Download PDF | Ransom Slavery along the Ottoman Borders, (Early Fifteenth—Early Eighteenth Centuries), Edited by Géza David and Pal Fodor, Brill Publishing (2007).
277 Pages
PREFACE
In the preface to an earlier volume compiled by us (Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe. The Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest. The Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage, 20. Leiden: Brill, 2000), we announced that as part of a project launched at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences we were putting together another volume, this time on the subject of ransom slavery along the Ottoman borders.
It gives us great pleasure to report that this new collection is now ready and will join its predecessor in the series “The Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage”. This indicates that the editors wish to maintain a balance among the different schools of research, and that they appreciate the new findings in Hungary concerning the Ottoman period.
As on the previous occasion, efforts have been made to avoid the onesidedness that results from speaking only about areas under Ottoman control in the strict sense of the word and from including solely those authors who use Turkish and Crimean Tatar sources. Instead, scholars of Habsburg—Hungarian history, relying on different archival materials, were also asked to contribute.
It should be emphasised that this twosided, complex, approach is a Hungarian speciality that stems from the merely partial conquest of the country by the Ottomans and from the abundance of written records here. A similar, but less marked, duality characterised the situation in some other European territories. Finally, although the degree of dividedness in certain other regions was comparable, depiction of the two sides there is difficult, since autochthonous archival material is scarce.
As the Introduction makes clear, the question of captives and slaves has been in the focus of attention in recent years, without, however, being fully explored. Probably the most intriguing question is the number of people whose lives were changed by the fact that they had to spend long years in captivity. There is no hope to correctly answer this question, since no systematic documentation was prepared concerning the individuals involved. The Ottoman treasury could, apparently, not enforce its claim to collect the “one-fifth tax” (pencik), which in any case did not even theoretically extend to the totality of captives over the whole period.
Nevertheless, by assembling scattered data, the scale of the tax levied or collected will perhaps be gauged sooner or later. This would help us to judge the accuracy of contemporary or modern figures that speak of hundreds of thousands of captives.
In this matter the present volume cannot offer orientation, even if it does suggest, and convincingly, that the ransoming of slaves was a widespread activity, a species of trade in the period under consideration. It contains much information on the techniques for taking captives and on the procedures for extracting money and goods from them, their families and their communities.
Here we should like to express our gratitude to Suraiya Faroghi, who encouraged us with a short but decisive sentence confirming her interest in the topic. Additional motivation came from Brill’s Trudy Kamperveen, the ideal editor, who supplied the necessary reminders always well in time and invariably with humour and goodwill. We also wish to thank colleagues for their readiness to contribute to the book and for their patience during the editorial process. We are especially indebted to Ferenc Glatz, the director of the Institute of History, for providing the conditions for our work (nine out of the twelve contributors to the book were or had been on its staff) and to the National Foundation for Scientific Research (Hungary’s central academic funding body) for granting our project the necessary financial support. Also, we should like to thank Eva Figder, Veronika K. Fodor, Andrew Gane, Tamas Palosfalvi, Judit Pokoly, Chris Sullivan, and Albert Vermes for their linguistic assistance.
During our editorial work we suffered grievous losses when two colleagues and friends, Ferenc Szakdly and Istvan Gyorgy T6th, passed away, leaving an aching void. We dedicate this book to their memory.
Géza David Pal Fodor
INTRODUCTION
Slavery is one of the most permanent phenomena of human history. With the exception of the past two centuries, the subjugation, deprivation and use of human beings as tools was considered natural and was widely accepted. This applied to the ancient societies of Europe, but also to many medieval and early modern worlds including Islamdom.' Slavery was part of everyday life in early Islamic history, and its importance grew as the Muslims conquered the territories of ancient Middle Eastern civilisations one after the other.
However, Islamic slavery was different from that current in the ancient world.” Muslim owners employed slaves as eunuchs, guards, concubines or domestic servants primarily in order to ensure their own comfort, to protect their homes or palaces and to keep the latter tidy. Acting on behalf of their masters, these “domestic slaves’ often occupied important positions in trade, and quite a few participated in cultural life; most of the singers, dancers, musicians and actors that we know of were servile status. As time went on, the military use of slaves also grew in importance.
From the age of the Abbasid caliphs into modern times, the main support of many Islamic states was provided by slave soldiers of foreign origin trained for the service of the ruler. What is more, in some cases (in the Ghaznavid and Mamluk empires and in certain periods of Ottoman rule as well) they gained control of the political sphere in its entirety.
Due to, at least in part, the tenets of the Muslim religion, slaves in Islamic societies generally were in a better situation than the slaves of earlier ages. According to Islamic religious law, the natural human state is freedom, and, apart from well-defined cases, it is forbidden to enslave human beings. Thus for example a Muslim of whatever condition cannot be enslaved, a free man cannot fall into servitude because of debt, and he cannot sell himself into slavery.
