A researcher who wants to understand Ottoman provincial government first asks how a sanjak was formed, who ran it, and what the state recorded about its lands and by what method. For Amasya the answer lies largely in the tahrir registers. In these books the Ottoman treasury listed taxpayers, villages, urban quarters, fields and sources of revenue one by one, and they remain the oldest and most orderly documents showing, in figures, the borders, districts and population of the sanjak of Amasya and how they changed over time. Amasya sits in a narrow valley opened by the Yeşilırmak, at a point where the roads linking inner Anatolia to the Black Sea coast cross, and from the day it entered Ottoman rule it served both as a sanjak seat and, for a long time, as the capital of an entire province. The presence of princes (şehzade) gave its administrative life additional weight, but what is discussed here is the sanjak's everyday administrative order and the registers that recorded it.

From Provincial Capital to Sanjak

Amasya entered the Ottoman administrative system in 1398, when Bayezid I (Yıldırım Bayezid) annexed the city. Its administration was left to his son Çelebi Mehmed. After the Battle of Ankara, in the turmoil of the Ottoman Interregnum, Çelebi Mehmed used Amasya as a base against his brothers, and by the time he restored the unity of the state the city had become the Ottomans' firm anchor in the northeast. After the conquest a sanjak of the same name was formed. It was an important administrative unit of the province of Rum and, in the early period, the province's seat as well. According to some compilations the seat of the province was first Tokat, then Amasya, and from 1526 Sivas; in other words, Amasya's weight as a provincial capital is an older fact than its weight as a sanjak.

According to the local account reflected in the governorship's records, in the years when Yörgüç Paşa was beylerbey (given as 1422 to 1435), Amasya was the center of a province made up of the sanjaks of Sivas, Tokat, Çorum and Samsun, and this broad region was then called the "Province of Rumiyye." The same records report that Yörgüç Paşa put down a Turkmen community known as the Kızıl Koca Oğulları, which had not entered the discipline of the order. It is known that during Yörgüç Paşa's Canik campaign in 1427-28 the Vezirköprü region passed definitively under Ottoman rule, and that the first survey of neighboring regions was carried out by his brother Hızır Paşa. Scholars of the registers think the first survey of Vezirköprü was probably also Hızır Paşa's, but no trace of that first register has survived.

In time the province of Rum covered a very wide area. At its largest it embraced the sanjaks of Sivas, Amasya, Tokat, Canik, Çorum, Bozok, Trabzon, Karahisar-ı Şarkî, Kemah, Bayburt and Malatya. As administrative difficulties grew, Karahisar-ı Şarkî, Kemah, Bayburt and Trabzon were attached to the province of Erzurum, and Malatya to that of Dulkadir. In the seventeenth century the province consisted of nine or ten sanjaks and covered the present provinces of Sivas, Amasya, Çorum, Samsun, Sinop, Yozgat and Tokat; its sanjaks are listed as Sivas, Amasya, Bozok, Divriği, Canik, Arapgir, Çorum, Tokat, Zile and Keskin. The province was abolished in 1864 by the Provincial Regulation (Teşkil-i Vilayet Nizamnamesi) and replaced by the vilayet of Sivas. The sanjak of Amasya continued in this new order as a unit attached to the vilayet of Sivas.

The Districts and Subdistricts of the Sanjak

The units of the sanjak did not stay the same from one century to the next. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the sanjak consisted of the central district of Amasya together with the districts of Lâdik and Merzifon. The central district of Amasya then had six subdistricts and 321 villages. By 1576-1577 the number of districts had risen to seven; Gümüş, Gedegra, Zeytun and Simre-i Lâdik were now also recorded as districts, while the district of Amasya kept its position. Evliya Çelebi says the sanjak had nine districts in the mid-seventeenth century. In documents of 1665 the number is eleven, and in those of 1671 it falls to ten. At the end of the nineteenth century the sanjak, attached to the vilayet of Sivas, consisted of eight districts: Amasya center, Merzifon, Vezirköprü, Osmancık, Gümüşhacıköy, Lâdik, Havza and Mecidözü.

