This paper will focus on the unique manuscript of Safai’s Fethname-i İnebahtı ve Modon, written in 1500 to celebrate the 1499 Ottoman conquest of Naupaktos and Methoni. The author was once a sailor who served in the Ottoman navy. He later became the personal secretary of grand vizier İskender Paşa, and the secretary to Beyoğlu Sufi Convent. Afterwards, Safai established his own convent, which was frequently visited by distinguished Ottoman sailors like Kemal Reis. Safai argues that he was personally present during the conquest of Naupaktos and Methoni and composes an eyewitness account of the expedition. He explains the preparations, the voyage, early encounters in the Aegean islands, major battles, and the victory, almost always discloses from whom he gathered the information he recounts. Two specific sections of the book are apologies, one composed on behalf of Kemal Reis. Thus, the motivation behind the book appears to be also an advocacy of sailors. The text embodies detailed eyewitness depictions of the activities and perceptions of some of the naval warfare and the Aegean. This presentation will map the Ottoman navy’s itinerary according, and highlight what the book has to offer in terms of Ottoman ideological and geographical perception of the Aegean and greater Mediterranean.

Hundreds of Ottoman judges were among the many thousands of Ottoman Muslims captured by Catholic corsairs in the early modern Ottoman Mediterranean. Some were snatched on their way to or from seaside posts, others were abducted from their homes in brazen amphibious raids on the islands where they held court. Well into the eighteenth century, a number of Ottoman judges could always be found imprisoned in Maltese dungeons. Yet the kadis of Malta were not simply valuable captives, symbols of Ottoman authority who would fetch a high ransom. Their captors and fellow captives alike needed them for their knowledge and legal training. Carried off along with their writing stands, seals, and reed pens, the kadis of Malta were put to work in their capacity as judge-notaries, drawing up surety agreements, assignations of legal agency, and ransom contracts that bound together Ottoman Muslim captives, Catholic captors, and a diverse assortment of middlemen who facilitated the transfer of men, women, and money across the liquid borders of the Abode of War. This paper focuses on the kadi—as captive, as notary, as local representative of the Ottoman central government and official conduit for communication with it—to explore the impact of Catholic corsairing in the Ottoman Mediterranean. The plague of piracy that descended on the eastern Mediterranean after the 1570s betrayed the weakness of the Ottoman navy and the Ottoman state’s utter inability to protect not only its most vulnerable subjects but its most important servants as well. Despite this fact, Ottoman Islamic law was the legal lingua franca of the Ottoman Mediterranean, even on Malta. The phenomenon of the kadis of Malta is a testament to the simultaneous, seemingly contradictory processes of the precipitous decline in maritime security in the early modern Mediterranean and the expansion in the power and reach of Ottoman law. Ultimately, I argue that what made the eastern half of the Mediterranean the “Ottoman Mediterranean” was not so much Ottoman political control of the islands and coasts or naval supremacy in the waters in between, but the fact that it was a unified Ottoman legal space.

This paper argues that two successful corsair admirals, Hayreddin d. 1546 and Mezemorta d. 1701, endeavored to establish a naval vision in the Ottoman Empire by reorganizing the Ottoman navy in two challenging periods of naval defeat. Hayreddin Pasha, Ottoman grand admiral 1534-46, originally from Lesbos, engaged in naval activities with his brother, Uruc. After backing the wrong Ottoman prince, they transferred their activities to the vicinity of Algiers where Hayreddin carved out a state. Due to unrest, he submitted to Selim I, and Algiers became an Ottoman province. When serious naval defeats awakened Süleyman to the necessity of employing an experienced naval commander as the admiral, Hayreddin returned to the Ottoman heartlands with experienced corsair captains and proceeded to transform the Ottoman navy into an effect naval power. He defeated the combined Venetian and Habsburg fleets at the battle of Preveza in 1538. Under Hayreddin’s leadership the Ottoman fleet was a powerful tool of diplomacy and force in advancing Ottoman interests in the Mediterranean. After his death in 1546 when his clients guided the navy, it remained effective, but political appointees periodically led the navy to disaster. At the end of the 17th century, the Ottoman Empire faced serious defeats because of their weak navy which had led to the loss of the Morea (Peloponnesus) to Venice. Once again, the sultan and his advisers turned to a corsair naval professional from Algiers, although Mezemorta may have originally been from Majorca, not Ottoman territory. Mezemorta had also spent many years as a successful governor and naval leader in Algiers before he was promoted to admiral in 1695 with the task of winning naval battles and reforming the Ottoman fleet. While serving as admiral he issued a new set of naval regulations. This paper analyzes the Gazavat-i Hayreddin Pasha and Ottoman historians Katib Çelebi, Raşid and Silahdar in addition to Muhimme orders. These sources reveal how Hayreddin and Mezemorta transformed weak Ottoman naval forces into an effective fighting force through their thorough understanding of naval warfare gained by experience in North Africa. Although separated by 150 years the reforming activities of admirals with naval vision revitalized the Ottoman fleet by providing personnel and training to provide qualified seafarers to lead the navy.

A brown leather-bound book kept under the number P.D. 66c in Museo Civico e Raccolta Correr di Venezia, is an unpublished accounting ledger, which belongs to the commenda agent of Minasian family firm, Agha di Matus (1644 - 1709). This unique ledger contains information about the cities in which he traded between 1679 and late 1680s and has not been published or closely scrutinized before. The consignments, described in the accounting ledger, contained diamonds and rubies, pearls, turquoise, lazurite, etc, all shipped or brought to Agha di Matus personally in Venice by different agents of the Minasian family firm trading in the Indian subcontinent, Izmir, Aleppo, Constantinople, Baghdad, Venice, Livorno, Amsterdam, Marseille, London, etc. Diamonds and gems formed some of the most lucrative global commodities of the early modern period and provided an important link between the production or mining centers in the Mughal Empire and the consumption centers in Europe. This trade was largely conducted by Armenian merchants from New Julfa as well as their counterparts from the Sephardic trade diaspora in Europe, and the various chartered East India companies of Europe. Like other Asian mercantile communities of the period, the Julfans organized their business ventures around the economic institution known as the “family firm.” Julfans did so by combining the archaic structure of the patriarchal family with modern techniques of investment and credit transactions. My paper will examine Agha di Matus’s life as a diamond merchant and the history of the Minasian family firm, thus shedding light on the important yet largely neglected history of this Armenian family firm and their most significant agent. It will treat Agha di Matus as broadly representative of a group of other Armenian merchants involved in the diamond and gem trade of the early modern period. Based on the above-mentioned accounting ledger and around a four dozen mercantile letters from four different archives, it will explore the various ways in which Agha di Matus and other agents of the Minasian family network traded with gemstones on the caravan trade routes of Safavid Iran, followed by the maritime routes stretching from Izmir to Venice and Livorno. By exploring the details of participation of Julfan diamond merchants in the commodity trade between India and the Mediterranean, this paper seeks to fill in the gap in the existing scholarship of the early modern diamond trade and the involvement of Armenian merchants in it.