110 | Becoming Ottoman in Sixteenth-Century Aintab
and the Çukurova Plain. Keeping roads viable—free from bandits and fit for pas-
sage of caravans (as well as the sultan’s army)—was a key to prosperity.
Crime and the networks of its prosecution provide an unexpected but use-
ful index of regional communications. Animal rustling, for example, was appar-
ently endemic in the greater Aintab region. The flourishing market for stolen
animals had as one of its centers the village of Kızılhisar southeast of Aintab
city. The attempts of individuals to recover their plundered horses and donkeys,
documented in the city’s court records, show us how far the web of this criminal
enterprise extended. Bereft owners came to Aintab from as far away as Karaman
in south-central Anatolia and Dayr al-Zor on the Syrian Euphrates. How did they
learn the whereabouts of their animals? Apparently, something of an “informa-
tion hotline” operated across villages and towns, supported no doubt by police
and judicial authorities (the punishment for theft was severe). In addition, Otto-
man legal policy gave a kind of definition to “criminal regionality” by specifying
that a suspect’s bail guarantor was responsible for searching across seven judicial
districts if the suspect went missing.
Regions of course overlapped one another, and new political constellations
could alter regional boundaries. This is evident in Aintab’s vacillating adminis-
trative affiliation. Istanbul authorities originally attached the province to the gov-
ernorate-general (beylerbeyilik) of Aleppo but then transferred it to the Dulkadir
beylerbeyilik sometime in the early 1530s. The latter’s capital, Maraş, the former
Roman-Byzantine frontier town of Germanicea, lay a day or two’s journey north
of Aintab, in the Anti-Taurus Mountains. Aintab’s more historical, and perhaps
natural, regional association was southward, toward Aleppo. Aleppo was a rich
domain, whereas Dulkadir, with a large tribal population, was not. In a mas-
sive land and census survey of the beylerbeyiliks of Aleppo, Damascus, Amid,
and Dulkadir dated 1526, Aleppo was the wealthiest and Dulkadir the poorest.
The impetus for Aintab’s transfer to Dulkadir may have been to award this long-
settled and sophisticated urban center to an underdeveloped region.
Aintab in the sixteenth century was a critical node in the transitional ge-
ography between the mountain highlands of Maraş and the agricultural plains
of Aleppo. Agriculture dominated Aintab’s rural economy. If not the largest
revenue-producing staple of the region, grapes were perhaps the most popular—
everyone, it seemed, wanted a vineyard or even a small handful of grapevines.
As Evliya Çelebi informs us in his voluminous mid-seventeenth-century travel
memoir, Aintab’s grape molasses (pekmez) was famous in the region because of
its purity, its unusual peanut butter–like consistency, and the wooden boxes it
came in. Although animal husbandry was an important activity, especially in
the province’s northernmost areas, the nomadic population registered in Aintab
was not large. However, pastoral nomads crossing Aintab on their annual migra-
tions contributed revenues to the province in the form of a camping tax.