Anyone who once approached the street of the coppersmiths in the Amasya bazaar heard it before seeing it. The steady tapping of hammers on red-hot sheet metal mingled with the other sounds of the market like a working rhythm, announcing that one of the city's oldest crafts was still alive. Behind that sound lay more than the labour of the masters; it carried the long journey of raw copper brought by caravan from the mountains beyond the Black Sea coast, the jealous attention the state paid to this metal, and a guild order built up over centuries. To understand the history of copperwork in Amasya, one must first ask where the copper came from, then how it reached the city, and finally in whose hands it took shape in the bazaar. The story begins at the town of Küre in Kastamonu and at the copper mines recorded in Ottoman documents as "Küre-i Nühâs".

Küre-i Nühâs: The Name and Early History of the Copper Mine

Küre is today a district of Kastamonu province, set in a steep valley of the İsfendiyar (Küre) Mountains along the road linking Central Anatolia to the Black Sea coast, only about thirty kilometres from the port of İnebolu. In Ottoman documents the settlement appears as "Küre-i Nühâs"; "küre" means a mine or smelting works and "nühâs" means copper, so that the compound roughly signifies "the copper mine". The name itself makes plain the reason the town existed. Vital Cuinet, who surveyed the region at the end of the nineteenth century, wrote that the mines had been worked since very early times and had been exploited by the Romans, the Byzantines, the Genoese as concession holders, and finally the Turks. On the basis of nearby Chalcolithic settlements it has been suggested that mining here may go back much further still, but there is no clear information on how far the pits were worked in the Roman and Byzantine periods.

The region passed into Turkish hands in the time of the Çobanoğulları, who rose to prominence as a frontier principality in the Kastamonu area. According to the hagiography of Sarı Saltuk, the Çobanoğlu lord Melik Muzaffereddin pursued a Byzantine lord named Şibad to the coast and took the strong castle at the place called "Bakır Küresi" (the Copper Mine) after a siege of thirty-eight days. Although the language of epic is known to bring together heroes of different periods, the fact that the narrative names the area directly as "Bakır Küresi" shows that the mine had already become the identity of the district. The oldest building in Küre is said to be the Aşağı Mescit (Ulu Hacı Mescidi) of 1332, which indicates that the town became a permanent settlement under the Candaroğulları.

A Source of Revenue Between the Candaroğulları and the Ottomans

For the Candaroğulları principality, which made Kastamonu its capital in the fourteenth century, the Küre mines were the backbone of state revenue. According to the Persian geographer Hamdullah Kazvînî, in the early fourteenth century the principality drew fifteen thousand gold coins in income from its copper mines. Byzantine sources regarded the copper of Sinop and Kastamonu in the mid-fifteenth century as the best in Asia Minor and recorded that this income reached two hundred thousand staters. A decision of the Venetian Senate dated 18 August 1394 mentions that the finest copper was to be found in Kastamonu, and in 1434 the same Senate even fixed the freight charge for Kastamonu copper to be loaded on merchant ships bound for the Black Sea; this shows that the metal also flowed westwards through the port of Sinop in the hands of Italian merchants. Copper was used in every field of the principality's internal market as well, and the fact that some Candaroğlu rulers struck part of their coinage in copper suggests that Küre copper was also processed in the principality's mint.

So valuable a resource could hardly escape Ottoman attention. During his rivalry with İsfendiyar Bey of the Candaroğulları, Mehmed I (Çelebi Mehmed) tried in 1416 to seize the revenues of Küre. As Ottoman sources relate, İsfendiyar Bey kept hold of the mine by sending the sultan word that "my livelihood is Kastamonu and the Copper Mine; the revenue of these lands is the very essence of the produce of all the others." Murad II, who defeated İsfendiyar Bey in 1423, left Kastamonu and Küre to him but made it a condition that a share of the copper revenue be handed over to the Ottomans. It is recorded that the Candaroğulları paid a quarter of this income, that is fifty thousand staters, to the Ottomans as tribute. Mehmed II (the Conqueror), too, during his Trebizond campaign of 1460, wrote to İsmail Bey of the Candaroğulları asking that the needs of ships calling at Sinop be met from the sum assigned to the Ottomans out of the Copper Mine.

