Religious endowments and their credit activities in the early modern Ottoman Empire have been a well researched topic in Ottoman historiography. The majority of the scholarly research, however, focuses on endowments from the point of cash waqfs and their role in major urban centers in the Ottoman Empire. Rural societies and their relations with waqfs in times of crises have largely been neglected. This paper offers new insights regarding credit relations between village societies and waqfs in the early modern Ottoman Empire by using the Muslim court registers (ser’iyye sicilleri) of Edirne from the eighteenth century. Particularly, as part of the Muslim court registers of Edirne, the hitherto unused borrowing entries that concern the Haremeyn-i serifeyn waqfs endowed for the Holy cities are used as the main sources. It focuses on the financial activities of waqfs (i.e., sultanic waqfs or evkaf-i selatin) in the rural spheres of Edirne between the 1740s and 1810s. Going beyond the conventional interpretations of religious foundations, this paper frames waqfs as credit institutions before the proliferation of modern banks in the Ottoman Empire. Unlike modern banks, waqfs offered credit to villagers (as well as to various segments of society) that could be returned with an interest in a longer period of time. On the one hand, through the credits waqfs provided, village societies found a way to pay large sums of taxes to the state (i.e., cizye). On the other hand, the interest accumulated as a result would create larger problems later on (i.e., property transfer or abandonment of villages). In other words, this paper suggests, waqfs offered to rural societies a wide range of credit options that alleviated villagers' economic problems in the short run, yet caused more burdens in the long term. Considering the efforts of the Ottoman state to centralize waqf revenues in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that posed a serious threat to the waqf institution (especially to cash waqfs) itself, it argues that expanding waqfs’ influence among rural societies was a way to protect their position in the reforming period of pious endowments. As a result, the role of waqfs as a main credit institution among rural societies would continue well into the late nineteenth century when financial system had other formal borrowing venues.