One of the examples that show the internal order of the sanjak in greatest detail is the Vezirköprü region. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries this area was organized as two separate subdistricts or districts, Gedegra and Kocakayası, and both units remained attached to the sanjak of Amasya in later centuries. According to the table Mehmet Öz drew from the registers, in 1485 the region consisted of five subdistricts: Simre-i Taşan, Kabakoz, Gaziler Ovacığı, Göl and Zeytun. Of these, Simre-i Taşan and Kabakoz belonged to Gedegra, and Göl and Zeytun to Kocakayası. In the final register of 1576, Gedegra appears as consisting of the center, Kabakoz and Gaziler Ovacığı, while the other district is written under the name Zeytun. This change shows that the register scribes used the word "nahiye" both for a large unit and for the subdivisions of that unit; the Gedegra and Kocakayası "subdistricts" of the fifteenth century are called districts in the sixteenth. That this does not mean the district did not exist as an administrative unit in the fifteenth century can be seen from the register of 1485, which contains a record of judgeships for these two regions.

The same records point to a small inconsistency. In the summary register of about 1520, Gedegra and Kocakayası are shown attached to the sanjak of Canik rather than Amasya. The researcher interprets this either as a mistake or as a short practice lasting a few years, since neither before nor after does either district appear attached to any administrative unit other than Amasya. The stability of settlement in the Vezirköprü region is also striking. Between 1485 and 1576 the number of inhabited villages and communities in Gedegra stayed largely constant, the number of registered communities rose only from fourteen to twenty, and apart from the transfer of the eight villages of Gaziler Ovacığı to Gedegra in 1576, no marked break is visible. According to the registers, the sanjak of Amasya kept the same administrative lines for long stretches.

The Cadres of Sanjak Administration

At the head of the sanjak stood the sanjak governor (sanjak-bey). In the periods when princes served there, the office was filled by the prince, the lala (tutor-guardian) at his side, and the palace organization; after the princely sanjak ended, Amasya was governed by sanjak governors appointed from the center. That Ziyâ Paşa served briefly in the city as mutasarrıf at the end of the nineteenth century shows the last form of the office, which had in time become the mutasarrıflık. Beside the sanjak governor the castle had a warden (dizdar), a steward (kethüda) and fifty-seven guards; this staffing belongs to the early sixteenth century. Castle servants lived in the mud-brick houses inside the castle, and every morning and evening trumpets and drums were sounded toward the city.

A distinguishing feature of Ottoman provincial administration was that beside the military-administrative branch there was also a judicial-administrative one. In each district the kadı was the head of justice and civil administration; he carried out his duties through his own deputies and cooperated with the zaims and sipahis on matters of public order. Timar-holding sipahis went on campaign in wartime and in peacetime kept order in the villages and supervised the peasantry. Because this supervision sometimes turned into pressure on the peasants, the kadı's balancing role gained importance. Mehmet Öz notes that each of the districts of Gedegra and Kocakayası was organized as a zeamet, and that at the end of the fifteenth century Tâceddin Bey, the zaim of Gedegra, was a person of considerable influence. Although it is known that kadıs were not always upright, this example shows clearly that the Ottoman administration built the military and judicial branches in balance. The details of the Islamic court registers are the subject of a separate article.

Financial matters depended on registers coming from the center and on the provincial treasurers (defterdar). The revenues entered in the registers were collected by timar holders, waqf trustees and holders of mukataa; to which fief, person or institution taxes were assigned was determined by the survey. For this reason the tahrir also meant the distribution of military and financial authority within the sanjak, not merely a count.

What Tahrir Is

In the dictionary, tahrir means to write, to record, to enter in a register. As a term in Ottoman finance it denotes the surveys carried out to establish taxes and taxpayers by name, and the registers in which these surveys were recorded. In pre-industrial agrarian societies it is common for states to take censuses to determine their tax potential, but the Ottoman tahrir system holds a distinct place through its general scope and its detail. The oldest surviving document containing such a survey is the register of the sanjak of Arvanid dated 835 (1431). In the early registers the operation carried out in surveys after the first one is described as the revision of the laws and of the çift and bennâk records. The register prepared as the result of a new survey was called defter-i cedîd, the previous one defter-i atîk, and the one before that defter-i köhne.

