The Price of Justice: Revenues Generated by Ottoman Courts of Law in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries

Much has been said about the Ottoman courts of law and their functions since the 1970s. Scholars interested in the topic have justifiably emphasized the important roles that the courts played in the governance of a large empire, in defense of the dynasty’s ideological claims to power, in the implementation of a sharia-based judicial system in fashions responsive to local, customary expectations of justice, and within interand intra-communal relationships in many provincial settings.1 Thus, we know