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"Without the labor of the captives and slaves, the Ottoman empire could not have attained and maintained its strength in early modern times. With Anatolia as the geographic focus, Leslie Peirce searches for the voices of the unfree, drawing on archives, histories written at the time, and legal texts"--

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.

Durant l'été de 1541, une jeune paysanne nommée Fatma fut conduite à la cour ottomane provinciale d''Aintab parce qu'elle était enceinte. Elle n'était pas mariée. Il est donc évident qu'elle ne pouvait qu'être impliquée d'une manière quelconque dans le crime de relations sexuelles illicites, ouzina.Mais qui était le père ? L'affaire se clarifiant, il apparut que Fatma avait désigné deux individus, et de plus accusé l'un deux de l'avoir violée. A aucun moment du procès il n'apparaît que Fatma ait été soupçonnée d'avoir eu des relations sexuelles avec plus d'une personne. Ce qui était en cause, c'était un cas de fausse accusation dezina, et même de crime, au vu à la fois des pratiques locales et des codes légaux définis par les autorités religieuses et étatiques. L'enjeu était l'honneur d'au moins trois personnes, et en même temps le scandale dans un village.

Mothers, wives, concubines, entertainers, attendants, officials, maids, drudges. By offering the first comparative view of the women who lived, worked, and served in royal courts around the globe, this work opens a new perspective on the monarchies that have dominated much of human history. Written by leading historians, anthropologists, and archeologists, these lively essays take us from Mayan states to twentieth-century Benin in Nigeria, to the palace of Japanese Shoguns, the Chinese Imperial courts, eighteenth-century Versailles, Mughal India, and beyond. Together they investigate how women's roles differed, how their roles changed over time, and how their histories can illuminate the structures of power and societies in which they lived. This work also furthers our understanding of how royal courts, created to project the authority of male rulers, maintained themselves through the reproductive and productive powers of women