Imperial Ottoman

Economy · Article

The Timar System: The Prebendal Cavalry of the Ottoman Empire

The prebendal timar and zeamet system that tied Ottoman cavalry service to land grants, and the long-term consequences for the empire.

The timar system was the institution that linked the Ottoman cavalry, the sipahi, to the agricultural surplus of the empire. In place of a salary paid in cash, the sipahi received the right to collect the taxes of a village, an estate, or a group of villages, in return for mounted military service. The system was the foundation of the Ottoman army for more than two centuries, and it shaped the rural economy, the tax system, and the political balance of the empire. The history of the timar system is an essential part of the broader history of the Ottoman economy and trade, and it is one of the most distinctive features of Ottoman governance.

Origins and structure

The prebendal cavalry of the Ottoman Empire was inherited from the Seljuk and Byzantine systems of mounted warriors supported by land grants, and it was formalized in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The smallest unit was the timar, which was the right to collect the taxes of a single village or part of a village. The next unit, the zeamet, was worth two or three timars, and the largest, the has, was worth much more. The haslar were reserved for the sultan, his family, and the highest officials of the empire; the zeamets and timars were distributed to the sipahi.

The sipahi, in return for his timar, was obliged to appear in wartime with a horse, a sabre, a bow, and a number of retainers proportionate to the size of the grant. The sipahi was also obliged to maintain the village from which his income was drawn, to encourage cultivation, and to keep the assessment register in good order. The system was administered by the kadi, the local judge, and the defterhane, the central office of the tax surveys, and it was one of the most important administrative institutions of the empire.

The timar system had a number of features that distinguished it from the European feudal system. The sipahi did not own the land; he held the right to collect taxes on it, and the land itself remained the property of the state, in the person of the sultan. The timar was not heritable in the European sense; it was reassigned at the death of the holder, normally to his son if the son was judged fit for service. The sipahi was a soldier, not a nobleman, and the system was designed to maintain a large standing army of mounted warriors without the political fragmentation that characterized European feudalism.

The great age of the timar system

The timar system reached its height in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in the reigns of Mehmed II, Bayezid II, Selim I, and Suleiman the Magnificent. The great territorial expansion of the empire, the conquest of the Balkans, the unification of Anatolia, and the incorporation of the Arab lands of the Mamluk state, brought an enormous increase in the number of timars, and the sipahi cavalry grew to perhaps 80,000 or 100,000 men. The sipahi was the backbone of the army, and the timar system was the principal mechanism by which the empire raised revenue and projected military power.

The great age of the timar system coincided with the great period of Ottoman administration. The tax surveys, the tahrir defters, were carried out at regular intervals, and they provided a detailed picture of the agricultural resources of the empire. The sipahi had a direct interest in the productivity of his village, and the system encouraged the registration of new settlements, the construction of small-scale irrigation works, and the extension of cultivation in marginal areas. The timar system, at its best, was an efficient and politically reliable way of maintaining a large standing army and a productive rural economy.

Cracks in the system

The timar system began to develop cracks in the late sixteenth century. The military and political pressure of the wars of that period, the long war with the Safavids, the war with the Habsburgs in Hungary, and the long war with Venice in the Mediterranean, strained the system and revealed its inflexibility. The cost of war grew rapidly, and the state, unable to raise additional taxes, turned to debasement, to irregular levies, and to the seizure of timars for the benefit of the central treasury. By the seventeenth century many timars were being reassigned to court favorites and to the household of the sultan, and the number of sipahi in the field was falling.

The agricultural situation also changed. The Celali rebellions in Anatolia, the great peasant revolts of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, depopulated whole regions and reduced the agricultural surplus. The chronic shortage of silver, a recurring problem of the Ottoman economy and trade, and the repeated debasement of the akçe, eroded the value of the taxes collected by the sipahi. The system, designed for an empire of relatively stable agricultural production, was under stress from a number of directions.

Tax farming and the çiftlik

The principal mechanism of decline was the spread of tax farming (iltizam). In place of the timar, the right to collect the taxes of a village or group of villages was sold to the highest bidder, who would keep the surplus above his bid. The tax farmer, called a mültezim, was typically a member of the local elite, often a soldier or an official, and he had a strong interest in extracting the maximum revenue from the village, often at the cost of the cultivators. The state benefited from the immediacy of the revenue, and the system was, from the financial point of view, much easier to administer than the older timar system.

The spread of tax farming was accompanied by the rise of the çiftlik, the large private estate. The çiftlik was a form of large-scale agricultural enterprise, often built on the lands of former timar villages, and it was worked by sharecroppers or by seasonal labor. The çiftlik produced cash crops for the market, particularly cotton and grain, and it was closely linked to the export trade of the Ottoman overland and maritime routes. The çiftlik was efficient from the point of view of the producer, but it undermined the timar system by reducing the number of villages from which sipahi could be supported.

The sipahi, deprived of their timars, lost their economic basis and their military usefulness. Many were absorbed into the household of a powerful pasha or into the janissary corps. The cavalry of the seventeenth century was increasingly composed of mercenaries and tribal horsemen, paid in cash or in grants of land that were personal and revocable. The last sipahi of the classical timar system disappeared in the early eighteenth century, and the timar itself became a historical curiosity.

Long-term consequences

The disappearance of the timar system had a number of long-term consequences for the Ottoman state and economy. The state lost a cheap and politically reliable way of raising a large cavalry force, and it was forced to rely on mercenary and household troops whose loyalty was uncertain. The tax system, increasingly based on tax farming, became more regressive and more corrupt, and the cultivator bore an ever-larger share of the burden. The çiftlik, although economically efficient, accelerated the conversion of land from a tax base to private property, and it contributed to the long-term social transformation of the Ottoman countryside.

The timar system is also important for what it tells us about the pre-modern Ottoman state. The Ottomans were able to maintain a large territorial state for several centuries in part because they could tax the agricultural surplus without the political fragmentation of European feudalism. The timar system was an institutional solution to the problem of paying a large army, and its success in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is one of the explanations for the empire’s remarkable military and political achievements. Its failure in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is one of the explanations for the long decline of the empire, and for the eventual loss of control over the Ottoman economy and trade to European capital.

Conclusion

The timar system was the institutional heart of the early Ottoman state, and its long decline was one of the most important developments in the long seventeenth century. The system gave the early Ottoman armies their military effectiveness and their political reliability, and it gave the rural economy a stable, if conservative, framework. The disappearance of the timar system in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, replaced by tax farming and the çiftlik, was both a cause and a consequence of the long Ottoman crisis, and it is an essential part of the broader history of the Ottoman economy and trade.