With the annexation of Kastamonu and Sinop in 1460-1461, the Küre mines passed directly into state hands. Historians place the most active period of the mine between 1300 and 1500, and it is reported that the copper for the cannon used in the conquest of Istanbul came from Küre and that the words "Küre-i Nühâs" could be read on those guns. In a revenue account for 1475 the mining revenues of Kastamonu and Küre amounted to one hundred and fifty thousand gold ducats; this was roughly forty-five per cent of the total of the principal revenues listed for Anatolia and three times the customs revenue of Bursa. Describing Kastamonu in the seventeenth century, Kâtip Çelebi would write that "Küre-i Nühâs being a district of Kastamonu, most of its wares are worked in this city and go out to the surrounding lands."

The Küre Mine in the Ottoman Order

Ottoman mines were administered from the centre and attached to the Imperial Mint. At the head of the works stood a mine superintendent (maden emini) appointed by the state, with clerks, agents and weighers under his command. At Küre the highest salary went to the "treasury clerk" attached to the central treasury, who was paid a daily wage of twenty akçe; each mine gallery, called a "cave", had its own clerk, one clerk was responsible for the charcoal used in refining the ore, and another for the timber props that supported the tunnels. Some of the agents lived at İnebolu, because copper bound for Istanbul and, when needed, for the east was loaded onto ships at that port. The state sometimes worked the mine directly through a superintendent under the "emanet" system and sometimes farmed it out to tax farmers as a revenue unit (mukataa). Once the tax farmer had delivered the copper he owed to the treasury, whatever remained in his hands counted as his profit; if he fell short, the deficit came back to him as a fine.

The real burden of the mine, however, was borne by the people of the surrounding villages. In the fifteenth century master foremen, mine workers called "küreci", refiners called "kalcı" and engineers worked at Küre, while slaves were employed in the heavy work at depth. Part of the villages of Devrekâni, Daday, Azdavay and Küre were registered as "Hizmetkârân-ı Küre" (servants of Küre) and exempted from certain taxes in return for services such as carrying charcoal, planks, poles and firewood. In the registers they appear under names such as "Cemâat-i Kömürcüyân" (the charcoal burners), "Cemâat-i Tahtacıyân" (the plank makers), "Cemâat-i Sırıkcıyân" (the pole cutters) and "Cemâat-i Oduncuyân" (the woodcutters). At the end of the fifteenth century the number of households serving the mine in this way was about 1,370, and together with their families some six thousand people depended directly on copper for their living. In the survey of 1487 the town of Küre had ten quarters and, counting the military class, the exempt and the workers, looked like a small town of three thousand people.

In the sixteenth century Küre grew more crowded even though the mine's output hardly increased, because craftsmen who worked the copper had begun to settle in the town. According to the registers of 1582 the town contained about 1,330 taxpayers, that is a population of between three and a half and four thousand. Masters who made and repaired ewers for the central administration are known to have lived in Küre at this time; three masters resident in the town undertook to make forty-seven new ewers and seventeen ewer stands using about ten tonnes of copper. The fact that the mine revenue, which formed part of the sultan's own domain, stood at about 2,255,000 akçe in 1530 and 2,753,000 akçe in 1582 suggests that the increase came from rising copper prices rather than from greater output. In time the town became an entire mining community with its grocers, bakers, tailors, farriers, saddlers, bath keepers, imams and madrasa teachers, and the number of mosques, prayer halls, madrasas and lodges rose and fell with the fortunes of the mine.

The Road of Küre Copper to Amasya

The largest buyer of Küre copper was always the Ottoman central administration. It is estimated that between 1617 and 1720 about thirty tonnes of copper a year were produced at Küre, most of it sent by sea to the Imperial Cannon Foundry (Tophane-i Âmire) in Istanbul. Raw copper went into the casting of cannon, the striking of coins, the ships built at the Sinop dockyard and the pots and pans of the palace kitchen. The state's priorities were clear: first to meet its own needs, then the demand of guildsmen and craftsmen, and only last that of the copper merchants. The coppersmiths of the Anatolian towns had their place within this order. The records state plainly that Küre copper was given to the coppersmith guilds of towns such as Sivas, Tokat and Amasya, while the surplus was shipped to Istanbul. Besides the coppersmiths of Kastamonu itself, those of Tokat, Amasya and Erzurum are known to have obtained their raw material from Küre.

