Caniklidir. Hacı Alî Paşazâde Battâl Hüseyin Paşa'nın büyük oğludur. Beyhân Sultân kethüdâsı mürtekib Ahmed Efendi'ye takdîm etdiği ağır hediyyeler mukâbilinde ve değerinden pek fâhiş olarak 1205 muharremi gurresinde Amasya muhassılı olup tarafından Köse Mehmedoğlu Hacı Ömer Ağa Amasya mütesellimi oldu.
Ömer Ağa, Köprülü Mehmed Paşa devrinde Amasya serdârı olan Ya'kûb Ağazâde Köse Mehmed Ağa'nın ahfâdından Hacı İbrâhim Ağa bin Hacı Alî Ağa'nın oğludur. Amcazâdesi Dervîş Ya'kûb Ağa bin Hacı İsmâ'il Ağa olup bunun oğlu dâmâd-ı şehriyârî Zühdü İsmâ'il Paşa'dır.
Bu yıl bir tarafdan imdâd-ı seferî, diğer tarafdan iltizâm rüsûmu halka pek ağır geldi. Bunların tarh ve tevzî'inde ağır davranan şehir kethüdâsı Hacı Hâfız Mehmed Efendi'nin azliyle Zeyneloğlu Hacı Ömer Efendi şehir kethüdâsı oldu.
Amasya livâsına öteden beri tertîb edilen seferiyye ve hazariyye imdâdı mâliye defterlerinde şöyle yazılmışdı: "Livâ-yı Amasya - Seferiyye-i [158] mutasarrıf-ı livâ 85.500, hazariyye-i mutasarrıf-ı livâ 3.000 kuruş."
O zamânın hesâbı üzerine bu mikdâr imdâd-ı seferî en büyük ve birinci sancaklara mahsûs bir meblağdı. Çorum’un seferiyye imdâdı 67.500 ve hazariyye imdâdı 2250 kuruşdu. Amasya etrâfında bulunan sancaklar da Çorum gibi idi.
Halbuki rüsûm-ı iltizâmiyye yüz bin kuruşdu. Sinîn-i sâbıkada Amasya hâslarının tutarı 60.000 kuruşdu. Mehmed Emîn Ağa 80.000 kuruşa almışdı. Kethüdâ Ahmed Efendi'nin belâsıyla yüz bini bulmuşdu. Tahsildârânın kendi hesâbına koparacağı rüsûm-ı tahsîliyye buna eklenirse Ahmed kethüdânın alacağı katmerler anlaşılır. Ordunun i'âşesi için vilâyetden tarh edilecek i'âneler de ayrı idi.
Safer evâ'ilinde Samsun'da kale-bend olan Göztaş Oğulları ile Abdüsselâm Efendi afva mazhar olup geldiler. Düşdükleri mevki'leri elde etmeğe çalışdılar. Hayreddîn Paşa, imdâd-ı seferî parasıyla rüsûm-ı iltizâmiyyeyi şiddetle taleb ve Göztaş Oğulları'nı tahsîle me'mûr etdi.
Hâlbuki Hayreddîn Paşa sefere gidecek değildi. Hazariyye imdâdı isteyecekdi. Çünkü Trabzon ve Erzurum vâlîsi olan Köle Sarı Abdullâh Paşa şark seraskeri olup Anapa'yı müdâfa'a etmeğe me'mûrdu. Hayreddîn Paşa da [159] bu harbe gidecekdi. Her ikisi de gitmeyip ayak sürüyordu.
Rebî'ulevvelde Göztaşoğlu Hacı Mustafâ Ağa baş a'yân ve birâderi Hacı Ebûbekir Ağa hacıbaşı olup Fazlıoğlu Abdüsselâm Efendi de dîvân efendisi unvânıyla tahsîlât işlerini der-uhde etmişlerdi.
Şa'bânın on altıncı günü müftü Hacı Osmân Efendi ba'zı mezâlime âlet olduğundan azl ile bâ-fermân-ı âlî Çorum'a nefy edilip selefi Dizdâroğlu Hacı Hüseyin Efendi yine Amasya müftüsü oldu. Bu esnâda Samsun halkı Hayreddîn Paşa'nın mezâliminden dolayı aleyhine kıyâm ederek harb ediyorlardı. Hayreddîn Paşa bâb-ı âlî ve Amasya'dan istimdâd etdi.
Bâb-ı âlî, Sinop muhâfızı Süleymân Feyzî Paşa'yı Samsun'a me'mûr etdiği gibi Amasya a'yânı Hacı Mustafâ Ağa da para kuvvetiyle topladığı askeriyle Samsun'a gitdi. Her ikisi de Hayreddîn Paşa'yı halkın elinden ve muhâsarasından kurtarmağa çalışdı.
