The Ottoman Survey Register of Podolia (ca. 1681).

• Position: Book review

The Ottoman Survey Register of Podolia (ca. 1681): Defter-i Mufassal-i Eyalet-i Kamanice. Edited by DARIUSZ KOLODZIEJCZYK. Studies in Ottoman Documents Pertaining to Ukraine and the Black Sea Countries, 3. Cambridge, Massachusetts: UKRAINIAN RESEARCH INSTITUTE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, 2004. Pp. xv + 1034. 2 vols. $75.

My attempt to review this edition of an Ottoman taxpayer register from Podolia--the only province of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to fall under Ottoman rule--has taken me, for various unrelated reasons, longer than I expected. In the meantime, I have read two excellent reviews of this edition to which I would like to draw attention: The first one, by Orlin Sabev, appeared in Etudes Balkaniques (Academie des Sciences de Bulgarie; Institut d'Etudes Balkaniques, 2005, No. 1; pp. 149-51) and the second one, by Yucel Terzibasoglu, was published online on H-Net Reviews (The H-Mediterranean, January 2006). Since both reviews are freely and easily accessible on the Internet, I refer readers interested in the types of Ottoman taxpayer registers, their importance, and the secondary literature on them to these reviews, which also contain a brief evaluation of previous editions within the same genre. What I would like to briefly do below is to look at Kolodziejczyk's editing principles in general. For convenience, I will start with a short description of the contents of the book under review.

The main body of the Defter-i mufassal-i eyalet-i Kamanice, prepared circa 1681 and now housed in the Prime Ministry Ottoman State Archives in Istanbul, is an inventory of Podolia's taxable persons and the amounts to be collected from them. More than nine hundred settlement names, some of which are no longer extant, are recorded on 383 pages (192 folios'?), many of which are left blank, along with an assortment of Ukranian, Polish, Jewish, and Armenian personal names. In addition to this inventory, the register also contains a few other documents, such as a protocol for the demarcation of borders between the Ottoman and Polish territories, and several lists, such as a list of the administrative subdivisions of Podolia. The present edition offers a complete transliteration of the register in Part One, and the manuscript in facsimile in Part Two. The accompanying narrative documents are translated in the appendices, and further guidance on the technical terms is provided as an aid for non-Ottomanists.

We learn in the introduction that preparing the...