The tahrir was directly tied to the timar system and was carried out only in the provinces and sanjaks where that system applied; in the sixteenth century these included provinces such as Rumeli, Anatolia, Rum, Erzurum, Karaman, Dulkadir, Diyarbekir, Aleppo, Damascus and Mosul. The sources generally say the survey should be repeated every thirty years, but the real intervals differed. The first survey made right after a conquest was often based on older records and so was not reliable, and was renewed after a few years. The accession of a new sultan was also treated as an occasion for general surveys; the survey of the beylerbeyliks of Rumeli, Anatolia and Rum in the first years of Mehmed II's reign (1454-1455) is an example. Country-wide surveys were made in the time of Süleyman the Magnificent and in the early years of Selim II. The last classical survey of the beylerbeylik of Rum dates from 982-984 (1574-1576), and the most detailed register (mufassal) of Amasya that we have is a product of that survey.

The documents state the purpose of the tahrir as the state's knowing where the subjects (reâyâ) lived and all the particulars of their work, the sources of their goods and produce, the incomes of timar holders, and the disputes between subjects and timar holders. In addition, the aims included preventing new practices contrary to the sharia and to law, knowing the number of households when the avârız tax was to be levied, and establishing the condition of the waqfs. The phrase most often repeated in the decrees sent to the provincial surveyors is that no person and no revenue-yielding source should be left out of the register.

How the Survey Was Carried Out

The team that was to carry out the survey consisted of an emin and a scribe who went to the sanjak with instructions of appointment from the center. The emin, also called the il yazıcısı or muharrir, was an official of high rank. In the fifteenth century experienced statesmen such as Timurtaş Bey, Umur Bey, Mihaloğlu Ali Bey, Tursun Bey and Baltaoğlu Süleyman Bey were assigned to this work, and in the sixteenth century names such as Celâlzâde Mustafa, a former chancellor (nişancı), and Ömer Bey, the sanjak governor of Trabzon, stand out. This list matches the particulars of the Amasya surveys as well. In the province of Rum the survey of 1455 was made by an emin named Umur Bey and that of 1485 by an emin named Tâceddin; the summary register of about 1520 was compiled by the provincial surveyor Mehmed bin İbrahim, the survey of about 1554 was carried out by Atai Bey, and the final survey of 1576 was made under the eminship of Ömer Bey, the sanjak governor of Trabzon.

The team set to work together with the kadıs and the fief holders or their deputies, and re-registered the taxpayers with a copy of the old register in hand. Those who had died since the previous survey were struck out, those who had come of age were added, and changes in marital status and physical condition were also noted. Persons and groups claiming exemption had to present their documents to the team. Revenues from produce were entered in the register as annual income, calculated as the average of the production and tax amounts of the three years preceding the record. The operation took one or two years under ordinary conditions and could be prolonged by problems that arose. The emin and scribes received two akçe from each household in return for their work. In the end the drafts were copied clean in two copies, one remaining in the defterhane and the other being sent to the beylerbeylik concerned.

The role of local knowledge was also important. In the survey of the administrative units called divan or bölük, formed by the union of ten to fifteen villages in the beylerbeylik of Rum, the information given by managers such as the divanbaşı and kethüda, who were at the same time fief holders, was taken as the basis. During the survey disputes sometimes broke out between the team and the fief holders; it is also understood that timar holders dissatisfied with survey results had a share in spreading the revolts of seemingly religious character that arose in the time of Bayezid II. Peasants hid the true yield, fled their villages to avoid being registered, and timar holders tried to hide their subjects from the survey.

