146 chapter 4
to Anatolia, where they joined armed bands of rebels. Peasants had already
started to leave their plots and take up arms for a number of decades (they had
made up the bulk of the army of Süleyman’s son Bayezid), but in the final years
of the sixteenth century these rebel bands, known as Celalis, almost reached
the size of regular armies. Under leaders such as Karayazıcı, Deli Hasan, and
Kalenderoğlu (the latter of whom also collaborated with a rebel governor of
Aleppo, Canbuladoğlu Ali), they managed to defeat powerful Ottoman forces
and virtually occupy most of eastern and central Anatolia, with occasional
raids reaching as far as Izmir and Bursa, until they were co-opted or suppressed
by successive imperial campaigns. Simultaneously, an enormous wave of
migration of the peasants towards the big cities, and especially Istanbul
(known as “the great flight”, büyük kaçgun), contributed to a sharp decline in
agricultural life within the countryside. It was not until 1609 that the Ottoman
state regained firm control over the Anatolian countryside.
On the institutional level, the most striking feature of the late sixteenth cen-
tury was the gradual waning of the timar system. As the use of lance-equipped
cavalry was becoming obsolete in favor of infantry with firearms, so was the
monetarization of the agricultural economy transforming the fief into a waste
of resources from the state’s point of view. The state needed cash to pay its
infantry, both standing (the janissaries) and auxiliary (the mercenary militias
known as sekban or sarıca). The latter were easy to recruit (by the state as well
as by local governors who needed private guards) since more and more peas-
ants’ sons were leaving their lands, either because the military career was more
lucrative (the “pull” factor) or because conditions in the agricultural villages
were becoming ever more difficult (the “push” factor). The existence of dis-
possessed ex-sipahis (and such were being produced by the crisis of the timar
system before and after the battle of Mező-Keresztes) added to this explosive
mixture, and contributed to the collapse of sultanly legitimization in large
parts of the Anatolian provinces. On the financial level, the need for ready
cash led to the gradual expansion of the tax-farming system (iltizam): the state
preferred auctioning and farming out taxes (as well as other revenue) rather
than granting them as timars, a system that contributed to the enfeeblement of
the sipahis and had a negative effect on the peasants’ situation, as tax-farmers
tried to gain most of their revenue.6 Here we should note, however, that the
use of this system had begun in the late fourteenth century, and that from the
state’s point of view it offered several advantages, namely the absence of risk
and the minimal size of the tax-collecting apparatus.7 On the other hand, one
6 The classic studies are İnalcık 1972 and İnalcık 1980.
7 Fleet 2003.