Constantinople: The Imperial Capital
Contrary to a widespread stereotype, after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottomans did not replace its name with Istanbul. The term Qostantiniye was used alongside Istanbul well into the twentieth century and figured on Ottoman documents and coins.
Mehmed II consciously aimed to restore the splendor of the ancient Roman and Byzantine capital by drawing merchants and skilled artisans by tax exemptions, forced resettlements (sürgün), and lucrative state contracts. The very presence of the court and the construction of the Topkapi Palace acted as stimuli for urbanization, as did the presence of janissary barracks, the navy arsenal, and the construction of large sultan mosques. Thousands of bakers, butchers, saddlers, shipwrights, carpenters, and stonemasons peopled the Ottoman capital, which also boasted the best Muslim religious colleges (medreses) in the empire. By the midsixteenth century Constantinople might have reached 500,000 inhabitants, and by the seventeenth century 700,000, thus becoming the largest city in Europe and one of the largest cities of the world.[1838] To feed its giant population, grain was imported from Thrace, the Black Sea basin, and Egypt, meat from the Balkans and Anatolia, while fish was abundant in the immediate vicinity in the Bosphorus and the Black Sea.[1839]The elaborate court ceremonial at the Topkapi Palace, especially developed at the audiences of foreign envoys, stressed the elevated position of the sultan as the absolute ruler over his subjects, but also as the universal ruler over all of mankind and the protector of foreign kings.[1840]
Sources of State Power
The annual revenue of Ottoman state around the mid-sixteenth century, estimated on the basis of Ottoman tax registers and the reports of Venetian diplomats, oscillated between 7 and 10 million gold ducats, roughly equaling the budget of Spain and exceeding the budgets of France and Iran. Over 50 percent of this quota fell to the imperial domain (hass) and directly reached the central treasury, while the rest was distributed among the timar holders.[1841]
Like in most preindustrial empires, peasants bore the main burden of upkeeping the state by delivering taxes, both in kind and in cash.
Unlike in most of feudal Europe, the Ottoman government preserved direct control over peasants in both judicial and fiscal aspects, which gave the latter some space for direct negotiation with the representatives of the state and enabled individual decisions regarding the composition and size of their crops.[1842] The agricultural productivity of the early modern Ottoman Empire compared favorably not just to contemporary Western Europe, but even to the nineteenth-century one (with the notable exception of England).[1843]Trade customs duties, from both domestic and foreign trade, constituted another important state income, followed by mining and minting fees, shipments in cash and kind from tributary states, etc. In the seventeenth century, the cash-hungry state resorted to extraordinary taxes known under the common name of avariz-i divaniye ve tekalif-i orfiye (“extraordinary impositions and customary levies”).[1844] Like the infamous aides in contemporary France, this initially extraordinary tax, levied in case of emergency, was soon to become a major state income, levied on annual basis. In the age of “military revolution” when the timar formation was gradually becoming obsolete, such additional state incomes could have been used for recruiting new military formations: salaried infantry, artillery, and elite units of sappers and miners (see also later discussion).