Ottoman Vranje and provincial notables

Now located in southern Serbia, the town of Vranje was the administrative center of the district of Vranje. The province had some 6,000 households, and thus a population of perhaps over 20,000 people.Footnote ⁵ The town itself was inhabited by as many as 8,000 people.Footnote ⁶ Located at the crossroads of Ottoman Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia, it had a mixed population consisting of Albanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Greeks, and Turkish-speaking Muslims. It was an economically important town with several large agricultural estates (çiftlik) and iron mines.

The available biographical information on Hüseyin Pasha is regrettably inadequate. He was an Albanian Tosk who served as the governor of Vranje for nearly three decades.Footnote ⁷ His conspicuous endurance resulted not necessarily from his administrative skills or from the large and steady annual tax revenue he sent to the treasury, but rather from his status as the descendant of one of the provincial notables (ayan) who had been granted by İstanbul de facto, and often de jure, hereditary governorship over the Balkan provinces.

The rise of ayans was intimately connected to the changes in the tax collection and land tenure system that occurred in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ⁸ The cavalry (sipahi), who served as provincial functionaries, had originally been in charge of collecting rural and agricultural dues from peasants as well as being required to provide a designated number of mounted cavalrymen for military campaigns. From the late sixteenth century onwards, however, the transformation of warfare toward infantry equipped with firearms made the prebendal timar system centered on cavalry increasingly obsolete and inefficient for the training and provisioning of infantry units. Pressured to increase the revenue of the treasury necessary for military reforms, the timar system was gradually abandoned from the seventeenth century onwards in favor of the tax-farming (iltizam) system, in which individuals who acquired tax-farming rights, usually through auction, made cash payments to the central government in return for the collection of taxes from a certain region or fiscal unit (mukataa), agricultural or otherwise. The duration of the contract was typically one year, but was later extended to three years and, at the end of the seventeenth century, to the tax farmer’s lifetime (malikane). Politically well connected and financially strong, most tax farmers resided in İstanbul or other major urban centers and were thus physically absent from the tax farms they held under contract. This necessitated tax farmers to appoint someone with local ties, almost always a local notable, who had the power to apportion and collect the taxes (mütesellim). This subleasing of tax farms served as the most important springboard for the rise to economic and political prominence of the majority of ayans.

In addition to being sublessees, the ayans also emerged as the owners of çiftliks, which were essentially private or quasi-private property.Footnote ⁹ The formation of çiftliks was also closely linked to the changing tax collection and land tenure system, and so to the subsequent popular uprisings and brigandage of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. One important result of the general decline of public order in this period was the conversion of large tracts of land into large agricultural estates, by a variety of means. Some of these çiftliks were created through the reclamation of wastelands or the appropriation of the lands abandoned by peasants due to unrest. More common, and more consequential in terms of the relations of production, was the conversion of the former timar lands (miri) on which peasants were actively cultivating. In some cases, ayans imposed loans upon the peasants—who were in chronic difficulty for a variety of reasons, such as brigandage, poor harvest, or inflation—so that they could pay taxes or purchase seed, and when they defaulted, as they frequently did, the land on which they worked would be seized.Footnote ¹⁰ In certain other cases, ayans seized the commons of nearby villages, and without these pasturelands, peasants were forced to pay rent, work as sharecroppers, or provide corvée labor.Footnote ¹¹ Distant and powerless, the central government could do little to reverse such seizures, and thus had to recognize the land grabs, which continued well into the early nineteenth century.Footnote ¹² In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many large çiftliks appear to have emerged in western Anatolia, along the western coast of the Black Sea, and in the Balkans especially, yet their size, the relations of production they entailed, and the degree of their commercialization remain matters of a scholarly debate in Ottoman historiography.Footnote ¹³ At any rate, these çiftliks were an integral part of ayans’ acquisition of power and wealth, and every ayan had several of them in his possession. In one extreme case, Tepedelenli Ali Pasha of Janina (Yanya) had acquired up to 900 çiftliks during his tenure.Footnote ¹⁴

In addition to wealth, power, and the privileges accrued through tax farming and çiftliks, another ayan trait was to have a sizable militia force. The personal militia of ayans—which was necessary to protect their interests from encroachment by other ayans—increased in size in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the central government charged them with the duties of safeguarding their localities from marauding bandits and joining wars along with the Ottoman army. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, these irregular units (sekban) came to constitute the largest segment of the Ottoman army, which inevitably further enhanced the power of the ayans in Ottoman politics.Footnote ¹⁵ Consequently, many of these ayans were incorporated into the ruling class through the granting of titles and of accompanying official governing posts in the provinces.

