Νέοι φορολογικοί φορείς για τον έλεγχο των περιφερειακών δαπανών στα τέλη του 18ου αιώνα στο Σιδηρόκαστρο

Νέοι φορολογικοί φορείς για τον έλεγχο των περιφερειακών δαπανών στα τέλη του 18ου αιώνα στο Σιδηρόκαστρο

SEVINÇ KÜÇÜKOĞLU

Rejecting Nâzır Appointments: The Districts of Kesriye and Siroz

A case from the district of Kesriye (Kastoria) offers a fine example of a local

rejection of a nâzır. Almost six years after Selim’s decree, the people of Kesriye

learned that a nâzır was about to be appointed to their district. They sent a petition to Istanbul saying that they did not need the supervision of a nâzır as their

notable had the fiscal and administrative issues of the district well in hand, and

they therefore asked the center to stop this appointment. They also said that they

would have difficulty paying a nâzır’s salary. Interestingly, the Rumelia Defâtir

Nâzırı indicated later in his report that no such appointment had been decided or

even discussed. In a way, the people of Kesriye revealed themselves by this letter

and showed that they might require closer monitoring on-site. The Kesriye notable

most likely provoked the people to preemptively reject a nâzır because he feared

that an official checking all the financial records of the district would threaten

his own interests. The Defâtir Nâzırı grew suspicious that the notable might have

forced people to write the petition. His immediate reaction was to send a mübâşir

to gather and inspect all of the districts registers since 1792, thus indicating that

the district had never sent the center any of its registers. The latest registers were

ordered to be dispatched to Istanbul. The final decision about whether to assign a

nâzır would have been made after the center’s examination and was not specified

in the document, but it seems likely that a nâzır would have been sent to the

district.64 The petition that a local notable likely had the people of Kesriye send to

the center to serve his own interests thus might ironically have ended up serving

theirs, saving them from future exploitation.

Documents indicate that even when the people of a district formally complained about abuse and excessive amounts in registers, it was still quite possible

for them not to want a nâzır. One method used to overcome such reluctance was

to assign a single nâzır to multiple districts, thereby lessening the burden imposed

on any one. For instance, the nâzır of Siroz (Serres), Osman Efendi, was ordered

to oversee the registers of three additional nearby districts in 1797. The Rumelia

Defâtir Nâzırı reported that four years after the 1792 decree, three districts (Zihne,

Temurhisar, and Petriç) in the sub-province (sancak) of Siroz had not yet sent any

registers to the center. The people of those districts had sent petitions about being

forced to pay for inflated public expenses. In response, he decided to appoint a

nâzır to each district, yet the people were not willing to accept one because of the

burden paying his salary would have imposed on them. They asked either to have

the appointment rescinded or else to be assigned an already-appointed nâzır, so

that the cost of paying his salary could be shared with other districts.65

While the Defâtir Nâzırı declined to rescind the appointment to the mentioned

three districts, based on their prior complaints and unsent registers, he believed

these districts definitely required local monitoring, so he accepted their second

proposal and recommended that the nâzır of Siroz, Osman, deal with the registers

of the three districts. The grand vizier approved the appointment, and Osman

was placed in charge of all three, in addition to continuing to work as the nâzır

of the district to which he had originally been assigned. However, because of the

rule requiring a nâzır to reside in the district to which he had been posted, Osman

had to remain at his original post in Siroz and therefore delegated three of his

men to visit the other districts and report back to him periodically. The multiple

posting of nâzırs in this case accorded well with the districts’ reluctance to pay

the salary of a nâzır, and it also worked well for Osman, whose salary increased to

1,300 guruş, apparently higher than usual. We do not know rest of this story. Who

were the three men he delegated? Did they succeed in decreasing the expenses of

the districts to which they were sent? Did such instances of delegating a nâzır’s

responsibilities to others create any new problems?