When the economic history of Amasya is told, apple orchards usually come to mind first, yet for centuries one of the branches of production for which the city was best known was sericulture. Mulberry groves along the Yeşilırmak, silkworm rooms set up inside houses, workshops where cocoons were unwound and looms where the thread was woven made Amasya one of the silk centers that ranked after Bursa in Anatolia. The chain of production drew in villagers, bazaar craftsmen and merchants dealing with distant markets alike. The story of Amasya silk is the story of a town that stopped being a way station where a raw material was weighed and taxed, and began to grow that material on its own soil. The traces of this change lie in the judges' registers, in reports sent to Istanbul, in tax ledgers and in the travel notes of foreigners who passed through the city, as pieces that complete one another.

A City on the Silk Road

Several advantages came together in Amasya. The trade road from Tabriz to Bursa passed through the city; its branches, which split before reaching it, joined again here and continued east through Tokat and Erzurum. Because Iranian silk reached the looms of Bursa along this route, Amasya in the early phase of Ottoman silk production served mostly as a depot and marketplace for Iranian silk. Its status as a princely sanjak lent the city prestige and attention, its closeness to the Black Sea ports made export easier, and its mild climate and the moist soil of the river valley suited mulberry trees and silkworms.

Silk coming from the east passed over an official scale in the city. The weighing and taxing of silk brought from Iran was called mîzân-ı harîr, the "silk scale", and the right to collect this tax was farmed out as a revenue concession (mukataa). Many studies note that raw silk had been weighed and taxed in Amasya since the early Ottoman period. The earliest concrete figure for the volume passing over this scale comes from the sixteenth century: in ten months of 1554-1555 the silk that entered the city through official channels and was weighed reached 10,632 lodra, about fifteen tons.

According to Yücekaya, the image of Amasya as a "silk city", which became clear toward the end of the seventeenth century, owed its existence to this road. While the city processed the raw silk the road brought and put it on the market, it gradually multiplied its own mulberry plantations and worm houses. The change did not happen at once. Weaving and the silk trade came first, and local cocoon production rose slowly on that foundation.

Weaving in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Amasya became known for silk weaving in the sixteenth century. In 1523, in the first quarter of the century, the population was about seven thousand. For so small a population there were many silk weavers, although the records mention only one dye house, one candle house and one mint. In the second half of the century, precious silk fabrics of a quality fit for gifts to the palace were being woven in five or six cities, Amasya among them. A fabric that met the taste of the court says something about the technical level of the Amasya looms and about the close ties between the princely sanjak and the imperial center.

Amasya's part did not stop at cloth. Alongside the raising of cocoons, the trades connected with the first processing of silk had developed; besides reeling raw silk, the city stood out for silk thread and for some semi-finished and finished silk goods. Reeling, twisting, dyeing and weaving were separate stages, each needing its own expertise and giving work to a different group of craftsmen. This division of labor also explains why silk supported a wide part of the population.

Hüsameddin counts the middle of the seventeenth century among Amasya's most prosperous periods. In his account the city had tanneries, cloth looms, smithies, foundries, workshops where gold and silver wire was drawn (simkeşhane) and jewelers. Every house in Amasya and its surroundings had a culfalık, a weaving loom, and all the clothes of the household were woven on it. Amasya's thread, cloth and linen were fine, strong and delicate; its cloth, its morocco leather and its saddlery were as famous as its apples and were offered as gifts to the great. Hüsameddin writes that when Murad IV came to Amasya in 1045 [1635] he was presented with bolts of Amasya cloth and Amasya morocco, and that the sultan admired them greatly. He adds that the vineyards and worm houses which supplied the raw material for these gifts were held in equal esteem. The detail of the cloth presented to the sultan rests on local records and could not be confirmed by another source.

Travelers recorded the weight of this production as well. Evliya Çelebi, who visited the city in the seventeenth century, speaks of 1,060 shops serving various trades. The figure is not specific to silk, but it shows a busy and productive bazaar. When the French botanist Tournefort came to Tokat in 1701, he wrote that Tokat and Amasya together produced more cloth than the whole of the rest of the country.

