Breaching the Bronze Wall: Franks at Mamluk and Ottoman Courts and Markets

Front matter

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Francisco Apellániz

Breaching the Bronze Wall

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 qimatr an Archive? 95 2.2.8 The Sijill: from Scroll to Codex 96 2.8 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 2.4.41 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

Introduction

And I have made you this day a fortified city, an iron pillar, and bronze walls against the whole land ... They will fight against you but will not prevail

JEREMIAH 1:18

In the three-hundred and forty-third Arabian Night the Mamluk sultan al-Malik al-Nasir sent for the chiefs of police of each the three urban agglomerations of late medieval Cairo: al-Qahira, the new city within the walls, Bulag, its riverine port district on the Nile bank, and Fustat, Coptic old Cairo. Al-Malik al-Nasir desired each inspector to recount the most astounding story they had encountered in the exercise of their duties. The chief inspector of Bulaq’s narrative dealt with counterfeiters and deceivers, while the chief of Fustat told a gruesome story about thieves and their executioners. Most significantly for the present work, al-Qahira, the new city built by the Fatimids and the epicenter of Mamluk life, served as the backdrop for a tale about false witnesses. The inspector narrated the story of two “professional witnesses" (ar. shuhud 'udül, or simply ‘udul); upright Muslims of good reputation and sound of mind permitted by the qadi to give testimony about people and facts under his jurisdiction. It was revealed that both witnesses had been secretly leading a life of dissolute ways, indulging in the company of low women and the consumption of wine. The chief of police planned to trap the witnesses, with the complicity of the tavern- and brothel-keepers. Informed by the latter that an episode of debauchery involving the two men was taking place, the chief of police came to the brothel in disguise. With no apparent sign of alarm, the two men, together with the landlord, welcomed the police officer in and proceeded to bribe him for three hundred dinars. Tempted by the money, the chief of police accepted to cover for the two corrupt men, but only that one time. To the police inspector's horror, the following day the local qadi summoned him to appear in court, to answer to a debt of three hundred dinars claimed by the brothelkeeper. The plaintiff exhibited a written deed whereby the chief of police acknowledged the debt, a document duly certified by the two legal witnesses, who attested

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to the validity of the transaction. Unable to counter this burdensome evidence, the chief of police paid the sum, and left vowing to have his revenge against the two witnesses. The story raises many questions for a contemporary reader: first of all, whether these men really did enjoy such a high reputation in their community, and why were they endowed with the privilege to testify in court. Since the paper exhibited to the qadi clearly bore no signature, why was it accepted by the court? Was the record valid just because it was supported by two “legitimate” witnesses?

This book deals with the Islamic idea that the word of honorable Muslims constitutes the proof par excellence, and that written documents and the testimony given by non-Muslims are of inferior value. According to this view, a merchant hailing from Christian Europe was at great pains to prove even the smallest claim in court, as neither his contracts nor his word were of any value if countered by Muslims. By the same token, a Frank made captive by corsairs or in a borderland attack in the Balkans was expected to prove his free condition by means of Muslim witnesses, failing which he was delivered to whosoever claimed to be his legitimate master. How, if at all, did Franks and Muslims manage to breach or circumvent what the late nineteenth-century jurist Francesco Contuzzi (1855-1925) called the “bronze wall”? This question lies at the heart of this book. In a nutshell, the present work addresses how the so-called ‘biases against non-Muslims’ were dealt with in medieval and early modern commercial litigation, in diplomatic talks and, more broadly, how discrimination based on religious affiliation could play out in the legal system. Together with the mistrust that Islamic law exhibited towards the word of non-Muslims, this work deals extensively with the chief inspector’s dilemma concerning the written deed produced against him and its legal value.

In recent years, historians have focused on the effects of these biases on Islamic societies, asking how they might have impacted Islamic economic institutions, or whether they might have fostered a shift towards a more European style of laws and courts.! My research deals instead with these precepts as a historical object, by attempting to understand how, in a typical Islamic

