ABSTRACT
Taxation is a key factor for the understanding of the political, social and economic systems of al-Andalus, which has been characterised as a tributary society, over time. Taxation in al-Andalus was in many ways similar to those implemented in other medieval Islamic societies, in which the State was seen as the only agent legitimated to exact rents. The enormous importance of the fiscal system stands in sharp contrast with our ability to understand its operation in detail, owing to the paucity of the archival record. As such, our main sources to analyse the fiscal system of al-Andalus are legal and narrative texts, as well as the documents generated after the Christian conquest, most of which are dated to the thirteeth century onwards. Ottoman taxation in the early centuries of the empire’s existence was marked by pragmatism and an eclectic amalgam of taxes, many of which were not part of any Islamic tax structure but were local taxes in the areas the Ottomans conquered and which they absorbed into their own taxation system. The dual legal system, made up on the one hand of the sharia, the religious law, and, on the other hand, of the kanun, the sultanic law, allowed the Ottomans to absorb local and customary taxes, thus ensuring income for the central treasury and avoiding economic disruption. This chapter examines how the Ottomans surveyed their tax assets, how the system of tax collection functioned and what types of taxes were levied in the period from the rise of the Ottoman state at the beginning of the fourteenth century to the early sixteenth century.