The most striking feature of this trade was the suspicion with which the state regarded the flow of copper to the east. Since copper counted as war material its export had long been forbidden, and especially during the periods of struggle with the Safavids sales of copper to Iranian merchants were barred; it was known that hundreds of merchants came from Iran trying to buy large quantities. For this reason the Ottoman administration laid down a special procedure for the cauldron makers (kazancı) who came from the Sivas, Tokat and Amasya districts to buy copper. On arriving at the mine these craftsmen had to present a certificate (temessük) obtained from the judge (kadı) of their own sanjak, and on leaving they were to carry a document showing how much copper they had bought. Suraiya Faroqhi describes these papers as a kind of letter of accreditation proving that the coppersmiths' business was lawful. The aim of the procedure was to prevent unrecorded copper from leaking to Iran by way of Amasya, Tokat and Erzurum. In this way an Amasya cauldron maker's access to his raw material was tied to an official chain that began in the kadı's court and ended at the mine.

Another record showing the value of Küre copper is an order of 1576. Copper from Hungary was forbidden to cross into Anatolia lest it damage the sale of the Küre product, and by orders sent to the judges of Anatolia and Rumelia it was to be sold in Rumelia instead. While the decision shows that Küre copper was considered more valuable, it also reveals that the mine was struggling to meet Anatolian demand on its own. Nor was Küre the only source of copper for the coppersmiths of Amasya. In the eighteenth century the refinery at Tokat, which purified raw copper brought by caravan from the Ergani and Keban mines, had become the largest copper centre in Anatolia, and the copper vessels, trays, braziers and cauldrons made in Tokat were being sent to Erzurum, Istanbul, Samsun and Amasya. The Amasya bazaar was thus fed from two sources, as a market that both worked raw copper from Küre and sold the finished wares of neighbouring Tokat.

Copper, Coinage and the Amasya Mint

Copper was the raw material not only of pots and pans but also of everyday money. The copper coins the Ottomans called "mangır" served as a subunit of the silver akçe and were an indispensable part of bazaar trade, and their metal came largely from the mines of Küre and Gümüşhane. Amasya had a place in this system too. According to Hüseyin Hüsameddin's Amasya Tarihi (History of Amasya), after Mehmed II's second accession to the throne in 855 (1451) the striking of copper mangırs bearing the figure of a lion was ordered in Amasya. İlhan Şahin and Feridun Emecen likewise note that sixteenth-century Amasya possessed a mint alongside a dyehouse and a candle works. The striking of copper coins in the city shows that raw copper came to Amasya not only for the crafts but also as part of the state's monetary order.

An intriguing testimony to how easily copper passed between coin and vessel comes from Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Habsburg envoy who came to the camp of Süleyman the Magnificent at Amasya. A collector of ancient coins, the envoy recounts in the letters describing his journey to Amasya an encounter with a coppersmith of whom he had asked for coins. The coppersmith told him that until a few days earlier he had owned a whole jar of old coins, which he had melted down into bronze vessels in the belief that they were worthless. Busbecq writes that he was grieved at the loss of these relics of antiquity and took his revenge by telling the coppersmith, "Had you not done this, I would have given you a hundred gold pieces." Some researchers place this encounter in Amasya, while others say only that it took place during the envoy's journey to Amasya; in the relevant part of the letter it is not certain in which town the coppersmith lived. Even so, the anecdote is a vivid example of how ordinary it was for a sixteenth-century Anatolian coppersmith to melt down old metal and turn it into new vessels.