1 Important debates on the capitulatory regime, its economic significance, and issues of proof can be found in Kuran, Timur: The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East, Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2010, Van den Boogert, Maurits H.: The Capitulations and the Ottoman Legal System Qadis, Consuls, and Beratlis in the 18th Century, Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2005, Ergene, Boğaç A., “Evidence in Ottoman Courts: Oral and Written Documentation in Early-Modern Courts of Islamic Law’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 124 3 (2004), 471-491. Scholarly debates on the impact of European law and institutions revolve around the the “Jurisprudential Shift Hypothesis”: Van den Boogert, Maurits H., “Legal Reflections on the ‘Jurisprudential Shift Hypothesis' ", Turcica 41 (2009), 373-382, Kuran, Timur context of legal and religious pluralism, people sought to overcome the challenges posed by these shari‘a-based principles. In order to answer this fundamental question, I aim to locate, describe and historicize a change in attitude regarding diversity in Middle Eastern marketplaces and courtrooms. It should be noted, however, that my research runs parallel to two important trends in Islamic studies. The first focuses on majority-minority relations, i.e. those binding Muslims to the local Christian and Jewish populations, or dhimmis. The second looks to Islamic jurisprudence, or fiqh; foreigners, in contrast with dhimmis and Islamic sectarians, did not belong to the Islamic community and, according to jurists, had no interest in the common good, and therefore their role in the legal system was inferior. Unlike dhimmis, they received little legal attention by Islamic Law. Rather than involve itself in these two dominant research subjects in Islamic studies, this book turns instead to a practical, historical reality that has largely passed under the radar in the scholarly debate. The restriction of proof to the testimony of Muslim witnesses, as well as the denial of validity for written records has been attested since the first century of the hijra. Caliph Yazid b. ‘Abd al-Malik (ruled 720-723), is credited for banning unbelievers to testify for or against Muslims, a measure qualified by a Syrian chronicler as the starting point of these perverted laws.”

These attitudes have been presented by researchers as characteristic of the Islamic legal system, surfacing in legal discourse around the second half of the second century? even though the Quran itself does not express any reserves about the drafting of documents and the use, if necessary, of unbelievers as witnesses. These biases have accompanied Islamic societies through the ages and, although some claim they weakened in late modern times, descriptions of Muslim testimony superseding that of Christians and Jews can be found and Scott Lustig, "Structural Inefficiencies of Islamic Courts: Ottoman Justice and Its Implications for Modern Economic Life’, ERID Working Paper Number 52 (2010), 1-35, Cizakca, Murat and Macit Kenanoglu: "Ottoman Merchants and the Jurisprudential Shift Hypothesis", in: Merchants in the Ottoman Empire, Edited by S. Faroqhi and Gilles Veinstein, 195—213. Paris-Louvain-Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2008, Cizakca, Murat, “Was Shari'ah indeed the culprit?’, MPRA Paper 22865, University Library of Munich, Germany (2010).

2 “Il prescrivit aussi qu'on ne récut point le témoignage d'un Syrien contre un Arabe. Il fixa le prix [du sang] d'un Arabe a douze mille [dinars] et celui d'un Syrien a six mille. C'est là l'origine de ces lois perverses”, Chronique de Denys de Tell-Mahré: quatrième partie, edited by Jean Baptiste Chabot. Vol. 1, Paris: É. Bouillon, 1895, Tillier, Mathieu, “Califes, émirs et cadis: le droit califal et l'articulation de l'autorité judiciaire à l'époque umayyade”, Bulletin d'Etudes Orientales, 63 (2014), 147-190.

3 Hurvitz, Nimrod: "Legal Doctrines, Historical Contexts And Moral Visions: The Case Of Sectarians in The Courts Of Law”, in: The Islamic Scholarly Tradition, 239—264: Brill, 2011.

even in late-Ottoman, nineteenth-century court practice. Indeed, the impact of these prejudices was not uniquely confined to courts of law. It soon extended to the notarial practice and in customs houses, and had become a cumbersome presence at the Ottoman Imperial Council, where diplomatic talks were held. These legal features were instrumental in shaping specific institutions, artifacts and procedures, and in deepening the legal divide vis-à-vis their Latin Christian counterparts—a divide that became its most pronounced in the late Middle Ages. Islamic archives, if they existed at all, may have looked very different from European ones, as did notaries, their registers, and the way proof was advanced in court. At the end of this period, the divide generated artifacts such as the notarial register in the West, and scrolls up to ten meters long in the Islamic world.

Not all scholars focus solely on jurisprudence, and indeed recent works have looked at how the intricacies of witnessing, proof and evidence have affected the daily practice of justice and the drafting of documents. Despite their undisputed erudition, however, they depart from the chaotic legal world of the Mediterranean port cities addressed in the present work, and, one could argue, describe societies that seem to be inhabited exclusively by qadis. My aim here is to undertake a historical survey of how cross-confessional relations could be affected by these two important features of the Islamic legal system.

