For a long stretch of world economic history silk served as a measure of wealth, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when it was regarded as an alternative to silver, it came to be called "white gold." Within the Ottoman lands the city most often associated with this precious commodity is Bursa, yet Amasya was one of the important links in the Anatolian silk chain. The city's relationship with silk was not confined to weaving or mulberry orchards. Silk arriving from Iran was weighed, recorded and taxed in Amasya, and the revenue from these operations flowed to the treasury through fiscal units known as mukataas. In time the foreign silk passing over the scale gave way to cocoons from worms fed in the city's own mulberry groves, and the tax system kept pace with this change, acquiring new items that ran from the mizan levy to the silk tithe and from customs to a duty on silkworm eggs.

This article deals with the tax, customs and tax-farm arrangements of silk; for the general history of sericulture, looms and fabrics in Amasya, see History of Sericulture and Weaving Production in Amasya.

The Iranian Silk Route and Amasya's Position

Most of the silk processed in Anatolia in the Ottoman period came from Mazandaran, Gilan and Shirvan, south of the Caspian Sea. A market was held first at Sultaniyya and later at Tabriz, and the great merchants and caravans made for these places. Under the Ilkhanids, caravans reached Konya and Istanbul by way of Sultaniyya, Erzurum, Erzincan and Sivas. After the founding of the Ottoman state the shorter Erzurum, Erzincan, Tokat, Amasya and Bursa route came to be preferred, while the sea route between Trabzon and Istanbul, once used more often, was almost abandoned. This shift was decisive for Amasya, because the city lay directly on the road. The direction of Ottoman conquests under Bayezid the Thunderbolt, along the silk roads toward Amasya, Tokat and Erzincan in the north and Malatya in the south, is also linked to the fiscal importance of this region.

Researchers list several factors that made Amasya, after Bursa, a city sought after for its silk: its position on the Iranian trade route, its status as a princely sanjak, its proximity to the Black Sea trading ports, and a climate suited to raising silkworms. The status of a princely seat carried more than political weight. In a city where a court was established, demand for cloth, caftans and ceremonial garments remained constant. The Ottoman palace was one of the heaviest consumers of silk, and the silk supplied by the superintendent of the imperial expenditures (hassa harc emini) was used for the clothing of palace members and for ceremonial robes.

Hüsnü Yücekaya's study covering the years 1750 to 1900 stresses that Amasya's earliest role in Ottoman silk production was that of an entrepôt for Iranian silk, a depot city where goods were collected and redistributed. According to Yücekaya, from the beginning until the middle of the eighteenth century Amasya dealt almost entirely in silk brought from Iran, and until the start of the nineteenth century the documents reaching the archives concern almost nothing but the mizan-ı harir tax. Caravans leaving Tabriz reached Tokat by way of Erzurum and Erzincan and then Amasya, and from there the goods were sent either to Bursa or to the Black Sea ports. The figures given for caravans bound for Bursa suggest the scale of this traffic. A caravan consisted of three to four hundred animals and carried an average of two hundred loads of silk. Since one load was roughly 154 kilograms, the goods carried by a single caravan could exceed thirty tons. It should be remembered that the load was not a fixed measure: because valuable goods such as silk were packed in special bales it stayed relatively standard, yet a load of silk was reckoned at about 155.86 kilograms in Bursa and about 161.5 in Erzincan. This volume helps explain why the customs and weighing arrangements at every stop along the route were taken so seriously.

The Silk Scale and the Silk Customs

In Ottoman financial records the customs duty levied on silk appears as "harir customs" or "mizan-ı harir." Mizan means a balance or scale and harir means silk, so mizan-ı harir denotes the arrangement under which silk was weighed on an official scale and a levy was charged on the basis of that weighing. Silk could not change hands casually. It was weighed at designated centers under the supervision of officials appointed by the state, the result was recorded, and the tax was collected according to that record. The practice was a means of control that entered the true quantity of goods into the treasury registers. As the Bursa case shows, silk remained under the supervision of the mizan official until it was woven into cloth on the loom, under the official of the dyehouse mukataa while it was being dyed, and under the market inspector or the stamp officials when the woven cloth was sold. Because the mizan levy was charged by weight, some craftsmen tried to pay less by working their thread below the prescribed standards, and the state had to take further measures against such evasions.