As the Ottoman state’s cooperation with and dependence on ayans grew in the second half of the eighteenth century, another group of ayans emerged: these were, in essence, warlords, mainly ethnic Albanians with thousands of Albanian mountaineers at their disposal. Expanding their power base from Albania toward the east and south of the Balkans, numerous Albanian notables—some of whom owed their status to being members of prominent families, while others had acquired their status through brigandage—seized power, often by force, and acquired wealth through çiftliks and tax farms, ultimately attaining an even more independent status than other ayans. They secured a great deal of autonomy and financial security as tax-farming contractors of the provinces they ruled, often with official titles granted in return for providing hordes of Albanian soldiers who were practically mercenaries at the service of the Ottoman army. Tepedelenli Ali Pasha and the Buşatlı family of Shkodër (İşkodra) are well-known examples of such ayans—not to mention another Albanian, Mehmed Ali Pasha, who was operating in a completely different geography.Footnote ¹⁶ Hüseyin Pasha seems to have belonged to this group of ayans, although, with 15 çiftliks in his possession and the tax-farm contracts he was awarded for Vranje’s agricultural revenue and six iron ore mines, he could be considered a lesser ayan as compared to these better-known Albanian figures. Nevertheless, the fact that he, like his father, was granted the provincial governorship of Vranje with the accompanying official title of pasha indicates that the family enjoyed considerable wealth and power in the region it ruled.Footnote ¹⁷

The central government’s pragmatic and largely ad hoc cooperation with the ayans in matters of tax collection and the military were formalized in 1808, when the newly enthroned Sultan Mahmud II was forced to sign the Sened-i İttifak (Deed of Agreement), which laid the ground for a mutual recognition and sharing of power between the sultan and the provincial notables. However, a major janissary rebellion erupted soon afterwards in İstanbul, resulting in the death of Alemdar Mustafa Pasha—the ayan turned grand vizier and the chief architect of the agreement—which rendered moot the power-sharing scheme of 1808. Successful in suppressing the revolt, and with his grand vizier now out of the way, Mahmud II soon managed to take the decisive steps leading to the empire’s recovery from one of its deepest crises. Between 1812 and 1820, he largely succeeded in eliminating most of the ayans in the Balkans and Anatolia either by peaceful means—such as interfering with ayan elections or exploiting divisions within ayan families—or by brute force, with surprising efficiency.

With thousands of Albanian mountaineers at their disposal—who were ferocious mercenaries when put into service and ravaging marauders when unemployed—the Albanian warlords posed a more challenging problem. Mahmud II, however, succeeded in dealing with the most notorious of them as well. A series of calculated moves by the sultan led to a rebellion by Tepedelenli Ali Pasha and his eventual elimination in 1822, and this was followed a decade later by the exile of Mustafa Pasha of Shkodër, the most prominent notable of northern Albania. Emboldened by this relatively easy removal of the most formidable Albanian warlords and frustrated by the “reluctance” of those still in power to provide full support to the Ottoman army during the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s, Mahmud II decided toward the end of his reign on a second wave of assault against the remaining lesser Albanian pashas.Footnote ¹⁸ When, following the suppression of Mustafa Pasha’s revolt, Grand Vizier Reşid Mehmed Pasha advised the sultan to implement “the gradual stationing of troops so as to reform Janina, Monastir (Manastır), and Albania,”Footnote ¹⁹ the sultan received the advice with great enthusiasm:

The central government’s strategy to “reform” Albanian lands was based both on the conscription of Albanian Muslims into the newly established regular army and on the establishment of financial control over the tax revenues of lands ruled by those Albanian pashas with a high degree of autonomy. Intense resistance and extensive revolts by Albanians throughout most of the 1830s, however, forced İstanbul to abandon the conscription project, at least “for now,”Footnote ²¹ leaving the authorities to focus instead on achieving greater control over provincial finances. It was within this context that the central government decided to tighten the screws on Hüseyin Pasha in 1836.

Claiming that the treasury had not been receiving enough tax revenue from Vranje, especially considering the iron production in the town, the central government began an inquiry into how much iron the town was capable of producing annually.Footnote ²² According to the investigation, there were six iron ore mines in Vranje, which altogether could produce at least 150 tons and as many as 180 tons of iron ore a year. Therefore, excluding manufacturing and transportation costs, an annual revenue of at least 300,000 guruş Footnote ²³ could reasonably be expected from Vranje.Footnote ²⁴ The amount of the fixed sum Hüseyin Pasha had been committed to pay on being granted Vranje’s tax revenue is unclear. It does seem, however, that Hüseyin Pasha declared a lower amount of iron ore than the 150 to 180 tons that Vranje’s iron ore mines were capable of producing, and consequently the lease was made based on these figures.Footnote ²⁵ Moreover, Hüseyin Pasha had not been sending any tax revenue accrued from agricultural and other sources of income in the province, “keeping it all for himself.”Footnote ²⁶ Determined to redress the situation, the government decided to put the deputy lieutenant governor (mütesellim) of Sofia, Hüsrev Pasha—who was experienced in collecting taxes from the iron ore mines in his region—in charge of collecting Vranje’s tax revenue, with an estimated amount of around 350,000 guruş, and Hüseyin Pasha was appointed to another place.Footnote ²⁷ However, Zekeriya Pasha—the governor general of Rumelia and thus the highest administrative authority in the region—strongly advised against this decision, sending several letters to İstanbul insisting that Hüseyin Pasha should remain in his post.Footnote ²⁸ Zekeriya Pasha supported his insistence by citing Hüseyin Pasha’s status as a local dynast who should not be offended without a justifiable reason.Footnote ²⁹ It is worth noting that Zekeriya Pasha’s persistence on the matter of keeping Hüseyin Pasha at his post emerged after the latter paid him a visit in Monastir, the administrative center of the eyalet of Rumelia; thus, a collusion between the two seems likely.Footnote ³⁰ More importantly, however, the eyalet governors knew well that they had to be tactful in dealing with such rogue Albanian pashas, because, in addition to the collection of taxes, these governors were in charge of recruiting irregular troops and provisioning the army in times of war, and they could hardly perform these duties without them. In any event, even at those rare moments when Hüseyin Pasha failed to receive the consent of his immediate superiors, İstanbul tended to turn a blind eye to his alleged misdeeds. For example, in 1830, when Selim Pasha, then the governor of Rumelia, sent a detailed complaint to İstanbul explaining Hüseyin Pasha’s misconduct—overtaxation and oppression of his subjects as he indulged in “a life of pleasure,” which resulted in the fleeing of a number of families to other regions—and urging İstanbul to replace him, the government took no action.Footnote ³¹

