144 | Ibrahim ibn Khidr al-Qaramani
the northern, Anatolian silk road, which by connecting Bursa directly with the
centers of silk production in Iran, bypassed Aleppo. As is well known, later, in
the latter part of the sixteenth century and much of the seventeenth century, the
silk route would shift southward, and Aleppo would for a long time become the
premier city trading in Iranian silk in the Levant.
While the sales on credit suggest how al-Qaramani marketed his goods, the
salam contracts suggest how he may have resourced and directed their manu-
facture. In a typical salam contract, the first party makes an immediate advance
of money for the future delivery by the second party of movable collateral at a
reduced price fixed at the time of agreement. Crucially, the amount of the mov-
able collateral must be delivered to the first party in kind irrespective of what the
market price of the good happens to be at the time of completion of production.
Salam contracts have attracted considerable scholarly attention because as finan-
cial instruments they offered merchants extraordinary control and profit poten-
tial that were, according to some, in tension with Islamic principles of economic
justice. The evidence, consisting of three salam contracts, is admittedly slim,
but it is nonetheless suggestive of how al-Qaramani sponsored artisanal manu-
facturing. In all three contracts, artisans acknowledge that they are required to
deliver robes made of velvet cloth to al-Qaramani at a fixed future date or in in-
stallments. The artisans themselves are freeborn Muslims. These arrangements
raise the question of comparison with late fifteenth-century Bursa, where there
was a dynamic luxury textile industry for both domestic consumption and for-
eign export. Bursa seems to have been a much larger market, exporting much
more silk and relying more on slave labor. Still, the presence of similar mecha-
nisms of capital investment and the production of luxury fabrics point to the
regional dimension of what was once thought to be confined to Bursa.
The third and final kind of loan, that of cash, presents the most problems of
interpretation. The documents in question do not explain how the borrower used
or planned to use the money; nor do they specify a rate of interest. Of the nine
loan transactions, two indicate that the debt amount is the result of a settlement
between al-Qaramani and the debtor after a history of multiple unspecified busi-
ness transactions, while two others record debts incurred by those who served
as guarantors after the first debtor defaulted, but there is no account of the origi-
nal business deal. The terseness of these documents provides the historian with
little detail to investigate. One loan transaction of this kind, however, stands out
because of its dating, size, and the geographical location. A cluster of documents
narrating the settlement of al-Qaramani’s estate and dating from 1566–1567,
some ten years after his death, record that three men, all brothers and of Kurd-
ish ethnicity, had borrowed 4,000 sultanis from al-Qaramani and then traveled
to the city of Goa, along the western coast of India. Since the documents pro-
vide no additional details, we must speculate that this loan reflected the legacy