Faroqhi S.N. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 3, The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603-1839

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certain provincial magnates did not prevent the production of accurate records

so as to enhance their own status as patrons of their peasantries, to say nothing

of the possible ﬁnancial advantages to themselves if the villagers were taxed

less by the central state. By the eighteenth century the number of non-Muslim

taxpayers began to grow once more; but once again we will need much more

research before we can make any claims about the demographic relevance of

these data.

Some of the best records date from the 1830s – in other words, the very

end of our period. Covering a number of Catholic Bulgarian villages whose

priests kept registers of baptisms, weddings and funerals in the style demanded

by the post-Tridentine church, these registers continue until the 1870s.

Here

some family reconstitution has proven possible, showing that marriages took

place between the ages of eighteen and twenty for women and at the age

of twenty for men, while child-bearing began as soon as possible afterwards.

There were only the faintest traces of birth control and mortality was very

high, for infants as well as for their mothers. Marriage was universal, and the

presence of Catholic religious women residing with their families was not

widespread enough to be reﬂected in the population structure even of these

small settlements.

The urban style of later marriage, particularly for men,

had not as yet spread to the countryside.

In the Ottoman Empire peasants were not supposed to settle outside their

villages without permission from their local administrators. In the eighteenth

century, the state sought to enforce this rule with considerable stringency

when immigration into Istanbul was to be prevented. Guardsmen checked

travellers at road barriers, and even the entry of people wishing to lodge

ofﬁcial complaints was restricted.

And yet many migrants slipped through

nonetheless. Quite a few trades in the capital were ‘colonised’ by rural/small-

town immigrants who brought in their relatives to succeed them, and among

the Istanbul market gardeners in particular there were numerous migrants

from Balkan villages.

A substantial immigration of slaves, most of them

originally of rural background, is also on record.

9 Maria N. Todorova, Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic

Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria (Washington, DC and London, 1993), pp. 29–70,

90–2.

10 Felix Kanitz, Donau-Bulgarien und der Balkan: Historisch-geographisch-ethnographische Reis-

estudien aus den Jahren 1860–1876, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1877), vol. II, pp. 168–9.

11 M

unir Aktepe, ‘

Istanbul n

ufus meselesine dair bazı vesikalar’, Tarih Dergisi 9, 13 (1958),

1–30.

12 Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Migration into Eighteenth-Century “Greater Istanbul” as Reﬂected in

the Kadi Registers of Ey

up’, Turcica 30 (1998), 163–83.

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Rural life

Nomads and semi-nomads

Many regions of the Ottoman Empire contained substantial proportions

of nomads and semi-nomads, whose modes of life were extremely diverse.

Thus the camels that merchants needed to transport their goods throughout

Anatolia, Syria and Egypt were often owned by nomads, who spent time in

towns and were closely linked to urban economies. A large number of the

sheep without whose meat, milk and wool Ottoman society could not have

survived were also bred by nomads; exchanges with settled villagers might

take place at local fairs. At the other extreme there were those tribal people

who inhabited the heart of the Syrian deserts, whose contacts with the outside

world were limited to a few villages and oases beyond the purview of Ottoman

ofﬁcials, where these Bedouins might go in order to trade and raid.

Yet in spite of their economic and also political importance, not much

research has been undertaken on nomads and semi-nomads. After all, these

people occurred in Ottoman documents much less often than sedentary folk,

who were easier to approach and to tax. Often information only becomes

available when there were major crises. Thus when in 1671 a punitive expe-

dition was dispatched against a S¸erif of Mecca and his Bedouin associates in

rebellion against the Ottoman authorities, this campaign was vividly described

by the Ottoman world traveller Evliya C¸ elebi, of course from the Ottoman and

not from the Bedouins’ point of view.

Another such document-generating

crisis occurred when the ‘Anaza tribesmen inhabiting the Arabian Peninsula

moved northwards in the mid-eighteenth century: the governor of Damascus

sought to accommodate them, but not the smaller tribes that the ‘Anaza had

displaced in the course of their migrations. This policy was to prove fatal to the

pilgrimage caravan returning from Mecca in 1757, which was virtually annihi-

lated with great loss of life.