After several letters, Zekeriya Pasha managed to reverse the decision, and İstanbul decided to keep Hüseyin Pasha as the governor and tax collector of Vranje, but with a substantial increase in the tax revenue: approximately 300,000 guruş from the iron ore mines and 50,000 guruş from other sources of income.Footnote ³² This was the same amount of tax revenue initially offered to Hüsrev Pasha. However, Hüseyin Pasha said that he would be unable to afford this amount because the income accrued from Vranje’s iron ore mines was less than that of comparable regions due to the lack of qualified labor in his district. Therefore, the iron extracted in Vranje had to be transported to Niš (Niş) for processing, which would significantly increase the cost.Footnote ³³ After a round of bargaining, Hüseyin Pasha managed to secure the contract for Vranje at less than what the government had offered, and an agreement was reached at an estimated value of 275,000 guruş, with 225,000 guruş for iron and 50,000 guruş for other sources of income.Footnote ³⁴ İstanbul must have anticipated the adverse effects of the new contract for the people of Vranje, as is evident in the warning that “the poor in Vranje must in no way be oppressed or pained because of [the new agreement].”Footnote ³⁵

Almost three years later, the first sign of the disturbances that would soon engulf Vranje came via a petition penned by the bishop of the diocese of Skopje and submitted to İstanbul by the Greek Patriarch, in which the bishop asked for the dismissal of Hüseyin Pasha on account of his “tyranny and oppression.” The central government quickly dismissed the diocese’s appeal on the grounds that this was a claim only of his own, for no such petitions had been submitted by the Muslims or the Christian subjects of Vranje.Footnote ³⁶ For this, however, İstanbul did not have to wait long.

Hüseyin Pasha vs. the people of Vranje

The petition forwarded by the Russian ambassador explained in detail the “oppression” that Hüseyin Pasha had been inflicting on the people, and gave the names of the 12 men who were alleged to have been summarily executed by the pasha, accompanied by illustrations of those executed, as well as the names of 14 notables who were collaborating with the pasha’s injustices.Footnote ³⁷ In their petition, the supplicants claimed that “the governor Hüseyin Pasha’s tyranny and oppression have reached such an intolerable level that the people of Vranje had no alternative but to petition to let the almighty sultan hear their pain and save them.” To escape Hüseyin Pasha’s tyranny, 2,000 families in a ruined state had already moved to other provinces. Hüseyin Pasha, they maintained, collected taxes in the amount of 500,000 guruş six times a year, and he did so by force, beating and tying up those from whom he collected. The pasha had 15 çiftliks and six iron mines in the province. He would conscript one person from each household as corvée, which, depending on the size, amounted to between 100 and 500 corvées from each village, whom he would make work in his çiftliks and iron mines for the whole year without pay. He collected poll tax in full from Christian children of seven or eight years old as if they were adults. When the sheep-tax collectors came to town, he would instruct the people to hide half their livestock, and then, after the sheep-tax collectors had gathered only half of what they were supposed to and left town, he would send his men to embezzle the taxes for the remaining half. He overtaxed the taverns by between 200 and 1,000 guruş depending on their size. He built a palace for himself with the labor of the poor, who were forced to work without pay for six years. He had killed all the respected Christian notables in the province. To save these humble subjects from Hüseyin Pasha’s cruel rule and for justice to prevail, the petitioners wanted him to be dismissed from the governorship of the province and be put on trial in İstanbul.

Illustrations of the men who were alleged to have been summarily executed by Hüseyin Pasha.

After detailing Hüseyin Pasha’s use of forced labor (angarya), extortion, embezzlement, and overtaxation, the next page written in Turkish focuses on the 12 people Hüseyin Pasha allegedly summarily executed, with accompanying illustrations drawn in color on a single large sheet. The petition gives the names of these 12 men, three of whom were Muslims and nine of whom Christians, one of the latter a priest. The suppliants asserted that the 12 men had raised their voices against the pasha’s oppression and injustices, upon which some of the province’s notables, henchmen of the pasha, informed him. The pasha then had them summarily executed.