The Registers of Amasya

The tahrir records of the sanjak of Amasya can be gathered into three groups. The first are the detailed registers (mufassal), in which records are kept by name at the level of village and quarter. The second are the summary registers (icmal), which give the names of fief holders and their income totals in condensed form. The third are the waqf registers (evkaf), which contain the detail of settlements and revenues set aside as waqf. Part of the registers is today in the Kuyûd-ı Kadîme Archive of the General Directorate of Land Registry and Cadastre; the detailed registers of the livâ of Amasya are cited there under numbers 26, 30 and 34, and because they cover wide regions they run to several volumes. Registers numbered 10, 12 and 14 also exist for Sivas and Tokat. In some provinces, such as the beylerbeylik of Rum, each sanjak did not have a separate kanunnâme, so the text of the kanunnâme stands at the head of the register of the central sanjak.

Register no. 387, called the muhasebe-i vilayet register, dated 1530 but probably reflecting the surveys of the 1520s, gathers the provinces of Karaman and Rum in a single summary frame. In its second volume are Amasya, Çorum, Sivas, Tokat, Niksar, Karahisar-ı Şarkî, Canik, Trabzon and other livâs. Summary registers of this kind, belonging to the early years of Süleyman, were prepared to learn the general condition of the empire before the "German campaign." The 1525 data on Amasya's quarters and population also come from this register. The detailed register of the livâ of Amasya for 1576 is in two volumes, and the section devoted to the Vezirköprü region is in the second. Adnan Gürbüz's master's thesis on the waqfs of the district of Amasya according to the 1576 Defter-i Evkaf-ı Rum, and his doctoral thesis on the sanjak of Amasya in the sixteenth century within the framework of land-waqf relations, are the most comprehensive treatments of these registers for Amasya in particular. Fuat Er's thesis on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Amasya and Ronald Jennings's article comparing urban population in Anatolian cities are among the studies that assess Amasya's urban data together with Kayseri, Karaman, Trabzon and Erzurum.

The Layout of a Detailed Register

The classical layout of the detailed registers is as follows. At the head stand a preface and, usually, the sanjak's kanunnâme. Then, beginning with the central district, the districts and subdistricts that make up the sanjak are listed. In a district the city or town in the central position, the "nefs," is written first; the quarters of the city, the names, father's names and occupations of the adult men registered in them are given. The adult population is given by married and unmarried status. After the quarters are written, the revenue of the city and the elements that compose it are listed; mukataas such as the market, dye-house, boza-house, weigh-house, customs, and in port cities the landing, are among them. Then come the villages. For each village its name, how its revenue was assigned (timar, zeamet, has, waqf or freehold), the adult men in the village, their father's names and their status are written. Muslim subjects are recorded as çift, nim çift, ekinlü bennâk and caba bennâk according to the amount of land they hold, and as hâne and mücerret according to whether they are married. Non-Muslims are mostly written by the hâne and mücerret distinction; from the middle of the sixteenth century a tax called ispence was imposed on them in place of the çift tax. After the individuals come farmsteads, plots and mezraas, then the total revenue of the village and the taxes composing it: the çift tax, ispence, bennâk and mücerred dues, tithes on wheat, barley, cotton, rice, fruit, vineyards, flax, hemp and honey, and occasional taxes (ârızî) such as those on crime and homicide and on marriage.

A notable detail of this layout is that how much each peasant farmer would pay was not entered in the register. Status as çift, bennâk or caba implied a fixed due and so was not stated separately, but the taxes on production, as the total of a village, were shown without saying from whom how much would be taken. These figures reflect estimated totals and do not show what was actually collected; for taxes on production the basis is the average production of the three years before the survey. The survey team determined this quantity, but the akçe value and the total revenue figures of the villages were fixed at the center. The register of the sanjak of Amasya contains a separate category for widows, which is called "havâtîn-i tul."

