17 - Rural life

Summary

Births, marriages, deaths and migrations

While the vast majority of Ottoman subjects lived in the countryside, mostly as peasants or else as nomads, it is impossible to be precise about numbers. Few tax registers of the type for which the sixteenth-century Ottoman administration had become famous were compiled after 1600, and those that were have often survived only in fragments. To fill the gap researchers have attempted to estimate rural population on the basis of the ‘tax houses’ made up of several families that in the seventeenth century, in place of ‘real’ households, formed the basis for assessing the payments and services known as avarız. But ‘tax houses’ comprised a highly variable number of real households, and it is only if the sources give us equivalencies that these registers become usable for population estimates; however, this information is by no means available in all cases.

Moreover, in the eighteenth century so many taxes came to be collected by lifetime tax-farmers that counts of the taxable population became irrelevant. Therefore, throughout the period treated we can only estimate population for certain limited regions. Only shortly after our period had ended, in the 1840s, was a further set of counts initiated, which appears promising for demographic studies, but as yet the critical evaluation of this material is only in its beginning stages.

In Anatolia and some parts of Greece, as well as in Palestine, certain areas lost population in quite a dramatic fashion during the political troubles and climatic irregularities of the early seventeenth century, with a low point around 1640–50.