The most striking figure for Amasya comes from the middle of the sixteenth century. According to an entry in the Maliyeden Müdevver registers, in the ten months of 1554-1555 the quantity of silk goods that entered the city by official channels and was weighed reached 10,632 lodras, roughly fifteen tons. In the same period the city had a dyehouse, a candle house and a mint, and silk weaving was widely practiced. Because Amasya lay on the road between Azerbaijan and Bursa, it had become an important market for Iranian silks. The period in question coincides with the years when Süleyman the Magnificent was in Amasya and the 1555 treaty with Iran was signed; silk trade and eastern frontier policy were two faces of the same road. It is also reported that the mizan-ı harir mukataa of Amasya was fixed at 40,000 akçe in 1552.

The meaning of these figures becomes clearer when one considers how profitable a tax item silk was. By taxing the earnings of trade along the Silk Road, the Ottoman administration met the needs of both the central treasury and the provincial administrations. It has been calculated that the silk trade with Iran contributed about seventy thousand gold pieces a year to the treasury. Silk and the silk trade fed the treasury continuously, and the palace and the wealthy classes created great demand for it. The state therefore treated control of the silk route as a serious political priority; it is accepted that economic calculations based on silk were also taken into account when, in the sixteenth century, the domination of Tabriz and close relations with Gilan and Shirvan were planned.

How the Tariff Worked

No detailed tariff specific to Amasya survives in the sources available. The records of comparable centers, however, show how the tax system worked. In Bursa, under a law of 1570, a tax of 104 akçe was set on every thirty lidras, about 9.6 kilograms, of raw silk, shared equally between buyer and seller at 52 akçe each. In addition, a brokerage fee of one gold piece, or sixty akçe, was charged per load, and a further six kuruş of yasakkiyye was collected on each load of raw silk. Because a load of raw silk sold for an average of 38,500 akçe, the total tax burden had reached 6.7 percent of the value of the goods by 1589. To these was added the zarar-ı kassabiyye, a levy of one percent on heavily traded goods such as silk, mohair and morocco leather, intended to support the janissaries' meat expenses. This tax was collected only from Ottoman merchants, and foreign merchants were exempt from it. In the eighteenth century the mizan officials in Bursa took 20 akçe on every vukiyye, about 1.2 kilograms, of raw silk, and 3 akçe on every vukiyye of the waste silk known as "kamçıbaşı."

The tariff of the Erzurum customs shows the same logic in another form. In this system, which rested on ad valorem principles according to Ottoman customs practice, specific tariffs fixed according to local conditions were applied to each commodity. For every batman of silk arriving from Iran, one riyali kuruş, that is eighty akçe, was charged as customs. Silk loads to be sold in the Erzurum market were opened and weighed by the ihtisab officials, and an ihtisab fee of forty akçe per batman was taken. From silk whose customs duty had been paid, a further twenty akçe per batman was owed as kassabiye tax. There were also levies with distinct names: the amediye, charged on every kind of goods arriving at customs; the reftiye, on goods forwarded elsewhere; the masdariyye, on goods consumed locally; and the mürûriye, on goods that came from one foreign country and passed on to another. The rates of these items are not known individually for Amasya, but the city's position on the same silk route suggests that a similar arrangement of items operated there.

The Silk Levy within the Mukataa System

In the Ottoman fiscal order a mukataa was a source of revenue whose geographical limits, types of tax and amounts had been fixed in advance. A mukataa could consist of a single tax item or be built up from several. Most mukataas were run through tax farming, that is, they were handed to a tax farmer for a stipulated sum. For the treasury, mukataa revenues were stable and more or less predictable, and they therefore held an important place in the budget. Care was also taken that the cost of collection should be small. As the variety of taxes within a mukataa increased, the area it covered narrowed, while a mukataa containing a single tax item extended over a wide area.

The silk weighing levy is a good example of this rule. In Ottoman fiscal organization the mukataa for the mizan levy on silk was a single-item, large mukataa covering the principal centers of silk production and consumption: Istanbul, Bursa, Izmir, Edirne and Salonica. By contrast, the mizan levy mukataas of Konya and Cyprus were reduced to narrower regions and were therefore enriched with other tax items such as bac, stamp duty, candle-house and dyehouse revenues. The Erzurum customs was likewise run as a single fiscal unit together with secondary mukataas in its district such as the ihtisab, the kassabiyye, the mint, the dyehouse and the bayt al-mal. No document showing the full scope of the mukataa in Amasya is available to us. That the dyehouse, candle house and mint of the city are mentioned together suggests that its revenues may have been gathered in a similar bundle of items, but this is an inference. That records of the late eighteenth century show the Amasya silk mukataa being farmed out together with its "dependent mukataas," and that in the early nineteenth century the mizan-ı harir and stamp-duty mukataas were entrusted to the same official, shows that such a bundle did exist, at least for that period.

