ABSTRACT
The Ottoman principles o f provincial administration were not unlike the Byzantine, though in a cruder form. The Empire was essentially military in its organization, and its object was frankly the power and well-being of the state, personified by the sovereign, with little thought for the well-being of its subjects. It distributed large tracts of land in feudal fiefs to its military commanders, though without disturbing the existing tenant-cultivators. The function of the provinces was to provide the central government with revenue in the form of material wealth and manpower for the armies, and the function of the provincial governor to collect this revenue, with
only secondary thought for the social or economic good of the provincials. Provided that these demands were met, there was little deliberate interference with the racial or religious status of the population, except such as might arise locally from the presence of garrisons and officials of the ruling race and creed. The Christians in the Ottoman Empire continued to fare much as they had fared under preceding Muslim rulers, and their lot was distinctly better than that of the Jews in medieval and twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe. The Turks showed greater toleration to the Christians in the Asiatic provinces, where they were a small and submissive minority, than in the Balkans, where they constituted a rebellious majority constantly intriguing with the neighbouring enemy Powers, Austria and Russia.1 Catholic missions were admitted, not only to the Levant, but to Baghdad and Basra as early as the seventeenth century, though they were always exposed to the caprice of changing local authority. In the depopulated Palestine o f the eighteenth century the pilgrim-dues were the most important item of revenue. The yearly pilgrimage of some 4,000 persons c. 1750 had risen to 10-12,000 when the French traveller Volney visited Palestine in 1784, and the tax collected for their visit to the Jordan alone amounted to three times the tax-assessment of the town of Gaza, then the most populous town in Palestine.2
