Localizing Legitimation: Bargaining Through the Law in a Provincial Court

Processes of legitimation in the Ottoman Empire are usually approached from the center-from the perspective of the dynasty, the entity assumed to be seeking legitimacy. This essay approaches the question of law and legitimacy in the Ottoman polity from a provincial vantage point, the province of Aintab, which took its name from its capital city (today's Gaziantep). It also examines the question of legitimation at a particular moment, from September 1540 to September 1541, the period encompassed by the first two extant registers of the court of Aintab available to researchers. In this microstudy of the events of a single year, I treat mid-sixteenth-century Aintab as a laboratory for examining the extent to which legal discourse furthered the process of legitimation, and the ways in which the two were related at the grassroots level. I argue that law broadly construed was a field of negotiation through which the constituent elements of legitimacy were debated and defined. This negotiation was a reciprocal process in which both province and dynasty aimed to establish legitimacy in each other's eyes-that is, they aimed to establish rightful claims over the control of local society and local resources. As the principal site of this process at the grassroots level, the local court provided a venue where this contest for control was articulated in what might be called a civil discourse of legitimation.