Repeated defeats by Russia are generally acknowledged as a major motivation for Selim III’s restructuring of Ottoman government. Yet scholarship on the Russo-Ottoman Wars, and on the eighteenth-century relations between the two empires more generally, has too often remained focused on war and diplomacy from the standpoint of generals and diplomats. My paper takes up the story from a different, and almost entirely unstudied, direction: that of Russian prisoners of war. I first trace the changing status of prisoners in Ottoman-Russian, and Ottoman-Habsburg, treaties through the eighteenth century. While these changes are intriguing, and can be seen as one aspect of the “Europeanization” of Ottoman foreign relations, I argue that it is important not to mistake them for a literal representation of Ottoman or Romanov practice. Through an examination of period Ottoman chronicles, I show that on both sides, these realties were considerably more complex than the treaties claimed—and quite different from earlier practices, such as those during the 16th-17th century kleine krieg with the Habsburgs in Hungary. Focusing especially on the 1787-1792 War and its aftermath, my paper contends that there evolved a set of norms for prisoner treatment, seen in the practices and attitudes of both governing elites and ordinary soldiers and sailors. At the same time, the gap between these norms and the theoretical provisions of treaties could bring the misfortunes of ordinary captives to the center of international politics, as when relations between the Ottomans and Romanovs broke down in 1794 over Russia’s refusal to return some of its captives. But prisoners were not only important as passive subjects in elite political squabbles; Russian prisoners and renegades—categories which were frequently blurred—took an active part in Ottoman military reforms under Selim III. The activities of famous, and frequently self-promoting, European renegades, such as the Baron de Tott and Humbaraci Ahmed Bonneval, are well-known. But the often-anonymous Russian subjects who passed into Ottoman service also played important roles—for example forming the very first Ottoman unit using “the European discipline”—roles which my paper will attempt to trace. Finally, I will touch on broader questions this study raises—how did prisoners affect Ottoman perceptions of Russia? How significant was their involvement in reforms, and does this problematize the idea of Selim’s reforms as “Europeanizing,” given Russia’s own eighteenth-century debates over its place in Europe?

This paper will consist of an examination of the use of work contracts (mukatiba) and manumission contracts in the mid-16th century as an institutional tool for the economic and social integration of slaves into Ottoman Istanbul. The mukatiba contract was a legal device by which a slave was given a fixed period of time in which he was required to work, or alternately was assigned an amount of money (presumably to be earned through performing a job) that he had to produce before he was granted his freedom. Recorded in the Galata ?eriyye sicilleri (court registers) dating from roughly 1560-1570, numerous examples of mukatiba and other types of contracts for slaves from the Black Sea area, such as Ukraine, and the northern Mediterranean coast, primarily Italy and Spain, provide us with a wealth of detail as to how these slaves—who basically represent a wave of forced migration at a time when the growing imperial capital required new labor—lived, worked, converted, and were manumitted in early modern Istanbul. In addition, the slaves’ level of technical skill and the nature of their employment in Galata can also be ascertained from the sicills. The numerous mukatiba contracts, in combination with other types of entries in the sicills, such as manumission of slaves charitable reasons, suggest that the slave-owners of Galata considered it the norm to manumit their domestic and technically skilled slaves who had converted to Islam, and post-manumission possibly also integrated them into the greater household. While conversion to Islam and manumission from slavery do not necessarily signify complete ‘assimilation’ into society, this phenomenon does illuminate the slaves’ ability to negotiate their situation through the manipulation of Ottoman cultural and religious constructs which they have very clearly grasped and made their own. Thus, through analyzing the data provided by the ?eriyye sicilleri it is possible to come to meaningful conclusions about the nature of slaves’ assimilation into early modern Istanbul and the significance of their contribution to the social and economic fabric of this urban center.

At the beginning of 1354 Gregory Palamas (1296-1359), the Archbishop of Thessaloniki, was captured by the Ottomans, according to Philotheos Kokkinos in the Vita of Saint Gregory, while on a trip to Constantinople from Thessaloniki to reconcile the controversy between Ioannis V Palaeologos and Ioannis VI Kantakouzenos. He spent a year in captivity and during that time wrote an epistle to his flock back in Thessaloniki describing his experiences. He was finally released in March of 1355. Palamas refers that he was jailed and suffered from hardships, only when he was transported from one place to another. The Turks did not put him in prison but they were setting him free only when he was visiting the region of Anatolia, in order to gain the compassion of Christian population, who would take pity on him and would contribute to the payment of the ransoms. They dragged them around to the regions of the Ottoman State, such as Lampsakos, Piges, Bursa, finally to the summer resort of Orhan. There Palamas engaged in two theological discussions; the first one with the grandson of Orhan, ?smail and the second one with a group of well-educated men from Orhan’s court, the “atheist Chiones”. The third theological debate occurred in July of 1354 in ?znik with a representative of the Muslim religion, called Tasimanis. Regarding to his three theological debates, Palamas, apart from some isolated hostile incidents against him, he was treated with respect gaining the same time the sympathy of the Muslims interlocutors. The content of this pastoral letter is of a great interest because it is sheds light on Ottoman practice of captivity in the 14th century, on Palamas’s impressions of his Turks captors, and the circumstances under which he set free. Palamas’s epistle is also valuable as a source for the study of Byzantine anti-Islamic policy and perhaps allows us to understand better how a Byzantine scholar and theologian of the period viewed the Ottomans in a period in which the Byzantine Empire was loosing more and more to the Turks in Anatolia. Generally speaking a study of Gregory Palamas’s epistle offers the possibility of contributing to a better historical understanding of Ottoman history in the mid-14th century, a period for which not a great deal is known and for which there is a paucity of Turkish sources.