Ottoman History Podcast - Slavery and Manumission in Ottoman Galata

Episode Date: December 11, 2014

with Nur Sobers-Khan hosted by Chris Gratien and Nir Shafir The legal and social environments surrounding slavery and manumission during the early modern period varied from place to place and profession to profession. In this episode, Nur Sobers-Khan presents her exciting research on the lives of a particular population of slaves in Ottoman Galata during the late sixteenth century, how they were classified and documented under Ottoman law, and the terms by which they were able to achieve their freedom. « Click for More »

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. And I'm Nir Shafir. The topic of our discussion today is Slaves in Sigils of Ottoman Galata. Our guest is Dr. Noor Sobers Khan. Noor, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you for inviting me. Dr. Sobers Khan currently is a curator of the Ottoman Collection at the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar.

She was also formerly a curator at the British Library for their Persian Manuscripts Collection, and she holds a PhD from Cambridge University Department of Oriental Studies. Her dissertation, which is the subject of today's conversation and has recently been published as a book, was entitled Slaves Without Shackles. And it's a micro-study of slavery and manumission in the Galata-Pera region of Ottoman Istanbul. Now, in a previous episode, we've done a discussion about slavery in a global context, comparing the Atlantic world with the Mediterranean world, with the Black Sea, and sort of looked at a very broad perspective on slavery and its different manifestations.

Today we're going to do the opposite and put a particular, let's say, slave community under the microscope. So Noor, your study, which deals with a narrow time frame, 12 years from 1560 to 1572, 12 years from 1560 to 1572 and is based mainly on Sharia sigils, looks at this community all based in Galata. Before we talk about their lives and their experience and how we can study the lives of Ottoman slaves, why don't you talk about where this community comes from, both, you know, what regions do they hail from and how do they end up living in adamant galata okay well basically i studied a population of about 600 slaves primarily male um who show up in the galata sigils uh in this very brief time period um that i chose to concentrate on i originally wanted to look look at slavery in the entire Eastern Mediterranean over like a century

and wound up having to narrow down considerably. So this particular group of slaves are fascinating because, I mean, basically I went to the Muftuduk when it was still, you could still pull out defters, like the physical defters, and they would just hand them to you and you would look at them.

And I was just basically searching for anything related to slaves and so I would read through the Besiktas sigillary and you would find a slave manumission every few pages when I got to the Galata sigils I found that the first sort of the first

three or four basically contained hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of slave manumissions. I mean, it was really an exceptional kind of set of documents. There could be others that I didn't come across, but, you know, waiting for some intrepid researcher to discover. But these are the ones that I stumbled upon. And I chose to focus on this brief time period because of this really large population of slaves. And you asked me where they're from. One of the pieces of information that we find in the sigils is

actually their asil or jins, sort of their origins. And they're, I would say about, I mean, I have the exact percentages and numbers in my dissertation for those who are interested, but I would say they're about 60% Southern Mediterranean, so described as Efrinji, so probably Romance speaking, either Italian or Spanish. And I would say the other groups are primarily Rus, so that's how they're described in the sigils. So they are from the Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian

general area and then we also have other slaves from the Black Sea such as Mingurians and Abkhazians and the occasional Ethiopian the occasional Hindi or Indian so I mean you have a wide mix of

groups of origins of ethnicities if you want to call them that, but primarily they're from the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. And we have to assume they've been captured in these maritime arenas, right? That is indeed my assumption. I mean, I mentioned before I don't really have any kind of documentary evidence for how they were captured, but by looking at the kinds of work they were engaged in in Galata,

almost all of them, in some respects, were engaged in seafaring or shipbuilding or the kind of maritime economy of Galata. In some respect, they were attached to it. So it's possible to conjecture that many of them might have been taken during sea battles. My main conjecture is that in 1560, the Battle of Djerba in Tunisia, of course,

is a famous victory for the Ottomans where they capture the Spanish fleet. And you have de Busbeck who talks about the parade of captives coming back from this particular battle and that many of them were enslaved and made to work in the T tarsane which of course is right right by galata so my conjecture is that many of these slaves who show up in galata right after the battle of jarba may very well have been captured in that battle but this is um you know i would love to come across a document that actually says that this is just my guess and this other this question of slavery of course adds another layer of complexity to the larger question of the porous boundary between the christian Muslim worlds in the early modern Mediterranean. That's something that we've dealt with in previous episodes of the podcast.

