POPULATION CHANGES IN OTTOMAN ANATOLIA DURING THE 16TH AND 17TH CENTURIES: THE “DEMOGRAPHIC CRISIS” RECONSIDERED

The historiography of the past two decades of the demographic history of 16th- and 17th-century Ottoman Anatolia has seen diverse and often conflicting arguments among historians. Whether the Ottoman Empire witnessed “population pressure” in the 16th century, and whether this was followed in the 17th century by a serious “demographic crisis,” considered by some historians as a “catastrophe,” have constituted the central theme of the debate. The roots of these issues can be traced as far back as the early works of Ömer Lütfi Barkan in the 1940s and 1950s. It appears that the disagreements not only arose as a result of the different models of historical demography developed by diverse schools of thought, but that they also owed much to the highly disputed nature of the sources that provide the bulk of quantitative data for the demographic history of the Ottoman Empire.