This paper will look at attitudes towards land holdings and land allotments in the Armenian territories that were conquered by the Georgian kingdom during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. During this period, the traditional notions of land tenure had become tenuous due to the disintegration of the dynastic social structure of Greater Armenia. In this structure, land was the central basis of society and considered to be the hereditary property of a dynastic family. The disintegration of the Armenian dynastic system from the combination of the Byzantine annexation of the Armenian kingdoms of the Arcruni and Bagratuni in the eleventh century followed by the Selj?q conquest of eastern Anatolia in the second half of that century weakened the very nature of land tenure. Evidence of changing attitudes with regard to land tenure is discernible in the development of a new vocabulary to denote land grants and land possession. This new vocabulary consisted of both loan words and of the redefinition of older Armenian terms. In addition, over the course of the twelfth century, the Kingdom of Georgia, starting with David the Builder (1089-1125), engaged in a policy of expansion into Armenia. During the reign of Queen T'amar (1184-1214), the Armeno-Georgian forces under the command of the Armenian amirspasalar (commander-in-chief), Zak'ara, had conquered nearly all of the lands of the former Bagratuni kingdom. These lands were subsequently granted to Zak'arZ and his family to administer and to allot to other families. It will be suggested that the administration of land allotments in the Georgian kingdom with respect to the newly acquired lands of the former Armenian Bagratuni kingdom mirrors the system of iqte' grants developed by the Seljeq Turks. These commonalities suggest that the regional Christian and Muslim powers developed similar strategies for dealing with problems of land tenure and allotment; they may further indicate the existence of a discernible sociopolitical paradigm within the Armeno-Georgian kingdom more closely aligned with regional models than with either medieval European or Byzantine ones.

In the century following his death in 638/1240 the legacy of Ibn al-'Arabi spread throughout the Muslim world attracting both dedicated followers and also sharp critics. According to an early Ottoman narrative Sultan Orhan assigned the medrese he built in Iznik, traditionally regarded as the first medrese of the Ottoman Empire, to Davud-i Kayseri, a scholar known to represent the intellectual tradition of Ibn al-'Arabi. This narrative has received considerable interest in modern literature both on the cultural and religious history of the Ottoman Empire and on the dissemination of the legacy of Ibn al-'Arabi in the Muslim world. However, a critical reading of the modern literature reveals that neither the circumstances nor the implications of this assignment have been explicitly identified. In fact no extensive research has been undertaken to discuss the Ottoman sources on this matter. In this paper I provide an overview of the Ottoman legal and literary sources on the assignment of the Iznik Medrese to Davud-i Kayseri by Sultan Orhan and point out certain problems these sources present in understanding the factors that might have been effective in this delegation and the extent of the role Davud-i Kayseri played in the local dissemination of the Ibn al-'Arabi school of thought. I first discuss the surviving abridged version of the vakfiyye of the Iznik Medrese which contains only a summary version of the original. Here I bring to attention the problem this summary version of the vakfiyye poses for identifying the director (mutevelli) of the Iznik Medrese described therein specifically as Davud-i Kayseri, the commentator of the Fusus of Ibn al-'Arabi. Secondly I survey the Ottoman chronicles and biographical dictionaries where this assignment is mentioned. Here I specifically discuss the history of Asikpasazade which is the first Ottoman literary source to convey this narration and bring to attention the indications that suggest his source for this particular piece of information might as well have been his contemporaries rather than an eye-witness account of the reign of Sultan Orhan through the work of Yakshi Fakih. This study constitutes an initial effort towards a much needed evaluation of the political, social and cultural circumstances and implications of Davud-i Kayseri's presence in early Ottoman Iznik as a representative of the intellectual legacy of Ibn al-'Arabi.

Re-thinking Waqfs: Beyond the Sacred vs. Secular Dichotomy Waqfs, civic endowments created in perpetuity, have been pillars of Islamic civilization that worked to answer the secular and mundane needs of people as well as religious ones. Given the fact that founders of a waqf could benefit from its revenues or pass them to any designated heirs, some scholars claimed that waqfs were basically used for personal interests. This paper refutes this argument through reading the waqf records from the 16th century Istanbul, in the Ayasofya Mosque district, Nahiye-i Cami'i Serif-i Ayasofya. Firstly, I argue that the waqf system, operating according to Islamic law, well understood that people would look for ways to satisfy their personal needs. This way, its mechanism linked people's personal interests with that of the public interest and widened the scope of benefits that personal properties could produce. Waqfs also planted this idea of interrelatedness of religious and profane, personal and communal in the minds of people. According to waqf records, the founders saw the relationship between the material and the spiritual, their personal interests and the public interests intertwined. A waqf founder could appoint his son as the manager of his waqf and decree some of its revenues to go to a soup kitchen. A woman could endow her waqf's benefits to herself, her husband and children, then to the poor and also require the recitation of the Qur'an each year, all decreed in the same document. Rather than using the waqf organization solely for personal gains, waqf founders made a statement that went beyond the dichotomy of personal interest versus public interest or sacred versus secular.

In recent years Mamluk historians have successfully deployed the distinction between legitimate power and effective power to make sense of the political conflict that plagued the Sultanate in the mid-fourteenth century, a period that previously had been written off as one of chaos. This work has emerged also from a re-assessment of the significance of the long reign of al-Nasir Muhammad in the first decades of the century as one which triggered the regime's loss of centralized power to that of the Mamluk magnates whose own autonomous political organizations competed with the government for access to material resources. The author's research builds on this re-assessment by noting that these alternative loci of effective power constituted also competing taxation systems within the Mamluk lands. One critique of this re-assessment, particularly the latter, is that it has relied excessively on the narrative historical tradition, which has long dominated Mamluk historiography. The corpus of Mamluk period epigraphic decrees, although systematically collected since the late nineteenth century and now being re-published in the CD-ROM Thesaurus d'spigraphie Islamique, has been generally neglected in recent scholarship. Nonetheless, the decrees, most of which concern the abolition of taxes, lend strong documentary support to this re-assessment of politics, not only in the fourteenth century, but continuing also into the fifteenth. The poster will exploit the opportunity afforded by graphic representation of epigraphic evidence by presenting tax abolition decrees in a variety of expressions: typology, geography, and chronology. The evidence shows the range of means used to exploit the subject population, the distribution of these alternative taxes across the landscape of Egypt and Syria, and the emergence and development of these alternative taxes. The evidence presented shows clearly the continuation of the conflict between the legitimate power of the Sultanate and competing loci of effective power throughout the remainder of the Mamluk period.