Absztrakt

The Ottoman state’s first two hundred and fifty years were made up of a series of victorious raids and wars of conquest that yielded spoils in overwhelming quantities. Capturing prisoners of war was considered the most lucrative type of plunder, and the state began to tax this activity early on. Scholarship traditionally dates the introduction of the “fifth,” a tax levied on captives, to the reign of Sultan Murad I (1362–1389) in the second half of the fourteenth century. The study investigates the practice of collecting the fifth between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries from three perspectives. First, it examines the customs that developed in the Hungarian borderlands, which is followed by the discussion of the tax collection practices in the imperial capital, based on documents of leased tax privileges. Finally, the methods used during seventeenth-century imperial campaigns are examined, providing and number of examples for the central government’s advance preparations, which facilitated the rapid collection and administration of the fifth. While the captives tax was initially set to one fifth of the value of the captives, by the seventeenth century, it turned into a flat rate tax with two categories: adults taxed at the full rate and children at half. The source material presented in this study clearly demonstrates that taking captives – as a way of life, a business, and a means of securing labor – remained as significant an institution in the Ottoman Empire at the end of the seventeenth century as it had been in its early period and during its peak.