Note 503 — Chapter V · THE RULING INSTITUTION: AS A NOBILITY AND A COURT

Spandugino, 145, relates how in his time the peasants were eaten, as it were, all the year by tithes, compulsory presents, land-tax, and extortion. The earlier sixteenth-century writers seem not to have observed that the sultan’s subjects were especially miserable. Morosini (1585), 272, remarks vigorously upon the tyranny and oppression which were causing depopulation and destroying the incentive of the farm-dwellers to produce more than a bare sustenance. Zane (1595), 395, 415, writes in a similar vein. Gerlach, 52 (quoted in Zinkeisen, iii. 361), found those who lived at a distance from Constantinople in a wretched state of oppression. Knolles (ed. 1687, p. 982), writing about 1603, speaks of the desolate condition of the empire, especially in those regions through which the army was accustomed to pass. In Ricaut’s time (pp. 124, 145, 323) agricultural decline, accompanied by misery and depopulation, was apparent.