Breaching the Bronze Wall Mediterranean Reconfigurations Intercultural Trade, Commercial Litigation, and Legal Pluralism Series Editors Wolfgang Kaiser (Université Paris i, Panthéon- Sorbonne) Guillaume Calafat (Université Paris i, Panthéon- Sorbonne) volume 2 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cmed Breaching the Bronze Wall Franks at Mamluk and Ottoman Courts and Markets By Francisco Apellániz LEIDEN | BOSTON The publication of this book has been funded by the European Research Council (ERC) [Advanced Grant n° 295868 “Mediterranean Reconfigurations: Intercultural Trade, Commercial Litigation, and Legal Pluralism in historical perspective”] This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. Further information and the complete license text can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ The terms of the CC license apply only to the original material. The use of material from other sources (indicated by a reference) such as diagrams, illustrations, photos and text samples may require further permission from the respective copyright holder. Cover illustration: Vittore Carpaccio, Group of Soldiers and Men in Oriental Costume, Tempera on wood, 68 × 42 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Apellániz Ruiz de Galarreta, Francisco Javier, 1974- author. Title: Breaching the bronze wall : Franks at Mamluk and Ottoman courts and markets / Francisco Apellániz. Description: Boston ; Leiden : Brill, 2020. | Series: Mediterranean reconfigurations, intercultural trade, commercial litigation, and legal pluralism, 2494-8772 ; volume 2 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020018154 (print) | LCCN 2020018155 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004382749 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004431737 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Dhimmis (Islamic law)–Middle East–History. | Witnesses (Islamic law) – Middle East–History. | Authentication–Middle East–History. | Merchants–Legal status, laws, etc.–Middle East–History. | Egypt–History –1250-1517. | Syria–History–1260-1516. | Turkey–History –Ottoman Empire, 1288-1918. Classification: LCC KMC565 .A64 2020 (print) | LCC KMC565 (ebook) | DDC 347.56/06609023–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018154 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018155 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill- typeface. issn 2494- 8772 isbn 978- 90- 04- 38274- 9 (hardback) isbn 978- 90- 04- 43173- 7 (e- book) Copyright 2020 by Francisco Apellániz. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect the publication against unauthorized use. This book is printed on acid- free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. Contents Acknowledgements vii Abbreviations x 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Structure of the Book 28 2 Producing, Handling and Archiving Evidence in Mediterranean Societies 38 2.1 The ‘Archival Divide’ 42 2.1.1 A Threefold Problem 46 a) Justice 47 b) Textuality 48 c) Notarization 61 2.1.2 Materialist Explanations 68 2.1.3 Non- Materialist Explanations 81 2.2 Islamic Notions and Doctrines on Proof and Evidence 85 2.2.1 Archive Transmission 93 2.2.2 Was the qimaṭr an Archive? 95 2.2.3 The Sijill: from Scroll to Codex 96 2.3 Notaries in the Cross- Confessional Middle Ages 100 2.3.1 Mediterranean Notarial Traditions 102 2.3.2 Legal Fiction and Roman Ancestry 108 2.4 The Case of the Outremer Notaries 113 2.4.1 Merchants and Notaries in the Eastern Mediterranean 119 2.5 New Attitudes towards the Written 125 2.5.1 New Attitudes and Archives 126 2.5.2 Legal Reform and the Written 129 2.5.3 Judicializing the Written, Writing Judicially, and Handling Orality 134 3 ‘Men Like the Franks’: Dealing with Diversity in Medieval Norms and Courts 143 3.1 An Introduction to Siyāsa 148 3.2 The Crusader Marketplace 152 3.2.1 Muslims and Crusader Courts 154 3.2.2 Jurors and Witnesses 156 3.2.3 Courts and Bans 157 vi Contents 3.2.4 Writing Down Transactions 158 3.2.5 Crusader Cyprus 162 3.3 The actor sequitur forum rei Principle 168 3.4 Empowering One Consul over the Others 170 3.5 An Iberian Epilogue 173 3.6 Siyāsa Justice in Theory and Practice 180 3.6.1 Persians in Cairo, Franks in Acre 181 3.7 Conflict Resolution in and out of the Courtroom 191 3.8 Merchants at the Islamic Courts: a Lender of Last Resort? 