 Ibrahim ibn Khidr al-Qaramani

A Merchant and Urban Notable

of Early Ottoman Aleppo

Charles Wilkins

The Ottoman conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate in 1516–1517 constituted the

single largest addition of territory to Ottoman domains in the empire’s history
and held great importance for the empire’s evolution. The Mamluk sultans domi-
nated Egypt, Syria, and Western Arabia (the Hijaz) and had governed a large
population; protected major routes of communication between Europe, Asia,
and Africa; and claimed legitimacy as upholders of Islamic law and tradition in
the heartland of Muslim civilization. From an economic point of view, the join-
ing of Mamluk and Ottoman lands under a single, powerful ruler after 1517 cre-
ated a vast, secure, and relatively integrated single zone of trade that must have
expanded commercial opportunity. Ottoman state practices in the economic
sphere also differed substantially from those of the Mamluks. What did it mean
to be an Ottoman merchant at this moment in history? This chapter considers the
career of Ibrahim ibn Khidr al-Qaramani (d. 1557), an Anatolian Muslim trader
resident in Aleppo, once a city of the Mamluk Sultanate and now incorporated
into the Ottoman domains. Though hailing from 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.
The vigorous political competition between the Ottoman and Mamluk states
before 1517 did not mean that trade could not pass between them. Economic in-
terdependency drove both states to maintain close trade relations even during
wartime; such was the case even during the European Crusades (twelfth through
fourteenth centuries), which were fought in much of the same territory in the
eastern Mediterranean and which pitted culturally more distinct camps, Euro-
pean Christian and Middle Eastern Muslim, against one another. The expansion
of commercial opportunity after 1517 was thus not absolute but rather relative.
Still, the Ottoman political elite pursued a set of economic practices that led to a
substantial improvement of conditions for trade and that can be seen as part of