Popular responses to mamluk fiscal reforms in Syria

Abstract

The creation of private property from former Treasury lands in the late Mamluk period, and the legal mechanisms that developed to support it, mark important turning points in the history of both medieval Islamic finance and jurisprudence. The following essay explores popular responses in Syria to changes in the rural endowment system as expressed through peasant action and the critiques of local intellectuals. Because of the early wave of sultanic endowments here in the mid-fourteenth century, Jordan becomes for us a barometer of the success and failure of these changes and a window on the ways in which they played out on the local level.