas for the beldâr payment (bedel-i beldârî akçesi). At the same time 400 camels and 300 mules with pack animals were requested from the province of Sivas for the Revan front. When the allocation was made, 65 mules and 52 camels fell to the district of Amasya.

The Way Station and the Lodging of Envoys

Amasya was a way-station stop on the central route, and the station served not only the army but also envoys traveling to and from Istanbul. At the way stations, alongside the officials appointed by the state for a year, such as the station superintendent, station steward, stable steward, room attendant, groom, driver and cook, there were the menzilkeş, drawn from the people of the surrounding villages, who bore the real burden. For their service these were exempt from avârız-ı dîvâniyye and tekâlif-i örfiyye. Amasya and many of its villages had been designated as menzilkeş. The Amasya station was farmed out annually. In 1143 (1730) the station tax farm was granted for 1,360 kuruş to a non-Muslim subject (zimmî) named Anastas, from the Gazgancı quarter and the carriers' guild. The same sum had been assessed on the people of Amasya for transporting the provisions of the soldiers on the Revan side, and Anastas stated in court that he had received it from the people of Amasya.

A command dated 12 Cemaziyelevvel 1151 (28 August 1738) shows the station's role in receiving envoys. Ahmed Pasha, governor of Baghdad, wrote to the deputy governor, the judge and the notables of Amasya, asking that Ali Merdan Khan, the sheikh ul-Islam of Herat and Oğuz Ali Khan, sent by the Shah of Iran to Istanbul, suffer no hardship at their halting places. The list of supplies to be given to the envoys from the sanjak of Amasya included bread, rice, clarified butter, mutton, chicken, honey, barley, straw, firewood and buffalo. Such expenses were met from items of the avârız type written against the people along the road.

Imdâd-ı Seferiyye and the Share of the Ruling Class

Besides avârız, the imdâdiyye, seen from the end of the seventeenth century, increased the burden on the people of the sanjak. According to the TDV Encyclopedia of Islam, the imdâdiyye began when the years of war after the siege of Vienna in 1683 drained the treasury and assistance was collected from wealthy people; at first it had the appearance of a loan, and later it became a tax. In the eighteenth century it was divided into imdâd-ı seferiyye and imdâd-ı hazariyye and became a regular tax. Under the arrangement introduced in 1718, the center assessed a fixed amount per province, this was distributed to the sanjaks, and from the sanjaks to the districts. The income was set aside for the expenses of the soldiers whom governors-general and sanjak governors were to feed. Under the arrangement, half of this sum was to be set aside for the administrator's own expenses, and for every 70 kuruş of the other half one soldier was to be fed.

The local reflection of this tax can be seen in the Amasya registers. For the year 1152 (1739-1740) Abdullah Pasha, governor of Sivas, sent an order to the judges of the province for the collection of imdâd-ı seferiyye, and the districts of the sanjak of Amasya were also assigned a share. The same governor also asked for a further levy for the repair of the palace and rooms inside the fortress of Sivas. The reason is given as follows: the palace and rooms used by soldiers were close to collapse, soldiers had been lodging in inns for fifteen years, and the rent cost more than the repairs. The repairs and purchases came to 20,500 kuruş in total (items of 4,000, 8,000, 4,800 and 3,700 kuruş), and this sum was distributed to the people of the districts of the province of Sivas on the basis of the imdâd-ı seferiyye allocation. The share falling to the districts of the sanjak of Amasya was 2,747 kuruş. That a construction expense unrelated to war was written against the population under the name of a war tax is a clear sign of how far the tax had become an ordinary burden.

The City Steward and the Distribution of Taxes

In a town such as Amasya, distributing taxes among the quarters and villages, recording them and collecting them were among the duties of the city steward (şehir kethüdası). The steward was also responsible for lodging public officials passing through the town, military units setting out on campaign or in pursuit of bandits, and governors, mutasarrıfs and deputy governors going to their posts, and for keeping the ledger of these expenses. Through him it was determined who would pay how much tax and who was exempt, according to economic circumstances. In 1152 (1739-1740) there was a change in the stewardship of Amasya; in place of Mustafa Bey, Hacı Halil was appointed with the approval of the people. In the accounting drawn up because of the change of office, it is written that 18,572 kuruş had been spent on provincial expenses from items collected as salyâne and that 12,482 kuruş had been given to the station keeper outside the register. These figures show that a large part of a town's annual burden consisted of lodging, station and provincial expenses.

The Reaction of the People

Heavy taxation inevitably produced various reactions. The most frequent reaction found in the registers was to claim military status in order to escape the burden. Mehmed Emin, the voivode of the Zile estates, reported that the village people of the district of Amasya had been scattered and ruined by the campaigns, and informed the council that the subjects who did not wish to pay tax were presenting themselves as "sayyids, sipahis, janissaries and gunners". In the same period, in a record dated 2 May 1739, two brothers, Mahmud son of Hasan and Hızır, from the village of Arıkur in the sanjak of Amasya, stated in court that they had been enrolled as janissaries but were not capable of this work. Two other brothers, Ömer and Osman, declared before the judge that they had been subjects since long ago, had nothing to do with soldiering and were paying their taxes. The prolonging of the campaigns and the growing frequency of demands in cash and in kind pushed some people to join the campaign disguised as janissaries in order to obtain timar and tax exemption, and others to abandon their homes.