Of course, Amritsar has talked about it in some of his episodes and his research. These seamen who one day are on a Spanish ship and because of something that happens end up becoming part of a Muslim crew. Absolutely. There's all sorts of interesting stories there. One thing about religion that's quite interesting is that you can kind of trace, to some degree, the rates of conversion among the slave population.

Now, of course, it's always difficult to do a kind of statistical study based on the sigils because we don't know how representative the slaves who show up in the sigils are of the greater population. It could be that slaves who convert got manumitted faster, and so they're more represented among the manumission documents. But you can nonetheless get an idea of who was converting. And a lot of the slaves who are manumitted, particularly, I mean, various types of manumission, the ones who are manumitted for charitable reasons rather than for the work that they've completed,

typically tend to have converted. And Black Sea slaves, in contrast to Frankish slaves, tend to convert at almost a rate of 100%, whereas the Frankish slaves, the Efrinji ones, convert at a much, much lower rate. And so there are all sorts of reasons you can conjecture as to why that's the case. When Chris was introducing this topic

he was talking about a community of slaves in Galata and what you just mentioned now that there's different people coming from Black Sea from these Efrinjis and other places. How much did slaves in Galata actually form a cohesive community in a sense?

Oh, right. That's a really good question. I mean, you can't get a sense of that from studying the sigis, I don't think, I mean, in my experience. But we do have a couple of captivity accounts, such as that of Michael Hebrer, which I rely on very, very heavily. It's from a slightly later period. I think it's about 50 years later than the period that I studied, but you can still get a decent idea of how slaves kind of interacted with each other. It does seem that they're, I mean, it's difficult to really form a community if you're just being forced into labor. But they did

kind of depend on each other for certain things, for ways of acquiring food, for different tricks, I mean, also just for moral support. And they tended to band together, and my impression is according to their linguistic proclivities, like basically who can you talk to, and that's who you kind of make friends with among a group of slaves. But in terms of a community, really, that I'm not, I mean, that really requires further study.

Well, and presumably if they're all employed in similar industries, that might add a little more cohesiveness in that case. Yes, yeah. But you don't see in the sigils, like this slave arguing with that slave or that, you know,

they're not represented like that in the sigils? Right, well, maybe I should just say a brief word about how they're represented in the sigils, which is a little bit boring, but might be of interest to, I don't know, other weirdos like me who really find legal formulary absolutely fascinating. So the sigils, the information about slaves in the sigils is really very abundant. It's huge amounts of information, not just in the Galata sigils. You can find it elsewhere as well. But it's very cut and dry. I mean, the sigils that I studied are written

primarily in Arabic, particularly the slave manumission documents, they're very formulaic. They mentioned basically the slave's name, his father's name, where he's from, and then they give a physical description, which can also be quite interesting. You can get a lot of information from that, but it's all very formulaic. So you can figure out, for instance, the types of manumission and the type of work to some degree that they're engaged in, who their owners are, sometimes how much they're getting paid for their work, you can even understand from different types of manumission contracts, tedbir contracts in particular. So that's the kind of information you can get out of the sigils. You don't have a great deal of litigation

in the documents that I've looked at. I mean, I know in other sigils, in Uskudar, for instance, you have a lot more sort of disputes and problems. In Galata, it's primarily, you know, slave owners going to court and registering a tedbir, manumission contract, or a contract that's, not so much a contract, but a manumission

out of charitable reasons, or an umwalid, or something like this. So you don't see slaves arguing with each other, for instance. You do see some intermarriage between different seafaring slave-owning families, which is quite interesting. So people who were trading in slaves tend,

