354 chapter 8
more radically, Penah Efendi declares that the timar system should be abol-
ished and a salaried cavalry should take the place of timariot sipahis; thus,
the income from the timars would be profitable for the state and the cavalry
would increase in number four-fold. Since this is impossible, however, Penah
Efendi proposes several measures to administer the timars and maintain order
and discipline in the sipahi army in the same vein as that of the janissaries;
his main leitmotif is that the timariots must stay in their fiefs and care for the
land (B233–35). A similar radical departure from the respected principles of
the “old law” can be seen in his chapter on the tapu or title deed, or rather
the practice of granting to farmers only possession and usufruct of state lands
(B397–400). Penah starts boldly with the assertion that “this is another rea-
son why the world cannot prosper”. The tapu landholding system means that
“the land, whose first cultivator was Adam, cannot be inherited”; this gives rise
to tax farmers, destroying the “landholders” (eshâb-ı arazî; this term usually
means the timariot, but here Penah Efendi seems to have the peasant-farmer
in mind). All income from the treasury comes from the “landholder”-farmer, he
notes; artisans and the people in general are at ease only with the landholder’s
well-being. Penah Efendi claims that he has seen personally several instances
in which a notable or officer has seized the land of some girls after the death
of their mothers, since tapu land cannot be inherited through female lineage.
The Exalted State should thus abolish the tapu system and proclaim all arable
land to be private property (sahiplerine temellük buyurub), just like gardens or
vineyards, so that it can be inherited. Moreover, villages that have been seized
as çiftliks by local notables must again become independent, and if a villager
dies without any heirs then his plot should be given to the whole population of
his village (karye veya çiftlik ahalilerine cümlesine virile).
Penah Efendi’s proposal to abolish the timar system and privatize the arable
plots is outstandingly radical and more than half a century ahead of its time
(given that private ownership of arable land, after a long process during the
1840s, was only established with the Land Law of 1858;50 on the other hand,
it should be noted that such proposals were indeed implemented in the late
seventeenth century, as seen in chapter 6). However, if we take into account
Dürri’s distrust of fiefs, we may discern a realistic change of views in authors
coming from the bureaucracy (as both of them do). Indeed, the timar system
was hardly even mentioned in texts written after 1774.
In sharp contrast, Canikli adopts a fully supportive stance vis-à-vis the ti-
mariot sipahis: he laments their situation, observing that the sipahis had been
forced to sell their horses out of financial need and obliged to serve in the
50 İnalcık 1955, 225–227; İnalcık 1973, 32–33; Hanioğlu 2008, 89–90.