116 | Becoming Ottoman in Sixteenth-Century Aintab
Costs and Benefits, Winners and Losers
Süleyman’s conquest of Baghdad in 1535 required many months of travel for the
sultan, his grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha and the Ottoman army; numerous visits
to cities and their leading citizens; and numerous endowments to local shrines,
citadels, and madrasas. This long military campaign was a kind of reconquest
or at least a reconsolidation of Selim’s territorial gains in Anatolia and the Arab
lands. It was natural that Ottoman networks made their way more intensively
into Aintab in these years. If the Pax Ottomanica—that reign of security, pros-
perity, and greater dependability of government—can be dated for Aintab to the
1530s, it was always uneven, biased in the accessibility of its benefits, and even re-
sisted. This time of prosperity was not permanent, and by the end of the century
numerous economic and social stresses beset the region as well as other parts of
the empire. Nevertheless, the years studied here were a honeymoon period for
many. The Ottoman regime was fortunate in that the overall rise in productivity
of the broader Mediterranean zone compounded its own efforts to maximize its
gains in the domains conquered by Selim.
There are many examples of growth in Aintab province, some stimulated
from Istanbul, some the result of local initiative in reconstituting former prac-
tices and connections and in devising new strategies to either cope with or exploit
facets of Ottoman overlordship. The rapidity of recovery is strikingly evident in
the rise in the province’s estimated revenue per household—from 213 akçesin
1536 to 288 akçes in 1543. Let us now turn to some developments of the times:
demographic expansion and agricultural productivity, rising urban revenues, the
trickle-down process of sharing largesse, and the prominence of local individuals
in imperial service.
One outcome of the security provided by the Ottoman regime was the re-
settlement of villages. The following court case in 1540 provides a chronology
of flight from the land and then return. In a dispute over a village vineyard, the
current owner, Haci Idris, asserted the length of his productive use of the land
against the claim of Yakub:
After Yakub planted the vineyard, the village went into decline. It’s been about
seven or eight years since the village started to prosper again after being aban-
doned, and the place was recultivated and then the vineyard reestablished. It’s
been 25 years since I took over the vineyard.By Idris’s calculations, Yakub abandoned his village in 1515, and the upswing in
rural prosperity began around 1532 or 1533.
Further proof of rural (re)settlement was the recovery of mezraa lands—
tracts devoted to agricultural production, boundaried and often linked to spe-
cific villages, on which settlement was forbidden. Mezraas have been described