I mean, in Galata anyway, I found a couple of cases where they seem to have intermarried and kind of shared resources, you know, sort of big slave dealers who were dealing like hundreds and hundreds of slaves. Well, you don't even see the slave's name. They're just listed as like 100 esirs

or, you know, whatever, kefere esirirler or something like this. So they would tend to intermarry. So you definitely have a slave-dealing community and a slave-owning community. Whether you have a slave community is something that we, I'm not sure that we have the, I mean, maybe we have the sources for it and I just haven't found them, but it's difficult to get that out of the sigils themselves. Of course. And just one more question that even after uh in the sigils or at least maybe have some other evidence of this

did the identity of being a slave continue even after they were manumitted or freed right well this is a huge question and one of the things i mean i kind of regret it now but one of the big questions that was very popular while i was doing my PhD was this question of identity and sort of what constitutes an Ottoman identity what are the possible processes of kind of cultural assimilation that a slave might go through especially if he was a skilled slave and especially in skilled at seafaring or shipbuilding or rope making where he would be of great economic value to the Ottoman Empire in sort of the late or mid to late 16th century. So you would assume that the Ottoman society of Galata

would want to integrate, I mean to use modern terminology, these groups into at least a household or a kind of economic network. So kind of based on that assumption, I read the court records as kind of documents of assimilation. So a lot of the slave owners themselves are Ibn Abdullah, which would suggest that they are themselves converts,

if not former slaves. And in some of the captivity accounts, we find that the seafaring sort of captains, and I should just mention that most of the slaves are owned by men who have titles associated with seafaring activities. So they're all Kapitan or Kapitan Ederia or these sorts of names.

I would conjecture that skilled slaves tended to be integrated into a sort of seafaring society based in Galata where it didn't necessarily matter if you're a manumitted slave or you're a converted Christian because your main skill is as a sailor or as a captain or as a shipbuilder. Again, this is primarily conjecture from reading about this for years and years. But in terms of whether their identity as a sailor or as a captain or as a shipbuilder. Again, this is primarily conjecture from reading about this for years and years. But in terms of whether their identity as a slave continued after their manumission,

in terms of maybe patronage within a household, it's definitely possible. And you come across certain inheritance inventories in the Galata sigils where it's mentioned that this person, Murad ibn Abdullah, whoever he happens to be is a manumitted slave of the deceased and he's also going to serve as the wakil you know the the person who's responsible for dealing with the legal issues after the person's death so it's clear that a relationship between former owners

and slaves continued and there's a huge sociological literature on that on why that's the case and I could go on about that for hours if you want. And that comes up a lot in some of our other episodes. You know, we did that episode with Zoe about mulberry trees and inheritance in Lebanon and in that case you found prominent families choosing to endow waqfs to slaves. That includes concubines, female slaves, not only limited to men.

And this question of household is interesting for me because one of the tropes we hear is that, well, in contrast to the Atlantic world, where plantation slavery was the dominant practice, slavery in the Ottoman world was was predominantly domestic slavery it wasn't agricultural slavery but rather this the stereotype would be to be like serve serving as a servant in a home now the individuals you're talking about certainly wouldn't fall into that category but um are they part of a like a household like a couple or some kind of yeah i would argue like i would argue that they're

part of a household economy certainly um because they i mean and they do fall under a different i mean they're not exactly domestic slaves they're skilled workers who are serving as i mean if we're using sort of western legal terminology indentured, sort of between inverted commas, in Islamic juridical terms, their legal status is that of slave. It's unequivocal. But maybe an easier way of thinking about it for non-specialists is to think of them as indentured laborers. Many of them are serving in tadbir contracts,

which means that their term of slavery is limited either by an amount of time or an amount of money they have to provide. So typically in the Galata sigils, I mean, most slaves are manumitted, you can calculate according to sort of how much they're required to pay by each season, are typically manumitted between two to eight years on average. So it can be quite a brief period of slavery that I argue may have served also as a period of cultural and linguistic and religious assimilation

so that upon their manumission, they could sort of integrate themselves into Galata society. Can I ask where they live in Galata? That's a brilliant question. I mean, we know from captivity accounts that many of them actually lived in the Tarasane, but in terms of my slaves that I studied, I don't, yeah, I know know that's how I refer to them yeah

that always I do it completely unironically but that's that's what I call them I don't know where my slaves lived exactly whether they lived in their owners households whether they lived in the place of work whether they had other accommodation I'm just not sure I couldn't find any any evidence about that it would be fascinating to know whether they were... I mean, I know that some of the manumitted ones, it would seem, were sort of residents in a household. But they maybe were sort of special or had a special relationship with their former owners.