The Bursa example shows how closely mukataa revenues were bound up with politics. The annual revenue of the Bursa mizan-ı harir mukataa fell from 9,000,000 akçe in 1598 to 5,200,000 akçe in 1606, and the cause of the decline was the Ottoman-Iranian war that began in 1603. Before the war, in 1614, the Erzurum customs brought in 4,500,000 akçe a year. Until the Treaty of Qasr-i Shirin, signed in 1639, the Ottoman-Safavid struggle continued largely around control of the Silk Road. The silk revenues of cities along the route can be expected to have been affected by these fluctuations of war and peace.

War, Prohibition and Prices

Because Iranian silk was both a commodity and a political lever, wars between the two states could interrupt the working of the weighing system. Selim I imposed an embargo on Iranian goods in order to weaken the shah. The measure failed to produce the expected result, since merchants turned to Aleppo and Iskenderun instead of Bursa. The sultan then ordered the confiscation of all caravans carrying Iranian goods; in Bursa Iranian goods were registered by quantity and owner and seized, and the buying and selling of Iranian silk was forbidden. When Süleyman came to the throne he lifted the prohibitions and returned the confiscated goods to their owners, though the ban on importing Iranian silk continued for some time longer. Many merchants abandoned the trade, prices rose, and Armenian merchants began to control the market. Under these conditions the government turned to encouraging silk production within the country.

Prices show this fragility plainly. Silk, which in the first half of the sixteenth century averaged 60 to 65 akçe in Bursa, jumped to 135 to 150 akçe because of the war with Iran in 1581. The average annual silk production of Iran in the late sixteenth century is reckoned at 22,000 loads, of which about 3,000 loads were exported to Anatolia. In the peace treaty of 1590 the shah was required to send 200 loads of silk each year, a condition later reduced to 100 loads. Shah Abbas's attempt in 1610 to sell silk to Europe by way of the Indian Ocean was also a serious threat to the Ottoman treasury. Silk was thus a subject of bargaining at the diplomatic table as much as on the scale where it was weighed.

Between 1578 and 1618 Foça and Izmir emerged as alternative markets, especially for Iranian and European merchants who wished to avoid the taxes in Bursa. The Ottoman administration answered by doubling the mizan levy on silk that did not pass through Bursa and by applying customs to all goods crossing its territory. The weighing system thus ceased to be only a means of collecting tax and became an instrument for directing trade routes. In the eighteenth century the busiest silk road was the Erzurum, Tokat and Izmir route. In the same century documents frequently state that, because of the long turmoil in Iran, the silk coming from there had greatly diminished, and the fluctuations in the annual price of the Bursa mizan mukataa are explained by this decline.

The Amasya Silk Mukataa in the Age of the Mâlikâne

At the end of the seventeenth century the way mukataas were run underwent a fundamental change. Under the mâlikâne system introduced in 1695, the annual tax a mukataa owed the treasury was fixed in advance, and bidding took place not on that amount but on a down payment called the "muaccele." Whoever paid the highest muaccele held the mukataa for life and paid the annual tax, together with a fee averaging about ten percent, in three instalments; on his death the mukataa was declared "mahlûl," vacant, and put up for sale again. The idea behind the system was that a holder who knew the mukataa would remain his as long as he lived would look after production and try to raise the revenue. The practice spread quickly; although it was temporarily abolished in 1716 everywhere except the provinces of Damascus, Aleppo and Diyarbekir, it expanded again after a short interval, and in the eighteenth century almost all mukataas became mâlikânes.

The silk scale did not escape this transformation. The great mizan-ı harir mukataa covering Bursa, Istanbul, Izmir, Salonica and Edirne was granted as a mâlikâne in the eighteenth century, its annual price fluctuating between 20,000 and 25,000 kuruş. The holder of a mâlikâne often did not run it himself but farmed it out to someone else year by year: in 1747 Kalemzâde Hacı Mustafa Efendi, who held the Bursa mizan, is known to have let it for one year to Abdüşşükûr Mustafa Ağa for 15,000 kuruş. That this contract left the tax farmer the levy on only the first twenty-five loads of silk coming from Iran shows that the real revenue of the Bursa mizan now came from local production; the decrees sent from the capital state plainly that very little silk came from Persia and that the revenue of the mukataa depended on "harîr-i şehrî," the silk produced in the city.