The City of Amasya in the Registers

The recording of Amasya as a city gives the most detailed data of the sanjak. According to records of 1525 the city had fifty-five quarters, five of them non-Muslim, and a population of about eight thousand, of whom about two thousand were non-Muslim. At the end of the sixteenth century the number of quarters was again fifty-five, but the number of non-Muslim quarters had risen to six, the total population to ten thousand, and the non-Muslim population had fallen to about 1,500. This result was drawn from the register of 1576. Evliya Çelebi writes that in the seventeenth century the city had fifty-three quarters, forty-eight Muslim and five non-Muslim, and a population of five thousand households, corresponding to about twenty thousand people. In the nineteenth century the population was between twenty-five and thirty thousand and the quarters numbered about thirty-six. The population of the city rose over the centuries, but physical growth remained limited. The fact that the city lies in a narrow valley enclosed by high cliffs on both sides bears a large share of the explanation.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century the city had nine mosques, ten madrasas, four lodges (zaviye), six soup kitchens (imaret) and fifteen baths. In about the same years there were also a dye-house, a candle-house and a mint. In the ten months of 1554-1555 the quantity of silk goods entering the city through official channels and weighed reached 10,632 lodra, about fifteen tons; this figure shows the weight of silk and of transit trade on the Iran-Bursa road in the revenue structure of the sanjak seat. A foreign traveler who visited the city in the same period wrote that most houses were two-story and of mud brick, stacked as if on top of one another, that there was one wooden and three stone bridges over the Yeşilırmak, and that the city had eleven mosques. These details agree with the register figures, because the two kinds of source complement each other.

Village Society: Gedegra and Kocakayası

One of the examples that make the tahrir registers most readable is the Vezirköprü study that compares the surveys of 1485, 1520 and 1576 for the districts of Gedegra and Kocakayası in the sanjak of Amasya. Of the registered population, 92 percent in 1485 and 97-98 percent in 1520 and 1576 were written as subjects (raiyyet); this ratio shows that the registers were kept essentially for peasant taxpayers. In the province of Rum a çiftlik was reckoned as 80 dönüm on good land, 100 on middling land and 130 on poor land; a subject holding a full çift paid 57 akçe of çift tax. Those holding half a çift were written as nim, those with less than half as ekinlü bennâk, and those with no land at all as caba bennâk. The share taken from agricultural produce was around twenty percent.

These data also show change over two centuries. The number of registered subjects in Gedegra rose from 2,388 in 1485 to 8,405 in 1576, and in Kocakayası from 1,044 to 3,125. Most of this increase comes from those recorded as unmarried; in Gedegra the number of mücerred rose from 241 to 1,665, and the share of the unmarried among subjects rose from 21 percent to 31-32 percent and then, in 1576, above 50 percent. As M. A. Cook has pointed out, both a change in the recording criterion and a population rise that made marriage harder may have played a part. The number of caba rose from 604 to 2,906 in Gedegra and from 206 to 1,099 in Kocakayası, while the number of çift fell from 173 to 119 in Gedegra. This gives an impression of landlessness, but because the caba entry often denotes persons working the same land together with their brothers, the conclusion is that the distribution of land was more egalitarian than it is supposed.

The position of the Etrâkiye communities of nomadic origin is distinct. In the district of Gedegra 386 persons were written under this name in 1485; the number fell to 292 in 1520 and rose to 539 in 1576, but their share of the general population dropped from 15 percent to 6 percent. The taxes of the Etrâkiye were divided between the timar holder and the Etrâkiye holder: of the 57 akçe of çift tax, 27 akçe went to the Etrâkiye holder, 15 akçe to the landholder and 15 akçe to the holder of the deputyship share (niyâbet). The müsellems, who in the fifteenth century gave auxiliary military service and were exempt from tax, and most of the exempt groups were reduced to subject status at the beginning of the sixteenth century; the number of müsellems in Gedegra rose from 69 in 1485 to 249 in 1576, and they made up about three percent of the rural population.

Limits in Reading the Registers

One should not suppose that the tahrir registers say everything. They are a record of the tax population, not a census; military groups in the city, the waqf subjects in some regions and certain taxes may not be entered. Erhan Afyoncu, listing the problems in studies based on the registers, draws attention to scribes' errors of addition and says that village and quarter populations should be counted one by one rather than trusting the totals in the register. The same article also shows that terms carry different meanings by region: the term caba is used in the province of Karaman for unmarried adult men, while in the province of Rum it is used for married subjects who hold no land. This difference is particularly important so that the unmarried population is not miscalculated when the Amasya registers are read. Because village names changed over time or disappeared, the present location of most settlements in the registers has not been determined; in studies based on registers in Turkey the rate of locating settlements has stayed between 25 and 40 percent, though a researcher working with fieldwork and maps was able to raise this rate to 85 percent for Karaman. Mehmet Öz likewise notes that for the Vezirköprü region the location of more than half of the villages in the registers cannot be established.