Copper Masters in the Amasya Bazaar

In Ottoman towns the guilds were arranged in a certain order from the centre of the bazaar outwards. According to Özer Ergenç, booksellers, bookbinders and sellers of leather goods were found near the mosque, followed by the weavers, then by the carpenters, locksmiths and coppersmiths; the blacksmiths lay furthest from the centre. One reason for this arrangement was the noise and smoke produced by hammering copper and working with fire. In Amasya, too, copperwork developed on the south bank of the Yeşilırmak, in the part of the city where commercial life was concentrated. In the Kazancı quarter south of the Helkıs Bridge, Hüseyin Ağa, one of the chief palace officers of Bayezid II, had built a large covered market (bedesten); its date is given in some studies as 1483 and by Hüsameddin as 890 (1485). Around the bedesten grew up the market known as the Aşağı Pazar (Lower Market), and among the buildings that gave life to this area were the Bayram Paşa Han, the Menzilci Mirza Han, the Bezzazistan (cloth market) and the Bakırcıoğlu Han, whose name seems to be directly linked with copperwork.

Although the name of the Kazancı quarter at first brings to mind the masters who hammered cauldrons, Hüsameddin records a different origin for it. According to him, the quarter appears in old registers as the "Kazancı Doğan Quarter" and takes its name from Kazancı Doğan Bey, who was dismissed from command of the Janissaries in 855-856 (1451-1452), sent to Amasya and settled there. The older name of the quarter was Kaya Paşa, and Kaya Paşa's bathhouse and school of 805 (1402-1403) stood here. Since Doğan Bey's own nickname derived from the craft of the cauldron maker, an indirect link can be drawn between the quarter's name and copperwork; but there is no document showing that the quarter came into being as a coppersmiths' quarter. This distinction is a small but instructive example of how popular attributions in urban history need to be tested against the sources.

The wares produced by Amasya's coppersmiths covered the whole range of utensils found in every Anatolian household. Cauldrons, basins, pots, pans, low dining trays, trays, dishes, samovars, bowls, jugs, water jugs, buckets, ewers and candlesticks were mostly made of copper. The master annealed the sheet in the fire and shaped it by hammering, turned the rims and joined parts such as handles and spouts. The separate listing of copper ewers, trays, pails, fat pans and strainers in the probate inventories of the Islamic court registers shows that such vessels held a valuable place among a deceased person's possessions. As Yakupoğlu points out, the people of Anatolia also regarded copper vessels as a form of investment that could be turned into money when needed. A set of copperware that went into a bride's trousseau was therefore both household equipment and a small capital for the family.

Beside the coppersmith stood another trade inseparable from his own: tinning. Copper vessels oxidize over time and could cause the poisoning known as "copper sickness", so the surfaces that touched food had to be coated with a thin layer of tin. Tin was a metal not found in Ottoman lands and was mostly imported from England, which made tinning an essential trade that depended on foreign supply. Copper vessels were taken to the tinsmith at regular intervals, and he cleaned and heated the vessel and spread the tin across its surface. The central administration issued decrees banning the gilding of copper on the grounds that the gold would be lost during tinning. The presence of a guild of tinsmiths in Amasya is also confirmed by families, discussed below, who rose from tinning into the ranks of the city's notables.

At the end of the seventeenth century another building now identified with the coppersmiths was added to Amasya's bazaar district. The Taşhan was built in 1699 for Rahtuvan Hacı Mehmed Paşa, governor of Amasya, by the architect Mehmed Kalfa. The Coppersmiths' Bazaar that developed right beside the han is mentioned together with the building in the sources, and the city's copperwork long remained concentrated in this area. Some promotional texts also give 1758 as the date of the han's foundation and say that it was built by the Rahtuvan family; the contradiction between the two dates cannot be resolved with the sources at hand. The present state of the Taşhan and the surrounding bazaar is a separate subject, but the gathering of the coppersmiths here shows that the Ottoman bazaar tradition of keeping members of the same trade together continued in Amasya as well.

Guild Order, the Ahi Tradition and the Lonca

Like the other crafts of Ottoman towns, the coppersmiths of Amasya worked as a community bound by a strict guild order. The roots of this order go back to the Ahi tradition, which founded craft life in Anatolia on principles of ethics and solidarity. It is known that from the founding of the Ottoman state there was a connection between the Ahi organization and the guilds, and that officials such as the ahi baba and the sheikh remained at the head of some guilds until the first half of the nineteenth century. The guilds were organized on the basis of mutual supervision and assistance rather than competition; members of the same trade worked side by side and kept watch over one another. The guild hierarchy comprised the guild sheikh, the steward (kethüda), the yiğitbaşı, the master, the journeyman and the apprentice, and the duties and rights of each were set by custom and by regulations.