The Silk Scale and Its Tax Farmers

In the eighteenth century the revenue of the silk scale was a source that could draw the interest of even the leading men of the state. A decree dated 13 Safar 1161 [February 1748], which Hüsameddin quotes from the Amasya registers, shows that from the start of the year 1161 the silk-scale concession of Amasya and its dependencies had been granted for life, as a mâlikâne, to the grand vizier Seyyid Abdullah Pasha together with Abdî Ağa, a former agha of the sipahis, Hacı Hüseyin Ağa and Ebûbekir Ağa. Halil Ağa, whom the tax farmers had sent to collect the dues, had been kept from his work by Bâkîoğlu Hâfız, Hacı Bilâl, the deputy Molla Mustafa of Yenice and Hacı Hüseyin and Hacı Ali, a former town steward, who had taken the dues for themselves. The decree was addressed to the governor of Sivas, the district governor of Amasya and its judge, ordering that the money be recovered from them. Hüsameddin also notes that all the tax farmers were men of Amasya. The episode suggests that the revenue of the scale was valuable enough to become a matter of contention among the town's notables.

The fiscal side of the silk scale and the silk customs, including the life-lease and tithe periods, is treated in detail in the article Silk Customs and the Harir Mizan in Amasya.

The documents studied by Yücekaya make it possible to follow the later course of this revenue. An account statement dated 1173 [1759-1760] records that Abdurrahman Ağa and Ebubekir Ağa were responsible for the concession for the four and a half years between 1755 and 1759, with a total account of 10,620 akçe. In Amasya register no. 62, covering 1785-1786, the scale concession was first auctioned to a man named İbrahim; when he failed to pay for 1786 it passed to others, and in the end the Amasya silk concession with its dependent concessions was given to Abdullah Raşid, İsmail, Hüseyin and Mustafa for one load of silk and 1,400 akçe a year. Taking inflation into account, Yücekaya concludes that the scale tax had fallen sharply over thirty years. The likely reason for the fall is that local cocoon production had reduced the importance of silk brought from outside.

The office of the scale nevertheless survived for some time into the first half of the nineteenth century. According to Hüsameddin, Râşid Ahmed Bey, a descendant of Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, was sent as superintendent of the Amasya silk-scale and stamp concessions in 1223 [1808], the year Mahmud II came to the throne; he carried out the work for about ten years, living now in Köprü and now in Amasya, and was dismissed in 1234 [1818-1819]. Kahvecizâde Râşid Mehmed Efendi likewise came as superintendent of the Amasya silk scale in 1245 [1829-1830], stayed about four years and left in 1249 [1833-1834]. Yücekaya writes that archival documents on the scale tax almost entirely cease after 1807, and that the last of them dates from 1849-1850. The appointments Hüsameddin records show that even as the tax lost its importance, superintendents continued to be named for a while.

From Imported Silk to Local Production

For Ottoman weaving, which long met its raw silk needs from Iran, dependence on imported silk could be a weakness. According to accounts, a restriction placed on the import of Iranian silk was a turning point in Amasya's production of its own silk. The documentary trace of local production becomes clear in the eighteenth century. In the archival records examined by Yücekaya, entries on mulberry plantations and worm houses appear with growing frequency from the middle of the eighteenth century. From the last quarter of the century, tax records on local silk production take up more space than records of the scale tax levied on the weighing of silk. A document of 1807 lists the sanjaks of Canik, Sivas and Tokat as dependencies of the Amasya scale, and for the first time mentions together the silk produced there and silk arriving from outside without a permit. Yücekaya thinks that the silk arriving without a permit must have been Iranian silk smuggled past the tax.

The value of mulberry plantations shows how profitable this change was. In register no. 61, covering 1784-1786, a mulberry plantation with its worm house at a place called Orman is entered at 400 kuruş and another plantation in the same estate at 500 kuruş; considering that many whole estates of those years were worth thirty or forty kuruş, these are exceptionally high figures. In the same register a mulberry plantation turns up in almost every estate. By 1810 a mulberry plantation could be worth 3,300 kuruş. Yücekaya stresses that mulberry plantations far beyond a region's need for fruit can only be explained by cocoon raising; the mulberry was slow to bear and its fruit was hard to gather and store. Mulberry groves that survive in the districts of Amasya and around it, and place names called "böceklik", are cited as traces of this past; a document of 1865 mentions a Böceklik quarter in the town center.

Details of the city's silk weaving also multiply in these years. A price list of 1769 fixed one dirham of embroidery silk at 5 akçe, a dirham of braid (kaytan) at 7 akçe, a dirham of ala and göz at 9 akçe, and three silk buttons at 1 akçe. In 1777-1778 the daily wage of silk workers was 8 para with bread and 10 para without. The fixing of prices for materials and the existence of a settled wage scale for silk work show that silk weaving held no small place in the city. Most of the fabrics recorded in the register of 1784-1786 were silks, and a harir shirt made of silk was worth 5 kuruş.

