Abstract
When examining the history of Ottoman agriculture and settlement, one of the most important questions is whether the state had a consistent policy aimed at developing its settlement areas, demographic structure, and agricultural production. According to the literature, the Ottoman state is known to have implemented various practices in this context. These included the use of forced migration (sürgün), the settlement of nomadic tribes on unoccupied lands, the cultivation of barren soil with the labor of war captives, the revitalization of desolate or dangerous areas by granting privileges to settlers, the transformation of forested areas into farmland, and the use of the iltizam (tax farming) system during these processes. It is also known that the timar system was effectively employed in the implementation of these methods and policies. Through this system, deserted or ruined villages and hamlets were granted as dirlik (fiefs) to timariot cavalry, leading to the rehabilitation and repopulation of abandoned settlements and the revitalization of agricultural lands. The central focus of this study is to investigate whether these practices consistently yielded successful results, the extent to which they can be traced in historical sources, and the types of data provided by archival records on this matter. Indeed, in some cases, due to the absence or insufficiency of related data, it remains debatable whether these implementations succeeded. One of the primary reasons for this uncertainty is the cessation of the classical tahrir tradition, which makes systematic access to such data increasingly difficult. Thus, identifying these problems in the context of available sources highlights the necessity of rethinking Ottoman settlement history and the fundamental challenges of agricultural production.
Keywords: tahrir defterleri, timar ruznamçe defterleri, iskân tarihi, terkedilmiş köyler, demografi
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