The Ilkhanid age of Amasya is usually told as a story of governors, noyans and rebellions. Yet the everyday reality of the city in that century lies in tax records, in the workshop of the mint, in the price lists of famine years and in the registers that recorded the distribution of pious endowment revenues. Squeezed into the narrow strip of the Yeşilırmak valley, the city entered the Mongol fiscal order after the defeat at Köse Dağ in 1243. It was crushed at times under heavy obligations, yet it also tried to take its share of an east-west trade that had become safe again. This article deals only with the economic side, that is, the traces of money, trade, taxation and production in Amasya; the political events of the period are told separately in the history of Ilkhanid Amasya.

Mongol Rule and the Fiscal Framework

After the battle of Köse Dağ the Seljuk state became a tributary of the Mongols. The Ilkhanid administration founded by Hülegü in Iran initially left Anatolia in the hands of two Seljuk brothers, Izzeddin Keykavus II and Rükneddin Kılıçarslan IV, while the country's total tax burden was fixed as an annual obligation to be sent to Tabriz. According to Seljuk sources this obligation consisted of twenty tümens in cash together with payments in kind such as 500 bolts of Antalya cloth, gold-embroidered vessels, 500 geldings and 500 mules. In these years Amasya was one of the provincial centres under Seljuk administration. According to Abdîzâde Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn, Kılıçarslan had one mint in Amasya and another in Gümüş Pazarı, the present Gümüşhacıköy; coins struck at Gümüş have been found, and the name of the Darbhâne quarter in that town survives from the same age.

A regular Mongol fiscal organisation in Anatolia could be established only under Abaka, after the defeat at Elbistan in 1277. Mamluk pressure and the northward expansion of the Golden Horde made direct rule of Anatolia unavoidable, and Abaka sent the vizier Shams al-Din Juwayni to reorganise the country's revenues according to the Mongol treasury. Offices such as the "Deputy of the Sultanate of the Lands of Rum" and the "Revenue Audit of the Lands of Rum" were created at this time. Juwayni is said to have reassessed taxes according to each person's income, to have sent instructions forbidding unlawful levies and abolishing confiscation, and to have put the tamga tax, which until then had not been collected regularly, on a firm footing. The order he established remained superficial, however, and before long an economy of plunder returned.

Types of Tax and Their Effect on Amasya

The Ilkhanid administration levied three main taxes on its subjects. The qalan (gılan) was taken from landowners on the basis of produce, the qubchur (kopçur) from nomads and herd owners on the basis of livestock; one animal in a hundred is mentioned, and small herd owners, scholars, the sick, the old, children and the needy were exempt from the qubchur. The tamga, also called bac, was a trade tax levied on townspeople, especially merchants, according to the value of the goods carried. To these was added the baliş, whose nature is not fully known and which may have been equivalent to the tamga. These taxes formed the Ilkhanids' greatest source of revenue, and the names qubchur and tamga lived on in the fiscal systems of the Qara Qoyunlu, the Aq Qoyunlu and the Ottomans in the following centuries. Officials called kavransa, charged with the safety of caravans, together with road guards, and the yam courier system reorganised under Ghazan Khan, supported the working of the trade routes. As an example of the scale of the burden, it is recorded that on the caravan road from Ayas through Erzurum to Tabriz 153 dirhams of tax were taken on one animal load of goods, a further 50 dirhams were paid to the official who guaranteed safety, and the total customs payment came to 203 dirhams. These figures belong to the general caravan route and not to Amasya, but they give an idea of the magnitude of the Mongol trade tax.

The liveliest account of how this system worked in Amasya is found in the records Hüsameddin transmits from Arabic chronicles. In the years when Muʿīn al-Dīn Süleyman Pervâne held sway, Zogay, the steward of the Anatolian overseer Alıcak Noyan, lived on his estate at Merzifon and imposed new and heavy levies on the people to build up his wealth. He extended the urban tax assigned to each person to newborn children, and took the children of poor people who could not pay the tax for three akçes each and sold them as slaves and concubines to Egyptian merchants. Hüsameddin notes that the Egyptian sultan al-Malik al-Manṣūr Ḥusām al-Dīn Lājīn was said to be one of the slaves bought and sold by Zogay. For this reason complaints from the people reached Abaka Khan "like rain". The place near Merzifon known today as Zogu Nahiyesi bears the name of this estate.