As to the ordinary relations of the state apparatus

with Bedouins living close to the hajj route, we have records concerning the

grants-in-aid (surre) that the Ottoman government made to selected Bedouin

tribesmen in order to ensure the safety of the pilgrimage caravan.

Other records are linked to the Ottoman authorities’ attempts to control the

movements of their subjects, particularly those living in Anatolia. Apparently

before the 1580s, when population had been on the increase, many former

13 Evliya C¸ elebi b Dervis¸ Mehemmed Zılli, Evliya C¸ elebi Seyahatn

amesi: Topkapı Sarayı Ba

gdat

306,S

uleymaniyeK

uphanesiPertevPas¸a 462,S

uleymaniyeK

uphanesiBes¸ir A

ga45 2 numaralı

yazmaların mukayeseli transkripsiyonu – dizini, vol. IX, ed. Y

ucel Da

glı, Seyit Ali Kahraman

and Robert Dankoff (Istanbul, 2005), pp. 266–410.

14 Abdul-Karim Rafeq, The Provinceof Damascus, 1723–1783 (Beirut, 1970), pp.199–200, 214–15.

379

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suraiya n. faroqhi

nomads had taken up agriculture, though possibly the Ottoman tax registers

were sometimes over-optimistic in declaring that this or that tribal unit had

turned itself into a village. Whether or not settlement generally involved

the loss of tribal afﬁnities remains unclear; but nomads who continued to

migrate and yet were detribalised to a degree, and organised in military fashion

instead, did exist in the Balkans.

During the early seventeenth century, when

the population in certain parts of Anatolia declined signiﬁcantly, new tribal

units migrated westwards from the lands close to the Iranian border; some

of them even crossed over into the Aegean islands.

These movements must

have caused many conﬂicts, and lacking horses and military experience, the

villagers were usually at the losing end.

The Ottoman administration reacted to these and other rural disputes by

demanding that those who had been accused of disturbing the peace promise

to refrain from so doing in the future; these people and also their fellow

villagers/tribesmen had to pledge major sums of money (nezir), which fell due

if the promises were not kept. In this context, there are references to routine

complaints about nomads/semi-nomads who supposedly damaged ﬁelds and

gardens while travelling between summer and winter quarters. But pitched

battles between local administrators and tribesmen are also on record, the

backgrounds of which remain obscure.

Eighteenth-century ofﬁcial attempts

to enhance the security of major routes involved a militarisation of the ‘pass

guards’ (derbendci), villagers responsible for the protection of travellers along

a given stretch of road; these people often were embroiled with migrant

tribesmen.

Yet Anatolian nomads most often found their way into ofﬁcial documen-

tation because of the authorities’ intermittent attempts to settle them. A

ﬁrst major project of this type was initiated in the 1690s, in order to estab-

lish mainly Turkish-speaking nomads in south-eastern Anatolia and northern

Mesopotamia. Though much state power was brought to bear, the project

15 M. Tayyib G

okbilgin, Rumeli’de y

ukler, Tatarlar ve Evl

ad-ı F

atihan (Istanbul, 1957),

p. 42.

16 Xavier de Planhol, Les fondements g

eographiques de l’histoire de l’Islam (Paris, 1968), pp. 235–

40.

17 Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘R

auber, Rebellen und Obrigkeit im osmanischen Anatolien’, Periplus 3

(1993), 31–46;Is¸ık Tamdo

gan, ‘Le nezir ou les relations des bandits et des nomades avec

l’

etat dans la Cukurova du XVIIIe si

ecle’, in Soci

es rurales ottomanes, ed. Muhammed

Aﬁﬁ et al. (Cairo, 2005), pp. 259–69.

18 Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanlı

Imparatorlu

gunda derbend tes¸kil

atı (Istanbul, 1967), pp. 111–

28.

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failed, as the new settlers were given no help to tide them over the critical

transition years. Moreover, the places to which they were assigned had been

selected according to military rather than agricultural criteria.

In conse-

quence, many former nomads and semi-nomads abandoned their settlements,

and in the absence of other means of livelihood, frequently robbed villagers

and caravans. Orders to local pass guards to detain the fugitives usually proved

impossible to enforce. Yet in the eighteenth century further attempts of this

kind were undertaken, and they increased in intensity when towards the end of

our period Mahmud II subdued the Kurdish principalities of eastern Anatolia.