A decree that Hüsameddin quotes from the Amasya court registers shows that the Amasya mizan-ı harir mukataa was likewise run as a mâlikâne. According to it, from the beginning of the year 1161 [1748] the "mizan-ı harir mukataa of Amasya and its dependencies" was held as a mâlikâne by the grand vizier Seyyid Abdullah Pasha together with the former agha of the sipahis Abdî Ağa, Hacı Hüseyin Ağa and Ebûbekir Ağa. The holders sent Halil Ağa to Amasya to collect the levies, but Bâkîoğlu Hâfız, Hacı Bilâl, Molla Mustafa the deputy from Yeniceli, the former town steward Hacı Hüseyin and Hacı Ali obstructed the collection and took and spent the levies themselves. A decree dated 13 Safer 1161 [February 1748] ordered the governor of Sivas and the governor and kadı of Amasya to recover the money from them in accordance with the sharia. Boynueğri Abdullah Pasha, the holder of the mukataa, was himself from Amasya; Hüsameddin notes separately that it is remarkable that all the tax farmers named were Amasyans. The episode shows that silk revenue was a matter of contention between the great mâlikâne holders in Istanbul on the one hand and the town notables who wanted to keep collection in their own hands on the other.

The accounts of the following decades reveal that the value of the mukataa fell rapidly. An account statement dated 1173 [1759-60] shows the total revenue of the Amasya mizan-ı harir mukataa, under the responsibility of Abdurrahman Ağa and Ebûbekir Ağa, for the four and a half years from 1755 to 1759 as 10,620 akçe, an average of about 2,360 akçe a year. In court register no. 62 of Amasya, covering 1785-1786, the mukataa was awarded to a man named İbrahim, and when he failed to pay for the year 1786 it was farmed out to someone else. Afterwards the Amasya silk mukataa and its dependent mukataas were given to Abdullah Râşid, İsmail, Hüseyin and Mustafa for an annual price of one load of silk plus a cash sum of a few thousand akçe; in Yücekaya's article the cash portion appears in one place as 9,400 and elsewhere as 1,400 or 1,460 akçe. Whichever figure is taken, these sums are very small beside the 40,000 akçe fixed in the mid-sixteenth century. Taking the intervening inflation into account as well, Yücekaya concludes that the mizan revenue fell steeply over thirty years and attributes this to local cocoon production reducing the importance of silk brought from outside.

A document dated 1222 [1807] also shows the geographical scope of the mukataa. According to it, the dependencies of the Amasya mizan-ı harir mukataa were the sanjaks of Amasya, Canik, Sivas and Tokat and the districts attached to them; the mizan levy was to be taken on silk produced in these regions and on silk arriving from outside without a permit. That local silk and silk from outside are mentioned together in the same document for the first time suggests that the tax item now rested less on the weighing of Iranian silk than on the region's own production. Silk arriving without a permit is thought to have been imported silk that people sought to keep out of the tax. Yücekaya considers that the places listed as dependencies formed Amasya's silk-producing hinterland; on this reading the city was the fiscal center where the silk tax of a region stretching from the Black Sea coast to Sivas was collected.

The Mizan Officials

In periods when collection was not in the hands of mâlikâne holders or tax farmers, the state appointed an official (emin) to the mukataa. Hüsameddin names two men who held this post. Köprülüzâde Seyyid Hacı Râşid Ahmed Bey, a descendant of Köprülü Mehmed Pasha born in Köprü, was trained in the offices of the Sublime Porte and in Cemaziyelahir 1223 [1808], in the days of Mahmud II's accession, was sent out as "official of the Amasya mizan-ı harir and stamp-duty mukataas"; he lived for about ten years now in Köprü, now in Amasya. Kahvecizâde Râşid Mehmed Efendi of Amasya, trained in the correspondence office of the finance department, returned to his hometown in 1245 [1829-30] as official of the Amasya mizan-ı harir, held the post for about four years and left for Istanbul in 1249 [1833-34]; after serving as secretary of the Dâr-ı Şûrâ and chief secretary of the imperial army, he governed the sanjak of Amasya as kaymakam for more than a year from 1259 [1843].

