Kültür Araştırmaları Dergisi

Abstract

The second half of the 16th century was a period of crises in the Ottoman political structure during which innovations occurred with crises, the struggles of the factionists within the palace intensified, and efficient statesmen were passivated. It was in this period that the malfeasance of central and rural managers’ nepotism for and protection of their relatives through bribery, the cruelty and persecution they applied to rayah with illegal and unreasonable drudgery gained intensity. It is necessary to investigate, in this context, what adversities in the daily life of rayah stemmed from the problems that arose in the management and what the circumstances incompatible with law and the book were in the authority gap in the management of cavalry in rural areas The taxes collected from the rural people constituted a considerable quantity among the revenue sources of the Ottoman treasury. The interaction between cavalrymen and peasants, who are primarily effective in production had a reflection, positive or negative, in yield, and consequently affected the revenue of the treasury directly. Although cavalry and peasantry related publications have recently been made in part in doctoral dissertations and articles, the scarcity of direct publications on cavalry- peasantry relationships in the period of Murat the Third, during which kanun-ı kadîm (laws-related to penalization, management, and finance-imposed by the Ottoman sultans in agreement with İslamic rules) degenerated, has drawn attention. In this context, it has become necessary to research how important for the management the cavalry and peasantry, two important pillars of production, and the vantage point from which the management see these two classes. Mühimme defteri (the official records of assembly in the Ottoman Empire), which contains judgements about the cavalry-peasantry disagreements, has been used as the main source in our study.