Regarding the illustrations, it is difficult to make sense of them, for there is no reference to them either in the petition itself or in the Ottoman documents, apart from acknowledgement of their receipt, along with the petition, by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Footnote ³⁸ It is obvious, however, that the supplicants hoped to use the illustrations as an abstract representation of the violence and suffering they had experienced, in order to enhance the effect of the petition, although illustrations were certainly an extraordinarily unusual means of doing this. Despite the circumstantial importance of the illustrations to the petition, at least from the perspective of their Ottoman recipients, they are nevertheless remarkable in that there seems to be a deliberate effort to sanctify the executed in the manner of contemporary neomartyrologies.Footnote ³⁹ While emaciated bodies with prominent ribs and naked figures without genitalia are characteristic of the depiction of saints and martyrs in Orthodox Christian iconography, the presence of an Ottoman Muslim figure torturing a Christian strongly hints at an attempt to make new martyrs of the deceased. It also suggests that the illustrations were drawn by a priest-painter or someone from monastic circles familiar with Orthodox Christian iconography. The pictorial representation of neomartyrs in the context of the petition, however, is misleading, because the religious discourse inherent in the illustrations is conspicuously absent in the petition itself. There is not even the slightest hint in the text of intercommunal strife between Christians and Muslims, and even though the petition was written by Christian subjects, it makes no claim that those illustrated were executed because of their faith. Furthermore, while the inscriptions on the illustrations—written in Serbian Cyrillic and revealing the names of those killed—indicate that they were all Christians, and in particular Serbs, the list of the 12 people summarily executed by Hüseyin Pasha in fact includes three Muslims.

The petition also provides the names of these 14 notables, three of them Muslim and 11 of them Christian, three of the latter being priests. They wanted “the new law”—i.e., the recently promulgated Tanzimat edict that promised to ensure the life, honor, and property of all subjects, to abolish corvée, and to redress injustices in taxation—to be put into effect in their province as well. Thus, the people of Vranje decided “not to leave the blood feud with the pasha to the Last Judgment,” but rather to take it to the sultan’s justice.Footnote ⁴⁰

The suppliants initially intended to deliver the petition personally to the Porte. However, having found out that some of his subjects had just left for İstanbul to submit it on behalf of their fellow townsmen, Hüseyin Pasha sent his men to intercept them in an attempt to prevent them from reaching the capital.Footnote ⁴¹ The suppliants then changed their course, moving toward Belgrade to seek help from the autonomous Serbian rulers, so that the latter might deliver the petition to İstanbul on the former’s behalf. It appears, though, that the Serbs did not want to be involved with this problem. They might have considered this incident merely a minor nuisance and thought that any involvement on their part was not worth offending İstanbul in the middle of a crisis of succession in the autonomous principality.Footnote ⁴² Disappointed, the suppliants this time took refuge at the Russian consulate in Belgrade, seeking the consul’s help. The consul agreed to send the petition to his ambassador, Pontif, in İstanbul, who, in turn, “unofficially” forwarded it to the Porte. This was a strategic move on his part. On the one hand, he emphasized the unofficial nature of the supplication in an attempt to dispel the impression that the Russian state wanted to directly take part in it. On the other hand, he nevertheless submitted it, so as to demonstrate to the Porte that Russia wanted to keep the affairs of the Ottoman Balkans, however minor they may have been, at arm’s length.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the initial recipient of the petition submitted by the Russian embassy, immediately forwarded it to the Meclis-i Vala (Supreme Council), which was as of 1838 the highest executive and legislative body, with judicial functions as well.Footnote ⁴³ The Meclis immediately began to deliberate the petition, and soon afterwards received another petition from Vranje.Footnote ⁴⁴ Signed and sealed by over 60 people, this petition declared that the people had been content ever since Hüseyin Pasha came to power, and the document praised him in most flattering terms. From its context, timing, and style, the Meclis immediately recognized that this petition was not the product of a spontaneous and voluntary expression of the people of Vranje, but rather had been forcibly written by order of Hüseyin Pasha, who, by that time, must have been aware that the complaint he had tried to prevent from reaching the capital had in fact arrived at its destination.Footnote ⁴⁵ After deliberations, the Meclis was convinced that the matter was worth investigating further, and decided to call the pasha and the complainants to İstanbul for questioning. But calling the pasha to İstanbul was no easy matter, as the Meclis was concerned, from the very beginning, about the possibility that Hüseyin Pasha might fear this seemingly troubling invitation and escape from the province. Initially, then, the Meclis considered instructing the governor general of Rumelia to call Hüseyin Pasha to İstanbul “quietly and without letting him know the reason, in order not to alarm him,” and to send a temporary lieutenant governor to serve in Vranje in his absence. However, calling him to İstanbul alone would make him suspicious, and so they found a solution under a different pretext. The Tanzimat had just been declared, and such Anatolian provinces as Diyarbekir, Erzurum, and Trabzon and Rumelian provinces like Bosnia and Albania, “due to their distance from the capital,” were not immediately included under the scope of the new tax regime implemented soon after the edict. It was already planned to invite the notables from these regions to İstanbul to discuss the matters pertaining to the implementation of the new tax regime in their regions in the near future. Hüseyin Pasha, along with some other Albanian pashas—notably Hıfzı Pasha, the governor of Skopje (Üsküp), and his brother Abdurrahman Pasha, the deputy lieutenant governor of Gjakova (Yakova)—were to be invited under this pretext. The justification, thereby, was different, and he would not be alone; thus, this constituted the perfect pretext for questioning him in the capital.Footnote ⁴⁶

Evident even in these small calculations is just how autonomous the Albanian pashas were and how little control İstanbul had over dealing with, much less administering, matters in the region. The decision not to implement the new tax regime in “distant provinces”—in this case a region ruled by an Albanian pasha—may have been one reason, but at the same time the new tax regime was, in fact, immediately put into effect in a number of provinces not very far from Vranje. Indeed, the real reason was the anticipated consequences of the new tax regime in the regions where it was implemented.

