220 chapter 5

Ömer Efendi b. Mustafa also belonged to the bureaucracy: he was trained
in the scribal service of the divan and attained the posts of nişancı and of
reisülküttâb (probably during Ibrahim’s reign). A disciple of the Halveti sheikh
Cihangirî Hasan Efendi, he founded a mosque in Kabataş in 1652 in which he
was buried after his death in 1659. His work is roughly contemporary with Koçi
Bey’s second treatise (there is one copy, probably not an autograph but with
notes by the author, copied in 1642). The author starts by declaring that the
timariot system was not functioning any more: he states that he wrote his trea-
tise because issues such as which kind of tax should be paid for lands, and
whether those who have the usufruct of a plot also have its freehold property,
were not known and unspecified, so he decided to describe all matters per-
taining to villages, peasants, landholdings, and land taxation in the domains
“inserted in general to the circle of justice and belonging in the territory of
[the sultan’s] full dominion” (U384: havza-i hükûmet-i tam ve daire-i adalet-i
amlarında münderic olan memalik). Then he explains in detail the landhold-
ing system (U384–86; this section, including the introduction above, is copied
almost verbatim from the kanunname of Sivas, compiled in 1578, a few years
after Ebussu’ud’s death),63 starting with a historical account of the creation of
the two categories (arz-ı haraciyye, arz-ı memleket) and explaining that, in the
second case (which in central Ottoman lands is called miri), the substance of
the land (rakabe) belongs to the treasury. Avnî Ömer then lists the land catego-
ries in the Ottoman empire, i.e. the various kinds of fiefs, the lands granted as
mülk by the Sultan, the vakf lands, the Christian timars, and so on, noting the
tax status of each and the obligations of their holders. Finally, in the unpub-
lished part of the treatise, the author gives an alphabetical list of the kazas in
Anadolu and Rumili.64

...

Thus, such texts abounded in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. It
was obviously not coincidental that this outburst was contemporaneous with
the period when treatises advocating a return to the “old law”, in order to mend
the present “decline”, became the main form of political advice. Moreover,
both trends seem to have originated from the same milieu of governmental
scribes and bureaucrats. While it is true that, from one perspective, these “ad-
ministration manuals” cannot be considered political treatises stricto sensu,

63 Akgündüz 1990–1996, 8:425–427. For the kanunnames used as source for the second part
of the treatise (land categories and lists), see Akgündüz 1990–1996, 4:455–527.
64 Gökbilgin 1991, 212.