In this period Amasya silk became a commodity sought by other weaving towns as well. A document of 1801 asks that part of the silk obtained in the city be sent, as before, to Istanbul, while noting as something new that it was also being shipped to Bosnia, Aleppo and Diyarbakır. A document dated 1231 AH [1816] relates that most of the silk brought to Aleppo came from Bursa and Amasya, and that foreign consuls bought up this raw silk and speculated with it; Yücekaya cites the same document in one place with the date 1806 and in another with 1815. Yücekaya takes the fact that the documents name Amasya right after Bursa in matters of silk as a sign that it was the most important center of cocoon production after Bursa. Another document deals with the silk tithe and customs of Bursa and Amasya together.

In Yücekaya's assessment, Amasya silk production had reached a level comparable to that of Bursa. Even if Bursa kept its dominant role in Ottoman sericulture, the combined output of a few cities such as Amasya could balance Bursa's production and perhaps exceed it. As far as the archival records show, state officials were most attentive to the silk of Bursa and Amasya among the silk-producing cities. The traveler Adrien Dupré noted that the silk made here could compete in quality with that of Bursa. Throughout the century from 1750 to 1900 that the sources discuss, the name of Amasya is mentioned alongside Bursa for the productivity of its silk.

The French traveler Victor Fontanier, who came to Amasya in the 1820s, writes that the city produced a hundred mule-loads of silk a year, worth by his own reckoning about two million kuruş. According to Fontanier most Amasya silk was white, inferior in quality to the silk of Gilan, and used in the country only for shirting; the rest fed the workshops of Diyarbakır, Aleppo and Damascus. Merchants from those cities came to Amasya every year at harvest time and bought the crop directly from the villagers. Since the weight of a mule-load is not known, the figure allows only a rough estimate; Yücekaya thinks a production of at least about ten tons can be assumed.

Developments in Europe supported this turn. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as weaving advanced rapidly in Europe, cheaper and showier silk fabrics began to be made there, and demand for fine Turkish silks fell. While silk weaving declined in the Ottoman lands, the raising of silkworms and the production of raw silk were, in a sense, encouraged by the state. The importance of silkworm raising in Amasya grew, and this also laid the ground for weaving to continue. Silkworm eggs were produced and exported together with raw silk; a document of 1861 mentions the "silkworm-seed dues" (tohum-ı harir rüsumu) of the sanjak of Amasya, and in the same years the payment of sums owed to a French merchant named Kolon, living in Amasya, for cocoons and silkworm eggs is taken up. In this way Amasya silk caught the attention of European merchants in the nineteenth century.

Silk as a Livelihood

In the first half of the nineteenth century silk was the main livelihood for most of the people of Amasya. A document of 1830 states plainly that the chief occupation of the town's inhabitants in general was sericulture. In the same document the taxes being levied were protested, and it was asked that, as in Bursa, a stamp be applied and one para per kuruş be taken for military expenses. From the tax rates accepted by the producers and from the citing of Bursa as a model, Yücekaya concludes that a settled silk market was functioning in Amasya, at least in practice. British consular reports likewise state that in 1840-1841 silk production and trade were the most important economic activity in Amasya.

The state too tried various ways of taking a share of this income. In 1844 the Amasya customs and the silk tithe dues, together with the market and goods customs dues of Tokat, were farmed out for 620,000 kuruş to Mehmed Pasha, the district governor of Sivas. Yücekaya calculates that even if only a third of this sum was silk tithe, it points to a cocoon production worth at least two million kuruş; this is an estimate, and he himself says that he took the lowest possibility. In the same year it was decided to levy 200 kuruş of customs per kıyye on raw silk produced in Amasya, but because the merchants suffered, the measure was withdrawn and the old 100 kuruş was restored. The documents of this period now speak only of silk produced in Amasya; references to Iranian silk and Persian merchants disappear.

Amasya's silk production rested on a wide surrounding region. Documents of 1861 show that besides the silk produced in the towns and districts around the city, silk and cocoons were regularly brought to Amasya from Sivas, Harput, Diyarbakır and Mosul. Yücekaya compares this network to the line of Mudanya, Yenişehir, Mihaliç, İzmit and Bilecik that fed Bursa, and thinks Amasya too was a silk center fed by such a hinterland.

