practice started by Murad II in 1437, fifteen members of the Ottoman dynasty, including two among the most notable, namely Mehmed II and Süleyman I, held the administration of the city and of its dependencies in seventeen near-continuous periods until 1595. Although the sanjak of Saruhan officially depended on the eyalet of Anadolu with its seat in Kütahya, a large degree of autonomy was left to the princes for them to acquire the experience of government. This practice was discontinued in 1595, largely due to the growing insecurity in the countryside, precursor of Jelali Revolts, and a violent earthquake dealt a severe blow to the Manisa region's prosperity the same year. Around 1700, Manisa counted about 2,000 taxpayers and 300 pious foundations (vakıf) shops, was renowned for its cotton markets and a type of leather named after the city. Large parts of the population had begun settling and becoming sedentary and the city was a point of terminus for caravans from the east, with İzmir's growth still in its early stages. But already during the preceding century, influent western merchants such as Orlando, often in pact with local warlords such as Cennetoğlu, a brigand (sometimes cited as one of the first in line in western Anatolia's long tradition of efes to come) who in the 1620s had assembled a vast company of disbanded Ottoman soldiers and renegades and established control over much of the fertile land around Manisa, had triggered a movement of more commercially sensitive Greek and Jewish populations towards the port city. Late-Ottoman Manisa Between 1595–1836, the sanjak of Saruhan (Magnesia) remained attached to the Eyalet of Anadolu, as in the time of the Ottoman crown princes. Between 1836–1867 the city and its depending region was made part of the short-lived Eyalet of Aydın, which became a vilayet with the administrative reforms of 1867. During this phase, Saruhan (Manisa) even had an eyalet of its own under its name as the "Eyalet of Saruhan" between the even shorter period 1845–1847. The seat of the province to which Saruhan sanjak depended was the city of Aydın (1827–1841 and 1843–1846) at first, and was later moved to Smyrna (1841–1843, 1846–1864). Magnesia was one of the first cities in the Ottoman Empire to benefit from the arrival of a railway line, with the Smyrna Cassaba Railway, whose construction was started from Smyrna in 1863 and which reached its first terminus at