Sources - Charting Ottoman Empire

Sources

Our research is based on Ottoman fiscal and administrative documents preserved in the Directorate of State Archives, Istanbul, and other archival collections. These records provide detailed insights into the economic, legal, and social structures of the Ottoman Empire from the early 1700s to the 1840s.

We focus on three key document sets that serve as the foundation for our analysis. Additionally, we are developing a comprehensive catalog of over 1,721 fiscal codices, many of which remain unsummarized.

Core Document Sets

Codex MAD9748 (1796–1800)

Codex MAD9748 contains 2,125 imperial decrees spread across 384 pages, detailing the assets, debts, and financial transactions of 1,849 notable individuals who died in the 1790s. The codex offers semi-narrative accounts that document state decisions on post-mortem wealth redistribution during the early Ottoman reform period (New Order). These records provide valuable insights into:

State intervention in wealth transfers.
Credit and debt relations among elites.
The financial obligations of the deceased and their impact on surviving communities.

Figure 1. Codex MAD9748: Ottoman financial records and wealth transfers.

Codex MAD9726 (1760s–1790s)

Codex MAD9726 is a highly complex Ottoman fiscal register containing shorthand annotations and intricate paratextual elements. This document set is essential for understanding:

Ottoman financial administration and revenue management.
State debt collection practices and legal frameworks.
The broader economic networks that connected merchants, tax farmers, and state officials.

Our team has worked extensively on decoding, transliterating, and structuring this codex to make its data accessible for computational analysis.

Figure 2. Codex MAD9726: A complex fiscal record with shorthand notations.

The Ali Pasha Collections

The Ali Pasha Collections consist of two separate sets of documents, offering a unique perspective on regional governance and economic relations in the late Ottoman period:

The Ali Pasha Archive (Greek Collection): Preserved in the Gennadius Library, Athens, this archive contains nearly 1,500 documents, including correspondence, financial agreements, and debt records from Ali Pasha’s administration. The texts are written in Greek script, often incorporating Ottoman Turkish, Persian, Arabic, Albanian, Vlach, French, and Italian words.

Figure 3. The Ali Pasha Archive: Financial transactions and governance records.

Figure 4. A Greek Document from Ali Pasha's archive.

Ottoman Archival Documents on Ali Pasha: These materials, collected from the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, detail Ali Pasha’s financial transactions, political negotiations, and interactions with Ottoman imperial authorities.

Together, these documents shed light on Ali Pasha’s governance strategies, military financing, and regional economic networks.

Figure 5. The order of liabilities.

Cataloging 1,721 Ottoman Fiscal Codices

Beyond these three key document sets, our project is developing a comprehensive catalog of 1,721 Ottoman fiscal codices spanning the 18th and 19th centuries. These codices contain an estimated 3.5 million entries, covering:

Probate inventories of deceased individuals.
Imperial decrees related to estate management.
Auction records and tax registers documenting economic transactions.

While many individual documents have brief digital summaries, the codices themselves remain largely unstructured and unanalyzed. Our goal is to create a searchable, structured dataset that integrates GIS-based maps, chronological diagrams, and a directory of notable figures, making these sources more accessible for researchers.