So I can't say, unfortunately. So just to jump back to the economic structure of it, I mean, you mentioned you mentioned again this tidbir contract is a sort of wage or is it a sort of a salary like well how exactly does it work what it is is the slave actually has to pay his owner a certain amount of money and it's often um dictated in installments and they can either be monthly or seasonal. In many cases in the Galata registers they're seasonal installments and during the sailing season they have to pay much much much more during the season when the Ottoman navy is not active which immediately would suggest that

they're engaged in some kind of maritime activities. So basically you can calculate what they must have been getting paid as workers by looking at how much they had to in turn pay their owners toward their freedom. So their owners would pay them a sum? Their owners wouldn't pay them anything. No, they would pay their owners toward their freedom. But where do they get the money from? Presumably they're working in the in the Tersane building ships. I see. Okay. So the owner So it's almost like an investment. The owners are not owning these businesses

and then employing these people as forced. Yeah, it's a business, absolutely. Well, that resonates with some of the previous discussions we've had about how there's actually very complex and differentiated legal structures and practices surrounding slavery in the Ottoman world. This Tedbir contract is just one example of how there are many categories. There's many types of slavery, we could say. Could you talk a little bit more about, within the legal framework,

how are slaves classified? Where do we see qualification for manumission how does that manumission process work could you yeah sure and actually this is kind of related to in part legal questions and the application of the law on a daily basis but at the same time

a close reading of these documents can also give us a little tiny bit of insight possibly into the stories of the slaves so just to answer your your first question about the actual kind of contracts themselves they're based on Hanafi shurut manuals so they take a very clear and formulaic form that's actually quite ancient in many respects. This later morphs into Turkish in sort of later centuries but in our period it's still in Arabic like sort of taken almost directly from

like you know Al-Marganani's shurut manual and At-Tahawi's shurut manual so I mean it's almost identical to much earlier forms and in order for a contract to be valid there are certain clauses that have to be present, one of which is a description of the goods, basically. And in this case, it's a person. So in order for a valid manumission contract, you have to have the name of the owner, and you have to have a physical description of the slave, as well as his name. And for a tadbir contract, you also have to have the oral description of the slave as well as his name. And for a tadbir contract, you also have to have the oral consent of the slave to the contract.

And then, of course, it has to be witnessed and so on and so forth. But the interesting part of all this is the fact that the name and physical description of the slave is required as well as his place of origin because that gives us a tiny bit of insight, at least, into some of the stories of these slaves. So for instance, in the Galata sigils, a lot of the slaves,

especially the ones who have tadbir contracts, have kept their original names. So you can trace where they are from in many cases. It's very clear that many of them are Spanish or Italian, what we would today describe as Spanish or Italian. When you say names, it includes like a... The patronymic, like the father's name, the last name. No, not just the first name.

And what's also interesting is that one of the scribes, particularly in the third Galata sigil, is really, really meticulous about transcribing the sort of Italian or French or Spanish names of the slaves. Like he vocalizes everything. You know, he's very, very, very careful with how he sort of writes the names of these slaves very carefully. And other scribes are not. Like they'll just sort of approximate something. And a lot of them have very common Italian names,

Vicenzo, Francesco, you know, these, Andrea, these sorts of names. I think you even have a doria somewhere in there i mean it's very very interesting like you can actually find kind of specific individuals um and then you also have a physical description of the person which can give you some indication of their history for instance a lot of the circadian slaves are missing their ears only the circadian slaves so you know it would suggest that there's some sort of practice of marking a slave that's going on in that particular part of the world that isn't happening elsewhere.