Modalities of land tenure

Throughout our period Ottoman ofﬁcialdom continued to assume that agri-

cultural lands, and also woods and open steppe, were the property of the

state (miri). Individuals, families, institutions or communities could rent this

land in order to cultivate it; or else an ofﬁcial or a pious foundation might be

assigned the right to collect taxes and dues from the local peasantry. Details

of these transactions fell into the province of sultanic law (kanun). Legally

speaking, state land could not be sold. If it was to be passed on to third parties

against payment of a fee, as happened quite frequently, the consent of the local

administrator was needed. In such cases, what was being alienated was the

right of possession (tasarruf), not the ownership of the land itself. By contrast,

houses, gardens, vineyards, orchards and vegetable patches were private prop-

erty (m

ulk), and Islamic religious law governed the modalities under which

these lands could be sold, rented or inherited.

However, the application of ofﬁcially promulgated rules in the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries was less clear-cut than had – mostly – been true in the

1500s. On the one hand, weobserve a growing impact of Islamic inheritance law

on the manner in which peasant tasarruf was passed on to the next generation.

Originally only a single son had been considered the rightful heir of his father’s

tenure; and if there was more than one surviving male descendant, all the

brothers were jointly responsible for the relevant taxes, in a manner that the

kanun did not specify. However, around 1600, at least in some regions daughters

19 Cengiz Orhonlu, Osmanlı

Imparatorlu

gunda as¸iretleri isk

an tes¸ebb

u(1 691 –1 696) (Istanbul,

1963); Yusuf Halac¸o

glu, XVIII. y

uzyılda Osmanlı

Imparatorlu

gunun isk

an siyaseti ve as¸iretlerin

yerles¸tirilmesi (Ankara, 1988).

20 Martin M. van Bruinessen, Agha, Sheichund Staat: Politik und GesellschaftKurdistans (Berlin,

1989), pp. 235–44.

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were allowed to take over after payment of a special tax (resm-i tapu) in cases

where there were no sons.

By the early nineteenth century, miri lands and

private property came to be governed by very similar rules, except for the

fact that no one could inherit miri lands from his/her mother, while this was

perfectly possible where private property was concerned.

As the right to tasarruf could be transferred to third parties for a mone-

tary consideration, it was possible for non-peasants to control agricultural

lands. Such holders might turn over their ﬁelds to sharecroppers or have

them cultivated by a few slaves, aided by hired labour during harvest time.

Members of the Ottoman elite often possessed such holdings in the vicin-

ity of Istanbul or Edirne. They might have acquired rights of possession by

driving away local peasants, or else due to the ‘sale’ of these rights by hope-

lessly indebted holders.

But more frequently Ottoman dignitaries seemingly

established their farms on uncultivated lands, which perhaps had been given

up during the mercenary rebellions that convulsed much of Anatolia during

the early seventeenth century. Such holdings were often recorded as mills or

other items that might legitimately be considered private property.

Some

local magnates farmed lands belonging to pious foundations, at rents disad-

vantageous to the latter but, on the other hand, such personages also estab-

lished numerous mosques and other charities, which were often located in

the countryside.

From the late seventeenth century onwards, lifetime tax-

farmers and other local dignitaries were in an advantageous position when

it came to appropriating peasant rights to land. For as they distributed taxes

ﬁrst assessed as lump sums among individual settlements and taxpayers (tevzi),

there was plenty of opportunity to bring to bear the appropriate ‘inﬂuence’.

Islamic religious law in its Hanaﬁ form had been developed in such a fash-

ion as to protect the interests of landholding elites at the expense of culti-

vating tenants.

Even so, landholdings in non-peasant hands could not be

21 Compare the ‘K

unn

ame-i Karaman’ in the Tapu ve Kadastro Genel M

url

Ankara, Kuyudu kadime, No. 104, fol. 3a(992/1584).

Omer L

utﬁ Barkan, ‘T

urk toprak hukuku tarihinde Tanzimat ve 1274 (1858) tarihli Arazi

Kanunnamesi’,in T

urkiye’detoprak meselesi, toplu eserler I, ed.

Omer L

utﬁ Barkan (Istanbul,

1980), pp. 291–375, esp. pp. 312–16.