Furthermore if a person cannot be proven to be a slave unequivocally, he must be considered free. A slave under Islam is not mere movable property, but a human being with certain, albeit very limited, rights. Thus for example, judges could call upon a slave owner to account for bad treatment meted out, and in well-founded cases of abuse, a slave could be freed contrary to his master’s will. The manumission of slaves and the facilitating of their emancipation (by way of contracts and so on) were regarded as good deeds in religious law, contributing to the alleviation of sins the benefactor might have committed.
On the other hand, slaves’ lives were made more bearable by the peculiarities of Muslim social development. As different layers of society — especially the militarised governing apparatuses — absorbed slaves in huge numbers, the borderline between free men and slaves was gradually blurred, or, more precisely, lost its significance (to such an extent that, for example, in the Ottoman state even dignitaries who were legally slaves could hold slaves themselves). As a result, social views about slaves became more favourable, and the attitude towards them more tolerant than in other civilisations.
The alleviations provided by Islam made it difficult for prospective owners to supply themselves with slaves from domestic sources. Due to the immense number of emancipations and the provision of zimma or legal protection to the infidels of the realm, the pool of people that lawfully could be enslaved was very limited. As a consequence, when in any particular empire, the time of great conquests came to an end and prisoners of war were no longer abundant, the demand for slaves first and foremost was satisfied by purchasing. Initially, most slaves in the Islamic world came from among Central and East European Slavs, then from the various peoples of the Eurasian steppe and Africa.
With the advent of the Ottomans, traditional forms of acquiring slaves came into the forefront once again, primarily the kidnapping of the Christian populations of the Balkans and Central Europe. The endless wars provided a continuous supply of slaves, encouraging society and the state to employ slave labour in a variety of occupations. Georgius de Hungaria, a captive in the Empire for twenty years in the mid-fifteenth century, wrote that “in whole of Turkey all share the view that someone who manages to acquire a male or female slave will never know destitution again”.”
At the same time, the demand for slaves created a widespread and well-organised slave trade, several elements of which the Ottomans adopted from their predecessors or trading partners (Byzantium, Venice, Genoa, Egypt).’ No town of note lacked a slave market of some kind. In the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries the bulk of slaves arrived in the Ottoman lands from four regions.
People from the Black Sea coasts were brought in as Ottoman merchants continued the famous Tatar slave trade, while slaves from the Mediterranean basin typically were often victims of piracy. Constant wars and raids on the Balkan frontier and later in Hungary legitimised the enslavement of large numbers of men, women and children. Finally slaves were brought in from black Africa via the subSaharan trade routes. The main markets, or rather distribution centres, operated in the towns of the Crimean peninsula, primarily in Caffa, from where slaves were transported overland and by boat to the markets of Istanbul and the Middle Eastern towns. According to Grand Vizier Ibrahim Pasha, in 1526—27 this trade brought a profit of 30,000 ducats at the customs offices of Kilia and Caffa alone.”
The Ottomans used a number of terms to designate their slaves: kul, abd, abd-i memluk, gulam, bende, rakik, halayik, and so forth for the masculine, and cariye, karavas, eme, memluke, rakika, and so on for the feminine. Prisoners of war and captives for ransom (fidye, baha) were called esir/tutsak (in the case of women seby). Neither in law nor in actuality was the esir a slave® but could easily become one if he or she was not sufficiently valuable to warrant a ransom demand, or if he or she could not raise the sum required. This book is first and foremost about the esirs and the circumstances of their captivity (esaret), about people who had already taken the first step on the road to slavery proper (rik, rikktyet).
Fortunately, research into Ottoman slavery has witnessed a considerable upturn over the past thirty years. Although no monograph of good quality has yet appeared on the ‘golden age’ (fourteenth-seventeenth centuries),’ several more limited studies and relevant source materials have been published. Initially attention had focussed on military slavery and the legal problems associated with it, for example the circumstances surrounding the introduction and legality of the so-called ‘one-fifth tax’ (pencik) that the Ottoman ruler collected from all those who imported slaves into his realm.
Other topics of research include the collection (devsirme) of non-Muslim youths, or else the legal and social status of that part of the élite that was of slave origin.* Later on, themes became more varied and the sources used were extended; it is sufficient to refer to the increasingly intensive exploitation of the so-called law court records during the past few decades. As a result, we are much better informed on such previously neglected areas as the slave trade, slave markets and the taxation of slave imports; the price of slaves,’ their ethnic composition in various localities and the special guidebooks meant to facilitate the job of the prospective slave buyer;'' the particular problems of black slaves;'*
the legal aspects of slavery and the forms of emancipation (voluntary and contractual, and so forth); the treatment and fate of fugitive slaves;'* the employment of slaves in industry, commerce and agriculture;'? galley slaves and slaves of the Istanbul dockyards (forsa);'® the illegal enslavement of Ottoman (Muslim and zimmi) subjects and their chances of liberation;'’ the ownership of slaves by non-Muslims and the attempts by the state to restrict this;'* the changes in slave identity and, within a gender studies perspective, the special problems of female slaves;'? Mediterranean piracy;”’ people crossing the border (sometimes more than once) between the Muslim and the Christian worlds and their perceptions of slavery; and so on.”!