The administrative affiliation of villages was also affected by this pressure. In 1143 (1730) the people of the village of Bayraklı, attached to the district of Amasya, sent a petition to Istanbul asking to be reattached to Taşâbâd, to which they had previously belonged. The reason was that taxes beyond their capacity had been imposed on them. To clarify the matter, the mevkufat registers kept in the imperial treasury were consulted, and it was judged appropriate for Bayraklı to be attached to Taşâbâd. This example shows that register entries could also be a source of rights for taxpayers.

The mevkufat registers had begun to be compiled, as avârız gradually turned into money in the eighteenth century, in the Mevkufat Office of the Imperial Treasury so as to show how many avârızhânes there were in the districts of every part of the empire. These registers formed the basis of tax collection.

Avârız Foundations and the End of the Tax

Some philanthropists set up avârız foundations to relieve the people of their quarter or village of the burden of this tax. The income of the foundation was set aside for avârız payments, and when it was insufficient the remainder was shared among the people of the quarter. In times when no tax was imposed, the income was used for the public benefit. Endowed to poor people as real estate and money, these foundations, once the tax lost its former importance, were also used in disasters such as fires, earthquakes, floods and epidemics, for the poor, widows and orphans, for the cost of burying people with no one to bury them, and for repairing waterways, pavements and primary schools. After the avârız tax was abolished with the Tanzimat, the foundation income continued to be used for the needs of the quarters. In 1875 an instruction of the Ministry of Education decided that these funds be spent on primary and elementary schools. In the republican period, under the municipal law of 1930, the avârız foundations were transferred to the municipalities.

Registers and the Difficulty of Reading Them

That we can speak about avârız today depends on the discipline of record-keeping in the archives. The Maliyeden Müdevver registers, the Mevkufat Office records and the court registers show how the tax was calculated, from whom it was collected and where it was spent. Among these documents there is also a recurring difficulty: the same tax may appear in the same record under different names such as avârız, nüzül, sürsat, imdâd-ı seferiyye or bedel-i beldârî, it may have turned into cash as the price of a service, or it may have been offset against the account of another item. When reading the figures it is therefore necessary to look less at the name of the tax than at the reason for which it was written and the household unit on which it rested.

Chronology

1514: First large example of nüzül systematically assessed, for the Chaldiran campaign of Selim the Grim; the levy was assessed on 422,846 households.

1515: The army, having wintered in Amasya, set out from there on 19 April for the campaign against Kemah and the Dulkadirids; nüzül was assessed on 318,167 households.

1683: The long wars that began with the siege of Vienna strained the treasury; the ground for the imdâdiyye was laid.

1691-1798: The century-long period in which the avârız tax of the districts of the sanjak of Amasya can be followed through the Maliyeden Müdevver registers.

1692: In the budget of 828 million akçe, the share of avârız was 188 million akçe.

1715: In the budget exceeding one billion, the share of avârız fell to 134 million akçe.

1718: The arrangement that divided the imdâdiyye into imdâd-ı seferiyye and imdâd-ı hazariyye.

1730-1731: Soldiers, provisions, bread, carts and animals were assessed on the district of Amasya for the Safavid campaign; request of the village of Bayraklı to be attached to Taşâbâd.

1738: Command sent by Ahmed Pasha, governor of Baghdad, for the lodging of the Iranian envoys at Amasya.

1739-1740: In the imdâd-ı seferiyye demands of Abdullah Pasha, governor of Sivas, 2,747 kuruş fell to the sanjak of Amasya; the stewardship of the city passed from Mustafa Bey to Hacı Halil.

1875: Instruction of the Ministry of Education allocating the funds of the avârız foundations to schools.

1930: Transfer of the avârız foundations to the municipalities under the municipal law.

Sources

Academic studies

  • Gürkan Cevger, "Amasya Sancağı'nda Avarız Vergisi Uygulamaları (1691-1798)", Amasya Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, no. 10 (2021), pp. 217-235.
  • Jülide Akyüz Onat, "18. Yüzyılda Amasya Kazasına Tahmil Olunan Vergiler", History Studies, 3/2 (2011). historystudies.net
  • Süleyman Polat, "Osmanlı Devleti'nde Nüzul Vergisinin Teşkili ve Gelişimi: XVI-XVII. Yüzyıllarda Osmanlı Ekonomisini Nüzul Vergisi Üzerinden Değerlendirmek", Belleten, 82/295 (2018). belleten.gov.tr

Other sources

  • Halil Sahillioğlu, "Avârız", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 4, Istanbul 1991, pp. 108-109. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • "İmdâdiyye" and "Avârız Vakfı" entries, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Ömer Döşemetaş, "Osmanlı Devleti'nde Avarız Vergisi: XVIII. Yüzyılın İkinci Çeyreğinde Kastamonu Örneği", Akademik Matbuat, 3/2 (2019).

Online sources