Around 1280, when Abaka was preparing for war against the Mamluks, the burden grew heavier still. According to a statement transmitted from Badr al-Dīn al-ʿAynī, since no animals could be found to carry the Mongol army's supplies, the Muslim population was harnessed to carts in place of oxen; when no cash could be collected from the poor, boys were taken as slaves in lieu of tax at five dirhams each and girls at three. In the same years the governorship of Amasya had passed to Nāṣir al-Dīn Muhammed Bey, grandson of the late Seyfeddin Torumtay; according to Hüsameddin this young governor was also, under the terms of the founder's deed, the administrator of the Torumtay endowment. The detail shows that the governorship and the management of the endowment went together, and that a large part of the city's financial strength was concentrated in endowment revenues.

Ghazan Khan's Reforms and the Emirate of Amasya

The reigns of Arghun and Gaikhatu were years of financial collapse for Anatolia. When the Iranian mustawfī Fakhr al-Dīn Qazvīnī was appointed in place of Fahreddin Ali, one of the last great viziers of the Seljuk state, the crowd of officials he brought with him quickly plundered Anatolia. Aksarayî writes that after the taxes set aside for the Tatar expenses the people were left without so much as a candle for fuel, and that the population turned to borrowing. Under Gaikhatu the state treasury was emptied by extravagance, livestock epidemics struck production, and in 1294 paper money modelled on the Chinese example was put into circulation in Tabriz and other cities. The experiment failed, trade weakened, and it was abandoned within two months.

Ghazan Khan, who came to the throne in 1295, tried to repair the picture. The main items of his programme were bringing empty land back into cultivation through iqta grants, collecting the underweight coins and recoining them, ending the pressure of tax officials, and announcing to everyone how much each village was to pay. The decree dated 22 February 1304 ordered that the tax amounts be written on stone, wood or copper plates and hung on the doors and minarets of mosques. The tax to be paid by villagers was due in two instalments, within twenty days after Nowruz and between 22 September and 12 October. The coins struck under Ghazan carried the Mongolian phrase "Tengriyin küchündür" (by the power of Heaven), together with inscriptions in Arabic and Tibetan. According to Rashīd al-Dīn, the reforms also brought an improvement in the fineness of the coinage, some of those who had abandoned their lands returned to their villages, and state revenues rose.

Hüsameddin also records how this arrangement worked out in Amasya. According to him, when Ghazan abolished the Seljuk sultanate he divided Anatolia into four parts and assigned each part an annual tax of fifteen tümens; a footnote states that one tümen was ten thousand dinars and the total one hundred and fifty thousand dinars. The emirate of Amasya was granted "in the form of a tax farm", that is, as one who undertakes the right to collect the tax, to Azîzeddin Muhammed Bey, son of Pervane Süleyman Bey. The governor's area of authority covered the Kızılırmak basin including Sinop, and Hüsameddin calls this region the "Eyâlet-i Rûmiyye". In his account all four emirs began to collect two or even four times the amount assessed on their region; one share went to the Ilkhanid treasury, one to the overseer, one to the dignitaries of the state, and the remainder stayed in the governor's hands. The same section, drawing on Ibn Bībī, also records that the region was nevertheless comparatively prosperous in comparison with the others.

Under Ghazan the work of tax collection did not remain in trustworthy hands. The duty of collecting Anatolia's taxes was given to greedy individuals sent to each region, among them Kemaleddin Tiflisi for Amasya and Samsun. When they began to collect more than the assessed amount and to impose new taxes, the people fled their villages, and the emptied villages brought production to a halt. Bad practice continued in the following years. Under Oljeitu, in 1312, the sahib-i divan Lakuşi collected excessive taxes in the lands stretching from Erzurum to Antalya and from Sinop to Diyarbakır, sold state lands to high officials, and in the end met the fate he deserved. It is likely that the Şemseddin Ahmed Lâkûşî whom Hüsameddin names as governor of Amasya is the same person as this sahib-i divan, but the sources do not state the identification explicitly.