Although historical in nature, this work is concerned with the handling of legal principles and ideas by the users of the legal system, often lower-rank users, rather than presenting salient facts in the political history. Yet it aims at contributing to a better understanding of the transition from medieval ways to deal with diversity and unbelief to those common in the Early-Modern Mediterranean. The core facts discussed in the present research extend from the decade of 1350s, when Arab authors became more talkative about the legal affairs of foreigners, and when Venetians felt the need to dispatch their own Latin notaries to Syria and Egypt, hence welcoming the region into the Latin archival Ecumene. The main narrative becomes thicker between the years 1390s and 1440s, due to the impulse for governance changes by sultans such as al-Zahir Barquq (1382-1389 and 1390-1399), al-Mu'ayyad Shaykh (1412-21) and al-Ashraf Barsbay (1422-1438), as well as to heftier collections of notarial deeds in Venice's archives than those preserved for the second half of the 15th century. The core narrative ends with the scrutiny of the correspondences sent by Venetian diplomats in Istanbul between the 1480s and the 1550s. The Mamluk sultanate was embedded in both the spice and silk routes and hosted an unprecedented number of foreign merchants, often non-Muslims, ranging from Malacca and Ceylon to France and the Iberian peninsula in the

West.4 The Arab regions I scrutinize in this work hosted their own scholarly circles and legal institutions, and a tradition of dealing with Franks going back in time to Crusader and Byzantine periods (this precedent, eventually, will justify some breaches in the chronology). The Circassian Sultans (a branch of the Mamluk dynasty that ruled Egypt and Syria between 1382 and 1517) and their forerunners in the mid-fourteenth century, such as al-Nasir Muhammad Ibn Qalawün (d. 1341) and his household, modelled a system by which communities were granted full legal coverage, starting from their very presence in the Islamic realm to the legal nature of their activities and the resolution of their eventual disputes. As we will see, one of the features that emerged in the mid-fourteenth century was that mixed disputes, this is, those involving at least a Muslim party, needed to be heard by an Islamic judge and not by a consul or by any other Frankish magistrate. Under the great sultans al-Ashraf Qaytbay (1468-1496) and Qansuh al-Ghawri (1501-1516), as well as under 16th-century Ottoman rulers, the supremacy of Islamic law in governing cross-confessional disputes was never discussed. Yet in 1625 a Venetian consul in Alexandria sent a report to the Doge on the current state of affairs during his tenure in office. The consul noted how, after centuries of Venetian presence in the country, the spice trade had almost abandoned Egypt, to the benefit of the new transoceanic routes. Most striking is a passage devoted to justice, where the consul assures “to your Most Serene prince that since these peoples hold the consul’s justice in such high esteem, often the Turks and Moors of the country, in mixed cases (nelle cause miste), while being able to benefit from the justice of the cadis, bring their disputes before my justice, with the other Frankish nations, as they do with the French, whose consul enjoys great reputation" By depicting a scenario where the supremacy of shari‘a is no longer observed, the relazione sets a terminus ante quem. Whether the Consul is exaggerating the Muslims’ confidence in Frankish justice we do not know, but it is fair to say that by that time the Mediterranean addressed by the present work was long gone.

Needless to say, sketchy, oversimplified view of the biases’ role in Islamic history have been challenged on several fronts, starting with the work of the

4 Apellániz, F. (2016). “News on the Bulaq: a Mamluk-Venetian Memorandum on Asian Trade, AD 1503.” EUI Working Paper HEC 2016/01.

5 “e prometto a Vostra Serenità esser appresso quelle genti tanto in stima la giustitia del console, che molte volte li turchi et mori del paese, nelle cause miste, che potevano valersi della giustitia delli giudici, et cadi, venivano alla mia giustitia, et volevano da me esser giudicati con le altre nation franche, et in particolare con la francese, che ha console di molta reputatione", Venice, Biblioteca Correr (hereinafter BC), Manoscritti Provenienza Diversa, C 306.

great legal historian Emile Tyan, who long argued that some schools of jurisprudence, such as the Maliki, were more open to the use of written documents, and that in places where the school was hegemonic this attitude could have modeled court practices. Papyrologists and other specialists in Islamic documents have difficulty accepting the idea that, since documents had no per se legal value, Islamic societies did not rely on records as much as their Western counterparts did. Since archives hosting judicial and legal records do not seem to have survived for the Middle Ages, a growing number of researchers have been brandishing extant, fragmentary collections of written artifacts so as to refute the alleged inferiority of Muslims as regards writing and documentation. Chapter Two deals with this highly controversial issue, which has taken center-stage in Islamic studies, and weighs in by arguing that although a proper archival logic nearly emerged under the Ottomans, it certainly did not appear before then.