194 3.9 Mixed Cases at the Qadi Court 195 3.10 Mixed Cases before Siyāsa Courts 196 3.11 Siyāsa among the Franks 198 4 Ottoman Legal Attitudes towards Diversity 206 4.0 The ‘Witness System’: a Bronze Wall? 206 4.0.1 The Early Ottoman Adjudication System 217 4.1 The Legal Grounds of the Ottoman Witness System 219 4.1.1 Vector One: the ‘Ḥanafī Exception’ 220 4.1.2 Vector Two: Mustāʾmins Cannot Testify 222 4.1.3 Foreign Unbelievers: Between Mistrust and Accommodation 226 4.2 The Ban on Muslim Witnesses 234 4.3 Dhimmī Claims on Communal Exclusivity: the Carazari Clause 242 4.4 False Witnessing 248 4.5 Proving Enslavement 258 4.6 Legal Truth and the Governance of Frontier Zones 266 4.7 The Aleppo Ferman 270 4.8 A Death in Damascus 273 4.8.1 The Priuli Case in Court 277 5 Conclusions 285 Bibliography 299 Index 323 Acknowledgements This book represents the final step of a long journey that took me through Flor- ence, Rome, Marseilles and Cairo and ended up at the baroque setting of the Orientale University in Naples. This long wandering protracted for more than a decade, involving several historical endeavors and an uncertain quest for an academic safe harbor. Somewhere in the middle of this process, the moral and legal implications of Islamic governance captured my scholarly attention and diverted my efforts away from a previous focus on Mediterranean networks, economic institutions and mutable identities. My teachings of Islamic history at Aix- en- Provence in the years 2009– 2012, and the long epilogue of academic wanderings that followed are largely responsible for this turn. The book’s mor- al and legal concern probably begun under the influence of the large share of Muslim students populating my courses at that time, within the contrasting, secular scene of a French University. If only, my exploration of the bronze wall helped mitigate the journey’s numerous dark moments. The project’s insti- gator, though, is to be searched among the fold of Mediterranean Historians. In 2014 Wolfgang Kaiser invited me to join his European Research Council- funded project Mediterranean Reconfigurations and asked me to venture, to- gether with a bunch of early- modern historians, into the unknown territory of legal relations across confessions, reaching as far as the hitherto (for me) unexplored sixteenth century. At the time, he barely knew me, and was not short of alternatives, what makes my debt of gratitude to his intellectual trust hardly able to repay. I would not be writing these lines as an active researcher were it not for his intransigent attitude to prioritize intellectual concerns. This research is what I render in partial return of his generosity, and I am glad to hear that, at the end, “vous avez très bien joué le jeu.” It is very unlikely that this book would have ever seen the light without the long- standing support to my career by Luca Molà and Wolgang Kaiser himself, together with that of Giovanni Levi, who forcefully added public demonstra- tion of appreciation for my work when I needed it the most. Thanks to their mentoring and to the EU-funded Marie Skłodowska- Curie Actions, I became depositary of a two- year Intra European fellowship at the Department of His- tory and Civilization at the European University Institute. It is in the fertile intellectual environment of my European alma mater where I developed the core research on the Siyāsa courts, published it in Comparative Studies in Society and History, and where I had the chance to benefit from the fleeting, yet profound influence of a seminal lecture by Anver Emon. Emon’s talk in- stilled me the necessity to look at minorities and more generally to ‘others’ to viii Acknowledgements understand Islamic governance and rule of law. My essay on siyāsah was dis- cussed in several formats and venues by Tijana Krstić, Tamar Herzog, Stéphane Van Damme, Jorge Flores, Mercedes García- Arenal, Maribel Fierro, Yavuz Aykan and Guillaume Calafat. I am particularly indebted to Ersilia Francesca as well as to the legal historian that anonymously reviewed my manuscript at Comparative Studies, and who contributed a great deal to sharpen the expres- sion of my ideas, later crystalized in this book. Together with Luca Molà, John F. Meloy counts among the number of my supporters. Both acted as mentors for my candidature for the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence in 2017– 2018, hence deserving a special share of my gratitude, together with the committee that granted me a Deborah Loeb- Brice yearly fellowship at Villa i Tatti, under whose auspices most of the writing was carried out. At i Tatti I benefitted from the surprising views on the moral implications of law and from the erudition of Justin Steinberg. Daily conversations over vermouth with Sanjay Subrahmanyam extended the hori- zons of law and governance into the wider setting of the Indian Ocean and its talkative Arab Chroniclers. I would like to thank Roberto Tottoli and Michele Bernardini for putting an end to my wanderings and welcoming me, in Novem- ber 2018, in the Department of Asian African and Mediterranean Studies at the Orientale of Naples, where they witnessed the closing stages of this project.