Rural economy and vakıf finances in sixteenth-century Anatolia: a study on Çelebi Sultan Mehmed Vakfı in Bursa, 1558-1591

Abstract

This study analyzes the dynamics of sixteenth-century economic growth and the following crisis at the end of the century in Anatolia as reflected in the finances of Çelebi Sultan Mehmed Vakfı in Bursa. The main resource of the study is the account registers which contain the records of annual revenues and expenditures of the aforesaid pious foundation. These registers, which constitute an almost uninterrupted series between 1558 and 1591, provide information about economic variables that reflect trends on a larger scale in addition to the foundation’s finances. This in turn allows for the construction of statistical series on trends in grain production in the foundation’s villages, prices of a number of goods in Bursa and peasants’ tax liabilities. A detailed presentation and interpretation of these quantitative data along with discussions of methodological problems encountered in the use of resources comprise the frame of the study. The main argument of this study is that the original causes of the economic crisis at the end of the sixteenth century, at least as observed in Bursa and Sultan Mehmed Vakfı, lied in the economic developments in the countryside. After the mid-1570s, demographic pressure and successive years of poor harvests forced the peasants to shift towards subsistence agriculture and triggered an increase in the general level of prices. Price increase and decline in tax revenues due to the fall in the level of agricultural output in turn led to a decrease in the incomes of surplus-extracting classes.