In 1561 Barbary corsairs took captive two men from Sicily, Visconte Cicala and his son Scipione. To students of the Ottoman Empire the latter is probably better known by the name assumed at his conversion to Islam, Cigalazade Yusuf Sinan. Some contemporary Christian European observers claimed that Cigalazade had been lured into becoming a Muslim with the promise that his father would be released immediately. Although this story is probably false, an experience of captivity played an undeniable role in the Italian's conversion. And while captivity and an attempt to overcome the numerous disadvantages and limitations associated with the status of a captive/slave can hardly be sufficient explanations for conversion, a sample of roughly 150 renegades active in the Ottoman Empire during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century indicates that, for the majority of them, experiences of captivity influenced their decisions to accept Islam. These did not always mean captivity at the hands of the Ottomans however. In the case of the Heidelberg theologian Adam Neuser, for example, imprisonment for heresy and treason in the Holy Roman Empire eventually led to his flight to the sultan's domains, where he was imprisoned once more before "turning Turk". On the basis of case studies drawn from the above-mentioned sample undertaken as part of my doctoral research, the paper will examine the relationship between captivity and conversion from Christianity to Islam and, as far as possible, vice versa in the context of the Ottoman-Habsburg frontier. While this relationship has been dealt with frequently in the context of the Mediterranean by scholars such as Bartolome and Lucille Bennassar, the model developed in this context is not easily transferable to the land frontier in South Eastern Europe where a largely artificial - and never fully stable - line separated communities with shared customs, languages, and ethnicities. It will be argued that captivity, if anything, provided individuals with an occasion and at best an added incentive for conversion. Whether or not taking this step acted as means of "career advancement" very much depended on the talents, skills, knowledge and, not least of all, the contacts -- both within and without the Ottoman Empire -- of the individual in question.

The fields of slavery and conversion in the Ottoman empire have undergone renewed scholarly interest recently, but the intersections between these two areas of research remain to be fully explored. The underlying assumptions on which our understanding of early modern man's motives for religious conversion were based have been called into question in the works of scholars such as Marc Baer, Nabil Matar, Tijana Krstic and Claire Norton. At the same time, recent research has unearthed much information on the central role of slavery and captivity to early modern society, particularly in the central industries of the Ottoman capital in the sixteenth century. However, the findings of Ottoman scholars working on conversion have yet to be applied to the new findings on the prevalence of slaves and ex-slaves at the grassroots level of Ottoman urban society in the early modern period. My paper will examine this phenomenon, namely, the crossroads of slavery and religious conversion in mid-to late Ottoman Istanbul, by analysing statistical data on conversion and manumission among the slave population of Galata, according to the Ottoman court registers. The conversion and manumission rates of the slaves of Galata will be assessed according to the slaves' origins and gender, to ascertain in what ways these elements would have affected the enslaved persons' religious conversion and manumission from slavery, and hence, the trajectory of his or her life. In addition to attempting to find patterns of conversion among a large sample of early modern slaves, and possible explanations for their existence, this paper will also investigate individual case studies of religious conversion (typically, from Christianity, to Islam) among the slave population of Galata, while attempting to explain how the influence of the local convert communities and desire for belonging and communal worship might have affected the slave's process of conversion and manumission. Relying on travel accounts and historical chronicles, in addition to court records, the role that local religious and convert communities, as well as politically or socially prominent converts, would have played in the assimilation of ex-slaves into Galata will be elucidated. The ways in which slavery, manumission, and conversion affected each other, and the methods by which slaves of different origins manipulated (or did not manipulate) these legal and social constructs to their advantage will also be examined, as will the possible ambiguities in slave and ex-slave convert religious identities.

Armies, merchants, travelers, pirates, captives and slaves crossed back and forth across the constantly shifting, invisible line that separated the Ottoman Empire from the darulharb, the "Abode of War." In the binary world of Islamic law, divided into darulislam, the "Abode of Islam," and darulharb, it fell to the Ottomans' chief Islamic religious authorities to rule on the pressing questions that concerned those who passed between the two realms. Though true to the tenets of Hanafi jurisprudence, the legal responsa (fetva) of the Ottoman Grand Muftis, the seyhulislams, were issued in response to real queries and reflected contemporary religious, political, military, and economic concerns. As the borders of the empire expanded and contracted over the course of the early modern period, the nature of the questions changed and developed, and so too did the rulings of the seyhulislams. Utilizing seyhlislam fetva collections from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, this paper explores the changing ways in which the Ottoman religious authorities confronted the questions concerning captivity, conversion, and apostasy that stemmed from the endless stream of foreigners, subjects, and slaves crossing, not always willingly, between the worlds of war and peace. Indeed, the fetvas have much to tell us about the experiences of prisoners-of-war, victims of pirates, slaves, apostates, protected foreign merchants, and so forth. Moreover, because the fetvas in each compilation represent only a tiny fraction of an individual seyhulislam's total output, the selections chosen by the compilers indicate the kinds of questions that were most pertinent at the time. Though fetvas were non-binding and theoretically did not create precedents, fetva collections were frequently referred to by provincial judges (kadis) for guidance and therefore had a significant impact on how similar cases were handled in courts throughout the empire. Thus, the interpretation of Islamic law shaped and was shaped by the policies of government, changing frontier realities, and the experiences of those individuals who crossed the line.

While visiting Russia in 1757, the Ottoman ambassador Shehdi Osman Pasha repeatedly came upon Ottoman subjects who claimed that, after being captured twenty years earlier, they had been kept in captivity and forced to convert to Christianity. They entreated Osman to liberate them, in accordance with the 1739 Treaty of Belgrade, but he encountered stiff resistance from Russian officials. As the century wore on, each Ottoman war was followed by similar treaty provisions, mandating the return of captives without ransom, and every ambassador encountered similar struggles over prisoners. And even as the Ottoman state struggled to redeem its subjects, the Habsburg and Romanov governments faced great difficulties in retrieving their own people who had been captured by Ottoman or Tatar forces. These struggles provide a fascinating study of the interaction between captivity, religious conversion, and diplomacy. This paper focuses on the Ottoman side of these disputes, using the sefaretnames, as well as Ottoman chronicles and archival documents, and foreign diplomatic correspondence. While such sources portray these struggles as a matter of diplomacy, as a struggle by each state to make its rival act according to its will, I argue that in fact the states struggled against their own, and their rivals' local authorities, individual owners, and captives themselves. None of the states had the absolute centralized authority that it claimed, and this presented significant challenges--the Porte could agree to return captives, but it the actual process was in the hands of kadis and governors. This was especially complicated by the interests of individual owners, who often had strong ties to local officials. My paper explores the incentive structure created by the abolition of ransom, and the Ottoman policy of paying owners a fixed price, whose value diminished through the century. Captives themselves could exercise some control over their fate by changing their religion, since every treaty specified that those who converted voluntarily would not be returned. But owners, local officials, and captives defined these provisions differently. Was conversion an act of cultural assimilation? Individual spiritual choice? Cynical manipulation of the rules? Each of these factors played a role, at least in the perception of some actors. Further, I show that states frequently came to emphasize precisely the issue which has attracted the most attention from modern scholars: individual sincerity. Thus, I provide a new perspective on one of the most significant theoretical debates on early modern religious conversion.