The tax reform represented a significant break from the earlier tax-farming system (iltizam) in three significant respects. Firstly, the private individuals (mültezims) who were in charge of collecting the taxes often from the provinces, were replaced with centrally appointed tax collectors (muhassıls). Secondly, in the iltizam system, taxes on a given region were fixed, predetermined, and collectively paid by the community, whereas in the new tax regime the basis of taxation was annual individual income, which, at least theoretically, was subject to change on a yearly basis. Finally, and for our purposes most importantly, the muhassıls, who were granted significant authority, from the surveying of property to the collection and transfer of taxes, were not subject to the authority of local governors.Footnote ⁴⁷

The center’s direct intervention through muhassıls was an effective means of fiscal and political centralization, aimed at curbing the political authority of governors in the provinces by seizing their financial autonomy. It is thus important to emphasize that İstanbul was not bold enough to implement the new tax regime of the Tanzimat in the provinces ruled by Albanian pashas, which would have rendered them powerless. The same worry existed for Albanian subjects in general. The Ottoman state considered Albanians, regardless of their mixed religious and ethnic composition, as an unruly bunch, and its discourse about them oscillated between disparaging and abusive.Footnote ⁴⁸ The probable negative reaction of the Albanians against the new tax regime of the Tanzimat was thus as important a concern as the likely disobedience of the Albanian pashas. Ruled by an Albanian pasha and inhabited by a significant Albanian population, Vranje was destined to remain an exception within the new tax regime.

The spring and summer of 1840 were busy times for the Meclis-i Vala. It had just promulgated the new penal code in early May, and the Edirne governor Nafiz Pasha, the İzmid governor Akif Pasha, and the grand vizier Hüsrev Pasha were first dismissed from their offices and subsequently tried and punished only a few months apart for “their corruption and misconduct in the implementation of Tanzimat” according to the new penal code.Footnote ⁴⁹ By punishing the officials who had for so long occupied the highest positions in the central and provincial administration, the Tanzimat bureaucrats, now in control of the Meclis, were trying to use the new legal arsenal at their disposal to give a message to the entire bureaucracy that the center was to be adamant in flexing its muscles concerning its control of the provinces and of its own bureaucracy. It is a fact that Hüseyin Pasha was not as high-profile a pasha as those who were punished, for he was merely a district governor, but his being an Albanian pasha nonetheless presented a different dilemma for the Meclis. The Tanzimat bureaucrats could not afford to implement the new tax regime in the region. Whether they were up to the task of applying the new penal code to Hüseyin Pasha, and thereby giving a message to the rest of the Albanian pashas, remained to be seen.

In the spring of 1840, Hüseyin Pasha stood before the Meclis-i Vala. Present with him as witnesses were Hıfzı Pasha; Abdurrahman Pasha; and Zekeriya Pasha, the former governor general of Rumelia and now the governor of Diyarbekir, who happened to be in İstanbul at the time. Two Albanian supplicants of the petition, 30–40 Christians and Muslims from the province, and the bishop of the diocese (metropolid) were also summoned to the court.Footnote ⁵⁰

The complainants repeated their claims, and even added new ones during the hearings. For example, the pasha, they maintained, did not have the Tanzimat edict read out to the public, and when an Albanian cried out that “the edict of justice had been issued, and our taxes had been pardoned for seven years,” Hüseyin Pasha had him stabbed to death in the middle of the marketplace.Footnote ⁵¹ The pasha, of course, refused this allegation as well.

The testimony of Hüseyin Pasha’s long-time ally Zekeriya Pasha was, as might be expected, in favor of Hüseyin Pasha. He said that he had not heard of the pasha’s tyranny as it was being claimed. As for the pasha’s alleged execution of 12 people, he testified that it was untrue. Two people from the province had indeed been punished two years before this allegation, and Zekeriya Pasha claimed that he had been informed about these two criminals by Hüseyin Pasha and consequently issued an executive order for their proper punishment. Moreover, he said that the use of forced labor, now abolished, had been a customary practice in most regions of Rumelia, and thus Hüseyin Pasha should not be singled out and held accountable for it. Hüseyin Pasha, he concluded, was of a local dynasty and thus a “necessary person pertaining to his special status.” The testimonies of Hıfzı Pasha and Abdurrahman Pasha were no different from that of Zekeriya Pasha. Even the bishop’s statements were in conformity with those of the pashas, for he raised only the issue of corvée and said that, apart from this, people were content with his administration.Footnote ⁵²