These two appointments show that the mizan-ı harir levy survived in Amasya as a separate revenue unit in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Yücekaya also states that archival records on the Amasya mizan-ı harir almost cease after 1807 and that the last document dates from 1849-1850. The two pieces of information do not contradict each other; the thinning of the records probably points less to the sudden disappearance of the institution than to a transitional period in which a tax item of declining importance continued to be administered by an appointed official, but this is an interpretation.

From the Scale to the Tithe: Silk Taxes in the Nineteenth Century

The decline of the mizan levy did not mean that silk lost its importance for the treasury; the tax simply changed form. A document dated 1246 [1830] states that silk was the chief livelihood of most of the people of Amasya. The same document objects to the taxes being taken and argues that, as in the Bursa market inspectorate, a stamp should be applied and one para per kuruş collected for military expenses. Yücekaya sees in this objection the traces of an established silk market resting on tax rates with fixed limits accepted by the producers; it is notable that Bursa is held up as the model here too.

In the following years the taxes taken on silk were collected under the names of customs and tithe. In 1260 [1844] the Amasya customs and the silk tithe dues, together with the market-inspection and goods-customs dues of Tokat, were farmed out to Mehmed Pasha, governor of Sivas, for 620,000 kuruş. Yücekaya calculates that even if only a third of this sum were silk dues, one could speak of a silk tithe of at least 200,000 kuruş, and, since the tithe was taken at a rate of one tenth, of cocoon production worth two million kuruş; this is an estimate, and he himself gives the figures as the lowest possibility. In the same year it was decided to double the customs duty on raw silk produced in Amasya, but because the merchants were harmed the measure was withdrawn and the old rate restored. That this document speaks only of silk produced in Amasya and makes no reference at all to the mizan tax on Iranian silk shows how far the transformation had gone.

Other documents show that the state ranked Amasya alongside Bursa in terms of silk revenue. A record dated 1269 [1853] mentions the silk tithe and customs of Bursa and Amasya together. Documents from 1278 [1861] refer to silk and cocoons regularly brought to Amasya from Sivas, Harput, Diyarbakır and Mosul, and in the same year to the "tohum-ı harir rüsumu," the duty on silkworm eggs, of the sanjak of Amasya. That a separate levy was placed on silkworm eggs shows that raising silkworms had become a branch of business in its own right. After this period Iranian merchants or Iranian silk hardly appear in the documents; the expression "Acem harîri," Persian silk, common in eighteenth-century records, gives way to silk "produced" in and around Amasya.

Foreign observers give varying figures for the size of the production on which these taxes rested. 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. William John Hamilton, who came in the 1840s, puts annual production at over fifty thousand okka, that is more than sixty-four tons, and says that it sold at 120 kuruş the okka. Another estimate quoted from Tchihatcheff gives twenty-eight tons for the city of Amasya alone. In the 1860s Mordtmann reports that 20,000 to 25,000 kilograms of raw silk were produced each year in and around Amasya, rising to about 30,000 kilograms in good years. The differences between the figures may stem from uncertainty about units of measure and the area covered; all of them nevertheless agree that a considerable production lay behind the collection of tithe and customs.

From Entrepôt to Production Center

In time Amasya ceased to be merely a city that passed on Iranian silk. Its mild climate and the mulberry groves of the Yeşilırmak valley were well suited to raising silkworms. Studies note that in the sixteenth century the city was known for its silk fabrics, that it began its own silk production when Iranian silk was banned, and that in the nineteenth century it drew the attention of European merchants. In this period Amasya was an important center that produced and exported both silk and silkworm eggs. That in the second half of the sixteenth century it was named among the few select cities where silk fabrics fit to be presented to the palace were woven also indicates the level of local production. Hüsameddin relates that in the seventeenth century the city had tanneries, cloth looms and workshops for gold and silver thread, and that a weaver's loom stood in almost every house; when Murad IV came to Amasya in 1045 [1635-36], bolts of Amasya cloth and morocco leather were presented to him as gifts. The author also praises the Amasya vineyards and silkworm houses that grew the raw material for these precious gifts.