So, I mean, I found myself writing part of a chapter about ears on Circassian slaves and sort of questioning what has happened to my life. But it's sort of you know, if you're interested Yeah, yeah. If you're interested in the vagaries of the ears of Circassian slaves and how Black Sea slaves are marked.

But you also find things like people with burnt limbs or wounds or one eye or, and you get a lot of physical descriptions as well. So you have to describe the skin color, the eyebrows, the eye color, the hair color, the stature, the complexion, all these things have to be described in the physical description. So what you actually wind up having is sort of the way that Ottoman scribes and bureaucrats perceived their slaves physically. So you can write a sort of social history of that alone, like how are these slaves described? Why are they described that way? You know, how are their names transcribed?

So I talk a bit about that in my dissertation and I try to connect it to other genres of literature, contemporary literature, because reading the sigils by themselves and trying to write about the ethnicities of slaves and how slaves are perceived is difficult. So if you look at other types of literature, like firasat or ilm al-firasa,

you can... Which is physiognomy. Physiognomy, yeah, yeah, physiognomy. So sort of discerning the inner characteristics of a human being by looking at their physical appearance. I mean, actually firasa itself is

a prophetic gift from God that allows you to penetrate someone's soul. But only prophets and saints can do that. And the rest of us just have to study Fidasah treatises where we say, oh, well, if a guy has a monobrow, it means that he's good at accounting.

So if I have a slave with a monobrow, I should put him in charge of my defters, basically. Whereas if I have a slave who has a wheatish complexion and stooping shoulders, oh, he'll make a good cook so I should put him in my kitchen. So basically there are other ways of understanding Fidasa, but one

of the more cynical ways of understanding it is as a method of managing power really within a household and a way of reading people, of classifying people and of manipulating a servile class. There are other much more optimistic readings of Firesa

that other scholars are working on, but because I work on slavery, obviously my interpretation of this genre of literature is geared towards social inequalities and power relations. I think it's a really interesting point, because for those of us who study the Ottoman Empire, when we try to find things like ethnographies, Ottoman descriptions of the other, foreign peoples and so forth, we really don't have that present. And I think where I've found it, and it seems that you've found it much more in these Galata sigils,

is that in the description of slaves, in the attempt to describe them, you have a sort of kind of proto-ethnography in attempt to really describe all sorts of peoples and their characteristics. I would say the sages are just one bureaucratic and legal manifestation of actually quite a sophisticated tradition of what you can call ethnography or we can call a kind of neo-platonic tradition

of attempting to understand and thereby manipulate one's fellow man. So I would actually say the Ottoman tradition doesn't, it's actually quite developed. I mean, it develops out of a lot of Ottoman Firas-e-Treatises or translations of earlier Arabic treatises, Persian treatises, mirrors for princes, guides for how to run a household, how to run a kingdom.

So, I would actually say that we have a wealth of those. And you have all sorts of poetry, like the Zainan Name is the most famous example where you have descriptions of the sort of amorous qualities of various slave women, or servile women,

not necessarily slave women, according to their origins. You have something very similar in Mustafa Ali, where he talks about how different ethnicities are suited for different types of work, and different types of servile work primarily, and also for different types of lovemaking.

Albanians are fierce, but loving. Russians are cold. I don't remember exactly what they are, but he has a stereotype associated with each of these different ethnicities. So I would say the Ottoman tradition is actually quite developed in that sense. And because it was such a mixed place,

I think it's natural to deal in, you know, deal in these categories, even if they weren't necessarily taken very seriously. You know, maybe they were, maybe they weren't. We can't really know, but they certainly exist. Yes.

And you can find them in the literature. I mean, I saw a presentation at the Walkmas conference last summer in Ankara by Gulay Yilmaz, I think, and she talked about how this process of categorization,

this detailed description is also part of the devshirme. Absolutely. When they go to the villages and get the boys, they write very detailed descriptions of each boy, including the scars and all of that. So it's something that pervades. And we also see it in the illustrated manuscripts, for example. The people are drawn with their particular ethnic features or whatever.