A coppersmith's apprentice was bound to his master in complete obedience and could not leave him without the guild's permission. After a certain time he rose to journeyman, producing in the workshop under his master's orders and supervising the apprentices. When he was judged to have learned the finer points of the craft he was raised to master in a ceremony; in this ceremony the yiğitbaşı girded the new master with a sash (şed) or apron (peştamal) amid prayers, and the candidate's work was shown to the other masters. These pieces were bought by masters and well-to-do guildsmen, and the money collected became the new master's capital for opening a shop. The guild's experts, known as "ehl-i hibre", arbitrated disputes between craftsmen and merchants and fixed the official price (narh) according to the quality of the goods. The işçibaşı, the yiğitbaşı's assistant, inspected the quality of the wares produced and prevented defective goods from reaching the market.

The city's records also show this order at work in Amasya. Hüsameddin lists the "guild sheikh" Hacı İbrahim Efendi among those who died in 1216 (1801-1802) and notes that his son Sheikh İsmail Efendi, known by the nickname "Kabasakal", became guild sheikh after his father. That the city's guilds were bound to a common sheikh suggests that the coppersmiths, the tinsmiths and the other branches of craft were gathered under the roof of the same tradition. The gedik system, which developed from the mid-seventeenth century, extended the guilds' monopoly rights by tying the right to open a shop to a fixed number of masters. In the nineteenth century the guild organization, unable to compete with European factory production, began to break up, and in 1913 the gedik and lonca systems were formally abolished.

People of Amasya Who Bore the Names Coppersmith and Tinsmith

The weight of a craft in a city's life can sometimes be traced in families that carried the name of that trade like a surname. Hüsameddin's Amasya Tarihi contains some notable records in this respect. One of them concerns Kara Hâfız Mehmed Ağa, son of Hasan bin Halil of Amasya's guild of tinsmiths. Known in his youth as "Kalaycıoğlu" (son of the tinsmith), Mehmed Ağa made his fortune by his own labour, bought the farm of Şeyhzade Kadı Mustafa Necib Efendi and his mansion at Köprübaşı, and entered the ranks of the notables. In 1281 (1864-1865), because of his zeal in collecting cash contributions for Ziya Paşa, the governor of Amasya, he became a member of the administrative council, and during the Russian war of 1294 (1877) he also served in gathering military provisions. The rise of this man from a tinsmith's family shows that the savings a craft provided could also open the way to social advancement in the city.

Kalaycı Halil Ağa of Amasya, for his part, rose to the post of head of the palace gardeners (bostancıbaşı) in 1164 (1751). Halil Ağa's son Hacı Ömer Ağa, on his death in 1174 (1760-1761), left instructions that a madrasa be built with a third of his estate; built in 1175 through the efforts of his executor, the mufti of Amasya Kâşif Mehmed Efendi, this building became known as the Kâşifiye Madrasa. A fountain belonging to Kalaycızade Hacı Ömer Ağa is also recorded as having been built in front of the madrasa in 1179 (1765-1766). The sources do not explain whether the family's name "Kalaycı" came from an ancestor's trade or from some other cause. Kazgancızade Hasan Ağa, son of Kazancıoğlu Hacı Ahmed Ağa of the notables of the Köyceğiz quarter, was likewise one of the Amasya men who went to Istanbul in their youth and entered the palace school (Enderun). These names point to cauldron making and tinning as trades remembered in the city across generations.

Not every "Bakırcı" (coppersmith) nickname, however, refers directly to copperwork. As Hüsameddin relates, Seyyid Hacı Ahmed Efendi, son of Zanalızade Seyyid Abdullah Efendi of the Amasya ulema, received the nickname "Bakırcı" because during the famine that broke out after the Russian war in 1185 (1771-1772) he distributed grain and seed free of charge to the poor using a copper measure. Hüsameddin writes that this man "turned his name from copper into silver by his generosity". Ahmed Efendi died in 1195 (1781), and his descendants were known as the "Bakırcızadeler". Bakırcıoğlu Hacı Mustafa Efendi, who became city steward (şehir kethüdası) in 1217 (1802), probably belonged to this family as well, though the source does not say so explicitly. This example shows that nicknames that look like trade names were not always based on a craft and sometimes preserved the memory of an event.

