Abstract:

ABSTRACT This study deals with the sursat obligation in Ayntab, which was an average sanjak of the country in the 17th century, which was considered a century of change and transformation of the Ottoman State. Sursat was an obligation demanded within the scope of war needs in extraordinary situations. This obligation was not a full tax in nature, but the transportation of products such as barley, flour/bread, sheep, clarified butter, honey and wood/straw at destinations determined by the reaya and selling them to the soldiers in exchange for money. Ayntab was subordinate to the province of Marash in the studied period. It was a sanjak consisting of Ayntab and Telbaşer kazas. The people of Liva fulfilled their sursat obligation mostly in-kind during the eastern military campaigns and in cash the western military campaigns. As the main source in the research, dozens of Sursat Zahiresi/Bedeli Notebooks, Mevkufat Notebooks and Ayntab Şer'iyye Registers, as well as many documents belonging to the period recorded in various funds of the Ottoman Archive under the Presidency of the State Archives of the Republic of Turkey were used. As far as the sources allow, the nature/identity of the sursat obli-gation, its course in time and its functioning in the assessment-collection process were followed in the 17th cen-tury in the private of the Sanjak/Kaza of Ayntab. In this process, from randomness to permanence, which emerged throughout the period, sometimes radically, sometimes in a slow but steady manner; the change/transformation from in-kind to cash has been observed. It has been observed how this contractual and imposing obligation, which was demanded in the beginning, was transformed into a full tax over time. This re-search has illuminated the financial/economic, social and even administrative situation of the period and the region a little more.

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