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.

African slaves in the Ottoman world during the 1500s have not attracted much attention, apart from a few outstanding individuals connected to the sultan’s court. However, by the late 1400s and early 1500s, quite a few Africans were showing up in the records of the Bursa qadis, usually because of sales and manumissions. In this context, we may ask whether African slaves were rare luxuries unknown outside of major commercial and politico-administrative venues. Perusing the registers of sharia courts, the researcher will conclude that this was not the case: Africans, whom the scribes typically termed Arab (sometimes: Habe?i Arab), were more widespread in sixteenth-century Anatolia than previously believed. I focus on information concerning African slaves in rural and semi-rural environments, showing that even before the conquest of the province of Habe?/Abyssinia by Özdemiro?lu Hasan Pa?a in 1561-67, there must have been a steady stream of African slaves arriving in Anatolia. In the mid-1500s, officials serving the qadi of the small and semi-rural town of Üsküdar produced 118 documents concerning slaves, both male and female. In 65 cases, the scribes mentioned ethnicity, and in 14 instances, the persons at issue, usually re-captured fugitives, were ‘Arab’. While these figures have no statistical value, they do indicate a significant presence of Black slaves and indirectly, the activities of slave traders, who probably brought in people by way of Egypt. Üsküdar was a coastal town, close to Istanbul. However, it is unrealistic to assume that the escaped Black slaves all belonged to members of the elite, because in some cases, the owners reclaiming them were clearly villagers. Furthermore, we possess evidence of a significant number of Africans, both slave and free, who during the 1500s lived in the Aegean region, far from Istanbul. Even more surprisingly, we find fugitive Black slaves in the sharia court records of the small land-locked town of Karaman/Larende, which date to the early years of Süleyman the Magnificent. These findings invite hypotheses concerning the trade bringing Black people, mostly males, to rural Anatolia. A likely explanation is the timber trade, as southern Anatolia had supplied Cairo already in Mamluk times. After the Ottoman conquest, this trade increased, as the use of timber became fashionable among the local elite. Possibly, the exportation of Black slaves paid for the wooden decorations of wealthy homes, but this intriguing problem requires further study.

The mores of the Crimean Khanate’s early modern slaving zone in Eastern Europe as pertains to female captives, and particularly the topic of sexual violence, are still under- researched. It is well known that Slavic girls and women from Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy captured during slave raids by Crimean Tatars and Nogays, constituted the majority of white female slaves trafficked to the Ottoman Empire in the 16th–17th centuries as a commercial enterprise. Yet the circumstances in which newly-captured females found themselves en route to the Khanate, and slave markets there and in Ottoman port towns of the Northern Black Sea region, remain poorly understood owing mostly to the paucity of reliable primary sources. Eastern European folklore (primarily Ukrainian) reflects various aspects of female experiences of captivity and slavery including sexual violence at the hands of captors during their southward journey. Such passages are sometimes quoted by way of illustration in contemporary studies (e.g., Mikhail Kizilov, Orest Subtelny). Yet there remain serious reservations as to the reliability of folklore narratives as historical evidence. However, hitherto no attempt has been made to peruse the testimonies found in contemporary memoirs and travel accounts (e.g., Simeon Lehatsi, Zbigniew Lubieniecki, Eremya Çelebi Kömürciyan) to evaluate the veracity of the folklore sources on the topic of sexual violence towards female captives. The proposed paper will analyze a selection of such testimonies in conjunction with Crimean Sharia court records (sijills) and Muscovite chancery materials. Undoubtedly, beautiful nubile girls deemed suitable for elite harems stood the best chance of passing through the hands of their captors unmolested. As for the rest, the English diplomat Paul Rycaut maintained that few female captives could “escape the lust of the Tatars.” Variants of this staggering claim appear frequently in other accounts consulted. Other European contemporaries viewed Tatar slave raiding as sexually predatory towards vulnerable female captives as well. Of course, many female captives were either sold to the Ottomans or entered Crimean society first as slaves and were eventually manumitted and integrated into local society. This paper will investigate whether the captors’ enduring pre-Islamic tribal ethos may have played a role in their treatment of newly captured females. Such attitudes along with commercial considerations may explain the substantial numbers of female slaves and ex-slaves in the Khanate offered for ransom or exchange to their countries of origin—a practice seemingly different from that in the Ottoman Empire proper.

Childhood and children are new areas of research in Ottoman social history. Despite increasing interest in the history of children, we have still not established how Ottoman subjects of the 1600s conceived and perceived childhood. As far as the Crimean Khanate is concerned, there are no studies on childhood of any kind whatsoever. To fill this gap, at least partly, I will address the children forced to live as slaves. As the child slaves that were born in Crimea or had arrived at an early age, grew up within local society, they lived like Muslims, and were unaware of their Christian pasts. The focus of this study are the seventeenth-century Crimean Sharia court records, which survive in St. Petersburg, Russia. In these documents, child slaves are easy to identify, as the scribes registered them as dogma (born into slavery), çora (male child slave) and devke (female child slave). Given the information provided by the court registers, in this presentation I will argue that slaves born into Crimean society felt less like strangers than those brought in from the outside. In many ways, they lived and sometimes even thought, like other inhabitants of Crimea. One of the goals of my work is to examine how slavery affected children born into this condition that is boys and girls, who were slaves by being the offspring of both a slave mother and father. These children experienced their parents as human beings forced to live by the commands of a master or mistress, and they grew up with the knowledge that the same fate awaited them. As a comparison, I also trace the social status and emotions of slaves captured during raids at a young age. It is fortunate that there are accounts that reveal the longing of these slaves for the lives, from which slave raiders and traders had abducted them. Therefore, I shall be able to compare the cultural identity, cultural awareness and social reality of slave-born children with the understandings of those who became slaves after abduction at a young age.