The tapu resmi was a feudal land tax in the

Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire (), also called the Turkish Empire, was an empire, imperial realm that controlled much of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and North Africa from the 14th to early 20th centuries; it also controlled parts of southeastern Centr ...

. A ''tapu'' was the equivalent of a title deed for farmland, in a

feudal system Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of legal, economic, military, cultural, and political customs that flourished in medieval Europe from the 9th to 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring socie ...

where farmers were proprietors rather than outright owners; this would be recorded in a ''tapu tahrir'', a survey of land ownership and land grants which the Ottoman government used to update land-tax records, and which are now valuable to historians. Not all land was subject to the tapu system;

iltizam An iltizam () was a form of tax farm that appeared in the 15th century in the Ottoman Empire. The system began under Mehmed the Conqueror and was abolished during the Tanzimat reforms in 1856. Iltizams were sold off by the government to wealthy n ...

tax-farming was more commonly applied to non-tapu land. A prominent 16th-century legal theorist argued that tapu resmi was contrary to shari'ah law, and was effectively a bribe; however, tapu resmi continued to be used across the Ottoman Empire. Tapu resmi was a ''divani'' tax on these land titles, payable to the

timar A timar was a land grant by the sultans of the Ottoman Empire between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, with an annual tax revenue of less than 20,000 akçes. The revenues produced from the land acted as compensation for military service. A ...

holder. Because land inherited land was subject to a change of title, tapu resmi could also be seen as an ''inheritance'' tax; but the tapu resmi fee was payable on other transfers too, including when farmland fell vacant because a tenant farmer died or left. After paying tapu resmi, a farmer would still have to pay resm-i çift (or an equivalent tax) each year. Land which was newly brought under cultivation, such as ifrazat, would be exempt from tapu resmi until the next tahrir (survey). In 1716, a kanunname (tax code) for the

vilayet A vilayet (, "province"), also known by #Names, various other names, was a first-order administrative division of the later Ottoman Empire. It was introduced in the Vilayet Law of 21 January 1867, part of the Tanzimat reform movement initiated b ...

of Morea set a sliding scale of tapuu resmi fees, from 20 akçes for low-quality land to 60 akçes for high-quality land; this was categorised as a bad-i hava tax, along with adet-i deştbani. The tapu system was partially reformed during the tanzimat; including increased gender equality, so that women could work or rent out farmland; the responsibility for collecting the tapu resmi passed to dedicated treasury officers rather than feudal lords, and documents were standardised in the 1840s.

References

{{reflist Taxation in the Ottoman Empire Land management in the Ottoman Empire