The fiscal side of this transformation can be traced in a change in the records. Yücekaya notes that from the last quarter of the eighteenth century onward, tax records concerning local silk production are mentioned more often than records of the mizan-ı harir. From the middle of the century, records of mulberry orchards and silkworm houses also grow denser. In the register for 1784-1786 a mulberry orchard turns up in almost every estate inventory; at a place called Orman a mulberry orchard with its silkworm house was valued at 400 kuruş, and another orchard in the same estate at 500 kuruş. Considering that many estates of those years did not exceed 30 to 40 kuruş in total, the meaning of these values becomes clearer. That a mulberry orchard was worth 3,300 kuruş in 1810 is a sign of a period of prosperity based on cocoon raising. This picture suggests that dependence on imported Iranian silk diminished over time. In other words, the weight of the tax registers shifted from raw silk passing over the scale to local production itself.

The officially fixed prices also show that silk work in the city had an established order. A register of 1769 prices a dirham of embroidery silk at 5 akçe, a dirham of braid at 7 akçe and three silk buttons at 1 akçe. In 1777-1778 the daily wage of silk workers was set at 8 para with bread and 10 para without. The trading range of Amasya silk was also widening. A document of 1801 orders part of the silk obtained in the city to be sent to Istanbul as before, while mentioning as something new that it was also being shipped to Bosnia, Aleppo and Diyarbakır. A document dated 1231 [1815-16] relates that most of the silk brought to Aleppo came from Bursa and Amasya and that foreign consuls bought this raw silk and speculated with it. Fontanier, too, writes that most Amasya silk was white and inferior in quality to Gilan silk, that within the country it was used mostly for shirting, and that the rest fed the looms of Diyarbakır, Aleppo and Damascus; merchants from these cities came to Amasya every year at harvest time and bought the crop directly from the villagers.

As far as the archival documents reflect, state officials attended perhaps most sensitively to the silk production of Bursa and Amasya compared with other silk-producing cities. Yücekaya accepts that Bursa played the dominant role in Ottoman silk production, but holds that the combined output of a few cities such as Amasya could balance Bursa's and perhaps even exceed it. The economic chain consisted of a series of interdependent workers. The gardener who grew mulberries, the villager who raised the worms, the reeler who processed the cocoons, the scale official who weighed the silk, the loom operator who wove it and the merchant who sold it were links in one chain. The value of silkworm houses had risen so high that two documents of 1856-1857 record silkworm houses being burned in revenge; in one of them the house burned belonged to Mehmed Efendi, the treasury officer of Amasya. In the seventeenth century Evliya Çelebi speaks of busy and prosperous bazaars in Amasya with some 1,060 shops. The French geographer Vital Cuinet writes that at the end of the nineteenth century the city had nearly 2,500 weavers.

Disease, the Public Debt Administration and a Second Revival

The silkworm disease that was active in the second half of the nineteenth century also had adverse effects in Amasya. The first Amasya document mentioning the disease dates from 1866; from this Yücekaya infers that the disease took hold in the city at the earliest after 1864. According to a report by William Gifford Palgrave, British consul at Trabzon between 1867 and 1873, based on information from two merchants, producers not tied to these merchants had sold 42,000 okka of silk, while their own producers, who worked on advances from the merchants, had delivered 300,000 okka of cocoons. The merchants considered this output very small for Amasya and its surroundings and blamed the pébrine and muscardine diseases and the producers' lack of knowledge for the decline. Palgrave also records that in the same years a merchant named Stroh opened a silk factory in Amasya that worked with sixty workers brought from Germany and some four hundred local Christian women and children. A document of 1895 reports that the place had formerly been a silk factory and had fallen idle.

The traces of the disease can also be seen in the records on mulberry orchards. In documents of 1867-1869 mulberry saplings were requested from Amasya for other places, Samsun for example, while from 1869 to 1895 the archives contain almost no record concerning mulberry trees. After 1895 the direction is reversed, and the question becomes one of bringing mulberry saplings to Amasya. From this picture Yücekaya concludes that during the years of disease the mulberry groves were uprooted and other crops planted in their place.