In his own testimony, Hüseyin Pasha asserted that the two Albanian petitioners present at the Meclis were swindlers who had failed to pay the money they owed him and fled to Serbia a year and a half before, and so they were charging him with these false accusations in order to avoid having to pay. He did not even accept the claim of using corvée, which even the supporters of the pasha present at the court had agreed was true. He also claimed that, indeed, people had been employed in the iron ore mines under his tax-farming contract and on his own çiftliks, but that they worked in return for the money they owed him.Footnote ⁵³ Hüseyin Pasha may have been right in this claim, since there is little doubt that, just as in other regions in Anatolia and the Balkans where çiftliks abounded, Vranje’s peasants must have owed him money.Footnote ⁵⁴ Even so, this interpretation on Hüseyin Pasha’s part was little more than semantics, given the fact that chronic peasant indebtedness had, since the seventeenth century, been the primary means used across the Balkans to seize and convert into çiftliks the miri lands cultivated by peasants, who were consequently forced to either pay rent or provide corvée labor, and many çiftlik holders deliberately kept peasants in debt for this very purpose.Footnote ⁵⁵ Just as in the case in Vranje, one of the primary demands of the peasant protests of the mid-nineteenth century was the curtailment of the ongoing and widespread practice of the corvée labor regime—which, according to one government report dated 1850, “reduced the peasant almost to slavery”Footnote ⁵⁶—in spite of such labor’s abolition by the Tanzimat.

As all the witnesses summoned to the court, from the governors to the bishop, were siding with Hüseyin Pasha, it was obvious that the supplicants stood no chance of deposing him. It was also clear that the Tanzimat bureaucrats were not prepared to cross an Albanian pasha in order to make an example of him, even though those same bureaucrats had no qualms about deposing and punishing even higher-ranking officials during the very same summer, and for allegations not significantly graver than those leveled against Hüseyin Pasha. Moreover, it became evident that the central government was not up to the task of abolishing the practice of corvée, despite the fact that the Tanzimat regime had, in principle, put an end to it. While peasant cultivators interpreted the abolition of corvée as the restoration of their former proprietary rights, and thus made it their primary demand in their protests, çiftlik owners vehemently resisted discontinuing the practice. As with the case in Vranje, whenever İstanbul was called to adjudicate on such matters, it often confirmed the rights of the çiftlik owners to the land. In this way, the actual reality of the situation flew in the face of the liberal views espoused in the Tanzimat, which, in theory, strove to establish the peasant cultivator as the principal proprietor.Footnote ⁵⁷ While siding with çiftlik owners was motivated by a potential increase in profitability and tax revenue, this approach was also no doubt influenced by the fact that most of the high officials in İstanbul were themselves the owners or tax farmers of çiftliks that had been confiscated from the ayans following their removal during the reign of Mahmud II. These confiscated çiftliks were first transferred to the Imperial Treasury and then subsequently either sold to entrepreneurs or farmed out to high officials in İstanbul as compensation for their services. For instance, Mustafa Reşid Pasha, the chief proponent of the Tanzimat reforms, held the tax-farming rights to 18 çiftliks in Trikala (Tırhala) that had been confiscated from Tepedelenli Ali Pasha in the 1820s.Footnote ⁵⁸

And thus the verdict was reached. Hüseyin Pasha was issued a polite warning regarding the use of corvée, and in the near future, after he presented his report on the implementation of the Tanzimat in his region, he would additionally be granted a diamond box worth 10,000 guruş as a gift for his loyalty to the empire.Footnote ⁵⁹ As for the supplicants, they had to be content with a pat on the back:

Most of the townsmen then left, but two of the Albanian supplicants had to stay, because they were imprisoned for slandering the pasha. After a while, the bishop of the Skopje diocese bailed them out.Footnote ⁶¹ Following their release, they continued to stay in İstanbul: not only were they afraid to go back to Vranje after what had happened, but they were also determined to pursue the case to the very end, and for that they had to remain in order to serve as the main medium between the people of Vranje and İstanbul, by means of petitions. They initially stayed at inns, and later at the house Hacı İbrahim Efendi, the prayer leader (hatib) of the Murad Pasha Mosque in İstanbul. A local Albanian from Vranje, İbrahim Efendi was a former steward of Hüseyin Pasha’s, who had, according to the pasha’s account, been sacked due to his corrupt activities. Hüseyin Pasha’s claim was that, driven by revenge, İbrahim Efendi was providing shelter and counsel for the two remaining townsmen.Footnote ⁶² Whatever the case may have been, for the next two years the Porte was flooded with petitions about the worsening conditions in Vranje.Footnote ⁶³

Having ignored them initially, by 1842 İstanbul had become more attentive to the petitions. What forced the government to look once again into the continuing complaints against Hüseyin Pasha was partly simply the increasing number of petitions, but more importantly the alarming situation in the Balkans, with the tax revolts occurring after the implementation of the Tanzimat’s new tax regime, particularly the one in Niš, a neighboring province to Vranje, in 1841.Footnote ⁶⁴ What is more, Kamil Pasha, the commander in Belgrade, reported that the situation was worsening as the supplications deteriorated into insurgency and the Christians of Vranje came to seek assistance from the Serbian authorities. In addition, the governors of Rumelia and Vidin reported that some bandits were patrolling around the towns of Niš, Leskovac (Leskofça), and Pristina (Priştina), and advised İstanbul that a regiment in Edirne be moved to the region as reinforcements, for fear that the insurgency might spread over an even wider region where the situation had been already tenuous ever since the suppression of the Niš rebellion in 1841.Footnote ⁶⁵

