Galley slavery was part of the system of enslavement as practiced in the early modern Ottoman Empire. Scholars have considered galley slavery as the absolute form of dependency, with evident peculiarities: The slaves at issue were ‘ordinary’ people rather than members of the elite, and this type of enslavement was a ‘male’ rather than a female experience. An immensely complex phenomenon, galley slavery remains an understudied field. Due to their speed and maneuverability on ragged coastlines, galleys were the battleships of choice in the sixteenth- and (to some extent) in the seventeenth-century navies of the Mediterranean world. Frequent maritime battles created an enormous surge in the demand for rowers to work the galley fleets of the seafaring powers. In the sixteenth century, Ottoman-Spanish-Venetian confrontations resulted in large-scale enslavement, while in the seventeenth century piracy, the protracted war over Crete, and naval encounters between 1684 and 1699 perpetuated the practice. While galley slavery among the Catholic European naval powers is now the subject of several important monographs, we still know very little about the Ottoman situation. After all, the principal records studied to date are first-person narratives by former captives returned from the Ottoman Empire. Limited in number, these records are partially unreliable as well. Thus, we still need to delineate the phenomenon of Ottoman galley slavery, focusing on how the Ottoman authorities employed slaves in the galleys of the Imperial Shipyards. In this paper, I demonstrate the multiple dimensions of galley slavery, including the Ottoman perception of galley slaves as labor power and as human beings, the practices of the Imperial Shipyards, and the organization of unfree labor within this framework. I especially focus on the various recruitment mechanisms, in which, as the Ottoman authorities saw it, legal and illegal methods coexisted. Aside from the numerous narrative sources—almost every literary genre provides implicit or explicit evidences on this phenomenon — I use Ottoman official documentation. Registers of Important Affairs (mühimmes), of Sharia courts, and of the Imperial Shipyards enable us to scrutinize galley slavery, creating a more accurate and differentiated picture of the relevant practices in the Ottoman navy.