The new investigations have shown that various groups in society benefited from slave labour in different ways. The main slave-holder and distributor was the Ottoman state; and slaves were employed en masse only in the army. Military slaves included the well-known Janissaries and the salaried troops employed by the sultan’s court, and also the private armies or retinues of military commanders (beys, beylerbeyis, viziers); even modest timar-holding sipahis might possess soldier-slaves and lead them into war.” From the end of the fourteenth century onwards, increasing demand for manpower in the army induced the Ottoman state to draft the children of its own Christian subjects as long-term soldiers.
It was at this time that the devsirme was introduced, a regular levy of boys that became a very important source of recruitment, not only of the Janissaries but also of the central administration and imperial household, both of which increasingly relied on slaves.”? The Ottoman Mediterranean and Black Sea fleets were still bigger consumers.
The need for galley slaves grew in step with the growth in Ottoman naval power and in the number of galleys. Although a considerable percentage of the Christian slaves obtained by the state were sent to row the galleys, the fleets could have swallowed up a multiple of those made available to them. For this reason the administration devised special arrangements by which certain groups of ordinary Ottoman subjects were pressed into service as rowers.”*
There is broad consensus among historians that most slaves not in the service of the sultan could be found in the households of the well-to-do. In other words domestic slavery was the other most typical form of slaveholding in the Ottoman Empire. In some places and on occasion — for example in fifteenth century in Bursa — slaves played a non-negligible role in certain industrial and commercial sectors, and some scholars think that their use in agriculture was more significant than was earlier believed.” Yet apparently these cases must be regarded as exceptional as far as the Empire in its entirety is concerned. The probate inventories unequivocally testify that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only a minority could afford the luxury of holding slaves.”°
This spectacular upswing notwithstanding, there are areas of Ottoman slavery that have still not received the attention they deserve. These include the issues of prisoners of war and more particularly of ransom slavery.°’ The available evidence seems to indicate that most captives were acquired either in wartime or in kidnapping operations conducted during periods of truce. Moreover for long periods, especially in regions close to the border, the most significant and flourishing trade was ransom slavery. Yet historians of the Ottoman Empire have paid very little attention to these topics. Regrettably, a large part of those studies that do exist has gone largely unnoticed by international scholarship, mainly on account of language barriers.** While slave-trading along the coasts of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, chiefly the North African littoral, is relatively well known,” the hunt for, the trade in and the treatment of captives in the Balkans and Central Europe are still to be researched and presented in more detail.*°
In this volume we hope to make a modest contribution to this important subject. The twelve studies it contains are organised around closely connected themes: the acquisition of (war) prisoners, kidnapping and ransom slavery. The area under scrutiny extends from the Crimea to Malta, but the focus is on Hungary. That the authors are Hungarians explains this choice only in part; for over three centuries, this region was a major focus of slave hunters and slave traders, apart from and in addition to the South Russian steppes, the Caucasus, and the seas. We know from a document dated 1403 that even at this time the warriors of ‘half the Balkans’ used to raid Hungary to kidnap human beings.*' Other evidence attests that along with Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians and Rumanians, Hungarians were the most popular quarry for Ottoman raiders (akinc).” Apparently, for the Ottomans the fifteenth century was the heyday of the acquisition of captives in Hungary. Given this situation, the sources used by the authors of the first three articles to cast light on this “dark age” seem to be particularly valuable.
By contrast, information about the techniques of acquiring, holding and exchanging captives that were current in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are extremely rich; and therefore most of the studies in the present volume deal with this later age. Each telling a particular story, the case studies all indicate that the main purpose of the acquisition of captives was ransom, because — as mentioned above — this procedure yielded the largest profit. This explains why on many occasions the Ottomans seized even their own subjects (cf. the study by Istvan Gyorgy Toth) and that — in violation of official peace treaties and religious law — soldiers of the Kingdom of Hungary and of the Ottoman Empire continually kidnapped persons from each other’s territory, stubbornly endeayouring — for years in some cases — to secure the gain that was hoped for.
The contribution of Géza Palffy describes, more thoroughly than any hitherto, the daily pattern of ransom slavery as it flourished in the Habsburg—Ottoman borderlands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When we compare his findings with those concerned with other border areas, we find that customary law played a tremendously important role, and that is why there are so many similarities between the practices of different periods and regions.** We have good reason to suppose that by the fifteenth century the system of ransom slavery as reconstructed by this author may have already evolved in outline along the entire Ottoman- Christian borderline.™*
Throughout, the contributors to this volume have adopted a broad perspective. Not only do they examine Christian slavery in the Ottoman Empire, but, using western sources, they also provide greater insight into the tribulations of Ottoman slaves on Habsburg territory.” In addition, our work attempts to shed light on the devastating effects of captiverelated transactions, especially those to do with guarantees, on trade; occasionally the financial position of whole communities, or in the case of Transylvania, even an entire country was jeopardised. Furthermore some of our contributors dwell on the mental shock that enslaved people had to endure, due to the enforced change of religion, or more broadly speaking, of their entire identities.
Pal Fodor
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