Feeding the Ottoman Troops on the Danube, 1768–1774

Abstract

Provisioning of armies of 100,000 and more was one of the great challenges of all the states of Europe in the eighteenth century, forcing the coordination of production and supply of foodstuffs, and contributing to the incorporation of the military systems into the early modern state.1 Mobilisation and provisioning of the army were likewise the prime economic motivators of the Ottoman Empire, which had a long and distinguished history of the production and distribution of war supplies over vast distances, originally for the Janissary corps, and subsequently for the irregulars (levendler), the bulk of the fighting forces in the eighteenth century. Focussing on the production of biscuit, or hardtack (peksimet), for the Danubian battlefront during the 1768-74 Russo-Ottoman War, this article examines the costs and methods of financing its production, the success and failure of distribution, as well as the benefits and hazards of participation in Ottoman military fiscalism. The Ottoman government had come to rely on a provincial class of notables, consistently called ayans in the documentary evidence, for the oversight and completion of transactions driven by the exigencies of a war economy. Although the emergence of this class of officials has been corroborated by a number of studies, no one has yet considered the impact of war on these 'stewards of redistributions',2 who both profited and were coopted as the state 'reached directly into communities and households to seize the wherewithal of war'. 3 One estimate for the problems facing the armies of Europe during the later seventeenth century indicates that 60,000 soldiers and 40,000 horses required close to one million pounds of food a day.4 Costs of such demands on the society at large are extremely hard to calculate, even in western Europe, which has been far more extensively studied in this regard than the Ottoman Empire.5 One recent study of the Russian army acknowledged that the lack of data on prices combined with existing contradictory evidence makes estimating costs for the eighteenth century practically impossible.6 The Ottoman case may prove similarly intractable, but few attempts have been made even to pose the question.