Peirce|113of local and regional rebellions that had plagued Anatolia for centuries. Would
the Safavids manage to push the Ottomans out of the region? Would a Mamluk
revival reorient Aintab southward? Or would a whole new power emerge to carve
out its own domain? It was only in the later decades of the sixteenth century that
the Ottoman sultanate fully secured Anatolia and the Arab lands. At some point
Aintabans must have realized that their city was unlikely to revert to a frontier
fortification, but just when this became a reasonable assumption on which to
base one’s decisions is not certain. In the meanwhile, it made good sense to culti-
vate one’s own garden, fertilizing it with local and regional ties.
What is certain is that Aintab’s kaleidoscopic political history had given it
a certain agility in shifting its loyalties and adjusting to new sovereign regimes.
The self-sufficiency it perforce evolved to survive intact was an advantage as the
province adjusted to Ottoman rule. In late medieval times the city was known
as “little Bukhara,” evoking the latter’s abundance of learned men. And it was
an apparent favorite of Evliya Çelebi. Aintabans could be proud of the urban
amenities they had produced on their own, for whatever repute Aintab enjoyed
was the result largely of local initiative. Only once in its past had the city been
particularly favored by a ruler: the minor Ayyubid prince Melik Salih Ahmed
is remembered for having turned the city into a “little Damascus” during his
mid-thirteenth-century governorship. One still hears today that the people of
Gaziantep prefer to invest locally and to avoid dependence on government mon-
ies. If so, this may reflect a long-standing habit reinforced by historical necessity.
Aintab’s Conquest
Official records answer only some questions about Aintab’s transformation into
an Ottoman province. Aintab was obviously fitting into the empire administra-
tively, but were its inhabitants becoming “Ottoman”? What were the forces that
molded political or cultural allegiance to a new sovereign authority? And did the
conquest itself figure in attitudes toward the new regime? More difficult, is local
thinking in the sixteenth century about geographies of belonging perceptible to
today’s historian?
By 1540, the Ottoman conquest was an experience that roughly half the
Aintab population had lived through and half knew as an event before their
birth. Since some who had lived through it were children at the time, many grew
up hearing about the conqueror-sultan, whose march southward halted for three
nights in the province. What memory of the Ottoman advance remained a gen-
eration later? Was Selim recalled as a welcome victor or an unwelcome invader?
The Ottomans were Rumi, “Roman,” and their capital—in official parlance
Kostantiniyye—still bore many physical traits and ingrained habits of its Byzan-
tine past. Aintab, on the other hand, was “the little bride of Arabistan.”