Peirce|119from royal lands and other occasional taxes; nor do they permit me to act as
sarraf within the city proper. For this reason, I am unable to perform the func-
tions delegated to me through the tax farm or to furnish the requisite remit-
tances. I will be held accountable for this.Ali Pasha proceeded to order the Aintab judge and Mustafa Çelebi (not the gov-
ernor) to facilitate Matuk’s assumption of the office. His decision carried the ap-
propriate air of imperial authority—“Now hear!” it began.
Matuk was already a familiar, and not disliked, local figure, both as a holder
of three large tax farms and as a trader in textiles and dyes. The resistance he
faced in Aintab was directed less toward him personally than toward the loss of
the post of sarraf to an outside appointment—to the imperialization of this office.
At Istanbul’s behest, the role of Jewish municipal financiers was growing in these
years, an effect of the influx of European Jews into the empire in the aftermath
of the Inquisition.
If Istanbul’s scrutiny of fiscal and economic affairs could circumscribe Ain-
tabans’ ambitions, tighter ideological controls subjected the province to religious
preferences and imperial ambitions formulated in Istanbul. In particular, the
contest with Safavid Iran required of Ottoman subjects not only political loyalty
but also religious allegiance to the Sunni Islam of the sultanate. The losers here
were individuals suspected of sympathy with the sectarian movement sponsored
by the Safavid religious order that had swept over regions in Anatolia and north-
ern Syria from the mid-fifteenth century on. Aintab lay in its path.
Ottoman fears of this militant sectarian drive intensified with the trans-
formation around 1500 of Safavid manpower into a political force that rapidly
established a new state in Iran. It was the territorial advance of the first ruler,
Ismail, that was the spark for Selim’s campaigns into eastern Anatolia and the
Arab lands. Safavid proselytizing of the fifteenth century gave way to the declara-
tion of Twelver Shiɇism as the state religion, but it was the heterodox teachings of
missionaries in Anatolia that had taken root in the Aintab region and elsewhere.
Followers were known as ızılbaş, “redhead” or “red hatted,” from the headgear
of Safavid religious devotees.
In 1540, Aintab had numerous ızılbaş loyalists, although how many is
hard to say, especially as some began to conceal their spiritual orientation. The
case of a woman teacher, Haciye Sabah, who was accused of instilling ızılbaş
doctrines in her all-female classes, involved perhaps the most scandalous accu-
sation and certainly the most unusual punishment—banishment—recorded in
the court of Aintab for the years studied here. Ottoman strategies for persecut-
ing ızılbaş activists were more covert than overt, with accusations sometimes
based on trumped-up charges. Although Haciye Sabah’s neighbors charged her
with ızılbaş proselytizing, the court sentenced her for the crime of illegal and