The Decline of Küre and the Changing Routes of Raw Material

The Küre mines entered a period of stagnation in the first half of the sixteenth century and from the end of that century gradually lost their former importance. Prolonged wars, shifting trade routes, the growing difficulty of obtaining slaves and peasants abandoning the land are counted among the causes of this decline. As the ore near the surface was exhausted, the pits had to go deeper; draining the groundwater that flooded the deep galleries, providing adequate ventilation and extracting high-grade ore were beyond the technical means of the time. Kâtip Çelebi relates that the slaves working in the pits looked like corpses amid the dirt and rust, and that the tunnel cut to drain the water had collapsed. According to a document of 1719 the mine had fallen idle because no workers could be found, and some of the people of Küre had migrated to large cities such as Istanbul. From the late eighteenth century the centre of Ottoman copper production shifted to Ergani and Keban.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the quantity of copper sent from the mine to Istanbul was rather modest. According to Gülşah Kaya's calculation from archival documents, a total of 81,054 kilograms of raw copper was sent to Istanbul between 1801 and 1821, and for the years 1802-1811 an unexplained difference of 3,496 kilograms arose between the 73,009 kilograms loaded at İnebolu and the 69,513 kilograms delivered to the Mint. In 1811 the ship of Velihacıoğlu Ahmed Reis, carrying sixteen ingots of raw copper, was caught in a storm off Şile and ran aground, and the second ship onto which the salvaged ingots were loaded sank in the Kefken strait. Documents show that in the same years kitchen utensils for the palace were made from Küre copper and that in 1809 six thousand okka of Küre copper held at the Mint were issued for the army's kitchenware and munitions. The people of the villages around the mine continued to work as charcoal burners, shovellers and stone workers in return for tax exemption, but there was no shortage of those trying to escape this service.

By the 1840s the extraction of ore from the underground pits at Küre had almost ceased, and attempts were being made to recover copper from slag produced earlier. Output could no longer meet even the demand of the Kastamonu coppersmiths. According to a decree of 1257 (1841), the Kastamonu coppersmiths' guild reported that they received a thousand vukiyye of copper a month from the Küre output against payment, but that this was not enough and their debts were mounting; ten thousand vukiyye of copper from the 1840 output was then ordered to be given to the guild at twelve kuruş per okka. For this period, when even the masters of Kastamonu were short of raw material, there is no record showing how much Küre copper reached Amasya. In 1845 the concession to work the mine was granted to a man known as Hacı Kosti or Bedos; he began production in seventeen furnaces set up along the stream, but that same year the collapse of a pit killed many miners and work was interrupted.

From the first half of the nineteenth century, imported goods that cost less than local products placed the crafts of Anatolia in general in a difficult position. To regulate mining and maintain its relations with foreign investors, the state issued mining regulations in 1861, 1869, 1887 and 1906. Copper production was becoming, worldwide, a business requiring large capital and concentrated in the hands of international companies. After the First World War, in 1924, the French-backed Balya Kara Aydın Mining Company carried out work at Küre, and in 1939 the Mineral Research and Exploration Institute studied the geology of the area. The Küre-Aşıköy open-pit mine, opened in 1955, was transferred to Etibank in 1959, and the mine still produces pyritic copper ore today. Yet the concentrated copper of modern Küre now goes to industrial plants and has long since lost its old connection with the masters of the Anatolian bazaars.