Bunun üzerine canı yanan Amasya'nın a'yân ve halkı da İstanbul'a şikâyetçiler gönderip İstanbul ve sarây ricâlinin merhametlerini celbe çalışdılar. Diğer tarafdan Sarı Abdullâh Paşa ve Hayreddîn Paşa harbe gitmediklerinden Anapa'yı Ruslar istîlâ etdi. [160]
Bunları haber alan Üçüncü Sultân Selîm, fevkalâde hiddetlendi. Sâdır olan fermân üzerine Sarı Abdullâh Paşa Trabzon'da, Hayreddîn Paşa Samsun'da, bunlardan çok zâlim olan Mikdâd Ahmed Paşa da Dimetoka'da i'dâm⁷²⁰ edilerek Canik sancağı Kıbrıs muhassılı Hacı Osmân Ağa ve Amasya sancağı da Bozok mutasarrıfı Süleymân Bey'e tevcîh edildi.
In Modern English
He was from Canik. He was the eldest son of Hacı Ali Paşazade Battal Hüseyin Pasha. In return for heavy gifts presented to Ahmed Efendi, the bribe-taking steward of Beyhan Sultan, and at an exorbitant price far above its value, on the first day of Muharrem 1205 [September 1790] he became muhassıl of Amasya; on his behalf Köse Mehmedoğlu Hacı Ömer Ağa became mütesellim of Amasya.
Ömer Ağa was the son of Hacı İbrahim Ağa son of Hacı Ali Ağa, a grandson of Yakub Ağazade Köse Mehmed Ağa, who had been serdar of Amasya in the time of Köprülü Mehmed Pasha. His cousin (paternal uncle's son) was Derviş Yakub Ağa son of Hacı İsmail Ağa; and the latter's son was the sultan's son-in-law Zühdü İsmail Pasha.
This year, on the one hand the campaign contribution and on the other the iltizam tax were very heavy on the people. The city kethüda Hacı Hafız Mehmed Efendi, who was slow in distributing and imposing these on the people, was dismissed, and Zeyneloğlu Hacı Ömer Efendi became city kethüda.
The campaign and peace-year contributions long imposed on the sanjak of Amasya had been written in the treasury registers as follows: "Sanjak of Amasya: campaign contribution of the sanjak governor 85,500, peace-year contribution 3,000 kuruş."
By the reckoning of that time, a campaign contribution of this amount was a sum peculiar to the largest, first-rank sanjaks. The campaign contribution of Çorum was 67,500 and the peace-year contribution 2,250 kuruş. The sanjaks around Amasya were also like Çorum.
Yet the iltizam tax was one hundred thousand kuruş. In past years the amount of the has revenues of Amasya had been 60,000 kuruş. Mehmed Emin Ağa had taken it at 80,000 kuruş; because of the affliction of the steward Ahmed Efendi it had risen to one hundred thousand. If the collection fees that the collectors would extract on their own account are added to this, the many-fold sums that the steward Ahmed would receive can be understood. The contributions to be laid on the province for the provisioning of the army were separate.
In the first days of Safer the Göztaşoğulları and Abdüsselam Efendi, who had been imprisoned in the castle at Samsun, were pardoned and came back, and tried to recover the positions they had lost. Hayreddin Pasha demanded the campaign contribution and the iltizam tax severely and charged the Göztaşoğulları with collecting them.
Yet Hayreddin Pasha was not going to the campaign; in that case he would ask for the peace-year contribution. For Köle Sarı Abdullah Pasha, Governor of Trabzon and Erzurum, was seraskier of the east and charged with defending Anapa; Hayreddin Pasha too was to go to this war. Neither went, dragging their feet.
In Rebiülevvel Göztaşoğlu Hacı Mustafa Ağa became chief ayan and his brother Hacı Ebubekir Ağa hacıbaşı; Fazlıoğlu Abdüsselam Efendi too, with the title of divan efendisi, took charge of tax-collecting affairs.
On the sixteenth day of Şaban the mufti Hacı Osman Efendi, having been made an instrument of certain acts of oppression, was dismissed and exiled to Çorum by imperial decree; his predecessor Dizdaroğlu Hacı Hüseyin Efendi again became mufti of Amasya. At this time the people of Samsun, because of Hayreddin Pasha's oppression, had risen against him and were fighting him. Hayreddin Pasha asked for help from the Sublime Porte and from Amasya.
