The island of Cyprus still lives with the history of its Ottoman era today. In this work by Ronald Jennings, we are presented with a picture of village life during the era of the Ottoman conquest of Cyprus. Jennings bases his work on the surviving tax and population survey of the island which was completed by the Ottoman administration in 1572. This Ottoman survey gives the official view of the island, but it also contains Venetian data. Jennings’s systematic study of the register looked at aspects of agricultural production and discovered how Cyprus was an important source of food and taxation revenue shortly after its conquest. Village Life in Cyprus is therefore both a look at how the Cypriot population lived in the sixteenth century and how it developed under the early years of Ottoman rule.
