114 | Becoming Ottoman in Sixteenth-Century Aintab
Documentary sources yield little trace of the actual events of 1516, perhaps
because no blood was shed in Aintab. Defecting to the Ottomans, the Mamluk
governor Yunus Beg is said to have handed the keys to the Aintab citadel to Selim
on August 20. The following day the sultan pitched camp “with great majesty and
pomp.” There he proceeded to plan his next move—the battle of Marj Dabiq, a
definitive Ottoman victory on August 24 that heralded the fall of Cairo and the
demise of the Mamluk Sultanate five months later. Selim’s conquests between the
date of his departure from Aintab and January 1517 were the largest territorial
acquisition in the empire’s history.
Land surveys and court records shed much light on the aftereffects of the Ot-
toman takeover—the scramble for property as the economy picked up, new tax
assessments, and shifting patterns in uses people made of the court. But as the
court records of 1540–1541 suggest, the conquest itself was cited by the occasional
Aintaban only as a means of dating events. In reporting the death of an elderly
horse expert, it was said that he had “come and taken up residence in these parts
around the time of the conquest,” and in establishing the validity of a land claim,
one witness stated that legal possession dated from “the imperial conquest.” The
Mamluks were now a preconquest era, “the time of the Circassians” (a refer-
ence to the ethnic origin of the later Mamluk sultans). Relying only on archival
sources, one might deduce that Ottoman administration was now business as
usual, with the conquest itself receding into the past, along with the Mamluks.
But Aintab’s remembered history tells a different story about the conquest,
one that casts light on the province’s own vision of its new place in the empire.
In local legends about the conquest, Aintab claims credit for Ottoman success.
Selim is the vanquisher of the Mamluk sultanate, but it is local miracle-working
holy men who give him the victory at Marj Dabiq. In a tale about the local holy
man Dülük Baba, who is usually represented in legend as a companion of the
Prophet Muhammad, Evliya Çelebi makes him a protagonist of the events of
1516. As Selim marches through Aintab province, Dülük Baba gives him the
good tidings of victory and even specifies the date. When the prediction turns
out to be true, the sultan honors the saint (who has died in the interim) with a
lofty tomb. In another legend, the dervish shaykh of Sam, a large village close to
Aintab city, works miracles with grapes and grapevines. The marvels range from
a single vine cutting that feeds the Ottoman soldiers to the appearance at a criti-
cal moment on the field of Marj Dabiq of a whole field of vines and the billhooks
used to prune them. This arouses panic among the Mamluk ranks and leads to
Ottoman victory.
These legends are a clear statement of reciprocal empowerment. Without
Ottoman boldness and might, regional conflict might have continued. Aintab
would still be vulnerable to siege by one or another contending power. But the