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Free keywords:
Nomads, Yörük, Albanians, Sedentarisation, Land-reclamation, Ottoman Empire, Greece
Abstract:
This chapter examines to what extent two late medieval nomadic groups in the southern Balkans adopted the economic practices of the areas they moved into, in order to achieve agricultural sustainability. In the fourteenth century, these two groups, Turk yörüks and transhumant Albanians, migrated to Greece in order to invigorate depopulated areas and reclaim lands in Thessaly and the Peloponnese respectively. Almost three generations after their establishment, Ottoman taxation cadastres cast light on their agricultural and pastoral activities. Even though these groups followed different trajectories in their sedentarisation—more or less dictated by their ethnocultural peculiarities—they both focused over time on farming basic, life-sustaining crops, such as cereals, which were complimentary to the manifold market-oriented farming activities of the long-settled local Greeks.