Silk was also a livelihood for the non-Muslim population. The poll-tax registers of the Tanzimat period list six Armenians and one Greek in Amasya as silk workers, and two Armenians as kazzaz. The occupational breakdown in the 1847 poll-tax records shows two Armenian silk workers. That the registers use pairs of names such as ipekçi and kazzaz, or çiftçi and rençber, for similar work suggests that occupational terms had not yet settled in the records of the time.

Silk Dealers and Cloth Printers

A person who worked or sold silk was called a kazzaz, and among the Muslim families of Amasya the trade passed down the generations much like a surname. Hüsameddin mentions Ahmed Bey, son of Kazzaz Abdulbaki Çelebi who lived in the Hatuniye quarter; known in the chronicles as "Kazzaz Ahmed Bey", he became one of the notable sipahis and, in the service of Bayram Pasha, rose to be head of the palace gatekeepers and a sanjak governor. Kazzazzâde Ahmed Ağa, a grandson of Kazzaz Abdulbaki Ağa, was likewise born and raised in the Hatuniye quarter; as a partisan of Köprülü Mehmed Pasha he was taken into the service of the palace stables and rose from there. Kazzaz es-Seyyid el-Hâc Yusuf Ağa is also named as the great-grandfather of Seyyid Mehmed Efendi, the muezzin of the Pervane Bey Mosque, born in 1284 [1867-1868].

The craftsmen who produced basma, cloth printed with patterns from blocks, were also organized in the city. According to Hüsameddin, Ahmed Ağa, son of el-Hâc İsmail Ağa, steward of the cloth printers of Amasya, became steward of the printers on his father's death in 1201 [1786-1787], sat several times on the council of the town's notables and died in 1222 [1807-1808]. His son es-Seyyid el-Hâc Mehmed Ağa was appointed to the same post. That the stewardship of the guild stayed in one family for three generations shows that cloth printing was a long-established and respected craft in the city.

Fabrics from the Looms

The quality of the fabrics woven in Amasya is shown in most detail by the Islamic court registers. When a person died, the judge wrote down the estate item by item, balanced debts and credits, and then divided the inheritance among the heirs. In these inventories the name of each cloth, its type, often its place of origin and its price were entered; even for a used item a note of origin such as "Persian shawl" was added. Examining more than two hundred estates in seven registers between 1784 and 1880, Hüsnü Yücekaya found 59 distinct fabric names; with sub-types the figure reaches 105. The cloth in use in the city, in other words, showed a far wider variety than is usually imagined.

By raw material these fabrics fall into cotton, wool, linen and silk, and there were also cloths in which cotton and silk were mixed. Kutnu and alaca could be woven from pure cotton or pure silk, but mostly they were cotton-silk blends. Cotton fabrics were the most used in the period, but after cotton the group most often seen in the registers was silk. It includes çiçekli, hatayi, sevayi, canfes, kadife, ahmediye, taraklı, çitari, futa, kıvırtma, abani and atlas. Hatayi and sevayi were woven of silk and klaptan; both the weft and the warp of kadife and gezi were silk.

The most remarkable of the silk goods is bürük. It was a wholly silk cloth with a rather elaborate weave and a high price, and the finding that it was produced in Amasya shows that besides raw silk and plain cloth the city turned out high-grade silks. Futa is another silk weave named in the same group. Prices make the value of silk plain. Sevayi, at 180 kuruş a bolt in 1851-1853, and the silk sheet and the ten peştamal, recorded at between 200 and 250 kuruş in 1862-1868, are among the most valuable fabrics in the registers. For comparison, a plain peştamal appears at about seven and a half kuruş in the same records.

The figures Yücekaya gives in his two studies do not fully agree. In his 2013 article he writes that 12 of 33 kinds of fabric in the register of 1839-1845, and 8 of 36 in the register of 1862-1868, were silks, and notes that such a proportion is not found even in Tokat, where weaving was lively. In his 2018 study, however, he counts 36 and 46 kinds of fabric for the same periods. The difference may arise from whether sub-types were counted or from the scope of the registers examined, but the author does not explain it. In both studies the conclusion that 1830-1840 and 1860-1870 were good years for weaving in general and for silk weaving in particular remains the same.