The new petitions partly repeated the former claims against Hüseyin Pasha and partly added new complaints, but now they were more concrete and better prepared to substantiate the pasha’s injustice:

What is here translated as “account books” was a four-page register written in Serbian, with a Turkish translation, that appears to have been prepared by the supplicants in a very detailed manner.Footnote ⁶⁸ The register included the following lists: the 248 Christian villages in the province, and for each village the name of the Christian notable (çorbacı) in charge of collecting the poll tax, the number of houses, and the number of people subject to poll tax in each house; the names of 100 taverns; the locations of 16 estates and six iron ore mines; and the regional distribution of 10,000 dönüms of vineyards. Annually, Hüseyin Pasha was collecting 1,040,000 guruş as poll tax, 720,000 guruş as tax (salyane) from 6,000 houses, 25,000 guruş as custom duty from taverns, 100,000 guruş as custom duty from vineyards, and 75,000 guruş from “the sale of girls to bachelors.” Furthermore, the supplicants even translated the use of corvée into a monetary figure that the pasha was claimed to have unjustly exploited: the people of Vranje had worked at the estates and iron ore mines for a total of 600,000 working days, and, on the basis of a stipend of four guruş per day, the pasha owed them 2,400,000 guruş.Footnote ⁶⁹ In sum, according to the petitioners’ claims, Hüseyin Pasha had been collecting well over four million guruş annually from Vranje, most of it unjustly. Note that this amount was roughly ten times more than the pasha’s tax-farming contract of 1837 had stipulated.

The suppliants also claimed that, in addition to overtaxation, Hüseyin Pasha had continued to use physical violence, having had two more townspeople killed simply for entering a vineyard to eat some grapes. As the number of petitions and claims mounted, there was also a thinly veiled admonition to İstanbul:

It had been nearly three years since İstanbul received the first petition, and the situation in the province was getting worse every day. The authorities in İstanbul seem to have been convinced that “Hüseyin Pasha had heretofore been administering the province with threats, even though the people of Vranje are not exactly commendable,” but they still remained hesitant about taking any radical decision.Footnote ⁷¹ They decided to once again address the problem by asking Hüseyin Pasha’s defense and his superior governors in the region to investigate the claims.

In his defense, Hüseyin Pasha attempted to isolate the people of Vranje from the supplicants in İstanbul and from the rest of the region where rebellious turmoil was still in the air. He repeated his former claim that the two locals who had been petitioning against him over the last three years on behalf of the people of Vranje were criminals, and that Hacı İbrahim Efendi, who had been providing them with shelter and guidance, was acting out of a personal grudge against the pasha. All of these petitions were thus individual endeavors and had nothing to do with his supposed misconduct in Vranje, where the people were very much content with his administration. The obvious evidence for this, the pasha argued, was that the people in the province had never considered taking part in the rebellion in the neighboring towns of Niš and Leskovac.Footnote ⁷² As for the two men claimed to have been killed by the pasha’s soldiers for entering a vineyard, he asserted that the two men had entered the vineyard to take grapes, but when the vineyard’s watchman asked them to leave the property, they wounded him with a gunshot, upon which the watchman returned fire, killing one of the men before he himself was killed by the other man. Subsequently, the soldiers pursued and cornered this man, and during the exchange of fire he killed a soldier before himself being killed.Footnote ⁷³ All of the pasha’s accounts were corroborated by the governors of Rumelia, Vidin, and Elviye-i Selase (i.e., the triple districts of Janina, Trikala, and Salonica [Selanik]), who were commissioned by İstanbul to carry out separate investigations.Footnote ⁷⁴ After three years of petitions and subsequent investigations, it was now obvious to the people of Vranje that Hüseyin Pasha would continue to remain the governor. At this point, they decided to take the matter into their own hands.

The spark that turned the disturbance into a full-blown rebellion in 1844 came with the conscription of the local population for the new army, which had been renamed Asakir-i Nizamiye-i Şahane (Regular Imperial Troops) in 1841. After a decade’s less than successful endeavor to establish reserve regiments (redif) in the provinces based on conscription from the local populace, a new set of regulations was passed in 1843 that set compulsory military service at five years as regular troops and then seven years as reserves.Footnote ⁷⁵ Although the Tanzimat edict promised a new and orderly military system based on universal conscription, widespread non-Muslim resistance made their recruitment into the new army impossible.Footnote ⁷⁶ Even earlier attempts in the 1830s to conscript Muslims—in particular Albanians, Bosnians, Kurds, and Arabs—had been largely thwarted, for the potential conscripts rightly perceived that their privileged autonomy was being jeopardized by the centralization efforts of the new order, leaving the new army to depend largely on “Türk uşağı” (Turkish lads).Footnote ⁷⁷ Determined to expand the conscription base for the regular army following the 1843 regulations, the central government once again attempted to recruit other Muslim groups, including the Albanians. Despite their claim that they were exempted from conscription in return for extra taxes,Footnote ⁷⁸ Muslim Albanians—who constituted a significant proportion of the population in Vranje and the surrounding regions—were recruited for the newly formed regiments. As they were being transported to Skopje for training, they revolted.Footnote ⁷⁹ Having been subjected to Hüseyin Pasha’s “tyranny” for years, and following a four-year failed struggle to remove him from the town, conscription was considered by many as insult to injury. Resistance to conscription and the demand to depose Hüseyin Pasha now became interconnected in a full-fledged Albanian revolt that spiraled out over a very wide region. Albanians from Vranje quickly merged with others from Skopje, Tetovo (Kalkandelen), Kumanovo (Komanova), Novo Brdo (Novaberda), Pristina, Kuršumlija (Kurşunlu), and Prokuplje (Ürgüb). They took up armsFootnote ⁸⁰ and marched towards Vranje crying, “Down with the pasha! We won’t have him!”Footnote ⁸¹

