Vostitsa: The Data

An Ottoman defter from 1463, cadastral records from the middle of the 2nd Venetian Period in 1700, and population and agricultural census records from the early 20th century. In this episode, what these data contain is explored since they are the foundation of any possible analysis.

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The community of Gerontos in Taxiarchon monastery in the vicinity of the

aforementioned town of Vostica: 0:05

the priests of the aforesaid monastery have been granted a decree in the infidels language in accordance with which no one should interfere with the private properties the monastery had previously acquired. They should be exempt from the ispence and the capitation and their private properties have been registered as laftero. The community of the Theotokou Monastery in the vicinity of the aforementioned Gerontos Monastery in accordance with the decrees in the infidels language. These priests too, like the ones mentioned above, should be understood to be exempt from the ispence and the capitation, and that their private properties to be laftero. That's a translation from the 1463 Ottoman defter on page 243 of Liakopoulos' 2019 book, the Early Ottoman Peloponnese. I'm Jen Glaubius, and this is The Helonaki Deep Dive, a podcast about mapping and analysis for historical and archeological research. Welcome to the second part of the season on Vostitsa. To briefly recap, the first nine episodes were about the history of the Vostitsa region and more widely the Peloponnese from the Roman period until present to give context for the analysis that's coming up in the second part of the season. So with that background context from part one, this part of the season will include analyses of Vostitsa through time on a number of topics. But before we jump into analysis, we'll spend this episode and the next, looking at the data sources to understand the information given in each source and the types of analysis that can be done with these data. Let's dive in. In general, what I'm interested in looking at for Vostitsa are any changes through time in the population and also in the economy. So what did agriculture look like? What products were being grown and what industries were around? So I have three data sets for the Vostitsa. I'm gonna talk about each one. And the aspects of what the data from each data set can tell us. The first data set is the very first Ottoman defter for the Morea, which dates between 1460 and 1463. So right after the Ottomans took control of the Peloponnese. But it's just before, there was a very, very short first Venetian period during which Vostitsa itself was actually occupied by the Venetians, but that was super, super short, and then the Ottomans were in control of the Morea. And this data, since it's right at the very, very, very beginning of the Ottoman period, really it reflects what was going on at the end of the Byzantine period more than what happened. During the Ottoman period, a defter collected by the Ottomans was a survey that was collected whenever a new province, joined their empire or about every 20 to 30 years, or when there was a new Sultan. So they went through and got information about tithes that were to be paid. So basically the taxation. And it did that by assessing. How much taxes were expected, so not the actual tax amount, but what was expected because it was basically looking at tax revenue sources, anything that could give revenue was recorded. The defter itself records information about districts and then places within those districts. So for example, there's the district of Vostitsa and it includes localities, including the town of Vostitsa and then other villages. Around the district, what you get is the number of households, and then you get the number of single adult men because they would be taxed. So households would be taxed, single adult men would be taxed, and then widows who are in charge of households were a separate category. Also tax because they paid less in ispence, one of the taxes. There would sometimes be one piece of information about the locality, which is whether it was Albanian or not, and that was because Albanians were given a slightly lower tax rate than other villages. So that's one piece of information about the population that we do have. Otherwise, most of the information from this is the amount of tithe that would be collected or expected to be collected. So not amount of trees or acreage or anything like that, but the amount of tax. Expected. And so it's anything. There are taxes on wheat and barley and vineyards, taxes on garden production, um, resin, raw silk, flax fruit, cotton, mulberries. Olive oil, honey wine, sheep, taxes on water mills for grinding grain taxes on fulling mills for woo cloth. And actually some things were in there twice, like vineyards are in there a few times. There's taxes on individual trees, all sorts of things. Um, there's also custom duties for transport of goods and also transit duties. So that's in short part what types of taxes were to be collected. As mentioned in introduction, the two little parts from the defter monasteries would be exempt from the ispence. It's basically the Ottomans. At the very beginning, they carried over tax breaks that were already in place by the Byzantines, which is also why the Albanians. Lower tax rates. It was a