Amasya Copperwork in the Industrial Age

The spread of mass production and the arrival of aluminium and stainless steel vessels in the kitchen narrowed copperwork in Amasya in the twentieth century, as everywhere else in Anatolia. As the habit of regularly taking vessels to the tinsmith faded, tinning too withdrew from daily life. Even so, Amasya did not lose the memory of this deep-rooted trade altogether; workshops survived in a corner of the bazaar where copper was still hammered and a cauldron, a tray or a samovar took shape in a master's hands. A large share of today's products is bought for decoration and as gifts rather than for the kitchen. Behind this craft stands a history of five centuries reaching back to the cauldron makers who set out for the Küre mines with the kadı's certificates, to the hans of the Aşağı Pazar, to the bedesten of the Kazancı quarter and to the guilds bound to their sheikh.

Chronology

1332: The Aşağı Mescit (Ulu Hacı Mescidi), the oldest known building in Küre, was built in the Candaroğulları period.

1394: The Venetian Senate recorded in a decision that the finest copper was to be found in Kastamonu.

1402-1403 (805): Kaya Paşa built his bathhouse and school in the district later known as the Kazancı quarter.

1416: Mehmed I (Çelebi Mehmed) tried to seize the Küre revenues held by İsfendiyar Bey of the Candaroğulları.

1423: Murad II obliged İsfendiyar Bey to leave a share of the Küre copper revenue to the Ottomans.

1434: The Venetian Senate fixed the freight charge for Kastamonu copper to be loaded on ships bound for the Black Sea.

1451 (855): After Mehmed II's second accession, the striking of copper mangırs bearing a lion was ordered in Amasya; Kazancı Doğan Bey was sent to Amasya.

1460-1461: Kastamonu and Sinop were annexed to the Ottoman state; the Küre mines came under direct state operation.

1475: The mining revenues of Kastamonu and Küre were recorded at 150,000 gold ducats.

1483-1485: Hüseyin Ağa built the bedesten in the Kazancı quarter of Amasya.

1487: The town of Küre was registered with ten quarters and a population of about three thousand.

1530: The Küre mine revenue was recorded at about 2,255,000 akçe.

1555: The Habsburg envoy Busbecq arrived in Amasya.

1576: Hungarian copper was barred from Anatolia so as not to harm the sale of the Küre product.

1582: The Küre mine revenue rose to about 2,753,000 akçe.

1699: Rahtuvan Hacı Mehmed Paşa had the Taşhan built in Amasya.

1719: The Küre mine was reported idle for lack of workers.

1751 (1164): Kalaycı Halil Ağa of Amasya became head of the palace gardeners (bostancıbaşı).

1771-1772 (1185): Seyyid Hacı Ahmed Efendi received the nickname "Bakırcı" for distributing grain with a copper measure during the famine.

1801-1821: A total of 81,054 kilograms of raw copper was sent from Küre to Istanbul.

1841 (1257): Following a complaint about raw material from the Kastamonu coppersmiths' guild, ten thousand vukiyye of copper was ordered to be given to them.

1845: The collapse of a pit at Küre killed many miners.

1913: The gedik and lonca systems were abolished.

1959: The Küre-Aşıköy open-pit mine was transferred to Etibank.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Hüseyin Hüsameddin Yasar, Amasya Tarihi, vols. 1-4 and 6-8.

Academic studies

  • Gülşah Kaya, "Küre Bakır Madeni (1800-1821)", Alınteri Journal of Social Sciences, 3/2 (2019), pp. 121-143.
  • Erdem Saka, "Osmanlı İmparatorluğu'nda Bakır Madenleri (1453-1789)", Journal of Universal History Studies, 2/2 (2019), pp. 223-238.
  • Selim Özcan, "Amasya'da Sancak Beyliği Yapan Şehzadeler Döneminde Amasya Şehri", Journal of the Faculty of Theology, Amasya University, no. 5.
  • İlhan Şahin - Feridun Emecen, "Amasya", TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam (TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi). islamansiklopedisi.org.tr
  • Ahmet Kal'a, "Esnaf", TDV Encyclopaedia of Islam (TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi). islamansiklopedisi.org.tr

Other sources

  • Cevdet Yakupoğlu, "Kastamonu'nun Doğal Zenginliklerinden Küre Madenlerinin Tarihî Arka Planı".
  • Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, The Turkish Letters (Türk Mektupları).
  • Articles on Küre, Kastamonu and the Küre copper mine, Wikipedia (supplementary source).

Online sources