Imperial Ottoman

Economy · Article

The Timar System: The Prebendal Cavalry of the Ottoman Empire

The prebendal timar and zeamet system that tied Ottoman sipahi cavalry service to land grants, the 1695 esham and malikâne reforms, and the long-term consequences for the empire.

The sipahi of a well-regulated timar in 1550, on the evidence of the surviving tahrir defters of Rumeli, kept one-third of the çift resmi and other customary per-capita dues, lived in a small house near his village or villages, and could put in the field a horse, a sabre, a bow or an arquebus, and a cebelü (retainer) for every 3,000 akçe of grant. The system was, in its classical form, neither feudal in the European sense nor a salary in the modern sense; it was a prebend, and its closest relative in the pre-modern Islamic world was the Seljuk and Abbasid iqta’ tradition. The Ottoman version was formalized in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and lasted, with mounting strain, until the late seventeenth. The story is part of the larger Ottoman economy and trade.

Key dates

  • c. 1326 — Orhan’s akıncı raiders begin to be assigned fiefs in Bithynia.
  • 1430s — Murad II institutes regular tahrir surveys in Rumeli.
  • 1477 — First comprehensive tahrir of Anatolia under Mehmed II.
  • 1520s–60s — High point of the timar system under Süleyman; perhaps 80,000–100,000 sipahi.
  • 1590s–1610s — Celali revolts depopulate Anatolia; the timar system under stress.
  • 1695 — Esham reform and introduction of the malikâne life-term tax farm.
  • c. 1700 — Classical timar system largely defunct; sipahi survives as a title only.
  • 1831 — Sultan Mahmud II dissolves the sipahi corps as a separate military body.

Origins and structure

The prebendal cavalry of the Ottoman Empire evolved from the Seljuk iqta’ tradition, and it was formalized in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The smallest unit was the timar, the right to collect the taxes of a single village. The zeamet was worth two or three timars, and the largest, the has, was worth much more. The hâslar (plural of has) were reserved for the sultan and his highest officials; the zeamets and timars were distributed to the sipahi cavalry who formed the backbone of the Ottoman army. In the well-regulated timar, the sipahi retained one-third of the çift resmi (the marriage tax on a peasant holding a çift of land) and other customary per-capita dues, while the remaining two-thirds passed to the central treasury.

The sipahi, in return for his timar, was obliged to appear in wartime with a horse, weapons, and a number of retainers proportionate to the size of the grant, and to encourage cultivation in his village. The system was administered by the kadi and the defterhane (the central office of the tax surveys), and it sat within the larger framework of Ottoman provincial government. The timar was not heritable in the European sense and the sipahi was a soldier, not a nobleman; the system was designed to maintain a large standing army without the political fragmentation of European feudalism. The prebendal system has been described as “Islamic feudalism” in older texts, but the term is misleading: the iqta’ was an Islamic institution (revocable in theory, conditional on service, and without the reciprocal vassalage of European feudalism), and the Byzantine pronoia was a related but distinct institution. The Ottoman timar was a development of the iqta’, not a fusion with pronoia; conflating the two, common in the older literature, gets the institutional history wrong.

The great age

The timar system reached its height in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in the reigns of Mehmed II through Süleyman. The great territorial expansion brought an enormous increase in the number of timars, and the sipahi cavalry grew to perhaps 80,000 to 100,000 men. The great age of the timar coincided with the great period of Ottoman administration: the tahrir defters, the periodic tax surveys, were carried out at regular intervals and gave the state a detailed picture of the empire’s agricultural resources. At its best, the timar system was an efficient and politically reliable way of maintaining a large standing army and a productive rural economy.

Two qualifications matter. First, the 80,000-to-100,000 figure is for the late sixteenth-century peak, not for the classical age of 1450–1560; for the latter, 30,000 to 60,000 sipahi is a more typical estimate. Second, the sipahi-oğlan (the devshirme cavalry of the kapıkulu, the household troops) is a different institution, and the timar-based provincial sipahi was a different kind of soldier. The “great age” of the timar is best read as the period in which the two systems were in productive balance.

Cracks in the system

The timar system began to develop cracks in the late sixteenth century. The wars with the Safavids, the Habsburgs, and Venice strained the system and revealed its inflexibility, and the same period saw the steady growth of Ottoman military expenditure in firearms, fortifications, and mercenary troops. The cost of war grew rapidly, and the state, unable to raise additional taxes, turned to debasement and to the seizure of timars for the central treasury. By the seventeenth century many timars were being reassigned to court favourites, and the number of sipahi in the field was falling.

The agricultural situation also changed. The Celali revolts in Anatolia depopulated whole regions and reduced the agricultural surplus. The chronic shortage of silver 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 many directions.

Tax farming and the çiftlik

The principal mechanism of decline was the spread of tax farming. Two distinct forms must be kept separate. İltizam was a short-term (one- to three-year) auction of the right to collect a village’s taxes, sold to the highest bidder (the mültezim). Malikâne, introduced in 1695 alongside the esham (state treasury shares treated like perpetuities), was a life-term tax farm that gave the holder the right to collect and bequeath a tax unit, in exchange for an upfront cash payment plus an annual rent. Both forms replaced the timar’s reciprocal obligation of cavalry service with a purely fiscal arrangement. The malikâne in particular created a hereditary class of tax farmers — the malikâneciler — whose political weight would long outlast the sipahi. The çiftlik, the large private estate, often built on the lands of former timar villages and worked by sharecroppers, grew up alongside these fiscal instruments. The çiftlik produced cash crops for the market and was closely linked to the export trade of the Ottoman overland and maritime routes. It undermined the timar system by reducing the number of villages from which sipahi could be supported.

A small aside on the esham of 1695: the reform is sometimes presented as a fiscal expedient, and it was, but it was also a financial innovation. The esham divided the state’s tax farms into transferable shares that were sold as perpetuities to investors in Istanbul and the provincial capitals; the sarraf houses of Galata underwrote the issue. The reform created the first Ottoman bond market, and it is the institutional ancestor of the modern Turkish Treasury bill. The same package introduced the malikâne life-term tax farm, and the two instruments together are the most important single fiscal reform of the seventeenth century. The sipahi, deprived of his timar, lost his economic basis and his military usefulness, and the classical timar system was largely defunct by the late seventeenth century. The sipahi survived as a title and a rank in the provincial hierarchy, but no longer as a functioning cavalry reserve.

Long-term consequences

The disappearance of the timar system forced the state to rely on mercenary and household troops whose loyalty was less reliable. The tax system, increasingly based on tax farming, became more regressive and more corrupt. 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 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, and the failure of the timar system 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.

Sources and further reading

  • Halil İnalcık, “The Rise of the Ottoman Timar System,” in The Ottoman Empire: Conquest, Organization and Economy (Variorum, 1978).
  • Linda T. Darling, Revenue-Raising and Legitimacy: Tax Collection and Finance Administration in the Ottoman Empire, 1560–1660 (Brill, 1996).
  • Metin Kunt, The Sultan’s Servants: The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Government, 1550–1650 (Columbia University Press, 1983).
  • Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Cornell University Press, 1994).
  • Heath W. Lowry, “The Ottoman ‘Tımar’ System: Its Rise, Development, and Administration — Some Preliminary Considerations,” Osmanlı Araştırmaları 13 (1991–92): 53–69.
  • Onur Yıldırım, Diplomacy and Displacement: Reconsidering the Turco-Greek Exchange of 1923 (forthcoming; on the esham and bond-market question).