IVILEGES and

Wealth and high office also supported claims to fine lineage.

The ashraf

They included porters and butchers, dealers in pastries and wheat, rope makers and textile artisans. But they also included many of the city's most prominent ulama, merchants, and acyan.

ther source of high standing in society was a prestigious lineage.

Even for the more ordinary ulama membership in the religious establishment was socially advantageous. Acquiring

ate graced them with honors and privileges, not least of them an exemption from taxe

The real rewards of membership in the Janissary corps went not

advancement

e great tax farmers established hereditary rights over dozens of villages, in which they acted as virtual landlords and patrons. In addition to collecting taxes from the peasants they took care of various administrative tasks, mediated local disputes, and lent money on a large scale. Large stocks of food came into their possession as tax payments, giving them a highly profitable control over the grain supply to the city.

The most lucrative and influential government positions involved tax collection.

one

n. Women countered some of the denigrating attitudes expressed toward them by males and asserted positive self-images. The local folklore, to which females as well as males contributed, stresses the importance of women, their indispensable role, and their ability to get their way.76

The community did not harbor xenophobic prejudices against all immigrants. Indeed, some climbed to the highest social circle

immigrants who settled in the city during the eighteenth century included a good number of Arab, Kurdish, and Turkman tribesmen whose language, dress, customs, and life-style set them apart from the urban population and from ur

ciety attached different degrees of respectability to these occupations. Prostitutes, entertainers, and servants fell into the category of lowly and denigrated professions. O

ven Christians and Jews shared these practices and enforced them.6

Far more basic and important than the distinction between slave and freeman was that between male and femal

mong other things, guild regulations set up different rates of taxation and quotas for the distribution of raw materials and jobs among members.5

conspicuous

Most people were employed in manufacturing or the retail trade, largely in the areas of food, clothing, and construction, in which the bulk of demand was concentrated

The Catholic missionaries, at work from the I620S, had by the late eighteenth century won over the majority of native Christians in Aleppo and other parts of Syria. With unrelenting zeal they provided education, rendered material and moral help in times of plague and famine, and obtained subsidies from Rome for the support of local causes

These men enjoyed consular protection and the enviable privilege of exemption from taxes