More detailed documentation on the population and agricultural production of specific regions is given in the various administrative and taxation registers. A complete census was taken in 1572 for the purposes of organising the taxation of the new province (İnalcık 1973, 122-3, 134-5). This document, which lists the land holdings and annual income of every household on the island, is preserved in the Directorate-General of Cadastral and Land Survey in Ankara (Gazioğlu 1990, 186). Various documents held
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Page 5
Ottoman Cyprus4 by the Cyprus Research Centre have been published in summary form (Hidiroglou 1971-72), and provide useful information on topics such as land and property sales. Tax and population figures for the 1820s and 1830s have been published and analysed in very useful detail (Papadopoullos 1965, 97-214; Theocharides and Andreev 1996). Another class of documents consists of monastery records and correspondence, usually with the Ottoman authorities, and often concerning land purchases, grazing rights, and water rights. The correspondence of the rich and powerful Kykko Monastery is particularly well-published, if mostly in summary form (Hidiroglou 1973; Theocharides 1993), but information is also available for other monasteries such as that of Ayios Iraklidhios in Politiko (Tsiknopoullou 1967) and Makheras Monastery (Tsiknopoullou 1968). Hopefully this trend towards publishing documents will continue; work in Greece, for example, has shown how valuable such information is to archaeological as well as historical research (see, for example, Kiel 1997). Historical and Social BackgroundWith the final capture of Famagusta by the Ottomans in August 1571, the Venetian rulers and most of the European landholding classes were killed or expelled, and Cyprus was incorporated into the Ottoman empire. The organisation of the new province followed lines similar to other Ottoman conquests (see Hill 1952, 10-34; Papadopoullos 1965, 16-36; İnalcık 1973; Sant Cassia 1986, 5-17; Hunt 1990, 226-33; Kyrris 1996, 253-62). The demographic profile of the island was altered by a Turkish garrison and a substantial but much disputed number of settlers from Anatolia, perhaps about 20,000 (Hunt 1990, 227; cf. Kyrris 1996, 260-2), and in many cases new Turkish estate owners took over from the old Frankish and Venetian feudal overlords. In keeping with the Ottoman millet system, the Orthodox church was given fiscal and administrative as well as spiritual control over its flock, with the Archbishop and the Dragoman (‘interpreter’) being allowed considerable personal power. The harsh Venetian taxes were rationalised and reduced, with the main sources of state income consisting of cereal tithes, generallyset at about one fifth, the poll-tax, and dues for such things as animals, mills, beehives, and orchards (İnalcık 1973, 125-33). The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were most notable for their considerable decrease in population. Many of the European travellers commented with varying degrees of reliability on the changing population, and these figures have been carefully analysed by Papadopoullos (1965, 37-77). Most useful are probably the surviving Ottoman records. According to the 1572 census, some 85,000 Christian adult males were liable to pay the poll tax (Papadopoullos 1965, 17). A hundred years later in 1673, according to official papers captured in the siege of Vienna, only 12,029 households were liable to the poll-tax. This may in fact represent only the lowest of three taxable categories, which would put the total figure at about 30,000; this would be consistent with the 30,000 family heads reported by a traveller in 1670. Another traveller in 1668, however, gave a figure of 12,000 households (Papadopoullos 1965, 40-2). Whatever the actual figure, the dramatic decrease is clear. At an anecdotal rather than statistical level, travellers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are eloquent in their descriptions of abandoned villages (see, for example, Cobham 1908, 236, 258, 261, 303-4; Mariti 1909, 73, 79; Barsky 1996, 33). The abandoned villages mentioned in the survey reports discussed above are clearly a
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Page 6
Ottoman Cyprus5 result of this same phenomenon. The various causes of this depopulation include a series of devastating plagues, locust attacks, droughts, and earthquakes (Hill 1952, 67), as well as emigration partly due to these factors and partly because of increasing andsometimes arbitrary taxation. Another feature of the Ottoman period was a series of rebellions, which until the nineteenth century were not so much nationalist uprisings as ‘tax rebellions’ (Kitromilides 1982, 92). Greek and Turkish Cypriots often protested together against the excessive depredations of the tax farmers and governors, who were generally collecting as much for themselves as for the Ottoman state. These social problems were expressed in uprisings, such as that against the governor Chil Osman Pasha in 1764, who among other extortions had doubled the poll tax to recoup what he had spent on bribes to gain his appointment. A deputation of Greek clerics and Turkish officials were appealing to have the tax reduced, when suddenly the floor of the Governor’s palace collapsed underneath them, in what was apparently a deliberate attempt to remove them. Three months later, Chil Osman Pasha was killed by a mob of protesting Greek and Turkish Cypriots (Hill 1952, 80-82; Kitromilides 1982). Such affairs are dealt with by the historians of political events; regional archaeology and an examination of local documentation gives a fuller picture of the underlying social trends which manifest themselves briefly in these isolated instances (cf. Ziadeh 1995, 1001).
