140 | Ibrahim ibn Khidr al-Qaramani
does not necessarily make up for other personal failings, and indeed the effect of
the virtuous act may be subverted entirely. The subject of this study, al-Qaramani,
illustrates not only the biographer Ibn al-Hanbali’s curiosity but also his special
moral and ethical judgments. Al-Qaramani is, according to Ibn al-Hanbali, not a
native of Aleppo but rather of Larende, a town in south-central Anatolia known
today as Karaman. His status in Aleppo is that of a nazīl, or temporary resident,
and it seems likely that his first language was Turkish. Ibn al-Hanbali describes
al-Qaramani as having risen from the lowly estate of a muleteer to that of a fabu-
lously wealthy merchant, with a vast fortune of 100,000 sultanis. If true, the size
of this fortune would have placed al-Qaramani in the wealthiest rank of traders,
comparable to the Karimi merchants under the Mamluk Sultanate and to the
late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century commercial magnates of Bursa under
the Ottomans. However, this rags-to-riches story, asserts Ibn al-Hanbali, is less
the result of business acumen and hard work than it is of the favor he enjoyed
with governors and judges and of unethical business practices. Curiously, Ibn
al-Hanbali does not explicitly link al-Qaramani’s commercial success with the
event he describes elsewhere in his work: the Ottoman authorities’ forcible relo-
cation of a significant number of Aleppan merchants to Trebizond in years just
following the Ottoman conquest. Ostensibly undertaken to rebuild the once-
thriving economy of Trebizond, the relocation must have left in Aleppo a strong
demand for commercial and financial skills that al-Qaramani and others could
easily exploit. Hence, al-Qaramani’s migration to Aleppo may have been a delib-
erate response specifically to Ottoman policies of forced resettlement.
Ibn al-Hanbali implicitly sets up comparisons between al-Qaramani and the
political elite by attributing to al-Qaramani acts of violence that were consistent
with the governor’s monopolization of coercive force. Evidently the owner of sig-
nificant numbers of slaves, al-Qaramani is said to have subjected his male slaves
to severe abuse, going so far as to publicly crucify one at the entrance of a major
commercial warehouse. Al-Qaramani accused the slave of financial embezzle-
ment, but no legal process seems to have been used. Al-Qaramani continued to
mistreat his slaves with apparent impunity, until one Ottoman governor blocked
an attempt by al-Qaramani to execute a second slave. A female member of the
Ottoman imperial family ordered the manumission of the slave as she was pass-
ing through Aleppo while on pilgrimage.
It was only a few months thereafter that al-Qaramani was afflicted with a
serious case of gout, and in the midst of that illness, perhaps wishing to secure a
favorable legacy and perhaps to atone for his misdeeds, he ordered the building
of a religious complex in Aleppo, comprising a mosque, an elementary school
for orphans, and a tomb for his burial (madfan). But soon after the complex was
completed, in what must be counted an ominous supernatural event, the qibla, or
prayer wall, of the mosque began to crack and lean dangerously, despite what Ibn