The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

~ THE STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF OTTOMAN WARFARE ~ 107
to subtract the appropriate amounts from their remittances to the central treasury
when the next instalment fell due. 48 As to the funds of pious foundations, they
were not much mobilized by the Ottoman administration before the eighteenth
century, and when this finally did happen, money was more often collected as
dues than as loans. 49 Banks in the narrow sense of the word did not exist, even
though, in the late sixteenth century, a pious foundation had been established in
Istanbul with the express aim of providing credit to solvent merchants; this institution
did not, however, survive for very long. 50 Some eighteenth-century
moneylenders were so active that we might class them as small-scale bankers,
but they acted as providers of credit to village communities and private persons,
not to the Ottoman government. And while in the eighteenth century money
changers (sarrafs) serving high-level administrators and tax farmers were in the
business of facilitating financial transactions, once again, they did not channel
funds held by the public into government loans. 51
Instead, the Ottoman administration relied on a plethora of deliveries, often
unpaid. Or else the peasants and craftsmen who provided goods and services
received a remuneration less than the ‘administratively determined’ price (narh)
so often recorded in the kadi registers, and sometimes in separate booklets (narh
defteri) as well. 52 The obligation to deliver such goods, usually grain stockpiled
along the routes that the Ottoman armies could be expected to use, was known as
the nüzul and sürsat. Nüzul constituted an unpaid delivery, one aspect of the
avarız taxes that, as early as the fifteenth century, could be demanded of the sultan’s
subjects in times of war; by the 1600s the avarız had been turned into an
annual payment. By contrast, goods delivered under the heading of sürsat were
paid for, even though the prices were often minimal. Thus even those taxpayers
fortunate enough to have gained exemptions from the avarız could not avoid this
particular sacrifice. 53 But even if the deliveries in question were remunerated
according to the narh, the taxpayers still might end up with a loss, as the price
paid did not include the very considerable expense of transporting grain by land
over long distances. If in the case of outlying districts, it proved impractical to
require deliveries in kind, a sum of money might be substituted (bedel-i nüzul).
Villagers who for one reason of another were late in delivering might also be
asked to pay a large amount of money in compensation. More typical of the
eighteenth century was the requirement that a certain percentage of the grain produced
in a given region be bought up by state officials at a very low price; this
was the so-called mübayaa, intended to feed both the city of Istanbul and the
men serving in the Ottoman armies. 54
In addition to grain, textiles needed by the soldiery might be demanded from
certain categories of taxpayers in lieu of dues. The most famous case is probably
that of the Sephardic Jews of Salonica, who had been settled in this town after
their expulsion from Spain in 1492/897–8, and had been assigned the job of
manufacturing the woollen cloth needed for janissary uniforms. 55 In the sixteenth
century, the government paid for these deliveries, but the sums of money disbursed
were not sufficient for the survival of the producing artisans. Yet, down to