Talk:Rumelia Eyalet

Renaming?

• "Eyalet of Rumeli" -Llc 30
• "Eyalet of Rumelia" -Llc 21
• "Rumeli Eyalet" -Llc 10
• "Rumelia Eyalet" -Llc 2
• "Province of Rumeli" -Llc 35
• "Province of Rumelia" -Llc 159

Takabeg (talk) 15:51, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Salaries

The section on 1520 mentioning the "salaries" of the sancakbeys should either be removed or rewritten. First of all, governors were not paid in "salaries", they were given the taxation rights to landholdings (zeamet, hass) which were estimated at a certain value. Saying they got a salary implies they were paid in cash, which wasn't the case throughout most of Ottoman history. Secondly, listing these values at all is misleading; it implies that each office had a static monetary value attached to it, but this wasn't the case either. The income of the governor of any given post would change each time the office went to a new person, going up or down depending on how long that individual had been in the service of the state and on his own personal merit. Thus, listing the income of the governors in 1520 does not provide the reader of the article with anything other than a snapshot of what each officeholder was getting revenues from at the time - it would have been entirely different five years previously or five years later. This is explained in detail in I. Metin Kunt's The Sultan’s Servants: The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Government 1550-1650. 76.78.59.193 (talk) 02:02, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

For example, the above mentioned book lists the sancaks and salaries of officals in 1527 (p. 105), and many of them vary dramatically when compared to the cited '1520s' listing. Ohri had dropped from 535,000 akçe to 300,000. Tirhala raised from 372,000 to 512,000. Alaca Hisar from 360,000 to 220,000. And so on. Naturally they did not follow an "order of precedence" as mentioned in the article, because the constantly changing salaries meant that one officeholder having more income than another did not necessarily mean that the office itself was more prestigious. Some were only vaguely seen as more important than others, Bosna for example consistently being worth more than 500,000 akçe. So it's also misleading to claim that they had a strict order of precedence. I'll edit that section soon if no one has any objections. 76.78.59.193 (talk) 23:11, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

You make a reasonable argument. Since you appear to be knowledgeable on the subject, I urge you to consider creating a user account and updating the articles on the Ottoman administrative and fiscal system, it is one of the areas where systemic bias unfortunately prevents much serious work from being undertaken. Constantine ✍ 11:42, 10 March 2014 (UTC)