Money and the Amasya Mint

The mint tradition of Amasya reaches back before the Ilkhanid age; under the Seljuks Kılıçarslan's mints at Amasya and Gümüş Pazarı are mentioned. The clearest proof that the tradition continued in the Ilkhanid period is the silver coin that entered Hüsameddin's own collection. On its face were the profession of faith and, on the rim, the phrase "Duribe bi-Amâsiyye" (struck at Amasya); on the reverse, in Mongol script, one could read "Ghazan Mahmud". Hüsameddin writes that Ghazan Khan had gold and silver coins struck at the sultanic mint in Amasya, as is also clear from the Catalogue of Ancient Coins. The presence of a mint in a city was a sign of its administrative and economic importance; the closeness of Amasya to the Yeşilırmak valley and to the mines around Gümüş must have favoured this choice.

The monetary units of the Ilkhanid system were the dinar and the dirham. The value of the dinar varied with its gold content, and Ghazan tried to end this confusion by collecting the underweight coins. The famine prices in Amasya were also recorded in dirhams. In the famine of 718 AH (1318-19), under İşboğa Noyan, who governed Amasya, people were forced to eat even the flesh of dead animals and dogs, according to al-ʿAynī, and since this meat too had grown expensive they obtained money by selling their children. To prevent cheating in the transaction the government fixed the price of a boy at ten dirhams and of a girl at eight. In the earlier famine of 1286-87 even the flesh of cats, mice and dogs had grown scarce, and mutton, goat and beef had been placed under a fixed price. These records show that prices were set officially in Ilkhanid times, as much as they show the scale of the economic devastation.

The Political Meaning of the Coin

In the Middle Ages a coin was not only a means of payment but also a declaration of sovereignty; a ruler who had the sermon read and coins struck in his own name was considered to have proclaimed his independence in fact. Demirtaş, son of the Anatolian governor Emir Çoban, did so in 1322, but his attempt was soon suppressed; some silver coins bearing the names of Kayseri, Kırşehir, Aksaray and Samsun are thought to be his. After the death of Abu Said in 1335, as Eretna Bey established his own power in Anatolia, he also had coins struck in the names of the last khans, puppets of the Ilkhanid dynasty. Among the mints of the coins dated 738 (1337-38) in the name of Muhammad Khan is Amasya, listed together with Ankara, Bayburt, Erzurum, Kayseri, Kırşehir, Maden, Samsun, Sivas and Tokat. From 1338 to 1343 Eretna also agreed to have the sermon read and coins struck in the name of the Mamluk sultan. The Amasya mint thus appears as one of the centres that kept working while Mongol authority was breaking up; the names on the coinage are a silent record of the city's changing allegiances.

Trade Routes and the Place of Amasya

The Ilkhanid peace affected Anatolian trade in two directions. Security on the east-west axis allowed caravans to move more easily from the Mediterranean to China; Italian merchants founded colonies in Tabriz, and the Genoese government opened commercial consulates at Tabriz and Sivas in 1270 and 1300. In the same years Mongol pressure eliminated the Seljuk merchant class and eroded the purchasing power of the Anatolian population through taxation. Ahmet Tabakoğlu opposes Zeki Velidi Togan and Fuad Köprülü, who regarded the low prices and abundance of goods at the beginning of the fourteenth century as a sign of prosperity; in his view the low prices reflected a collapse of demand, a kind of depression. The difference between the two readings matters for Amasya as well, because to read the city's vitality in one direction only would be to say more than the sources permit.

The Ilkhanid trade network was centred on Tabriz, and the busiest lines passed through eastern Anatolia. The roads from Trabzon through Erzurum to Tabriz, and from Ayas through Kayseri and Sivas to Erzincan and Erzurum, were prominent, and many routes joined at Sivas and continued to Tabriz. Erzurum, Erzincan, Harput, Niksar, Sivas and Kayseri became important trade centres. The Mamluk-Ilkhanid conflict weakened the trade of southern ports such as Antalya and Alanya, and as the Genoese-controlled Straits came to the fore, Antalya and Sinop were left outside the main route. In this picture Amasya lay not directly on the main transit line but on the northern branches linked to it, that is, on the connection between Sivas and Tokat and the Black Sea coast at Samsun and Sinop. According to Hüsameddin, Sinop was the iqta of Pervane Süleyman Bey and was administered on his behalf by Emîneddîn Mikâ'îl Bey; the fact that the governorship of Amasya under Ghazan also covered Sinop shows that the city was administratively tied to the Black Sea coast. The sources at hand contain no separate customs revenue or merchant census for Amasya. The commercial character of the city can therefore be described only through indirect indicators drawn from its place in the regional economy.

