Káldy–Nagy Gyula: A budai szandzsák 1546–1590. évi összeírásai. Demográfiai és gazdaságtörténeti adatok - Pest Megye Múltjából 6. (Budapest, 1985)

Introduction

The copy we have available of the 1559 census, a valuable document made more vivid by the various notes and corrections, is, nevertheless, incomplete

: the amount of the taxes and tenths payable by the residents of most settlements is missing. This shortfall may, in part, be compensated for, as the 1559 timar defter compiled on the basis of the completed (although non-extant) copy of the census enumerates all the expected income from the individual settlements and pusztas. All the other extant censuses of the sanjak of Buda do contain these data. The census takers, after indicating the total number of residents who had to pay the jizye-tax, first listed the collectible land revenues of the settlement in a lump sum (never inclusive of the jizye-tax), then broke this figure down to its components of types of taxes and tenths. They forwent this detailed listing only in the cases of those settlements (some of them the Sultanate's khass properties), whose inhabitants were granted the privilege by the treasury to pay their taxes and tenths in an amount calculated on the average of their previous years' levies. They always started the detailing with the entries for the gate tolls (in Turkish: resm-i kapu, or ispenje). Up to the time of the first two censuses of Buda, according to law, the 50 akche gate toll was payable to the landlords by only those who were obligated to pay the jizye-tax to the treasury; yet it often happened that there was a discrepancy between the number of people who paid gate toll and those who paid jizye-tax. Later, according to the 1562 census, the two types of taxes were levied— with few exceptions—on every head of household. As we know, the Mohammedans did not pay any jizye-tax, but they, too, were obliged to pay the landlord a tax corresponding to the gate toll, which varied from province to province (22-57 akches), and was called the „cift-tax", or property tax (the word „cift" or „ciftlik" means a plot held in villein tenure, or a farmstead).

7 For more pertaining to this, see the farmstead of Berber Karagöz, under Felkesző puszta in this volume. In taking further account of feudal dues, the rule was that the tenth had to be calculated on the basis of three years' average yield for grains (wheat, and ,,mixed", i.e. rye, barley, oat and millet), for cider, as well as other produce: peas, cabbage, onion, hemp, lentil, beans, flax, linseed and hay. The appearance of the word ,,mixed" (mahlut) in the listing of the types of grains may appear to be somewhat problematic. The word „mahlut" means ,,mixed", therefore it is plausible to think that our sources refer to the „double", the traditional mixture of wheat and rye. I have already referred to this parenthetically, but in my source publications I have alway insisted on keeping to the meaning „mixed". The meaning of the word mahlut („mixed") can be well defined with the aid of the 1586-1588 tenth-registers of the Sultanate's khass-villages in the Szeged area. These tenth-registers listed all the taxes and tenths paid by the individual residents, and then went on to prepare a summary of how much all the residents of the settlement paid and on what grounds. 7. For the gift-tax (cift resmi) see: H. Inalcik, Osmanlilar'da raiyyet riisumu, in: Belleten 92 (Ankara 1959), 575-86. 31