ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 asks how the Ottomans incorporated their new territories into their empire. As was their practice in their Balkan and Anatolian provinces, they appointed military governors and issued law codes. These codes explain the sources of revenue in each province, for taxation and revenue were among the Ottomans’ top administrative priorities. In Syria and northern Iraq, they imposed the timar system, whereby a military commander received the right to the revenues from a plot of land and used these revenues to equip horsemen for the sultan’s army. In southern Iraq, Egypt, and Yemen, in contrast, the Ottomans experimented with direct tax collection by imperial agents. By the seventeenth century, in any case, tax-farming, the auctioning of revenue-collection rights to wealthy officials, had become the norm in all the Arab provinces. The chapter’s final section explores rebellions against Ottoman rule by disgruntled holdovers from the Mamluk Sultanate, by a governor passed over for grand vizier, and, most cataclysmically, by the Zaydi Shia imam of Yemen.
