Historical overview
[Picture source: © Jean-Claude David] [Picture source: © Jean-Claude David] Aleppo has been an important center of trade for ages due to its favorable location on regional and transregional trade routes. The city is located close to the ‘Syrian Gate’, the principal access to Bilad ash-Sham from Anatolia, and almost half way between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates. Its natural hill, a perfect place for fortification (an acropolis), and a small river, the Quwayq, alimenting the settlement and its gardens with fresh water.
Trade requires particular urban infrastructure to flourish. How these trade-related structures looked and functioned in earlier times remains largely unknown, because they were not often discovered, excavated and studied in detail. In medieval times, information starts to be more available. We are able to locate Aleppo’s central market district around the Umayyad mosque where is has remained ever since. Though there are mosques and madrasas, no commercial buildings from the pre-Mamluk period have been preserved. This is probably because some of these structures, like markets (sing. suq), were wooden in the 12th century,[1] not stone structures as in later times. Usually, markets and the khans in the center of Aleppo were part of Islamic religious endowments (waqf, pl. awqaf), often established by rulers or other members of the elite. Khans in the center of Aleppo are only documented from the late Mamluk period onward (like Khan as-Sabun and the Khan Khayr Bek); older examples were situated in the suburbs only.
The khans provided space for the storage of goods, wholesale markets and also housed foreign merchants, as well as other ‘foreigners’, like the European consuls who stayed only temporarily in the city.[2] Different khans might cater for different needs. We know for example that European merchants and those from India and Persia frequented different spaces in the city.[3]
The founder
Khan al-Jumruk (customs khan) was part of a large endowment (waqf), probably one of the largest ever established. The founder, grand vizier Soqollu Mehmed Pasha, was born around 1505 into a Serbian family of minor rural notables in Ottoman Bosnia. He entered Ottoman service through the devşirme (child levy) system, in which children from Christian families – mainly from the Balkans – were forcibly ‘collected’ to serve as ‘slaves’ in different areas of the Ottoman state, mainly the Janissary units and the palace. Several members of the Soqollu family entered Ottoman service in this way, Mehmed Pasha being the most prominent and influential of them. After occupying a number of different positions in the military and the palace, he distinguished himself in the 1554 campaign against Safavid Persia as the commander of the Rumelian troops. In 1565 he was appointed grand vizier by Sultan Süleyman I ‘Qanuni’ (the lawgiver), a position he occupied for the next 14 years, serving three sultans.[4]
His time in office as grand vizier coincides with a period of the Empire’s consolidation, particularly in the newly conquered territories, like Bilad ash-Sham. High ranking bureaucrats and members of the ruling family established endowments that comprised not only mosques and other religious institutions, but markets, khans, etc. to support the economic development of these lands. Soqollu Mehmed Pasha’s extremely large endowment (established in 1574) comprised a high number of urban and rural objects in the provinces of Aleppo, Damascus and Tripoli, as well as in other parts of the empire. Among these, we may highlight three: The ‘külliye’ (in this case a complex including a mosque, a khan and a hammam) and the pier (iskele) in Payas, the Khan al-Franj in Sidon and the Khan al-Jumruk in Aleppo.[5] These three institutions show very clearly one intention of this endowment: the building of infrastructure to support and develop long-distance trade. It helped to make Bilad ash-Sham, particularly the city of Aleppo, an important node in global trade networks.
