The “military” farms (“askeri” çiftlikler), uprooted landless peasants, and different forms of labor found in the seventeenth-century tax surveys constitute the points of departure of this study. I argue that these çiftliks were the agents of change in early modern agrarian transformation processes and property relations in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. Although these private estates did not mark an absolute and radical break with the miri land regime in legal terms, they paved the way for new social and economic relations, specifically in Thessaloniki and Kütahya provinces, within the conditions of the seventeenth-century crisis. In this regard, the seventeenth-century agrarian social and economic structure was significantly different from the sixteenth-century rural order, in which independent peasant households and the timar system were the main elements. This new agrarian social structure emerged within the conditions of the seventeenth-century crisis. The complex amalgamation of long-term demographic, economic, social, political, and climatic factors and, most importantly, conscious actions of people created the new class relations in this context. The establishment of privately owned estates engaged in commercial agriculture and specialized in grain production went hand in hand with the expropriation of certain segments of the peasantry. While the dispossessed peasants became farmhands and sharecroppers in these estates, the new rural landed gentry came into being with a distinctive class disposition. Additionally, different from the case of Kütahya, the dispossessed peasants were mostly Christians in the Thessaloniki countryside, while most of the new landlords were Muslim. Therefore, different class positions overlapped with different confessional identities in the case of Thessaloniki.