I mean, I would, rather than, I mean, in my own work, I start off understanding these categories of jins or ussel as ethnographic features, but they're not even really ethnographic so much as they are physiognomic. And I mean, I imagine with the Devshirme, it's not something I know much about,

but I would imagine that it's a similar process of enslavement and thereby having to to describe and and categorize a particular object i think yeah i think that um the one of the scholars said i forgot who it is but had had indicated they were looking for boys who had physical markers of being um combative yeah yeah yeah essentially scars or something that would show that they fight yeah i'd like to fight yeah so they'd probably read a razi and like look where he says oh well you know if he has a pale complexion with this kind of nose and this kind of stance it means that he's combative and so you know i mean there is like a developed and quite ancient tradition of this literature of course course, I wasn't suggesting that.

I was just saying that in the discussion of slaves. I wasn't accusing you of suggesting that. In the discussion of slaves, we find this much more than, say, in geographies or where you would find it necessarily in the European literature. I don't know. So just one more question about this. I don't know. So just one more question about this.

Like, do you ever, like in some of the later sources I look at about slaves, when they mention them, in a sense, the physiognomic aspects of it fall away. And you just get kind of a hierarchy of slaves based on their, for instance, their capacity to convert to Islam, their moral qualities and they're just saying you know that these people like nabi for instance says uh you know austrians and hungarians and uh frank and stuff that they're all just traitors uh the only you know an ambaza girl is okay yeah that sort of thing like but the rest of them you know you can't trust any of these people and it's basically really the moral qualities that come out in the end but and that certainly exists in the earlier period as well

and the main purpose of this is to understand the moral I mean the main purpose of physiognomy of firaset or elmelfiresa

as a genre is to understand the moral qualities the inner qualities the hidden qualities of a human being if you're a slave owner it's so that you can

make use of them if you're a bureaucrat it's so that you can you use of them. If you're a bureaucrat, it's so that you can, you know, take advantage of your colleagues and get ahead, you know. But I mean, in some cases, it's also so that you can study the good moral qualities of someone as an example. I mean, for instance, the Shemayel Name, where you have portraits of Ottoman sultans. That's basically a work of physiognomy as well,

in the sense of admiring someone's physiognomy and seeking to learn from it rather than taking advantage of a slave for what you perceive as his weaknesses or strengths. Can you give us some examples of the physiognomic, what are these ephrenjis? Oh, actually, I can tell you what they're described as, but kind of every physiognomy treatise says something different

about what it means to have, you know, a reddish complexion versus a monobrow versus dark hair. So, I mean, every treatise, I mean, in my experience anyway, you know, kind of will have its own version of things. But the typical descriptors that are used are the eyebrows, whether they're joined or separate, the complexion and you have kind of a limited number of terms to describe that

height and eye color and those are the main characters and scars of course those are very important as well I mean there's some argument that and I think I take the sigils a bit too far in saying that this is so closely related to physiognomy.

It could be that the shurut tradition draws on the firesa tradition, and that's why these physical descriptions are present, and they don't mean anything more than that. They're just fulfilling a condition in the manumission contract. We can play, let's say, give the opposite, or let's look at it in a more practical way

of identity yeah identity you know when slaves escape yeah exactly when you need to identify your yeah you know middle height man with a brown one eye yeah one eye and a brown complexion yeah and then you can track them down right i mean how let's I guess maybe transition to this question of practicalities and escape slaves runaways do those come up? I don't encounter any runaways in the Galata sigils but