A privileged locus in the discussion is the judicial archive—the qadi's diwan—since major scholars such as Wael B. Hallaq argue it has always existed in Islamic societies. Research on medieval judicial documents is now claiming that documents were far more important than previously believed, and that they were systematically preserved by Muslims. Specialists of legal practice and of the functioning of qadi courts have sought to challenge a long-standing assumption: that medieval Islamic law was characterized by the strain placed by the demands of practical life on doctrine. Traditionally, in the absence of judicial archives for the Middle Ages, scholars have presented Islamic medieval law as purely theoretical, and fundamentally divergent from actual practice, a divide only narrowed under the Ottomans, with their pragmatic approach to lawmaking. In the case of both the Mamluk and Ottoman legal systems, authors have felt the need to dispute the established idea that shari‘a was a formalistic, idealistic and skeptical system that mistrusted the human capacity to attain the truth, and that therefore its precepts were not followed in practice. Recently, the work carried out on a judicial collection found in Jerusalem has helped to challenge this view, dwelling on the sophisticated procedures used by qadis to comply with the demands of shari‘a, particularly as regards the complex validation procedures found in Mamluk documents. However, these works' high degree of technical sophistication and their restriction to court procedure does not help historians to make sense of daily transactions with unbelievers. Similarly, researchers

6 Schacht, Joseph, An introduction to Islamic law, Oxford-New York, Clarendon Press, 1982, 76-85.

dealing with Ottoman judicial archives tend to conflate actual practice with works of jurisprudence, hence building the image of a legal empire whose jurists dedicated great effort to making the sultan’s decrees compatible with shari‘a. My book does not concern itself with the technical solutions found by the qadis to make documents valid as bearers of truth, nor with the vexing question of whether or not practice followed shari‘a doctrine. However, it does dwell on these works’ findings, which point for example to the Ottoman invention of the register—or sicil—a landmark in Islamic history, since without it historians would have no archives to investigate. I am much indebted to the contributions of Reem Meshal, in which she suggests there was an important change in attitude towards writing and documentation in the 16th century, which brought about the invention of the archive, and heralded a totally new approach by common people to documents and courts of justice. A great deal of attention will be paid to the scribes and notaries of the various confessions, to the artifacts they produced, and to the problems encountered by witnesses, either before the judges or simply when attesting to the validity of transactions in the marketplace.

This book is concerned with the actors and practices that have often passed under the radar of traditional scholarship on Islamic law. Much attention will be dedicated to the lowest layer of the legal profession: the notaries. Unlike their European counterparts, Islamic notaries have garnered little interest. Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib (1318-74) a secretary from Islamic Granada, described Islamic witnesses as materialistic men of ill-repute who could be found hanging around the markets.” According to him, they passed themselves off as versed in law and in the drafting of contracts, often posing at the door of their workshop in the market surrounded by law books, in a calculated display of legal mastery. As in the case of the witnesses’ story from the Nights, it takes some effort for the contemporary reader to understand the logic behind some of these episodes reported by Arab chroniclers. Ibn al-Khatib describes notaries showing up at lunchtime at their clients’ houses, and the latter feeling obliged to make room at their table for the scribes. Yet if they did not trust a particular clerk, due to his ignorance of the law or a reputation of dishonesty, why did clients not simply go to the next notary workshop in the street? As in any other aspect of daily life, shari‘a law is entrusted to implement a normativity stemming from Islam as a religion. Notaries were nominated by a gadi, who acknowledged his qualities as a probative and trustworthy witness; thus there

7 Turki, Abdelmagid, “Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib (713—76/1313-74), juriste d'après son oeuvre inédite: Muthla l-Tariga fi dhamm al-wathiqa’, Arabica 16 (1969), 155-211 and 279-312.

