Fur of Lynx and Arable Land: The Wealth of an Ottoman Tax Farmer in the Early Seventeenth Century

Abstract

At the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries the tax farmer (multezim) was prob ably one of the most hated figures in the Ottoman empire. Tax farmers were used in the collection of the state revenues as early as in the 15th century, but their role gained momentum particularly from the second half of the 16th century. This was due to four major developments: 1. the slow but steady growth of the imperial domains (has) of the sultans; 2. the granting of high offices in combination with tax farming; 3. the spread of entrepreneurial forms within the traditional system of tax farming, or, to put it in other words, the merging of administrative functions with tax farming; 4. the evolution of the corporate estate called ocakltk. There was a growing need for fiscal contrac tors, generating increasingly more intricate business chains, and conversely, a growing portion of the finances passed into the hands of enterprising tax farm ers. To the latter belonged the inspectors of finances (nazir) who originally supervised the operation of the tax farms. Their main task was to oversee and endorse the contractors' accounts. In the course of this work, they often stood surety for the tax farmers and issued loans to finance the tax farms (sometimes, they also acted as tax collectors on behalf of the leaseholder they were expected to supervise). By the turn of the century, this complex function had produced a new type of naztr. the bidder-inspector (naztr-i multezim), who, like ordi nary tax farmers, received commission in return for huge payments in advance, for making a higher bid and naming guarantors. The number of tax farms under his authority also growing (involving all the tax farms of a province in the extreme case), he assigned all or some of them to sub-contractors in return for higher bids and advance payment. As time went on, some of the units controlled by the nazirs separated administratively from the earlier BRILL