I have it has occurred to me that you know perhaps I'm making too much of this argument of the descriptions and that it might just be I would argue not so much in the case of this particular of the descriptions and that it might just be i would i would argue not so much in the case of the this particular set of slaves galata slaves um who are skilled who who found quite well-paying work in istanbul many of whom have converted um they're not going to want to escape i mean especially if they're in the process of being manumitted in two years and

they've got a new muslim name and you know nice job I think that these descriptions in many cases would have been used actually to prevent re-enslavement which often happened so you could pull out your document and say ah okay like I speak Turkish with a funny accent and my name is originally Francesco but I'm a Muslim now and I've been manumitted so you can't re-enslave me and you could pull out your document and say look this, this is me. I have one eye and a monobrow and brown hair and I'm, you know, orzo boilu or whatever. So I think it was, and you know, as you know, like often they would receive their own copy

of the manumission document to keep on their person. And so I think that was sort of a way of pulling it out and saying, oh, look, no, no, no, I'm either in the process of being manumitted or I have been manumitted, you know. Do any of those manumission documents that were given to slaves survive? No, I've found other sort of independent sigil documents that have been handed out,

but, you know, in various other archives that are scattered around, obviously not in the Mufti Luq archive. But I haven't been able to find a manumission document i found other documents property documents and so on that that have you know have been issued by the court um but i haven't haven't been able to find a manumission document unfortunately well but it is kind of remarkable what this uh very limited set of sigils from a very specific time period in a very specific place in the ottoman empire tells us not only about the

life in that place and you know the life of the lives of slaves as well but even touches on these questions of uh maybe uh perspectives on how people see the other as near was saying or uh the body for example absolutely yeah and one of the you know sort of to kind of conclude one of the other things you know besides the obvious reality that it is possible to study slaves in the documents, there's a lot more material there than has been acknowledged, I think. Loads. But one of the other things that came out is right across the Golden Horn, of course, we have another population of slaves, of course associated with the ottoman palace yes and and and the lives of those individuals while maybe having some overlap with what you've talked about here sounds like very different even though they're in the same city we're talking about

two different slave communities with different practices in play yeah different economy well one of the things i always bang on and on and on about every time I go to a conference about slavery is that it almost makes no sense to talk about slavery as a single thing in the Ottoman Empire, or just generally if we're discussing slavery. I mean, if we even just take Istanbul, not even the Ottoman Empire, just Istanbul as an example,

there are so many different types of slavery, different types of manumission, that it's almost impossible to discuss slavery as a whole. I mean, I would argue actually from more focused micro-historical studies, I mean, I don't know if you know Betül Ipshirli.

She did an excellent study of concubines, just looking at ex-palace concubines. And I mean, that's one type of slavery, one type of document that is a very specific manifestation. My sort of skilled seafaring slaves are one manifestation. You might have had, I don't know,

craftsmen, builders, they were one type of slave who were treated in a different way and issued with a certain type of contract. Same goes for, you know, umwalids, umuvelids in private households. I mean, there are a million different types of slavery and the Ottoman and Arabic and Persian terminology of slavery is much richer than the English vocabulary that we use to discuss it in academia. So one of

the things I always argue for is actually using the Ottoman, using the Arabic vocabulary. Different categories. Yeah, to describe these different categories and not just assume that, ah, you know, someone who's taken in the devshirme is the same as a seafaring slave in Galata, is the same as a concubine, is the same as, you know, a merchant slave

who gets to travel and handle large amounts of money. I mean, they're all very, very different and working under different conditions. Well, as Ehud Toledano points out, I think, in one of his works the the only thing or the main thing that slaves and different parts of the world and times and places have is in common is that they're they're owned and you know i think beyond that just like land can be owned in lots of different ways people have been owned in lots of different ways throughout history

and of course using such flat terms can sometimes um limit what we can understand from the topic. Or oversimplify it, for that matter. So, you know, we've talked about Galata, but how does it compare, if we look at other studies or compare this to other studies around the Mediterranean, maybe even other parts of the Ottoman Empire? The other sort of examples of slavery that have been studied in the Mediterranean are the Italian peninsula. And you also have, for a slightly earlier period, kind of Genoese and Venetian colonies in the Levant and Black Sea, and their experiences of owning slaves in those parts of the world. One thing I would really love to do actually is undertake a comparison.