23 Baber Johansen, The Islamic Law on Land Tax and Rent: The Peasants’ Loss of Property Rights

as Interpreted in the Hanaﬁte Legal Literature of the Mamluk and Ottoman Periods (London,

1988), pp. 88–93.

24 Halil

Inalcık, ‘Ad

aletn

ameler’, Belgeler 2, 3–4 (1965), 49–145.

25 Yuzo Nagata, Tarihte

anlar, Karaosmano

gulları

uzerinde bir

Inceleme (Ankara, 1997),

pp. 89–163.

26 Halil Inalcik, ‘Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1700’,

Archivum Ottomanicum 6 (1980), 283–337.

27 Johansen, Land Tax and Rent,p.116 and elsewhere.

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passed on to legal heirs; at the deaths of the possessors, they were conﬁscated

and recorded, only to be ‘sold’ in due course to other members of the

elite.

Before about 1980 scholars often linked the emergence of landholdings

in non-peasant hands (c¸iftliks) to expanding export markets. But empirical

research on the distribution of these holdings has considerably modiﬁed this

view. At least before 1750, in the relatively market-oriented coastlands to the

west of the Black Sea and in Aegean Macedonia, such non-peasant farms were

documented in signiﬁcant numbers, but quite a few of them were located in

areas not open to foreign trade before 1774. Such c¸iftliks, often of modest size

and worked by sharecroppers, must have been producing for the consumption

of Istanbul – if indeed they had any connection to trade at all – and were not

simply devices by which ofﬁce-holders skimmed off a larger share of peasant

production for their own beneﬁt.

Peasants were legally considered freemen, and were even entitled to bring

disputes with local administrators to the kadis or else to the authorities in

Istanbul. The Ottoman central administration never recognised the debase-

ment of peasant status in law, but regarded it as an abuse to be remedied

whenever possible. On the other hand, the peasants’ obligation to stay in their

villages and provide certain services upon demand placed them at a disadvan-

tage when confronted with members of the Ottoman elite. Yet in practice,

villagers – and even townsmen – often responded to serious pressures by ﬂight

to distant provinces. Others migrated to the towns, trying to make a living

by waged labour. Such refugees sometimes sought service as mercenaries, at

times eking out a meagre livelihood by brigandage.

Taxation, debts and the loss of peasant holdings

Very often the loss of tasarruf rights was caused by peasant debt. Indebt-

edness might be due to the vagaries of climate; thus in the years around

1600, Anatolia suffered from a lengthy period of subnormal rainfalls.

While

some taxes demanded from agriculturalists were proportional to the harvest

and – at least in principle – payable in kind, others involved ﬁxed sums of

money and might thus cause serious liquidity problems whenever the har-

vest failed. Even worse from the peasants’ perspective, in the seventeenth

century the avarız tax became one of the major revenue sources available to

28 McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe,pp.76–7.

29 Peter I. Kuniholm, ‘Archaeological Evidence and Non-Evidence for Climatic Change’,

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A330 (1990), 645–55.

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suraiya n. faroqhi

the central administration. Services, deliveries of grain and of course mon-

etary payments all formed part of the avarız; the latter varied with ﬁscal

needs, which were always considerable.

Therefore ﬁscal demands did not

necessarily relate to the cultivators’ ability to pay, even though the tax was

graduated according to income. Peasants whose grains were not needed in a

given year might be asked to pay substantial sums of money instead; and these

were hard to procure in a cash-poor environment. Or else the obligation to

transport grains to a military stopping-point might generate expenses quite

out of proportion to the quantities of wheat or barley actually demanded.

Ofﬁcial couriers also might descend upon villagers demanding food and fod-

der. As to the sultans’ purchasing agents, they depleted peasant purses by

demanding local products at sub-market prices for the court, army, navy and

capital.

Payments due to the sultans’ servitors as a compensation for their activities

as tax-collectors were considered legitimate by ofﬁcialdom. Yet there were also

demands from local governors and other power-holders whose legitimacy was

regarded as dubious but which villagers had to pay nevertheless. After all, by

the seventeenth century, governors were expected to largely ﬁnance their

own administrations, and often succeeded in appropriating enormous sums

of money.

Given relative decentralisation of power local strong-arm men

might collect further dues without any legal basis whatsoever, to say nothing

of villagers who found themselves in a war zone, where they were ruined by

the demands of regular soldiers, deserters and other brigands at least as much

as by the consequences of enemy action.

