The Ottoman state began using iltizām (tax farming) by auctioning rights to collect specific public revenues to private contractors (mültezim), who remitted agreed payments to the treasury and kept the surplus. This created a flexible way to monetize state revenues beyond the older service-for-revenue arrangements.
Avârız (extraordinary levies) developed as a cash-based fiscal tool, initially used intermittently—often in wartime—adding to the empire’s growing reliance on monetized taxation alongside or in place of in-kind obligations.
Nüzül functioned as a requisitioning system (often in-kind, later frequently commuted to cash) to provision Ottoman forces in the field, illustrating how wartime logistics pushed fiscal practice toward more frequent extraordinary levies and their monetization.
Sixteenth-century tahrir (survey) registers underpinned provincial fiscal administration by recording households, landholding status, and tax obligations, enabling the state to allocate and monitor revenues that could be collected directly, via timar-holders, or increasingly through farmed revenues.
The agricultural tithe known as öşür/aşar—nominally “a tenth,” though variable in practice—continued as a major category of rural taxation and could be collected through different administrative channels, including timar-holders and (in some cases) farmed arrangements.
A range of ad hoc and customary charges were grouped under tekalif-i örfiye, reflecting the breadth of extraordinary fiscal exactions (cash and in-kind) that expanded as the empire’s military and administrative costs rose.
As military needs and fiscal pressures grew, Ottoman finance increasingly favored cash taxation; iltizām became more prominent as a mechanism for converting diverse revenue streams into predictable treasury receipts through auctions and fixed installment payments.
Over time, avârız moved from being an exceptional wartime levy toward more regularized cash extraction, signaling a structural transition from older revenue-for-service systems toward centralized fiscal collection and monetized obligations.
In 1695, the empire introduced malikâne (life-term tax farms) as a reform of annual iltizām contracts. These auctions typically required a large upfront payment (muaccele) plus annual remittances (mâl), aiming to stabilize revenues and create longer-term incentives for tax farmers.
Local şer‘iyye (court) records from the early eighteenth century preserve detailed evidence of how avârız was assessed, negotiated, and collected at the district level, showing its embeddedness in routine fiscal governance.
In March 1793, Selim III established the İrâd-ı Cedîd (New Revenue) treasury to finance the Nizâm-ı Cedîd military program, drawing on designated revenues (including income connected to life-term tax farms) to create a more targeted, reform-oriented fiscal stream.
The Ottoman state officially abolished iltizām in 1856, marking a formal shift away from classic tax-farming auctions—though elements and successor practices persisted in various forms into the late imperial period.
Tax Farming (Iltizam) and Fiscal Practices (16th–18th centuries)