The value of the silk tax to the treasury became evident again in this crisis. In 1879 the Ottoman government, which had suspended its payments, handed over six sources of revenue to the Rüsûm-ı Sitte Administration against its debt to the Galata bankers, and among these was the silk tithe of Istanbul, Edirne, Samsun and Bursa. The Public Debt Administration (Düyûn-ı Umûmiyye), founded by the Decree of Muharrem of 20 December 1881, took over these revenues. The net yield the administration drew from the silk tithe rose from 18,851 Ottoman lira in 1882-1883 to 131,217 lira in 1907-1908. Measures to encourage production also appear in this period. The first of the Harir Dârüttalims, institutes of a kind that taught how to obtain disease-free eggs, had been established in Bursa. From 1894 onward requests were made that funds be allocated to set up such a school in Amasya on the Bursa model, to obtain healthy eggs and to create model mulberry orchards, and Amasya is named in every one of the nearly ten documents on the matter. The holding of a silk competition with prizes in 1903 was part of the same policy of encouragement. No document has been found showing within which district the Amasya tithe was collected in the Rüsûm-ı Sitte period.

These efforts bore fruit, and from 1885 onward Amasya sericulture enjoyed a second spring. After 1895 eleven archival documents mention the planting of mulberry orchards in Amasya, and at the beginning of the twentieth century lawsuits over mulberry groves multiply again. The bringing of a craftsman who made boxes for transporting cocoons to Amasya with his family, and a request in 1914 that those skilled in reeling cocoons into thread be allowed to go to Amasya to practise and teach their craft, are details of this revival. The Sivas provincial yearbooks of 1883 and 1903 record that there were 150 looms in central Amasya and that the city's kutnu weaving and cocoon raising had reached a level that could compete with Diyarbakır and Aleppo. Hüsameddin too, in his work published in 1927, writes that Amasya was famous for its silkworm houses, mulberries and cocoons and that in recent years annual cocoon production had reached a million kilograms. No other document confirming this figure has been found.

Chronology

1552: The mizan-ı harir mukataa of Amasya is reported to have been fixed at 40,000 akçe.

1554-1555: The quantity of silk goods entering Amasya by official channels and weighed within ten months is recorded as 10,632 lodras (about 15 tons).

1555: The Treaty of Amasya is signed between the Ottoman Empire and Iran.

1570: A law in Bursa sets a tax of 104 akçe on every 30 lidras of raw silk.

1581: Because of the war with Iran, the price of silk in Bursa rises to 135-150 akçe.

1590: The peace treaty requires the shah to send 200 loads of silk each year.

1598-1606: The annual revenue of the Bursa mizan-ı harir mukataa falls from 9,000,000 akçe to 5,200,000 akçe.

1614: The pre-war annual revenue of the Erzurum customs mukataa is 4,500,000 akçe.

1635-1636 (1045): Amasya cloth and morocco leather are presented as gifts to Murad IV on his arrival in Amasya.

1639: The Treaty of Qasr-i Shirin ends the Ottoman-Safavid struggle over the silk road.

1695: The mâlikâne system is introduced for mukataas.

1748 (1161): The Amasya mizan-ı harir mukataa is held as a mâlikâne by the grand vizier Boynueğri Abdullah Pasha and his partners; a decree is issued against the Amasyans obstructing collection.

1755-1759: The mukataa's revenue for four and a half years is reckoned at 10,620 akçe in total.

1785-1786: The Amasya silk mukataa and its dependent mukataas are farmed out for one load of silk a year plus a cash sum.

Last quarter of the eighteenth century: In Amasya records, the tax on local silk production begins to be mentioned more often than the mizan-ı harir records.

1807 (1222): The dependencies of the mukataa are given as the sanjaks of Amasya, Canik, Sivas and Tokat.

1808 (1223): Köprülüzâde Râşid Ahmed Bey becomes official of the Amasya mizan-ı harir and stamp-duty mukataas.

1829-1834 (1245-1249): Kahvecizâde Râşid Mehmed Efendi serves as official of the Amasya mizan-ı harir.

1830 (1246): Objection is raised to the taxes, with the statement that silk is the chief livelihood of the people of Amasya.

1844 (1260): The Amasya customs and silk tithe are farmed out together with the Tokat dues for 620,000 kuruş.

1861 (1278): The silkworm-egg duty of the sanjak of Amasya appears in the documents.

1866: First document mentioning silkworm disease in Amasya.

1879: The silk tithe is handed to the creditors among the Rüsûm-ı Sitte revenues.

1881: The Public Debt Administration is founded by the Decree of Muharrem.

1894: A silk school on the Bursa model is requested for Amasya.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Other sources

  • Fatma Şensoy, "Mukataalarda Muhasebe Kayıtları ve XVII. Yüzyıl Başında Bursa Mukataası Örneği".

Online sources