For this reason the tahrir registers are not sufficient on their own for the administrative and economic history of the sanjak. Records such as the mühimme, ruûs, timar ruznâmçe and finance ruznâmçe registers complete the picture of the sanjak's administrative cadre, banditry, disputes between the people and officials, and changes in administrative structure. It is also necessary to look at the registers of neighboring sanjaks, because population or waqf information belonging to one district may have been written in the register of another. For Amasya, reading the Sivas and Tokat registers together is important for this reason.

From Tahrir to Avârız Registers

At the end of the sixteenth century, wars on two fronts, the Celâlî revolts within, the rising importance of soldiers using firearms and the need to raise the revenue of the central treasury caused the timar system to lose its former weight. The classical tahrir method was thus abandoned and avârız and cizye surveys took its place. The sanjak of Amasya was among the regions that went through this transformation. Celâlî bands are known to have moved mostly in the Yeşilırmak basin, in which Amasya lies; the followers of Kara Yazıcı Abdülhalîm of Urfa, who had also served as sanjak governor of Amasya, burned the city in 1603, and the notables of the city were forced to take refuge with their wealth in the royal tombs. Evliya Çelebi likewise writes that the city's rich kept their valuables in the castle against Celâlî attacks.

Avârız registers are kept on a household basis and record adult male household heads able to pay avârız and, in some cases, widows. Those left out of the household because of old age, poverty or illness, and those exempt from tax in return for certain services, are also mentioned separately. In the nineteenth century, broad population surveys recording the male population by age and appearance were made for the new army set up by Mahmud II, and this practice is regarded as the beginning of modern censuses. After the Tanzimat, temettuât registers containing surveys of property and wealth were prepared.

The Administrative End of the Princely Sanjak

The sources give different dates for when Amasya lost its status as a princely sanjak. According to the governorship's sources, the city was removed from the princely (şehzade, çelebi sultan) sanjak status after Prince Bayezid fled to Iran in 1559, and no prince served there afterward. The TDV Islamic Encyclopedia, on the other hand, says that after the killing of Prince Mustafa the princely sanjaks closer to Istanbul grew in importance, that Amasya, being far from the capital, lost this character from the middle of the sixteenth century, and that Manisa came forward as the sole princely sanjak. The two accounts do not conflict; one describes the end of the process and the other its beginning. The detail of this long transformation is treated in a separate article.

Chronology

1398: Bayezid I annexes Amasya to Ottoman lands and leaves its administration to his son Çelebi Mehmed.

1427-1428: During Yörgüç Paşa's Canik campaign the Vezirköprü region passes definitively under Ottoman rule.

1431: The register of the sanjak of Arvanid, containing the oldest surviving Ottoman survey record, is drawn up.

1454-1455: In the first years of Mehmed II's reign a general survey of the beylerbeyliks of Rumeli, Anatolia and Rum is made; in the province of Rum the emin is Umur Bey.

1485: Survey of the emin Tâceddin. Gedegra and Kocakayası appear in this register as five subdistricts.

About 1520: The summary register of the provincial surveyor Mehmed bin İbrahim is prepared; the muhasebe-i vilayet register of 1530 for Karaman and Rum reflects these surveys.

1525: The city of Amasya is recorded with fifty-five quarters (five non-Muslim) and a population of about 8,000.

1554-1555: The quantity of silk goods entering the city within ten months is recorded as 10,632 lodra.

1576: The last classical survey of the province of Rum and the detailed register of the livâ of Amasya. The city is written with fifty-five quarters (six non-Muslim) and a population of about 10,000; the sanjak has seven districts.

1603: The men of Kara Yazıcı Abdülhalîm burn Amasya.

1864: The province of Rum is abolished and the vilayet of Sivas is established in its place.

Sources

Primary sources

Academic studies

Official sources

Online sources