In the late nineteenth century, opportunities for obtaining officially sanctioned credit expanded in the rural regions of the Ottoman Empire. Borrowers and lenders, mainly cultivators and merchants, had long used forward-purchase contracts to complete transactions of agricultural commodities, sometimes attaching privately owned urban property as collateral. However, controversial clauses in the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 legalized using agricultural land as collateral against debt. The Hamidian regime also created the Ottoman Agricultural Bank, the first state lending institution aimed at provincial cultivators and providing cash loans with land as collateral. This paper will explore the contestations around late Ottoman mortgage policy as well as the dynamics of mortgaging landed property in Syria during the Hamidian and CUP periods. Although they used language developed previously for privately held urban property, the clauses sanctioning mortgage of agricultural land in the Land Code were innovative and Ottoman jurists debated the potential social dynamics of this legal infrastructure extensively. These debates, informed by bureaucrats’ reports about credit practices in the provinces, provided the context for the founding of the Ottoman Agricultural Bank. Ottoman mortgage regulations and the Agricultural Bank opened the legal and institutional doors for producers to lose land over which they had only recently gained legal ownership. However, the same regulations rendered foreclosure complex and costly. This contested expression of the conflicting interests of borrowers, creditors and the Ottoman treasury was the legal and institutional context of rural finance inherited by colonial regimes in the twentieth century. To investigate the social context of these debates and regulations, the paper will turn to the district of Salt in Syria (contemporary Jordan), where the Sharia court and land administration were involved in sanctioning the use of agricultural land as collateral in exchange for cash credit. Imperial legislation provided a legal framework for producers like nomads, whose main fixed property was land, to use mortgage on the official credit market, including borrowing from the local branch of the Agricultural Bank. Mortgage also served to tie particular communities of small-holding agricultural producers more closely to particular merchant lenders, intensifying existing credit relationships. However, especially at times of environmental and political crisis, mortgage provided a route to crushing debt for some producers, if not landlessness. The paper will explore how these contradictions contributed to the slew of amendments to legislation on mortgage at the imperial level during the last years of Ottoman rule.