From the work of Hamdullah Mustawfī, which gives the Ilkhanid budget for the year 1336, it emerges that the total tax revenue of Anatolia (Memâlik-i Rûm) amounted to 5,645 thousand dinars; the revenue of Konya and Sivas alone reached 1,385 thousand dinars, while the taxes of cities such as Erzurum, Erzincan, Tokat, Niksar, Akşehir, Diyarbakır and Kayseri rose to as much as 150 thousand dinars. No separate figure for Amasya was found in the sources consulted. The total tax revenue of Anatolia, about 27 million dinars before the Mongol invasion, had fallen afterwards to about a quarter of that, and the Risale-i Felekiyye, written in the 1350s, gives the figure of 3 million dinars. Hamdullah writes that under Ghazan the revenue of Iran rose from 17 million dinars to 21 million; a similar rise is thought to have occurred in Anatolia, but revenues never reached even half of the pre-Mongol level.

Ibn Battuta's Amasya and the Silver Mines

The most valuable source describing Amasya through a traveller's eyes in the Ilkhanid age is Ibn Battuta. In 1332-33 the traveller came to Amasya from Sivas and described the city as a place with a great river (the Yeşilırmak) running through its middle, surrounded by orchards and gardens, full of fruit and trees. This description confirms that the agricultural economy of the city rested on the gardens of the valley. Ibn Battuta then stayed at a Rifāʿī lodge in Sonisa and went on to a place called Gümüş. He describes Gümüş as large, well kept and crowded, famous for its silver mines; he records that steep mountains rise two days' distance away and that merchants come to the town from Iraq and Syria, and he spent three nights at the lodge of Akhī Majd al-Dīn. There he met the deputy of Eretna Bey and received travel money from him. Some scholars have taken this place to be Gümüşhane; but since the settlement history of Gümüşhane goes back only to the fifteenth century, the view that the place where silver was mined in Seljuk and beylik times is present-day Gümüşhacıköy, now part of Amasya, is considered more plausible. Hüsameddin too spoke of the Seljuk mint at Gümüş Pazarı and of the Darbhâne quarter; thus the mine, the mint and the merchants from Iraq and Syria meet in the same region.

Ibn Battuta's stays at Akhī lodges also shed light on the organised structure of the bazaar tradesmen. In Anatolia the Akhīs were at once a guild of craftsmen and an organisation that hosted travellers and kept order in the town; the traveller writes that in Kayseri this organisation ran the city when the ruler was absent. The lodge at Gümüş suggests that this tradesmen's order also operated around Amasya. It may be assumed that the craftsmen working in weaving, leather, metal and food production were organised within the same framework, but the sources give no detailed information by trade for the Ilkhanid age.

Endowments and the Hospital

Despite Mongol pressure, endowment institutions continued to function in Amasya and gave continuity to the city's economic life. The most important of them is the Hospital (Darüşşifa), built, according to the inscription on its door, in 708 AH (1308-09) in the time of Oljeitu Khan and his wife Ilduş (Yıldız) Khatun by Anber b. Abdullah, the Khatun's slave. The building follows a madrasa plan, with an open courtyard and two iwans; it has eleven cells, its portal is adorned with Seljuk stone carving, and a kneeling human figure on the keystone attracts attention. The endowment's income was rich; a large staff of administrator, physicians and their assistants, pharmacist, doorkeeper, launderer, cook and attendants worked on this income. The deed names Anber b. Abdullah as the founder. In old records the building is also called the Hospital of Alâeddin, of Alâeddin Ali and of Pervane Bey; Hüsameddin explains this by saying that the builders died before arranging the endowment and that Alâeddin Ali Pervane Bey drew up the deed. It is reported that Sabuncuoğlu Şerefeddin, one of the well-known physicians of the Ottoman period, worked in the building for fourteen years and wrote his work "Cerrahiyye-i İlhâniyye" there.

The Torumtay endowment also matters in this context. The endowment left the administration to the founder's grandson under the terms of the founder's deed, and according to Hüsameddin's records this office continued into the Ottoman period. A deed dated 701 AH shows that the endowments of a tomb in Amasya were arranged. The building and endowments of the Mevlevi lodge were arranged by Alâeddîn Ali Pervâne Bey in 714 AH (1314-15); the same records show that the Mevlevis had been present in Amasya since 675 AH. Endowments worked not only as religious and social institutions but also as property, shops and a source of income. No detailed documents exist for the full extent of endowment revenues, but these institutions were among the main arrangements that kept the city standing even under the weight of Mongol taxation.