I mean, a lot of the, I mean, for instance, the Tadbir contract actually derives from a Greek form of slavery called Paramone. And so there are actually similarities in kind of islamic slavery practices on italian merchant communities who are based in the islamic world so they begin to do things like allow their concubines and children to inherit money from them which is you know unheard of back in the mainland italian peninsula so i mean that's interesting, like looking at these sort of seeping cultural practices and how practices of slavery sort of go across religious boundaries and geographical boundaries. If we were actually to compare, say, Istanbul to Venice or, I mean,

Florence, it's not a port, but they had quite a significant slave population. One of the main differences that you notice is that there's a lot less absorption of slaves into the population in the Italian peninsula they don't have the same mechanisms like legal mechanisms of manumission that you have in Islamic law

whereby it's basically encouraged to manumit your slaves after a rather brief period. So you find that slaves are either just not manumitted, they're not integrated, they don't really intermarry. Again, my experience is with slightly earlier time periods than the 16th century, the 15th century, for instance, in Italy, even the 14th century. So you find huge differences in some instances

and great similarities in others, as you would expect. So I mean, that's definitely something that requires more study. One of the other interesting things that you find is in various Venetian and Genoese notary documents discussing ownership of slaves, the physical descriptions of the slaves in sort of late medieval Latin and kind of medieval Italian are almost identical to the Arabic descriptions in terms of the order that the different physical aspects of the slave are listed in the document. So I would argue for some kind of Mediterranean Mediterranean sort of slave description, conventions across languages and geographic regions. And I don't know how that came to be the case,

but it's something I really wanted to write an article about one time and then, I mean, sort of didn't. But the material is all there, but it's sort of picking apart these kind of philological issues across Latin and Arabic and Ottoman. I mean, it would be great fun to me, probably not to the readers of this article. Well, no, it opens up a lot of interesting topics. Slavery is inherently a cross-cultural thing because it involves the movement of people

and the intersection of different legal spaces you know a big thing in the americas was the the way that slavery was practiced in the atlantic went against the way slavery was practiced in the mediterranean and in africa where there were long-standing legal and cultural traditions surrounding it which which is what i guess made the experience uh experience much worse, although it's hard to compare these things. Very different, certainly. I mean, in the Ottoman Empire, especially in this particular period when the economy is very strong,

the navy is very active, you sense that this was almost a kind of forced labor recruitment in many respects, especially with how quickly they're manumitted, how relatively well they're manumitted, how relatively well they're paid, that the Frankish slaves don't even convert about 50% of the time, and they're still manumitted. So I mean, it almost seems as though the Ottoman method of slavery in this particular instance was kind of, I mean, dare I use the word lenient, but I mean, it seems that

it was more aimed at bringing labor in and then actually integrating it into kind of a maritime economy rather than just pure exploitation like you see in, say, the Atlantic models of slavery. Or even like later in the 17th, 18th century in Istanbul when, you know,

criminals, other people are forced to be galley slaves. Kind of much more punitive. That exists as well in the period that we're studying but just not with these slaves because they seem to have possessed some particular skill valuable skill related to seafaring that meant that they were manumitted and seem to have been treated relatively decently had legal documents consented to their contracts so they certainly weren't galley slaves. They were slaves, but doing something of greater value that required more knowledge and more technical ability.

Well, Noor, I want to thank you for sharing your research with us today, taking time away from your activities as curator during your visit to Istanbul to talk about this exciting research, which I think opens up a lot of different topics for those who are thinking about, you know, I'm thinking mainly of graduate students, undergraduate students, thinking of their own projects. It shows you, this little micro study shows you all the different angles on the topic of slavery that maybe you don't get when you take that broader perspective. So I really appreciate you doing that with us today. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. Now, for those who are interested in learning more

about the topic, we have a select bibliography on our website, which Dr. Sobers-Khan has provided to us, as well as a link to her academia.edu page, where you can check out the dissertation, download it, read it, as well as her other publications. By the book. Or of course, by the book. On Amazon. Which we have links for all of that on our website, autumnhistorypodcast.com. You can also get in touch with our Facebook community. Now, I think almost 19,000 strong in terms of followers and more casual engagers on Facebook and other social media.

Thanks to all of you for tuning in this episode. Join us next time. And until then, take care.