carryover from the Byzantine period. That's the information about the Ottoman defter. All of this is published in a 2019 book by Liakopoulos. It was based off of his dissertation and actually goes through all of this defter for the Morea, which covers not just Vostitsa, but many parts. The Morea of the Peloponnese of Greece, but not all of them. So I'm focusing on Vostitsa and that's the data I'm pulling out. But it's also possible to look at district versus districts, so Vostitsa versus other neighboring or other districts in the Peloponnese to look at information that way. So that's the first source. The second source is the one I'm most familiar with, which is the 1700 Venetian cadasters. Because I worked on this, this data set for my master's thesis, the context for these Venetian cadasters is that they were collected halfway through the Venetian period. So the Venetian took control of the Peloponnese in 1685. Most of it except for like the islands of like Monemvasia, which took a lot longer. And then they gained formal control of the area in 1699 with the, with a treaty, with the Ottomans. And so then they had been trying to collect this data, this information because they wanted to switch from the ottoman type of tax farming, so to taxing people based on the land that they had. And so Venetians went around and they gathered information from local informants. They also did a, a lot of mapping. So the detailed cadaster contains maps of each unit, which. They call basically a villa, and you have a map that shows where individual plots of land are, and then they also list out who owns those plots of land. That's a ton of data that I'm really not going to go much into for this analysis because it's much more information that we have than we have for. Otherwise what's recorded in both the detailed and the more general cadaster is basically the same information. So based on this unit of the villa, which could include one or more villages or other groupings, it would have information about how many families live there and usually if they were. Uh, native inhabitants of the area or had come from elsewhere? Um, mostly if they've come from elsewhere in Vostitsa, that means they've, they've come from Rumelia, which is central Greece. Information about the houses, how many houses were destroyed, how many houses were intact, how many houses were publicly owned, um, how many houses were roofed with reeds versus tiles. And this is information, interesting information about. Housing and structures, but it's not uniform across all the villas. So you'll get one that'll describe from villa to villa. It'll describe houses in different ways, so it's not easy to compare these things because one will be like, yes, the public houses with with reeds that are destroyed. Another one will like divvy those up. Separate. They also list different structures like, uh, olive presses, uh, grist mills and folding mills. So that's similar information that is in the, in the Ottoman defter. They also list numbers of trees and animals, and so you've got information about how many mulberry trees, how many fig trees, things like that. How many sheep, how many goats. That's all. So all of this information, this information, this data set was published in a book in 1993 by Dokos and Panagopoulos, out of records that are in the state archives in Venice. I do not have current access to this book. I do have photocopies that I took from the early 2000s. So that's our second data set. The third data set is more. A few different things. First, there's population censuses for the modern Greek state. These are for different areas, so the modern Greek state has changed their arrangements of, of how they collect population many, many times. And so their first census. In 1828, so right at the end of the Greek War of Independence, and that one's mostly based on families. Otherwise, they did censuses mostly almost once a decade, but it's not necessarily on a strict schedule. Sometimes it would be longer than 10 years or less than 10 years. The one that we're mostly, that I'm mostly concerned with is from around 1907. 1909 when it was published, and that's because there's also the first. Really good agricultural census. That dates to 1911, so really close in time, which allows me to join looking at both population and agriculture together because those two match up and that agricultural census records many of the things that we've seen for the other two data sets, the 1911 agricultural. Gives information in terms of a unit of land called strema, plural, stremmata, which is equivalent to one 10th of a hectare. There are amounts of land for like wheat, barley, corn, oats, all things like that. Lentils, fava, and then also the amount of of agricultural plants and numbers of the diff, the various trees and numbers of various animals for agricultural production as. It gives a lot of information about those things, which is great. And the, the, all of the, the population and agricultural censuses are available for download from the Greek Statistical Service, and you'll be able to find that link in the show notes just to think about the three data sources. They cover a long period of time. Um, three data points, 1460, around 1460, then 1700 and then 1911. So there's at least 200 years between each of those. So these are just three data points. They're not really