was no official investiture or any requirement to follow a professional curriculum. The tension between the Islamic notaries and their clients resided in the fact that the former's appointment depended upon local qadis, which meant that the chances of actually choosing a notary were in fact fairly limited. Unlike Muslim ‘udul, Latin notaries were to be blamed for lying and committing perjury at court, but overall for their capacity to forge notary deeds. This was the main accusation against Ser Cepparello da Prato, the famous character by Ibn al Khatib's contemporary Giovanni Boccaccio (1318-75) perhaps the worst man that ever was born, and who tried to cheat God almighty in his deathbed confession.®

The kind of legal issues that this book looks into was rarely commented upon by Arab authors; they did not deem it necessary to detail the risks associated with notaries and documents, and as in the story of the Cairo chief of police, it is often difficult to grasp the underlying mechanisms behind some of these episodes. Alongside harsh criticism, favorable portrayals of notaries abound, and indeed descriptions of virtue are often the best way to understand, by contrast, censurable attitudes. For example, Arab authors describe honorable notaries who refused women or dhimmis the right to enter their workshops as clients. Considered to be socially weak, and whose word was legally inferior in court, it was implied that the latter could be blackmailed by corrupt ‘udul, and therefore that accepting their legal business could be harmful to a scribe's reputation. Tulün (1485?-1546) tells the story of Khitab Ibn ‘Umar al-Shuwayki, a honorable man who for reasons initially unknown fell progressively ill, ending up in a maristan, or hospital, in the Salihiyya neighborhood of Damascus. Upon leaving the hospital he stopped at a shop and bought a length of rope for half a dirham, with which he subsequently hung himself. Ibn Tulùn briefly comments on the motivations behind al- Shuwayki's desperate act: he saw himself in the position of having to handle his wife's estate during her absence for a pilgrimage to Mecca. Indeed, after his suicide, it was found that a deposit (wadr'a) of four hundred and thirty gold dinars had been made to a religious institution. In light of the abundant criticism against notaries by chroniclers, one would expect Ibn Tülün to conclude that al- Shuwayki had been a victim of dishonest notaries. Instead, he informs us that one of the madrasa's staff refused to keep the money without the acknowledgement of witnesses. Ibn Tulün is implying that new, supplementary testimony of the deposit needed to be given, and that a new deed must have been drawn up. This situation would have never occurred in Latin Europe,

8 TheDecameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio, translated by J. M. Rigg, Day 1, Tale 1.

where a valid, original deed would have been kept by a notary at the disposal of the right holders.?

Another fundamental problem is the immaterial product of the notary’s work. Unlike in the West, in the Islamic world, and particularly from the tenth century, witnessing services were divided into two steps. In the first step, testimony of a given fact was taken by a notary-witness (tahammul al-shahada). The second step implied the performance of witnesses before a judge (ada al-shahada). In general, in this second step the notary and other witnesses (usually two) gave oral testimony for the transaction. Some people were enabled by the judge to take on these services on behalf of the community, and came to be known as professional notaries, ‘reputable witnesses’ (shuhud 'udül, hereinafter simply *udül), or notary-witnesses (who Ibn al-Khatib sarcastically describes for the case of Granada). Although the qadi, as a result of this second step, did sometimes produce some paperwork for his own use, the task of the *udül was in substance limited to witnessing and subsequently giving oral testimony. The ‘udul therefore, although they delivered a written deed to the parties as an aide-memoire, were not clerks charged with the keeping of original—or ‘authentic as they are called in Western notarial jargon— documents in case one of the parties lost the copy. The fact that they did not file 'originals' in a ledger or casebook puzzled Latin merchants. Ultimately, clients resorted to the *udül because the latter were authorized by the local judge to act as depositaries of the truth, which implies that it was difficult to ensure the validity of a legal business, ranging from property to family and probate issues, without the notary's consensus, and eventually that of the witnesses accompanying him. To put it plainly, in late medieval times, people needed notaries in order to enjoy and maintain their actual rights, and it was for this reason that from time to time they welcomed the notary at their table.

European notaries have been celebrated as a unique feature of Western society, thanks to their capacity to confer legal validity to peoples' agreements and transactions. They were able to bestow public faith on the deeds they drew up, by virtue of their investiture by legitimate powers, such as the Emperor or the Pope. Islamic notaries, on the other hand, do not benefit from this triumphal view of institutional history, and the ‘udul’s capacity to produce documents endowed with legal validity was far more limited. It is these conflicting views about the notarial institution that I will be discussing in this book. I will be targeting the assumption that the Islamic approach to notarization

9 Ibn Talin, Shams al-Din Muhammad Ibn ‘Ali (1485?-1546): Mufakahat al-Khillan fi Hawadith al-Zaman, Edited by Khalil al-Mansur, Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyah, 1998, 193.

was fundamentally different from the Western one, cast from classical models and Roman law. According to this assumption, the features characterizing the labor of the ‘udul stem from a religious normativity hailing from Islam as a religion, such as its formalistic principle that only good Muslims can be bearers of truth. Western notaries would have dwelt, instead, upon the old Roman practice of granting public faith to notarial deeds.

