Muslim-Non-Muslim Relations According to Erzincan Shar’iyya Court Registers

Shar’iyya registers, which means court records kept by qadis or their naibs in shar'iyya courts, occupy a very important place in historical studies as they provide a lot of data about their own period, and allow us to obtain important information in different fields such as law, culture, demography, and economy. There is a total of 40 shar'iyya registry books belonging to Erzincan in the archives. 36 of these registers, the originals of which are in the national library, belong to Kemaliye (Egin) district and 4 belong to Erzincan Center. In this article, the case records in the shar'iyya registers of Erzincan Center and in which at least one of the parties is non-Muslim are examined. The aforementioned records contain relatively few documents, despite the fact that it is a densely populated area since it coincided with the 1915 Armenian deportation and was subsequently occupied by the Russians. Due to the characteristics of the period, the Ottoman census information of 1914 is also given. The documents are related to receivables, inheritance, guardianship, the appointment of trustees, and marriage. Since it is related to the subject, general and local population information in the official archives of the last period of the Ottoman Empire was also shared, and the evaluation and conclusion were discussed together at the end of the article.