Book Description

The study is a publication with commentary of two registers kept in the Tapu ve Kadastro, in Ankara. The Ottoman census of 1715, which was conducted immediately after the surrender of Kythera to its new masters, may be correlated with the Venetian censuses that followed, when the island returned to the possession of the Serenissima Republic of San Marco, after the Treaty of Passarowitz, in 1718. The Ottoman census converses with these, particularly with the two that are closest in time, the censuses of 1721 and 1724, showing the continuity of the island’s history, as well as enhancing the central differences in attitude between the two sovereign powers concerning the marking of the land and the recording of the tax-payers. The Ottoman tax register demonstrates yet again the tactic that the Sublime Porte adopted in order to win over the local population, so as to persuade it to abandon its old sovereign.