Conflicts involving sheep-breeding in an agricultural district: Gebze in the mid-1700s Documents on sheep-breeding in the Ottoman world often concern the supply of animals for the slaughterhouses of Istanbul; presumably this concern is also a backdrop for for the documents studied here. But from the local peasants’ viewpoint, other issues were more immediately significant: above all, they needed to safeguard their pasture rights vis à vis nomads and semi-nomads on the one hand, and against sheep-breeding farms working for the Palace (miri mandıra) or members of the elite on the other. In addition fellow villagers might cause conflicts as they might wish to plough up rough pasture to transform it into fields. Access to pastureland – and the dues payable for access -- were thus a frequent bone of contention. Whatever information emerges on sheep-breeding practices is incidental to this set of conflicts. As for the administration, the ‘ancient registers’ (defter-i atik) or compilations detailing settlements, taxes, and tax-takers, which went back to the 1500s and sometimes even the late 1400s, had established a norm from which it was very difficult to deviate, even almost a quarter of a millenium later. This fact appears with special clarity when people tried to change land use: villagers could not set aside land for grazing if the registers did not provide for this need. In a region known for its good-quality pastures such as Gebze, official inflexibility must have made for many unofficial ‘arrangements’, which only entered the records if one of the conflicting parties, usually a tax-taker, decided to take the issue to court or directly to the administration in Istanbul. In this paper, I will try to establish how the parties to the conflict referred to the registers of the 1500s in order to get their way in the changed context of the 1700s. Responding in this manner legitimized complaints and allowed whoever used this form of recourse to put his opponent in the wrong. Peasants sometimes used this strategy; but above all it was the tax-takers who benefited from references to ‘imperial tradition’, which after all served the elite more than it served the subject population.