In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a striking number of Ottoman military assigned to defensive or administrative posts in the provinces engaged in lawless conduct that brought great suffering to local urban and rural residents. Banditry became epidemic in the core provinces of the empire, Anatolia and Rumelia (as attested in local petitions to the authorities in Istanbul for help against marauders, approximately half of whom were Janissaries, provincial cavalry, or other functionaries). At the same time pasha generals in border zones were authorizing their soldiers to engage in raiding forays and seizure of captives, ignoring the rights of Ottoman subjects. This paper focuses on eastern Anatolia, in particular the province of Harput (modern Elazığ) in order to argue for the existence of internal frontiers. Harput is an example of a region that was semi-autonomous throughout this period. Despite the fact that its governors were the usual Ottoman figures, drawn from military-administrative ranks, they sustained their power through what we might call "officialized banditry”. While these local warlords might at first seem to belong to the long wave of the Jelali rebel-pasha, I will argue that their political practice, seemingly handed down from one governor to the next, constitutes a different phenomenon. The paper will outline this political practice as well as the attempts of central and local authorities to dismantle the walls that had gradually enabled Harput to become an autonomous fiefdom.

The question of who could be legally enslaved in the early modern Mediterranean was one not simply of religious identity—of Muslims enslaving Christians and Christians enslaving Muslims—but also, in the Ottoman case, of juridical subjecthood. The enslavement of Ottoman non-Muslim subjects was strictly forbidden under Islamic and Ottoman law, as was the enslavement of the subjects of the Ottomans’ treaty-partners, such as Venice during the long period of peace between 1573 and 1645. Nevertheless, in this period local administrators and pirates in the Ottoman Balkans formed human trafficking networks with their counterparts across the Mediterranean in the de facto independent port cities of North Africa in order to circumvent these prohibitions. Along the Adriatic, Ionian, and Morean coastlines and further inland, Ottoman naval irregulars, amphibious strongmen, and district governors frequently conducted raids on Ottoman Christian villages and captured Ottoman subjects, Venetians, and others whom they were bound by law and treaty not to molest. To disguise the provenance of their captives and realize maximum profits with minimal interference, such raiders engaged in what I call “slave laundering,” shipping those illegally enslaved to North Africa where the Ottoman center would have little chance of finding or redeeming them and where the captives themselves would be unable to summon the witnesses necessary to prove their subjecthood and free origin in the courts. In Ottoman North Africa, such captives could be exchanged for slaves of acceptable, “enemy infidel” origin for export back to the Balkans or simply sold for cash. Based on research in Ottoman administrative and court documents, this paper explores the trade in illegally enslaved persons in the Ottoman Mediterranean, the difficulties inherent in defining and determining subjecthood on the ground, and the administrative and legal tools the Ottoman central government employed, often though not always in vain, to locate and identify the illegally enslaved and effect their return home.

In Ottoman historiography Balkan banditry is understood solely as a symptom of deteriorating security in the eighteenth century. In fact the Balkan "bandit" has much more to offer. If we understand the Balkan bandit as representative of indigenous military traditions, then we can interrogate this often mythologized actor to open up three major issues in Ottoman and Balkan history: the relationship between war and society, the relationship between great and little traditions of warfare and the existence of military diasporas. In my paper I will focus on the fifteenth century because in that century Balkans fighters spread out across the Ottoman and Italian worlds and established the outlines of a military diaspora that would endure until the end of the eighteenth century. Moving continuously between the Pindus mountains, a mighty range which stretches from what is today Albania down into mainland Greece, and centers of military recruitment, I will argue that Balkan fighters, often presented in rather splendid isolation, cannot be separated from the lowland societies around them. In addition, the extent to which both Ottomans and Italians drew on Balkan manpower, and thus Balkan military traditions, has been insufficiently appreciated.