Sources of ‘legitimate’ credit were limited: in the larger cities of Anatolia

and the Balkans, some pious foundations lent out money at 10–15 per cent

interest, but they normally served urban and not rural needs. Peasants some-

times borrowed from shopkeepers who sold them necessities.

In the area of

Karaferye (modern Verroia) seventeenth-century villagers were lent money

by local Muslim notables. Contrary to the prescriptions of Islamic religious

law, which requires that at the death of a person, all his/her debts be paid and

30 McGowan, Economic Life in Ottoman Europe,p.112.

31 Ibrahim Metin Kunt, The Sultan’s Servants: The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Gov-

ernment, 1550–1650 (New York, 1983), pp. 91–2.

32 Sofroni von Wraza, Leben und Leiden des s

undigen Sofroni, trans. Nobert Randau (Leipzig,

1979).

33 Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–

1900, (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1995), pp. 150–1; the author minimises the

signiﬁcance of the debt nexus.

384

Rural life

all credits be called in, these debts were carried on over the generations, with

every member of the village community taking over a share along with his

farm.

Studies covering the Bursa region show that money-lending to a mixed

clientele of villagers and townsmen had by the 1730s become a major source

of income both for urban artisans and servitors of the central administra-

tion. Unlike what has been observed for seventeenth-century Kayseri, where

lending had typically been small scale, these were signiﬁcant operators with

occasionally hundreds of debtors. Some apparently preferred to appropriate

the gardens and vineyards of insolvent owners, while others must have sold the

relevant properties and used the money to enlarge their businesses. Lenders

might resort to a variety of tricks in order to prevent borrowers from paying

off their debts; this enabled them to continue pocketing the interest. These

practices indicate that credit was tight and that even in fairly commercialised

areas, local notables may sometimes have been hard put to ﬁnd investment

opportunities for their cash.

Rural crafts

The extent of rural craft production remains unclear; but it seems that in

the narrower sense of the term, i.e. the replacement of agriculture by a craft

as the principal source of income for a village community, proto-industry

remained limited to a very few places. A well-known example is the village

of Ambelakia, today in northern Greece, that during its heyday in the late

eighteenth century turned itself into a small town for a few years.

Local

cotton spinners produced yarn destined for the weaving industries of Austria,

which greatly expanded during the years before and after 1800. Even today

elegant houses in the style favoured by wealthy Ottomans demonstrate the

brief prosperity of this town. Eighteenth-century Chios became a producer

34 Eleni Gara, ‘Lending and Borrowing Money in an Ottoman Province Town’, in Acta Vien-

nensia Ottomanica, Akten des 13.CIEPO-Symposiums, ed. Markus K

ohbach, Gisela Proh

azka-

Eisl and Claudia Roemer (Vienna, 1999), pp. 113–19.

35 Ronald C. Jennings, ‘Loans and Credit in Early 17th Century Ottoman Judicial Records:

The Sharia Court of Anatolian Kayseri’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of

the Orient 16, 2–3 (1973), 168–216; Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘A Builder as Slave Owner and Rural

Moneylender: Hacı Abdullah of Bursa, Campaign mimar’, in M

elanges Prof Machiel Kiel,

ed. Abdeljelil Temimi, Arab Historical Review for Ottoman Studies 19–20 (1999), 601–15;

Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Indebtedness in the Bursa Area, 1730–1740’, in Soci

es rurales ottomanes,

ed. Muhammed Aﬁﬁ, Rashida Chih, Nicolas Michel, Brigitte Marino and Is¸ık Tamdo

gan

(Cairo, 2005), pp. 197–213.

36 Olga Katsiardi Hering, Associations of Greek Artisans and Merchants between the Ottoman

and Habsburg Empires (in press).

385

suraiya n. faroqhi

of silk cloth; given the island’s limited urban development, this must have been

in large part a rural industry as well. Eighteenth-century Balkan muleteers also

sold the woollens that their families wove during the winter season. But the

largest centre where such fabrics, usually of modest quality, were produced,

was Filibe/Plovdiv. While it was originally an urban craft, local peasants soon

played an important role, ﬁrst as suppliers of wool and later also as spinners and

weavers. In addition to heavy fabrics (aba) and the braid sewn onto the ﬁnished

cloaks made of this material (gaytan), after 1800 weavers also produced a ﬁner

quality cloth known as s¸ayak. After the suppression of the janissaries in 1826,

these rural–urban manufacturers obtained contracts to clothe the Ottoman

army; they found ready labour in the numerous places where holdings were

too small to support peasant families.

