They Receive Regular Pay From The Mosque, Besides What They Share Of The Presents Made To It By Hadjys, For

The purpose of distribution; those not made for such purpose, are reserved for the repairs of the building. The revenue

Of the mosque is considerable, although it has been deprived of the best branches of its income.

There are few towns or districts of the Turkish empire in which it does not possess property in land or houses; but the annual amount of this property is often withheld by provincial governors, or at least it is reduced, by the hands through which it passes, to a small proportion of its real value. El Is-haaky, in his History of Egypt, states, that in the time of Sultan Achmed, the son of Sultan Mohammed, (who died in A.H. 1027,) Egypt sent yearly to Mekka two hundred and ninety-five purses, destined principally for the mosque, and forty-eight thousand and eighty erdebs of corn. Bayazyd Ibn Sultan Mohammed Khan (in 912) fixed the income of Mekka and Medina, to be sent from Constantinople, at fourteen thousand ducats per annum, in addition to what his predecessors had already ordered; and Sultan Solyman Ibn Selym I. increased the annual income of Mekka, sent from Constantinople, which his father Selym had fixed at seven thousand erdebs of corn, to ten thousand erdebs, and five thousand for the inhabitants of

[p.157] Medina. [See Kotobeddyn.] He likewise fixed the surra from Constantinople, or, as it is called, the Greek surra, at thirty-one thousand ducats per annum.

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Words from 59475 to 59737 of 182297