The “Sunna-minded” Trend 267
attract both Muslim and non-Muslim reaya to (re-)settle;118 as a consequence
of the general empire-wide transformation of the taxation system; as one of
the legal loopholes deliberately created by the Köprülü households who want-
ed to siphon off revenues from the central treasury for their own benefit;119 and
as a result of the fiscal necessities imposed by the specifics of agricultural pro-
duction on the islands.120 It has also been suggested that the application of
Sharia principles on post-conquest surveys had already been carried out on
what were called the “insular kannunnames”, that is, the legal regulations is-
sued specifically for the Aegean and Mediterranean islands such as Lemnos
and Cyprus.121 One interesting detail is the similarity of the land taxation
policies implemented in Crete to those of Basra, which was subjugated by the
Ottomans in 1669; there, too, the Ottomans declared the lands that the urban
and tribal elites had been cultivating to be private.122 This similarity has rightly
been interpreted as an indication of the fact that Grand Vizier Köprülü Fazıl
Ahmed had the same model in mind for both cases.123
Although believed possible and widely debated as one of the most plausible
explanations for the peculiarity of the Cretan kanunname, none of the studies
on the Cretan kanuns has presented a clear link between the Shariatization of
Ottoman land management and the Kadızadeli wave, especially the influence
of Vani Efendi on the Köprülü administration.124 Unfortunately, very few of the
administrative texts produced by the Ottoman bureaucracy chose to reveal the
intellectual provenance of the policies they espoused. Therefore, it is highly
unlikely that neither Birgivi Mehmed’s Tariqa nor any other Kadızadeli text
would surface in the kanunnames as the ideological basis for the privatization
of land-holding rights in Crete. However, it is possible to gauge the influence of
Birgivi on the Kadızadelis who consulted the Köprülü grand viziers based on
an analysis of the circulation of his works, especially the Tariqa.125
118 Kermeli 2008, 33. Kermeli mentions this possibility but concludes that “the choice to
allow extensive private landed property on the island could not be merely the result of
political manoeuvring and propaganda”, and points out the wider transformation of timar
land and taxation system in the empire.
119 Greene 2000, 27.
120 Veinstein 2004, 101–106.
121 Veinstein 2004, 102.
122 Khoury 2001, 316.
123 Kermeli 2008, 37.
124 Greene is skeptical about this, and rightly states that the Kadızadelis did not take any
explicit stand on this matter (Greene 1996, 73); Veinstein expands on it in detail (Veinstein
2004, 101–106; Veinstein 2008).
125 See Kaylı 2010.