indicative of what goes on in between, but hopefully we can see that there. If there are changes or there are changes, but we can see what types of changes there. by comparing the data to each other, but that's not especially easy because they're not directly comparable. So the ottoman Defter, the information is in the amount of tithe, so we don't have amounts of trees or acreage or numbers of plants. We don't have that information. And so that makes it dissimilar from both the Venetian records from 1700 and the 1911, around 1910 ish population and agricultural censuses. So it doesn't make it easy to compare those. As far as population goes, the both the Ottoman defter and the Venetian cadaster from 1700, they don't give individuals, but families or households. And so we don't know exactly, we can estimate the number of people based on the average family size, but it's. Quite directly comparable with the 1907, 1909 population census, which gives numbers of people, and it's broken down by male and female population as well as the total, so they're not comparable in that way. So there are ways to possibly get around it, but what I think is easiest and best is to look at the data, each data set within itself. So information from the 1460s when right after the Byzantines are taken over by the Ottomans, we can understand vasa and the areas the locations given with in Vostitsa and then in comparison with other districts during that time period. And then we can do, look at. Venetian cadasters from 1700, of which we have Vostitsa and no other areas, or at least I don't have access to any of the other areas. Most of them weren't completed, and so we have information just for Vostitsa and we can look at comparing information within the territory of Vostitsa in 1700 and then say, okay, here's where patterns are similar or different. And then same thing with 1900 data, whereas the population and also can bring in some of the earlier population censuses from modern Greek state. So we can look at patterns through time within the modern Greek state, and then also compare it with the other two time periods, but not directly because. with the modern Greek state, we're dealing with individuals and not just families or households, but we can see patterns in certain places within Vostitsa or what it was then called with Aigio. And then we can also look at comparisons between the different provinces within the modern Greek state. And the way that we can do that is by looking at spatial patterns because a lot of what goes on. Like the things that are going to be true from one period to the next are because of the environment, and I'll talk more about this in the next episode, but the topography of the land and natural resources are there, and so different villages, different locations are going to be able to access different things. The landscape might be predisposed towards herding sheep and goats rather than growing any. Because of the topography, and I'll go into that. And also what makes looking at these things spatially difficult as well in the next episode. But hopefully what you got from this is that there is a lot of information out there. These three data sets are amazing, but because the people collecting that information had different goals. The information contained not directly comparable. The way that I see best for doing this is actually to look at each data set within itself. and then look at trends between the three and looking at that spatially. And so in the next episode, you'll get information about how that spatial component can come in to actually put these data into context. For the and notes. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about how I've prepared the three data sets for analysis. I'll start with the middle one, the 1700 Venetian records, because that's the easiest. Well, mostly because I did most of the work in the mid 2000s when I put all the data into a Filemaker database. Since then, I've exported that data into CSV format, uh, a comma separated value because it's a nice open source type of file that I can open in a, in a variety of programs, including GIS for the mapping, and in R for just straight up statistical analysis. The other two data sets are both in, are also both in CSV and I've been able to enter those directly. The 1460 Ottoman defter, the author of the book, Liakopoulos, uh, had tables that included all of the data for Vostitsa, and I was able to then enter that data into my CSV table for. Agricultural and population censuses for the modern Greek state 1911, and otherwise I also entered those into. Thanks for listening. Email questions or comments to deepdive@helenaki.com or ask them on the Helonaki Deep Dive Facebook page. Show notes with links to resources mentioned in this episode will be available at helonaki.com. That's H E L O N A K i.com. You can also find ways to support the show now, including merch, such as t-shirts, mugs, and stickers with the Helonaki Deep Dive logo at helonaki.com/support. My thanks to Patreon supporters at the geospatial analyst level, Leah Varrell and Janice and Jerry Farrell. Your support keeps the Helonaki deep dive going. The Helonaki Deep Dive is written and produced by me, Jen Glaubius of the Helonaki. The theme music is Deep Ocean, instrumental by Dan o of dan o songs.com, additional sounds from zap splat.com. Thanks for listening.