For the end of the nineteenth century there is also an official figure for the number of looms. The Sivas provincial yearbooks (salname) of 1883 and 1903 state that there were 150 weaving looms in the center of Amasya. The same yearbooks record that kutnu weaving and cocoon raising had advanced greatly in Amasya and had reached a level to rival Diyarbakır and Aleppo. Kutnu was the most favored silk fabric in the city. The French traveler Vital Cuinet, who visited in the same years, also reports about 2,500 weavers in Amasya.

Dye Houses and Cotton Production

Amasya's cloth production did not rest on silk alone. Like Kayseri and Tokat, Amasya had large dye houses; cottons that arrived raw at the cotton centers of Anatolia were dyed there, calendered and exported as finished goods. The Yeşilırmak valley was also counted among the cotton-growing regions, and in 1863 Amasya was one of the pilot areas chosen to try cotton seed brought from Egypt. In the registers the share of cotton rose markedly in the nineteenth century. In the register of 1839-1845 printed cloth (basma) made up fifteen percent of the fabrics recorded, while in that of 1862-1865 it appeared 58 times and reached twenty-eight percent; the overall share of cotton fabrics exceeded sixty percent toward the 1850s. Kutnu, by contrast, among the most frequent fabrics in the first two registers, failed to enter the ten most common in the last. Yücekaya ties this change to a shift in the mode of production in cotton weaving.

The Figures of Travelers and Consuls

Europeans passing through Amasya in the nineteenth century saw silk as part of the city's landscape. The English geologist William John Hamilton, who traveled in Anatolia in the later 1830s and published his observations in 1842, describes the mulberry gardens along the Yeşilırmak watered by gigantic waterwheels, wheels whose radius reached five or six meters yet were of very light construction. Approaching the town he saw that the garden hedges were made of mulberry twigs, stripped of their leaves by the silkworms, laid in layers and held in place by a few large stones. In Hamilton's account silk was one of the staple products of Amasya; the city produced upwards of fifty thousand okka a year, at a price of about 120 kuruş the okka. On the same visit he toured a mill recently set up by the river to make a coarse woolen cloth for clothing the Nizam troops, and wrote that the whole process, from spinning the thread to weaving the cloth and beating it with wooden hammers, was driven by a single waterwheel.

Hamilton's fifty thousand okka corresponds to more than sixty-four tons, and together with the price of 120 kuruş it indicates a production worth six million kuruş. Other observers give lower numbers. According to Viquesnel, quoting Tchihatcheff, the silk production of the city of Amasya alone was 28,000 kilograms; for comparison, according to reports of the French ministry of trade and agriculture, Bursa's exports reached 375,000 kilograms in 1841-1842. Yücekaya reminds us that these figures must be treated with caution, since the 28 tons may cover only the town center while Bursa's 375 tons may cover its whole hinterland. It is also reported that Viquesnel gave a production of 400 tons for Amasya and considered even this below the truth; as the number stands far above the other estimates, it should be received with reserve.

By the 1860s the figures had begun to fall. According to Mordtmann's observations, 20,000-25,000 kilograms of raw silk were produced each year in Amasya and its surroundings, rising to 30,000 kilograms in good years. Donald Quataert also writes that silk production in Amasya declined after the 1860s. William Gifford Palgrave, British consul at Trabzon between 1867 and 1873, based his report on information given by two large merchants. According to them, producers not bound to them had sold 42,000 okka of silk, while the producers who worked for them against advances had delivered 300,000 okka of cocoons; the merchants put the money value at 1,125,000 pounds sterling, yet still found this output small for Amasya and its region, attributing the fall to the pébrine and muscardine diseases and to the ignorance of the producers.

Hüsameddin's observations from the early twentieth century show silk once again part of the town's everyday calendar. In his account the worm houses, mulberries and cocoons of Amasya were very famous, and in recent years annual cocoon production had reached a million kilos. The cocoon season followed the cherry season and gave occasion to many festivities; then the seasons of fruit, of melons and vegetables and of grapes occupied the town in turn. No document confirming the figure of a million kilos has been found. The average annual cocoon production of 700,000 to 800,000 kilograms given in some studies falls close to it.

