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Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire
remained in bondage years after their technical emancipation. 75 On the western front, on the European side of the border, Osman Aga from Ottoman Temesvar (Timisoara in Romania), a seventeen-year-old Ottoman official captured by the Austrians at Lipova in 1688, was denied release for eleven years, even though his ransom had been paid almost immediately. The Treaty of Karlowitz (1699) stipulated that war captives be exchanged expeditiously, but there was foot-dragging all around. Osman's memoir makes it clear that many Ottoman Muslims were being held illegally. Nonetheless, there, as on every front, not all captives were eager to return home. 76 Legal exceptions built into the rules of exchange concerned Christians who had converted to Islam while among the Ottomans and Muslim converts to Christianity who chose to stay among their new coreligionists. Although converts on both sides often refused repairiation, in the long history of OttomanEuropean confrontation, the Ottomans usually prevailed in the competition for war prisoners' hearts and minds. Well after the heady days of Ottoman victories, as late as 1690, Europeans were embarrassed to find that "there might be several complete French Regiments in the Ottoman Anny.,,77 On the seas, many of the Barbary corsairs who preyed on Christian shipping were Christian converts to Islam, or "renegades," as they are disparagingly styled in European literature. 78 In 1675, some three thousand liberated Slavic slaves preferred to return to their Muslim captors, although when they tried to do so, all were massacred by the infuriated Cossacks who had liberated them. 79 In 1812, when 1,000 Russian soldiers were released from captivity, 116 of their number converted to Islam and stayed behind in Istanbul. 80 As late as the
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77 78
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istM, 2/183, fols¡. 42b-43a, and 14/286, fols. 15b-16a; see also Chapter 5 in this volume. Osman Agha de Temechvar, Prisonnier des infidels: Un soldat ottoman dans l'empire des Habsbourg, ed. Frederic Hitzel ([Paris], 1998), 138-44. A number of important articles on Muslim and Christian captives appear in Turcica 33 (2001), including Eyal Ginio, "Piracy and Redemption in the Aegean Sea during the First Half of the Eighteenth Century" (135-47); Pal Fodor, "Piracy, Ransom Slavery and Trade: French Participation in the Liberation of Ottoman Slaves from Malta during the 1620s" (119-34); and Maurits H. van den Boogert, "Redress for Ottoman Victims of European Privateering: A Case against the Dutch in the Divan-i Htimayun (1708-15)" (91-118). See also Rosita D' Amora, "Some Documents concerning the Manumission of Slaves by the Pio Monte della Misericordia in Naples (1681-1682), Eurasian Studies 1, no. 1 (2002): 37-76. Zilfi, Politics ofPiety, 154. Weiss, "Back from Barbary," 335; Friedman, Spanish Captives in North Africa, 73. A "renegade legion" made up of former Spanish subjects was part of the Moroccan military; see Fatima Harrak, "Mawlay Isma'il's Jaysh al- tAbfd: Reassessment of a Military Experience," in TofU and Philips, Slave Elites, 181. See also Tal Shuval, "Households in Ottoman Algeria," TSAB 24, no. 1(2000): 45-7, regarding converts holding important positions in Algeria and as beneficiaries of their masters' vakfs. Mikail Kizilov, ''The Black Sea and the Slave Trade: The Role of Crimean Maritime Towns in the Trade in Slaves and Captives in the Fifteenth to Eighteenth Centuries," International Journal ofMaritime History 17, no. 1(2005): 230. Cabi Orner, Cab; Tarihi, 2:872-3.