10 | Living in the Ottoman Realm
position as a sacred site and spiritual center for Christians was no less crucial
in determining its strategic importance. Ottoman investments in Jerusalem em-
phasized its new Ottoman affiliation and aimed to create a deeper identification
of Jerusalem with the Ottomans in the eyes of local residents (urban and rural)
and foreigners. Physical changes to urban spaces are more obvious, perhaps, than
those that occur in the minds and hearts of the people who inhabit them. Yet en-
vironmental changes are a compelling factor in reconfiguring individual identity
and the identification of an individual with a larger entity. The Ottoman projects
in Jerusalem were only one example of the transformations to individuals and
places that resulted from the fact of becoming territorially Ottoman.
In chapter 10 Charles Wilkins continues exploring the experiences of sub-
jects who inhabited former Mamluk lands. The Ottoman conquest of the Mam-
luk Sultanate in 1516–1517 constituted the single largest addition of territory to
Ottoman domains in the empire’s history. Because they ruled Egypt, Syria, and
Western Arabia (the Hijaz), the Mamluk sultans had protected major routes of
communication between Europe, Asia, and Africa and claimed legitimacy as up-
holders of Islamic law and tradition in the heartland of Muslim civilization. The
joining of Mamluk and Ottoman lands under a single, powerful ruler after 1517
created a vast, secure, and relatively integrated zone of trade that expanded com-
mercial opportunity. This chapter explores what it meant to be an Ottoman mer-
chant at this time through analyzing the career of Ibrahim ibn Khidr al-Qara-
mani (d. 1557), an Anatolian Muslim trader resident in Aleppo, formerly ruled by
the Mamluks. Though native of a Turkish-speaking Anatolian town, al-Qaramani
must have developed a hybrid cultural identity, because he lived much of his life in
a predominantly Arabic-speaking city and married into at least one local family.
In chapter 11 Christine Isom-Verhaaren returns to the center of Ottoman
power in the sixteenth century, Istanbul, where the Ottoman princess Mihrimah
Sultan, daughter of Süleyman, wife to a grand vizier, and leader of a powerful
faction, lived her entire life. During her lifetime, few individuals beyond her im-
mediate family glimpsed the princess; however, from the sixteenth century until
the present, millions have gazed on the mosques that she created through her
patronage of the renowned architect Sinan. These have become enduring memo-
rials to her name and to the glory of the house of Osman, and they helped visually
transform Istanbul into an Ottoman imperial capital ruled by a Muslim dynasty.
Part III. th through th Centuries: Upheaval and Transformation:
From Conquest to Administrative State
Part III investigates the transformation of being Ottoman during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, when the Ottoman Empire shifted from being a con-
quest state to an administrative state. These chapters demonstrate the contested