The Waterwheels of the Yeşilırmak

Though it did not count as heavy industry, silk production depended on water. The waterwheels on the Yeşilırmak irrigated gardens and orchards and also powered watermills and silk factories. In his 1870 travel book the traveler Van Lennep describes crossing the stone bridge over the river and seeing, upstream and downstream, many wheels turned by the current, carrying water to the mulberry gardens, and he was amazed; he adds that the wheels were also used for flour mills and silk factories. Kara Müftüzâde Mustafa Vâzıh Efendi, who compiled legal opinions concerning Amasya in the eighteenth century, also counts among the features that set the city apart from others its vineyards and gardens, its rivers, wells and waterwheels, its silk production and its agriculture.

In the second half of the nineteenth century foreign capital entered the business. Heinrich Barth writes that Krug, the agent of the wealthy Freiburg silk merchant Metz, had built a new and large silk house for sorting cocoons, that it was an important enterprise and still expanding, and that a new mill had been set up beside it. According to Barth, when Krug wanted to narrow the river's flow in order to turn his great wheels and keep the water for his own mill, he met fierce opposition from the local people and faced great difficulties and threats. The British consul Palgrave reports that of two large mills one belonged to Stroh, the German vice-consul for trade, and the other to Imbert, a merchant from Marseille, and that these two foreign agents were engaged in Amasya in silk thread, flour production and other trade. According to Palgrave, Stroh's silk factory employed sixty workers brought from Germany and some four hundred more, mostly local Christian women and children. A document of 1895 records that the building had formerly been a silk factory and had fallen idle.

Disease and Recovery

Sericulture depended on the course of nature. The first document concerning Amasya on the silkworm diseases that swept Europe and Anatolia in the middle of the nineteenth century dates from 1866; from this Yücekaya infers that the disease took effect in the city no earlier than 1864. It reduced production sharply; within three years cocoon output fell to 30,000 kilograms in 1880. Documents on mulberry saplings reflect the break as well. Documents of 1867, 1868 and 1869 ask for mulberry saplings to be sent from Amasya to other places, for example to set up a nursery in Samsun, whereas from 1869 to 1895 the archives hold no record concerning mulberry trees. After 1895 the direction is reversed, and it is now the bringing of mulberry saplings to Amasya that is discussed. Yücekaya writes that during the years of disease the mulberry plantations were uprooted and other crops planted in their place, since otherwise there would have been no need to plant saplings again; this is an interpretation drawn from the silence of the documents.

The documents of this period also show how profitable and contested silkworm raising was. Two documents of 1856-1857 concern the burning of worm houses: one deals with the retrial of Emin Efendi, who had burned the worm house of Semerci Osman Efendi, the other with the burning of the worm house of Emin Mehmed Efendi, treasurer of Amasya. Yücekaya thinks that burning a worm house was used as a means of revenge and that this must be connected with the profitability of the trade. Another document of 1899-1900 concerns a silkworm-seed producer named Ansaryon Oseb going to Russia on cocoon business.

The state did not leave the producers to their fate. The way out of diseased seed was to produce sound seed, and for this the Harir Dârü't-ta'limi founded in Bursa was taken as the model. In these schools, a kind of institute, the methods of obtaining healthy seed were taught. Nearly ten documents ask for a school like the one in Bursa, and for model mulberry plantations, to be established in Salonica, Antalya and Amasya; two documents of 1894 concern meeting the costs of such a school, and Amasya is named in all of them. Yücekaya notes that the tone of the documents shows the state treating the matter with unusual seriousness. To revive production the pasteurization method was applied, mulberry trees were replanted, and in 1890 cocoon production rose to 80,000 kilograms. Yücekaya calls the period after 1885 the "second spring" of Amasya silk.

Cocoon Raising in the Early Twentieth Century

By the turn of the century Amasya silk rested mostly on cocoon production. Eleven archival documents after 1895 deal with the planting of mulberry plantations in Amasya, again citing Bursa as the model; that the cities where mulberry plantations were to be re-established were limited to a few centers shows the importance given to Amasya. In 1903 a silk competition with prizes was held. Incentives of this kind are counted among the practices of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration (Düyun-ı Umumiye), which held the right to collect the silk tithe.

New trades also grew up around cocoon raising. A document of 1917 concerns bringing a master craftsman, with his family, to Amasya to make the boxes used for carrying cocoons; from this Yücekaya concludes that a professional network of agents had been set up for collecting and shipping cocoons. In a letter that Yücekaya dates to 1914, permission is requested for masters skilled in reeling silk cocoons into thread to go to Amasya to practice their craft and teach it to others. It is noted that not only cocoons were sent abroad, and that from the 1880s silk was also exported as thread. A lawsuit of 1916, in which a man named Hacıköylüoğlu Osman went to court over trespass on his mulberry plantation, is a sign that mulberry groves had once again become valuable property.