Siyasa justice is another practice that has gone fundamentally unnoticed. Shari‘a law can be described as a series of divine commandments to the community of believers, an abstract and general notion that historians of Islamic law increasingly refer to as the ‘rule of law Shari‘a as a legal ideal differs then from positive law; i.e. the trove of commentaries found in works of jurisprudence (figh). It is generally agreed that shari‘a was applied by the Mamluks, together with most medieval sultanates, in two parallel, well-defined areas of jurisdiction. The first court level was run by qadis under the supervision of the four chief justices of the madhhabs, or legal schools. Their decisions could be appealed at a second, superior jurisdiction, which came in the form of ‘royal courts’ presided over by sultans and officials. Under the late Mamluks, these special courts gained in importance, leading to the development of a parallel judiciary that was perceived by many as competing with the traditional gadi courts. Several Arabic terms were used to denote the different manifestations of royal jurisdiction, such as mazalim and Siyasa, however all were grounded in the same legal doctrines. Scholars have traditionally sought to understand these special jurisdictions and in which ways they corresponded with Islamic law. Since the time of the Abbasid Caliphate, jurists have composed works of jurisprudence dealing with governors’ responsibilities in the application of justice; these theories are known as mazalim (plural of mazlima, “oppression” and shortened form for al-nagar fi-l-mazalim, the investigation of "injustices") and Siyasa, an abbreviation for al-Siyasa al-Shar'tyya, denoting governance in accordance with Islamic law. Mazalim indeed evokes the idea of the ‘wrongdoings' committed by administrators, while the etymology of Siyasa carries notions of behavior, public or self-conduct deriving from a primary meaning of the tending or training (of beasts).

As a branch of jurisprudence, some eleventh-century authors began to address the role of officials in criminal investigations and the loose procedural methods (in contrast with those adopted by the qadis) that they were supposed to follow, such as torture, or drawing conclusions from circumstantial, non-testimonial, evidence. In the late Middle Ages some malikis composed works that sought to furnish the qadi with the efficacy of police methods, and later, Siyasa became a topic of debate for hanafi and hanbali authors dealing more broadly with the "political" jurisdiction of judges. Some of these works are over a thousand pages long, developing Siyasa into an exercise in legal reasoning that covered the entire sphere of public policies and regulations. Large sections of the work al-Turuq al-hukmiya ft al-Siyasa al-shar'iyya by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziya (1292-1350) are devoted to proof and procedure, although it also covers a broad range of other topics, from gender to minority issues and market behavior.!° It should be noted that the aim of early jurists was to provide qadis with the more efficient resources that governors and officials already disposed of. However, the division of labor that eventually emerged saw Mamluk and Ottoman qadis confined to the traditional regime of proof, and the arbitration of disputes brought to them by the parties, while officials were in charge of conducting investigations and preventing crime in a more expedite manner. Siyasa will be one of the primary concerns of this book, since over a century prior to the Ottoman conquest, Siyasa judges had begun passing verdict over foreign merchants. As a forum for mixed cases (that is, cases involving Muslims and foreigners hailing from outside the abode of Islam, which therefore could not be resolved autonomously by the community in question), Siyasa trials have gone largely unnoticed because they did not correspond to either of the two approaches mentioned earlier, focusing, respectively, on dhimmis and traditional jurisprudence. One the one hand, Siyasa justice was not delivered by the gadis, but by Mamluk officials and secretaries. On the other, mazalim has traditionally been understood as justice delivered by the sultans or caliphs at tribunals located in their palaces. Siyasa as a forum where Frankish merchants were judged has left no material traces on Islamic sources, let alone a series of proper court proceedings. Although in principle, it is agreed that Mamluk Siyasa was inspired by a specific branch of jurisprudence, and that it respected the general rule of law, legal scholars have often approached Siyasa with suspicion, seeing it as a chaotic and contingent discipline deprived of the legal rectitude applied by qadis to their court decisions.