120 | Becoming Ottoman in Sixteenth-Century Aintab
immoral mixing of the sexes in her classes. The neighbors had told at court of
orgies, presumably between the pupils and the male teacher Sabah had hired and
his two apprentices. The female pupils were so distracted, they alleged, that “a
little girl fell off the roof while participating in their ceremonies and was injured.”
With the city’s religious authorities as witnesses of the legal action, the
Aintab judge banished Haciye Sabah from the city. She did not go quietly, how-
ever. The teacher repeatedly asserted in court that she had been making a living
for years with such classes.
There were no males present at the aforementioned conversations besides the
said Ibrahim and the two apprentices. I hired them, and for [their] fee for
preaching, I had them conduct conversations with the girls and young brides.
This is what I have always done for a living.The implication of Sabah’s words was that it was the climate of judgment that had
changed, not her conduct. In her view, she had done nothing wrong, since no one
had stopped her before for the same conduct. Rather, she implied that it was the
arbiters of morality and the criteria by which they judged that had changed. The
teacher’s message was that her guilt was in the eye of the beholder.
***By 1540, the habit of thinking of one’s location as a part of the Ottoman sultanate
was no doubt increasing in Aintab. If nothing else, there was common awareness
of who the sovereign power now was. Selim I’s passage through the province was
still alive in some memories and was starting to enter local lore. Ottoman coins
had joined the mix of currency passed among hands in Aintab’s shops, and the
Ottoman silver akçe was the standard by which most if not all transactions were
recorded. The Pax Ottomanica eased the travails of pilgrimage, and pilgrims on
routes south were beginning to notice Ottoman monuments along the way. Some
of them provided services to travelers. If not every taxpayer knew the destination
of his or her taxes, the managerial elites of villages, tribes, and urban neighbor-
hoods had some understanding of the economic and fiscal networks into which
their constituencies fit. If not clearly visible, Istanbul was clearly present in the
form of imperial overlordship in its local manifestations.
This chapter argues that the Ottoman revival and reinforcement of regional
communications and trade routes worked to the economic benefit of the prov-
ince as a whole and to significant numbers of its residents. That it was largely
local individuals who populated state-sponsored offices and their staffs enabled
incomes to feed back into the local economy. This was especially true in the first
decades of Ottoman rule, when imperial networks were not yet consolidated in