The Sublime Porte sent Süleyman Feyzi Pasha, guardian of Sinop, to Samsun; the ayan Hacı Mustafa Ağa of Amasya also went to Samsun with soldiers he had gathered by the power of money. Both tried to rescue Hayreddin Pasha from the hands and siege of the people.
Thereupon the ayan and people of Amasya, stung to the quick, also sent complainants to Istanbul and tried to win the compassion of statesmen in Istanbul and the palace. Meanwhile, since Sarı Abdullah Pasha and Hayreddin Pasha did not go to war, the Russians took Anapa.
Learning of this, Sultan Selim III became extremely angry. By the decree that was issued, Sarı Abdullah Pasha was executed in Trabzon, Hayreddin Pasha in Samsun, and Mikdad Ahmed Pasha, far crueler than they, in Dimetoka. The sanjak of Canik was given to Hacı Osman Ağa, tax collector of Cyprus, and the sanjak of Amasya to Süleyman Bey, governor of Bozok.
Notes and Research
Old Words in the Text
- mürtekib: one who takes bribes
- gurre: the first day of the month
- ahfâd: grandchildren
- dâmâd-ı şehriyârî: the sultan's son-in-law
- imdâd-ı seferiyye: a tax collected from the people in war years, under the name of aid, for the sanjak administrator
- imdâd-ı hazariyye: the lower form of the same tax taken in peace years
- livâ: sanjak
- sinîn-i sâbıka: past years
- rüsûm-ı tahsîliyye: fees collected by tax collectors
- i'âşe: provisioning with food and subsistence
- afva mazhar olmak: to be pardoned
- istimdâd: asking for help
- muhâsara: siege
Hayreddin Ragıb Pasha
Hayreddin Ragıb Pasha, grandson of Canikli Hacı Ali Pasha, is treated in detail in Mehmet Sait Çalka's study published in 2023. The mother of Hayreddin, son of Battal Hüseyin Pasha (d. 1801), was named Fatma; he had two brothers, Tayyar Mahmud Pasha (d. 1808) and Seyyid Ali Bey (d. 1796). Very little information on his childhood and education is found in the sources. Most of what is known about him concerns the Canik muhassıllık and the voyvodalık of Karahisar-ı Şarki, which he undertook in 1790–91 after his father fled to Russia on condition of paying six hundred purses of akçe to the treasury, and the events that led him to execution. A biographical dictionary also records that in 1205 [1790–91] he became governor of Karahisar with the rank of beylerbeyi.
What Hüsameddin relates about the Samsun uprising appears more broadly in Ahmed Cevdet Pasha's history. According to what Çalka relays, Cevdet Pasha tells that the people of Canik and Karahisar had long lived under the pressure of this dynasty, that when Hayreddin Pasha's military force was insufficient to subdue the people, the population united and marched on the pasha, and that, because the pasha used force without control, many people on both sides died. The government's charging Süleyman Feyzi Pasha, guardian of Sinop, to rescue the pasha agrees exactly with Hüsameddin's record. The representatives the people sent to Istanbul, according to Cevdet Pasha, said this: no good comes to the state from the Canikli dynasty; even if the most ordinary servant of the state were sent, the people would obey him and would gladly pay the six hundred purses the pasha had undertaken, provided that no one from this family be brought over them.
His Execution and Grave
Hüsameddin's record "was executed in Samsun" is confirmed by the Dış Ruznâme, the palace diary of the time of Selim III. According to the diary, the severed head of "Battal Paşazade Mirimiran Hayreddin Pasha" was placed before the Bâb-ı Hümâyun on the eighteenth of Cemaziyelevvel 1206 [January 1792]; the pasha was killed by el-hac Osman Ağa, one of the kapıcıbaşıs of the exalted court, and his brother in Istanbul was also imprisoned. The "Hacı Osman Ağa, tax collector of Cyprus", to whom Hüsameddin says at the end of the text the sanjak of Canik was given, is this kapıcıbaşı; that is, the sanjak was left to the man who carried out the execution.
The grave of Hayreddin Ragıb Pasha today is in the Çarşamba district of Samsun, in the cemetery of the Rıdvan Pasha Mosque, west of the mosque's staircase. The verse inscription on the gravestone gives the date of death as 1206 by abjad reckoning, in the line "Eyle Hayreddîn Bey'e yâ Rab mesken cenneti" (O Lord, make paradise the dwelling of Hayreddîn Bey). The prose part of the inscription calls him "the late Seyyid Hayreddin Bey, who became muhassıl of Canik with the rank of kapıcılar kethüdası and, killed, drank the sherbet of martyrdom", and bears the date 1215 [1800–01]. The stone was set up about nine years after his death; this date coincides, as Özcan Mert records, with the years when his father Battal Hüseyin Pasha, pardoned in 1799 after nine years of Russian captivity, was again made governor of Trabzon.
