Despite the considerable expansion of research in Ottoman economic and social history in recent decades, our knowledge of the long-term trends in prices in the Ottoman Empire, and more generally in the Balkans and the Middle East, is very limited. Economic and social historians of these regions in the late medieval and early modern eras are still unable to make sense of the most basic of monetary magnitudes involving prices, wages, and wealth, even though inter-temporal comparisons of these magnitudes are the most basic prerequisites for studying the long durée.