Becoming Ottoman in

Sixteenth-Century Aintab

Leslie Peirce

Ageneration after its surrender to Sultan Selim I in August 1516, the city of

Aintab and the province of which it was the capital were busy adjusting to the
new Ottoman presence and exploiting it as well. For a northern Syrian prov-
ince whose recent overlords had resided to the south—in Cairo, Damascus, or
Aleppo—Istanbul demanded a radically new orientation. But if the Ottoman
conquest meant subordination to imperial policies, it did not mean wholesale
domination by the capital. The governors, judges, and soldiers assigned to Aintab
by the ruling regime included numerous local individuals. More important, Ot-
toman practice depended heavily on the cooperation of provincial power bro-
kers, especially in the aftermath of conquest.
Aintab entered the Ottoman domains in a period when the empire was still
“becoming.” Selim’s huge conquests of 1514 and 1516–1517 doubled its size, and the
process of absorbing new territories was far from immediate. It was only around
1536 that Aintab began to appear regularly in records of the province’s integration
into imperial networks of administration. Two kinds of Ottoman bookkeeping
provide the portrait of Aintab sketched here. One is the case records kept by the
judge of the Aintab court. The other is the detailed land and census surveys (tah-
rirs) periodically carried out by the Ottoman regime; the Aintab surveys of 1536
and 1543 are bookends for the period this chapter focuses on.
Aintab may have been a relatively insignificant addition to the empire, but
the Ottoman sultanate was the sum of its relations with places like it. It saw its
dominion as a collection of conquered states, or so the term it used for “em-
pire”—memalik-i mahruse, the well-protected domains—implied. This is prob-
ably why the land and census surveys and court records of a small province like
Aintab were as carefully executed as those of major cities and provinces. These
records show us the ways in which Aintabans sought to gain advantage from the
new regime’s presence and who was or was not successful in doing so. For exam-
ple, since tax revenue was arguably the sultanate’s supreme desideratum from its
provinces, local entrepreneurs, rural and urban alike, made productive subjects
who might be rewarded with investment opportunities, which were notarized at

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