Inventory of Ottoman Turkish
Documents About Waqf Preserved
in the Oriental Department at the St St
Cyril & Methodius National Library
Part 1 - Registers

By Evgeni Radushev, et al.
November 2003
IMIR Publishers
ISBN: 954523072X
350 pages, 6 ½" x 9 ½"
$99.50 Paper Original

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For more than a century Ottoman scholarship (and particularly that branch of it which deals with the socioeconomic history of the empire) has deemed TIMAR the basis of Ottoman agrarian system. The timar was - and still is, the object of numerous studies, more and more detailed and exhaustive. Summarized in the general courses on Ottoman history, they have led to the understanding that timar landholding was the most representative of the agrarian structure of the empire, and that all its other components, as far as they existed at all, were of less importance.

The reason for such a widespread belief lay mainly with the accessible source bias - the numerous and very detailed kanunnames which regulated the relations among the central authority, the spahis and the reaya, the equally numerous timar registers, and the kadi sicills. Thus, the very sources directed research towards the "timar theme," and indeed exhausted it as a problem.

History

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