Ottoman archives held over 50,000 registers spanning the entire empire.

Evidence

One series of registers alone contains a record, in over 1,000 volumes, of towns, villages, population and revenue for the whole Empire from Budapest to Bagh­ dad. The 50,000 and more bound registers, and the millions of papers, still preserved in the Turkish record office show that whatever may have been the faults of Ottoman administration, it was, in the early and middle periods, any­ thing but ramshackle. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 637

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to broader reading on pre-modern bureaucratic states, like the Mughal and Qing administrative records.