The Poet Ragıb
That Hayreddin Pasha was a poet is recorded in old biographical sources, but his poems were long unknown. Çalka, starting from a Turkish manuscript in the British Library in England registered as Or. 7083 and a tahmis (poem extending another poet's verses) in the divan of his brother Tayyar Mahmud Pasha, identified nine ghazals and one müfred (single-couplet poem) by the poet who used the pen name "Ragıb". The most striking among them is an unfinished ghazal with the refrain "saklar" (hides). Çalka thinks this poem was written in the days when the poet was awaiting his execution as a prisoner. Here the poet says that fate bestows generosity on the ignorant, that it keeps the sword of injustice to execute mature men, and that the gold the fool accumulates with a thousand troubles in the end falls to others' lot. Thus it is seen that the muhassıl whom Hüsameddin calls "oppressive" regarded his execution as unjust and expressed this in verse.
The Fall of Anapa and Sarı Abdullah Pasha
Hüsameddin gives the loss of Anapa as the real reason for the executions. According to Özcan Mert, Battal Hüseyin Pasha, though sent against Anapa in 1788, did not go to his post; the following year when the order was repeated he went with a few hundred men instead of the 10,000 required of him, and without engaging in serious fighting was defeated by the Russians in October 1790 and taken prisoner. A note in the Dış Ruznâme, however, writes that he fled to Russia in 1205. Thereupon Sarı Abdullah Pasha, Governor of Erzurum and Trabzon, former steward of Hacı Ali Pasha, was brought to the seraskierate of Anapa, and as he too was slow in going to the front, the castle fell on 22 June 1791 (old calendar) after an assault lasting more than five hours. In this assault about 8,000 of the garrison are reported to have been killed and 13,532 taken prisoner.
Mehmet İnbaşı's list of governors of Trabzon records Abdullah Pasha as "the steward of Canikli Ali Pasha" and shows that between 1788 and 1791 he governed Trabzon alternately with Battal Hüseyin Pasha; Hüsameddin's nickname "Köle Sarı Abdullah" (Abdullah the Blond Slave) also tells that he was raised from among the slaves of this family. The Dış Ruznâme writes that the head of Abdullah Pasha, Governor of Trabzon, "raised from the slavery of Canikli Ali Pasha", came to Istanbul on the twenty-third of Safer 1206 [October 1791] together with the head of his steward Kalcıoğlu. Thus it is understood that the three execution orders issued at Selim III's command were carried out within a few months, between the autumn of 1791 and the winter of 1792.
On the Tax Figures
The figures Hüsameddin gives clearly show how heavy a financial burden Amasya was under in these years. The has revenues of the sanjak rose within a few years from 60,000 kuruş to 80,000, and with the intervention of Beyhan Sultan's steward to 100,000 kuruş; to this are added the campaign contribution, the collectors' share and the provisions demanded for the army. No study was found that makes it possible to compare these amounts with register or treasury records. Hüsameddin's heavy accusation against the steward Ahmed Efendi is also his own interpretation; the Dış Ruznâme records only that Beyhan Sultan's steward Ahmed Efendi changed place with another post in Muharrem 1207 [September 1792].
Bibliography
Primary sources
- Abdîzâde Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar, Amasya Tarihi, Amasya Belediyesi Kültür Yayınları, 2022, Remainder (Bakiyye) of vol. 4, p. 675–676. amasya.bel.tr
Academic studies
- Mehmet Sait Çalka, "İdama Mahkûm Bir Şair: Caniklizâde Hayreddin Râgıb Paşa ve Kayıp Bir Kısım Şiirleri", Divan Edebiyatı Araştırmaları Dergisi, 31, 2023, p. 133-152, https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/3333859
- İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, "Üçüncü Sultan Selim Zamanında Yazılmış Dış Ruznâmesinden 1206/1791 ve 1207/1792 Senelerine ait Vekayi", Belleten, XXXVII/148, 1973, https://belleten.gov.tr/eng/full-text/1301/tur
- Özcan Mert, "Canikli Hacı Ali Paşa Ailesi", TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/canikli-haci-ali-pasa-ailesi
- Mehmet İnbaşı, "Trabzon / Batum Eyâleti Valileri (1755–1795)", Atatürk Üniversitesi Türkiyat Araştırmaları Enstitüsü Dergisi, 31, 2006, p. 161-191, https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/32993
Books
Other sources