Sipahi-peasant relations in the Ottoman Empire have always been one of the topics studied by Ottoman social and economic history researchers. However, domestic research based on archival documents has always remained at a negligible rate compared to those made by westerners in this area. This situation has led to the result that the studies are often handled with an Orientalist perspective. For this reason, the Ottoman Timar system has always been compared with the European feudal order. In fact, the two systems differ from each other much more than their similarity. If the European feudal order were to be compared to an order in the Ottoman Empire, this would undoubtedly be the Timar system. Moreover, this understanding is often a misunderstanding and its fundamental points. The reason why timar is compared with Feudality is the effort to compare and understand the sipahi and the senor, the peasant and the serf. However, the Timar system, which is the basic land management and tax collection system, like many institutions of the Ottoman Empire, is more oriental than western in terms of its own and resources. Indeed, it would be more correct to look for the origins of the Timar system in the katia system in the Abbasids or the ikta system in the Seljuks, not in the feudal system that existed in western societies before it. In fact, aside from the indispensability of tax collection for states, the fact that almost all of the production was agricultural-based in the Middle Ages and the transportation vehicles were very limited and slow in this period, the tax should be collected in kind and spent in the place where it was collected rather than transported. The need to collect the tax in kind and spend it on site has created the need for an organization of tax collectors all over the country. For this reason, whether its name is timar, katia or feudal order, similar structures appeared in all medieval states. In every country where these structures emerged, the relationship of the members of this structure naturally came to the agenda, and this relationship, which takes place in very different channels within the framework of the special conditions of each country, has been a subject of great interest to today's researchers. In the article, in the case of the Ottoman Empire, this relationship, namely the relationship between the taxpayer-collector, or in other words, the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, or the military-reaya relationship in the term, finally, the sipahi-peasant relationship is discussed.
Primary Language | Turkish |
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Journal Section | Articles |
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Publication Date | June 25, 2021 |
Published in Issue | Year 2021 Volume: 6 Issue: 2 |