This presentation uses narrative as well as archival sources of Muslim and Christian provenance to discuss how networks of violence comprised of extremely mobile irregular soldiers/bandits that operated throughout the Ottoman Empire became embroiled in imperial governance and politics between 1792 and 1832. Addressing the misconception that these types of networks’ operations were confined to inter-imperial borderland, “shatter-zones,” this talk will demonstrate how trans-regional networks of violent men were surprisingly well-organized and operated throughout the Ottoman Empire with impunity. These networks could rely on crucial information, resources, as well as support from vast groups across social divides, thus pointing to how they not only belonged to larger interpretative communities but also played a crucial role in shaping the norms, values, and morals of these larger communities. The story of these disciplining networks that operated alongside state institutions points to how seemingly marginalized rogues, irregulars, and bandits became very adept legal actors whose legal posturing shaped Ottoman history in overlooked ways. The Ottoman state consistently used these recalcitrant networks to police specific confessional cum ethnic groups whose loyalties were suspect during inter-imperial conflicts. The networks were allowed to pillage, enslave, and terrorize groups such as the Serbs in the 1788-92 war with the Hapsburg and Russian Empires, Armenians and Georgians along the eastern Anatolian Russian frontier during the 1806 and 1812 war with Russia, as well as Greeks during the Greek Revolution (1821 to 1829). However, in times of peace, though they found themselves without sultantic sponsorship, these highly organized networks nevertheless forged symbiotic relations with vast groups across social divides and even expanded their operations to target Muslims as well as Christians throughout the Empire. In this sense, the states of exceptions in which Ottoman governance relied upon the cheap but highly-effective terror of these organizations to fight specific groups whose loyalties were suspect became normative well after inter-imperial conflicts, and simultaneously provided the wherewithal for such targeted groups of state-sanctioned violence to form their own networks of violence that became the blueprint of new state apparatuses within the Empire (e.g., Serbia and Greece). The operations of these networks of violence are hereby conceived of as the politicized site of contestation in which socio-economic and moral concerns of groups converged to highlight new tensions and define new relations during a watershed period in a trans-regional context that the scholarly fields of Ottoman, Balkan, and Middle Eastern history have artificially separated.

This paper explores how maritime networks of violence, mostly consisting of Greek-speaking corsairs, interacted with the inter-imperial legal system between 1770 and 1830. Beginning during the 1768-1774 Russo-Ottoman War, the Russian government sponsored a mixture of Maltese, Ottoman Ragusan, Ottoman Greek, Venetian Greek, and British corsairs to raid Ottoman shipping. Over the next 60 years, these corsairs attacked Ottoman, British, French, and even Russian merchant shipping. Sometimes they flew the flag of Russia; sometimes, that of France; in the 1820s, that of the newly-declared Greek nation-state; and sometimes, no flag at all. These raiders—variously called privateers and pirates—have been previously seen as examples of proto-nationalist Greek resistance to Ottoman rule. But, taking seriously their multi-lingual origins and their complex motivations, this paper conceptualizes them as maritime, trans-regional “networks of violence.” The paper then uses Ottoman and British archival sources to trace how these networks negotiated with and shaped the inter-imperial legal regime of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As these corsairs of varying origins, and loyalties, seized ships, cargoes, and crews, and were themselves captured, the Ottomans and their counterparts were forced to confront three important sets of questions. First, what rights did states have, in controlling their subjects’ extraterritorial violence, in searching suspect ships, and in seizing enemy and neutral cargo? Second, who, as a legitimate sovereign state, could exercise these rights, in licensing privateers? And finally, who had the right to decide—which states’ prize courts were legitimate, and which were not? These debates grew out of the Aegean and Black Sea context but paralleled similar questions which were asked in the Atlantic World at the same time--questions which fueled litigation in U.S. federal courts, helped spark the War of 1812, shaped the international law of neutrality, and eventually produced the 1856 Paris Declaration on maritime law. Engaging with a wealth of recent legal and historical scholarship on this Atlantic context, the paper then reflects on larger questions of imperial sovereignty and trans-regional, inter-imperial law, situating the Ottoman case in a global context.