Hearing that nearly 600 rebels were approaching the town, many of Vranje’s Albanian Muslims, including some of the pasha’s own servants and militia, joined them.Footnote ⁸² The rebels—whose number with the new additions reached as many as 1,200Footnote ⁸³—quickly took control of the town, burning down the pasha’s mansions on his estates and seizing his livestock.Footnote ⁸⁴ Along with 500 Albanian Tosk soldiers, Hüseyin Pasha sought refuge in his mansion, avoiding direct military confrontation and waiting for reinforcements from neighboring provinces.

In the midst of the turmoil, Serbs—who from early on had also been suppliants in many petitions to unseat Hüseyin Pasha—took up arms in small bands under the leadership of a certain Mihal from Vranje, who had to escape from the Ottoman authorities to Belgrade in the early 1840s “for inciting people to rebellion.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The Serbian insurgency appeared in a separate, yet related, movement, and there is no indication that Serbs joined the Albanian rebels.Footnote ⁸⁶ In fact, the general insurgency deteriorated until it was on the verge of intercommunal violence between Muslims and Christians, with the Albanian rebels pillaging the property of Serbians and Bulgarians in Vranje and the surrounding regions as they advanced and Serbs breaking into Muslim villages.Footnote ⁸⁷ On another level, however, even though Albanian Muslims and Christians may have taken up arms in separate movements and sometimes against each other, the source of their discontent and their target was ultimately the same: Hüseyin Pasha, perceived as the embodiment of the failure of the Tanzimat regime to keep its promise to uphold justice.

The Albanian rebels declared that “their quarrel was only with the pasha, and that if they could gain redress, they would leave the town.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Otherwise, it would be “his life or theirs.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Although the pasha’s removal was the primary goal, the rebels also insisted on the dismissal of Abdurrahman Pasha of Pristina, the elimination of Tosk soldiers, and the abolition of conscription for the Regular Imperial Troops in the region. They vowed that they would not relinquish control of the town until the appointment of new governors of their choosing to Vranje, as well as to Skopje and its subprovinces.Footnote ⁹⁰

The rebel leaders met with some notables and village headmen from Vranje, and they agreed to once again send a petition to İstanbul requesting the pasha’s dismissal.Footnote ⁹¹ Signed by 135 people from the town, the petition was sent to İstanbul, and stated that it was the presence of the pasha that was the main reason for the insurgency.Footnote ⁹² In the meantime, reports by the governors of Rumelia, Skopje, Niš, Sofia, and Leskovac expressed deep concern that the revolt in Vranje might spread to their provinces, asking for military reinforcements and urging the government to take action.Footnote ⁹³

No one had to wait for İstanbul’s response. Fearing for his life, Hüseyin Pasha, along with his 500 Tosk soldiers, escaped from the town “without firing a gun at the rebels.”Footnote ⁹⁴ He reached Monastir, taking refuge in the headquarters of Said Pasha, the governor general of Rumelia. Soon after he left, İstanbul ordered Said Pasha and Reşid Pasha, the commander general of the Army of Rumelia, to suppress the revolt.Footnote ⁹⁵ The army dispersed the rebels, capturing some 150 of them, most of whom perished within a few years under the terrible conditions of the naval dockyard in İstanbul where they were imprisoned.Footnote ⁹⁶ Hüseyin Pasha died the same year.Footnote ⁹⁷ Apparently not ready to break the dynasty of Albanian pashas, and with a tacit admission of its failure to bring the region under its own direct control, the government appointed Hurşid Bey, Hüseyin Pasha’s son, as the new governor of Vranje.Footnote ⁹⁸ After Hurşid Bey’s death in 1852, the town administration still remained in the family, with this time his brother Süleyman Bey taking over. Hüseyin Pasha’s successors inherited not only their father’s unpaid debts to the treasury,Footnote ⁹⁹ but also the income of the town’s iron ore mines and agricultural estates as well.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Apparently, they also took after their father in terms of “tyranny” and “corruption,”Footnote ¹⁰¹ for soon afterwards they would find themselves in the very same confrontation with the people of Vranje over charges of extortion, the use of corvée, overtaxation, and unjust capital punishment.Footnote ¹⁰² Evidently, it was business as usual in Vranje.