Instability and the Economy After the Dynasty

The order set up after Ghazan's reforms did not last. Under Abu Said, measures and weights were regulated in some regions, but the tax burden did not lighten. The inscriptions of Abu Said's time at Ani and in the citadel of Ankara record that the amounts of qubchur and wheat set by the state were found excessive by the people, and that those who demanded unlawful tithes and qubchur were cursed. Though these documents do not belong to Amasya, they show that the same problems were being experienced in central and eastern Anatolia. It is reported that in some places people took refuge underground to protect themselves from tax collectors, and Armenian sources say that the population withdrew into the mountains. Hamdullah writes that the revenue of the province of Armenia fell from 2 million dinars to 390 thousand dinars in 1336. When the Ilkhanid centre collapsed with the death of Abu Said in 1335, the taxes and the coinage of Amasya passed into the hands of local powers.

Even so, the economic weight of the city did not vanish. The valley agriculture, the mines, the mint, the endowments and its position between the Black Sea and Sivas formed the foundation for Amasya's rise in later centuries as an Ottoman mint and sanjak centre. According to Hüsameddin, an official who served as mint director in 824 AH (1421) also struck coins at Amasya in the name of Yörgüç Pasha by the sultan's order. In this respect the Ilkhanid century should be read as an age of devastation and interruption, and also as a transitional age in which institutions were joined to one another.

Chronology

1243: The battle of Köse Dağ; the Seljuk state comes under Mongol tax obligations.

1256: The Ilkhanid state founded by Hülegü in Iran.

1277: Defeat at Elbistan; Abaka sends Shams al-Din Juwayni to organise the financial affairs of Anatolia.

1280-81 (679 AH): Nāṣir al-Dīn Muhammed Bey, grandson of Torumtay, becomes governor of Amasya and administrator of the Torumtay endowment.

1286-87 (685 AH): Famine; even the flesh of cats, mice and dogs grows scarce, and meat is placed under a fixed price.

1294: Paper money introduced under Gaikhatu; abandoned within two months.

1295-96: Ghazan Khan comes to the throne; according to Hüsameddin he abolishes the Seljuk sultanate and divides Anatolia into four parts, and the emirate of Amasya is given by tax farm to Azîzeddin Muhammed Bey.

1304: Ghazan's tax decree of 22 February.

1308-09 (708 AH): Construction of the Amasya Hospital.

1312: The sahib-i divan Lakuşi collects excessive taxes.

1318-19 (718 AH): Famine; the government sets prices following the sale of children.

1322: Demirtaş proclaims independence and strikes coins.

1332-33: Ibn Battuta's visit to Amasya and Gümüş.

1335: Death of Abu Said Bahadur Khan.

1337-38 (738 AH): Coins struck at Amasya in the name of Muhammad Khan.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Abdîzâde Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn, Amasya Tarihi (Vols. 1-4, 6-8; records of the Ilkhanid period).

Academic studies

  • Mehmet Çayırdağ, "Eretnalı Beyliğinin Paraları", Belleten, Vol. 64, No. 240 (2000). belleten.gov.tr
  • Erol Keleş, "İlhanlıların Anadolu'da Kurduğu Vergi Nizamı ve Neticeleri Hakkında Bir Değerlendirme", Türk Dünyası Araştırmaları, No. 244 (2020).
  • Murat Ali Yülek, Betül Gür, "Moğol İstilasının Anadolu Ekonomisine Etkileri", Stratejik ve Sosyal Araştırmalar Dergisi, 8/1 (2024).
  • Tahsin Koçyiğit, "İbn Battuta'nın Karadeniz Seyahati Üzerine Bazı Mülahazalar", Dinbilimleri Akademik Araştırma Dergisi, IX/4 (2009).

Other sources

  • Müjgân Cunbur, "Selçuklu ve Osmanlı Devirlerinde Kadınların Kurdukları Şifahaneler", Erdem, Vol. 3, No. 8 (1987).
  • "İlhanlılar" and "Gāzân Han" entries, TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi. islamansiklopedisi.org.tr

Online sources