Population and Revenue in the Towns of Palestine in the Sixteenth Century

Surveying the population and revenue of six Palestinian cities—Jerusalem, Hebron, Gaza, Ramie, Nabulus, and Safed—in the sixteenth-century, Amnon Cohen and Bernard Lewis consider the numbers, composition, and distribution of the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish population, and discuss the different headings of revenue, the manner of assessment and collection, the yield, and the destination of the money collected. This monograph traces these developments, in detail, over an extended period and for a significant area of the Ottoman Empire.

Based on the Tapu registers in Istanbul and Ankara, this book provides to the academic world a collection and analysis of documents previously unavailable and unreadable except to a very small number of people. Translations and annotations of these texts illuminate and explain the terms and institutions found in Ottoman surveys of population and taxation. Professors Cohen and Lewis establish the fact that in the cities of Palestine, population and revenue showed a rather spectacular parallel development towards the middle of the sixteenth-century when the disruptive conditions of the conquest had disappeared and Ottoman administration had been well established. Then, in the latter half of the century, they find a recession again.

Originally published in 1978.

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