Local Weaving and Imports

Yücekaya's survey of the registers also tests an established assumption about Ottoman industry. It is often said that after the industrial revolution in Europe, imported factory cloth quickly took over the Ottoman market. In the Amasya records, imported cloth does not dominate before 1885. Twenty-five percent of the fabric types identified in the city came from outside Amasya, but imported ones were only nine percent of that. Most of the cloth brought in came again from Ottoman weaving centers, above all Diyarbakır, Damascus, Aleppo and Tokat; that seven kinds of fabric came from the Syrian region, quite far from Amasya, shows how far weaving had advanced there.

The character of imported cloth changed over time. Until the 1830s the imported fabrics identified were mostly of Iranian origin; finished goods such as silk shawls from Iran stayed at one or two percent of the registers. After the 1830s Western goods such as Frankish printed shawls, English prints and Frankish kerchiefs began to increase. In the same years the variety of fabrics also widened markedly. According to the 2018 study, the register of 1784-1786 records fourteen kinds of fabric, that of 1839-1845 thirty-six, and that of 1862-1868 forty-six. Yücekaya thinks this widening may be connected with the repercussions of the industrial revolution.

A similar conclusion is reached for raw silk. In Yücekaya's view the initial role of Iranian silk is certain, but the established opinion about the nineteenth century is exaggerated: after 1800 records suggesting imported silk are rare, and no situation appears that would have made imported silk necessary. From being the most important city on the route of Iranian silk, Amasya had become a production center that built its own market on the silk grown around it. Today the sound of silk looms has largely died away, but the cloth names in the court records, the notes of travelers and the water works on the Yeşilırmak still make it possible to trace the city's past in this field.

Chronology

1523: The population of Amasya is about seven thousand; the city has one dye house and many silk weavers.

1554-1555: The silk entering Amasya and weighed in ten months reaches 10,632 lodra, about fifteen tons.

Second half of the 16th century: Silk fabrics fit as gifts for the palace are woven in five or six cities, Amasya among them.

1635 (1045): According to Hüsameddin, Murad IV is presented in Amasya with bolts of Amasya cloth and morocco leather.

1701: Tournefort writes that Tokat and Amasya produce more cloth than the rest of the country.

1748 (1161): The Amasya silk-scale concession is granted for life to the grand vizier Seyyid Abdullah Pasha and his partners.

1755-1759: The four-and-a-half-year account of the scale concession is recorded at 10,620 akçe.

1769: A price list fixes the prices of embroidery silk, braid and silk buttons.

1784-1786: Court register no. 61 records fourteen kinds of fabric; a mulberry plantation with a worm house is valued at 400 kuruş.

1801: Amasya silk is recorded as being sent to Bosnia, Aleppo and Diyarbakır as well as Istanbul.

1807: Canik, Sivas and Tokat are named as dependencies of the Amasya silk scale.

1808 (1223): Köprülüzâde Râşid Ahmed Bey becomes superintendent of the Amasya silk scale and stamp dues.

1810: A mulberry plantation is valued at 3,300 kuruş.

1830: A document states that sericulture is the chief livelihood of the people of Amasya.

1840-1841: According to British consular reports, silk production and trade are the city's most important economic activity.

1842: Hamilton publishes that Amasya produces upwards of fifty thousand okka of silk a year.

1844: The Amasya customs and silk tithe are farmed out together with the dues of Tokat for 620,000 kuruş.

1847: The poll-tax records show two Armenian silk workers in Amasya.

1851-1853: A bolt of sevayi is valued at 180 kuruş.

1861: The "silkworm-seed dues" of the sanjak of Amasya appear in the documents.

1863: Amasya is included among the areas where cotton seed brought from Egypt is tried.

1866: The first document concerning Amasya on the silkworm disease is written.

1867-1873: Consul Palgrave reports that producers bound to two merchants sold 300,000 okka of cocoons.

1880: Because of the silkworm disease cocoon production falls to 30,000 kilograms.

1883: The Sivas provincial yearbook records 150 weaving looms in the center of Amasya.

1890: With pasteurization and new methods cocoon production rises to 80,000 kilograms.

1894: Correspondence is conducted on the costs of founding a sericulture school in Amasya on the Bursa model.

1903: A silk competition with prizes is held.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Online sources