Ransom Slavery Along the Ottoman Borders
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Ransom Slavery along the Ottoman Borders FODOR_i-iv.indd i 7/6/2007 3:26:36 PM The Ottoman Empire and its Heritage Politics, Society and Economy EDITORS BY Suraiya Faroqhi and Halil Inalcik Associate Board Firket Adanir • Idris Bostan • Amnon Cohen • Cornell Fleischer Barbara Flemming • Alexander de Groot • Klaus Kreiser Hans Georg Majer • Irène Mélikoff • Ahmet Ya- ar Ocak Abdeljelil Temimi • Gilles Veinstein • Elizabeth Zachariadou VOLUME 37 FODOR_i-iv.indd ii 7/6/2007 3:26:39 PM Ransom Slavery along the Ottoman Borders (Early Fifteenth–Early Eighteenth Centuries) Edited by Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor LEIDEN • BOSTON 2007 FODOR_i-iv.indd iii 7/6/2007 3:26:39 PM This book was compiled at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences with the support of the National Foundation for Scienti c Research (Országos Tudományos Kutatási Alap/OTKA). A CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. This book is printed on acid-free paper. ISBN 9004157042 ISBN 978 90 04 15704 0 © Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands FODOR_i-iv.indd iv 7/6/2007 3:26:40 PM CONTENTS PREFACE ................................................................................................. VII ABBREVIATIONS .................................................................................... IX INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................... XI ENIKO CSUKOVITS Miraculous escapes from Ottoman cap- tivity ..................................................... 1 ISTVÁN TRINGLI Litigations for Ottoman prisoners of war and the siege of Buzsin (1481, 1522) .................................................... 19 ÁRPÁD NÓGRÁDY A list of ransom for Ottoman captives imprisoned in Croatian castles (1492).. 27 GÉZA PÁLFFY Ransom slavery along the Ottoman– Hungarian frontier in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ........................... 35 KLÁRA HEGYI Freed slaves as soldiers in the Ottoman fortresses in Hungary ........................... 85 FERENC SZAKÁLY The ransom of Ali bey of Koppány. The impact of capturing slaves on trade in Ottoman Hungary............................. 93 ISTVÁN GYÖRGY TÓTH Catholic missionaries as Turkish prisoners in Ottoman Hungary in the seventeenth century.................................................. 115 ZSUZSANNA J. ÚJVÁRY A Muslim captive’s vicissitudes in Ottoman Hungary (mid-seventeenth century) ................................................ 141 JÁNOS J. VARGA Ransoming Ottoman slaves from Mu- nich (1688) ........................................... 169 GÉZA DÁVID Manumitted male slaves at Galata and Istanbul around 1700 ............................... 183 MÁRIA IVANICS Enslavement, slave labour and treat- ment of captives in the Crimean Khan- ate......................................................... 193 PÁL FODOR Maltese pirates, Ottoman captives and French traders in the early seventeenth- century Mediterranean ......................... 221 INDEX ..................................................................................................... 239 PREFACE In the preface to an earlier volume compiled by us (Ottomans, Hungar- ians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe. The Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest. The Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage, 20. Leiden: Brill, 2000), we announced that as part of a project launched at the Insti- tute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences we were putting together another volume, this time on the subject of ransom slavery along the Ottoman borders. It gives us great pleasure to report that this new collection is now ready and will join its predecessor in the series “The Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage”. This indicates that the editors wish to maintain a balance among the different schools of research, and that they appreciate the new findings in Hungary concerning the Ottoman period. As on the previous occasion, efforts have been made to avoid the one- sidedness that results from speaking only about areas under Ottoman control in the strict sense of the word and from including solely those authors who use Turkish and Crimean Tatar sources. Instead, scholars of Habsburg–Hungarian history, relying on different archival materials, were also asked to contribute. It should be emphasised that this two- sided, complex, approach is a Hungarian speciality that stems from the merely partial conquest of the country by the Ottomans and from the abundance of written records here. A similar, but less marked, duality characterised the situation in some other European territories. Finally, although the degree of dividedness in certain other regions was com- parable, depiction of the two sides there is difficult, since autochthonous archival material is scarce. As the Introduction makes clear, the question of captives and slaves has been in the focus of attention in recent years, without, however, being fully explored. Probably the most intriguing question is the number of people whose lives were changed by the fact that they had to spend long years in captivity. There is no hope to correctly answer this question, since no systematic documentation was prepared concerning the individ- uals involved. The Ottoman treasury could, apparently, not enforce its claim to collect the “one-fifth tax” (pencik), which in any case did not even theoretically extend to the totality of captives over the whole period. VIII PREFACE Nevertheless, by assembling scattered data, the scale of the tax levied or collected will perhaps be gauged sooner or later. This would help us to judge the accuracy of contemporary or modern figures that speak of hun- dreds of thousands of captives. In this matter the present volume cannot offer orientation, even if it does suggest, and convincingly, that the ransoming of slaves was a wide- spread activity, a species of trade in the period under consideration. It contains much information on the techniques for taking captives and on the procedures for extracting money and goods from them, their families and their communities. Here we should like to express our gratitude to Suraiya Faroqhi, who encouraged us with a short but decisive sentence confirming her interest in the topic. Additional motivation came from Brill’s Trudy Kamperveen, the ideal editor, who supplied the necessary reminders always well in time and invariably with humour and goodwill. We also wish to thank colleagues for their readiness to contribute to the book and for their pa- tience during the editorial process. We are especially indebted to Ferenc Glatz, the director of the Institute of History, for providing the conditions for our work (nine out of the twelve contributors to the book were or had been on its staff) and to the National Foundation for Scientific Research (Hungary’s central academic funding body) for granting our project the necessary financial support. Also, we should like to thank Éva Figder, Veronika K. Fodor, Andrew Gane, Tamás Pálosfalvi, Judit Pokoly, Chris Sullivan, and Albert Vermes for their linguistic assistance. During our editorial work we suffered grievous losses when two col- leagues and friends, Ferenc Szakály and István György Tóth, passed away, leaving an aching void. We dedicate this book to their memory. Géza Dávid Pál Fodor ABBREVIATIONS APF Archivio Storico della Sacra Congregazione de Propa- ganda Fide, Roma BHStA Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, München BOA Ba2bakanlık Osmanlı Ar2ivi, 0stanbul DF MOL Diplomatikai Fényképgy^jtemény, Budapest DL MOL Diplomatikai Levéltár, Budapest HHStA Haus, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Wien HL Hadtörténelmi Levéltár, Budapest KA Kriegsarchiv MAD Maliyeden Müdevver Defterler, BOA, 0stanbul MD Mühimme Defterleri, BOA, 0stanbul MKA Magyar Kamara Archivuma, Budapest MOL Magyar Országos Levéltár, Budapest MTA Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, Budapest ÖNB Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Wien ÖStA Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Wien TSMA Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Ar2ivi, 0stanbul TSMK Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi, 0stanbul INTRODUCTION Slavery is one of the most permanent phenomena of human history. With the exception of the past two centuries, the subjugation, deprivation and use of human beings as tools was considered natural and was widely accepted. This applied to the ancient societies of Europe, but also to many medieval and early modern worlds including Islamdom.1 Slavery was part of everyday life in early Islamic history, and its importance grew as the Muslims conquered the territories of ancient Middle Eastern civi- lisations one after the other. However, Islamic slavery was different from that current in the an- cient world.2 Muslim owners employed slaves as eunuchs, guards, concu- bines or domestic servants primarily in order to ensure their own comfort, to protect their homes or palaces and to keep the latter tidy. Acting on behalf of their masters,