This arrangement conforms to the theory that peasants in case of popula-

tion pressure will not automatically farm soils of ever poorer quality. Instead,

they will look to more labour-intensive kinds of agriculture and also to rural

industry as supplementary sources of income.

Moreover, these manufactures

have often proved quite resilient, with producers ﬁnding niches for their goods

even in the face of competition from European imports.

Agricultural products for the domestic market

In their own understanding peasants must have worked to feed themselves and

their families; and much of their labour must have been devoted to cereals and

vegetables for daily consumption. Presumably many other goods in common

use were either grown/manufactured at home or exchanged among relatives

and fellow villagers. But in spite of its importance, our sources have little

to say about this aspect of rural life. Only when goods left the subsistence

sector and were sold in the market, or were turned over to members of

the elite in the form of taxes and dues, have they left traces in Ottoman

documents.

37 Nikolaj Todorov, ‘19.cu y

uzyılın ilk yarısında Bulgaristan esnaf tes¸kilatında bazı karakter

gis¸meleri’,

Istanbul

Universitesi

Iktisat Fak

ultesi Mecmuası 27, 1–2 (1967–8), 1–36; Michael

Palairet, The Balkan Economies c. 1800–1914: Evolution without Development (Cambridge,

1997), pp. 69–73. Compare also Chapter 16.

38 Huricihan

Islamo

glu, State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire: Agrarian Power Relations and

Regional Economic Development in Ottoman Anatolia during the Sixteenth Century (Leiden,

1994), pp. 157–71.

39 Donald Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge,

1993).

386

Rural life

Urban demand mostly affected the productive activities of local villagers

in the hinterlands of important cities such as Istanbul, Bursa, Aleppo or

Damascus. Here peasant livelihoods were signiﬁcantly affected by the pres-

ence or absence of cash crops, and by the prices that the latter commanded;

for quite a few agricultural products were marketed by the peasants them-

selves. Before the second half of the eighteenth century, export-oriented crops

were relatively less signiﬁcant than those intended for the domestic market; if

export has long been privileged by historians, this is merely due to the abun-

dance of documents concerning European trade. Yet we have noted that the

connection between export-oriented farming and the emergence of c¸iftliks

was less close than had at ﬁrst been assumed. Given the relative ease with

which members of the provincial elites could pocket surpluses by taxing the

peasantry, in addition to the norms enforced – more or less – by the Ottoman

state, these prominent personages were frequently prevented from appropri-

ating agricultural lands outright. Thus to a signiﬁcant extent, the Ottoman

Empire remained a land of peasants.

In the closing years of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth

centuries, grain was brought to the Ottoman capital from the eastern regions

of modern Bulgaria and also from Wallachia and Moldavia. This trade was

in the hands of Istanbul merchants, closely supervised by the state; beyond

the delivery of wheat and barley, rural dwellers had no share in it. As to the

prices paid, they depended upon the character of the deliveries in question:

some were seen as a service to the state, others were at least in principle

commercial in character. Often enough production costs were not covered,

especially since it was difﬁcult to evade the numerous controls ensuring an

affordable and certain supply of bread to the inhabitants of Istanbul.

The

difﬁculties suffered by the cultivators were not really taken into consideration,

and this must have discouraged the people concerned from major investment

in their holdings.

Other kinds of commercial agriculture, once again for the domestic market,

were practised in the vicinities of larger cities, where they sometimes gave rise

to the development of veritable hierarchies of rural and semi-rural markets:

we possess studies, among other places, on Bursa, Istanbul and Damascus.

Around Bursa from the early 1600s onwards, the cultivation of mulberry trees

and silkworms had established itself as the importation of Iranian silk became

Islamo

glu, State and Peasant,pp.243–9.

41 Salih Aynural,

Istanbul de

girmenleri ve fırınları, zahire ticareti (Istanbul, 2001), pp. 7–16.

387