Moriscos in Ottoman Galata, 1609–1620S

Chapter 11 Moriscos in Ottoman Galata, 1609–1620s

Tijana Krstić*

Introduction: The Ottomans and Moriscos – A Story Still Waiting to be Told

Sixty years ago, Fernand Braudel intuited in his epochal study of the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II that the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires were intimately interdependent, but scholars have been slow to follow up on his suggestion.1 As a phenomenon that straddled the boundaries between these two empires in the early modern Mediterranean, the Expulsion of the Moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula between 1609 and 1614 and their subse- quent dispersion across Europe, North Africa and the Ottoman Empire repre- sents a research topic of particular interest in this context. Nevertheless, to this day, the study of the Moriscos’ plight before and after Expulsion continues to be the exclusive concern of historians of the early modern Iberian Peninsula, with little engagement by historians from other related fields. In a world where the nation-state framework for the study of history still reigns supreme despite advances in theory of history of empires and migrations, the Moriscos, espe- cially in their diasporic manifestations, figure as an elusive trans-national and trans-imperial phenomenon which historians outside the field of “Spanish” history have been slow to claim as a subject of research. Studies of relations between the Moriscos and the Ottomans, the key imperial rival of the Spanish Habsburgs and the polity that Moriscos were accused of secretly supporting as an insidious “fifth column” before their Expulsion from Spain, are particularly few and far between.2 Until recently, most of what

* I would like to thank my colleagues Natalie Rothman (for assistance with the translations from Italian), Matt Padrone (for assistance with translations from Spanish), as well as Günhan Börekci and Eric Dursteler for helpful suggestions on primary sources. 1 Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: Armand Colin), 1949. 2 The studies include Efdaleddin Bey, “Bir Vesika-ı Müelim,” Tārīh-i Osmānī Encümeni Mecmuası 1–4 (1910), 201–210; James T. Monroe, “A Curious Morisco Appeal to the Ottoman Empire,” Al-Andalus 31–1 (1966), 281–304; Andrew Hess, “The Moriscos: an Ottoman Fifth Column in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” American Historical Review 74–1 (1968), 1–25; Louis Cardaillac, “Le Turc, Suprême Espoir des Morisques,” Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Economiques et Sociales, Extrait du cahier Série Histoire 1–2 (1974), 37–46; Raphaël Carrasco,

270 Krstić was known about Ottoman-Morisco relations concerned early contacts between Spanish Muslims and the Ottoman-sponsored Barbary corsairs in the Western Mediterranean following the fall of Granada, as well as mostly abor- tive plans on the part of the Ottoman Sultans Süleyman (1520–1566) and Selim II (1566–1574) to provide more decisive military support for the embattled Moriscos as part of the Ottoman bid for military and religious supremacy in the Western Mediterranean.3 This research was later expanded to include the epoch of Sultan Ahmet I (1603–1617), during whose reign the Expulsion trans- pired, and demonstrated that the Ottoman sultan aimed to ease the hardships of the refugees by sending letters to different European sovereigns asking for the Moriscos’ safe passage as well as by ordering tax breaks for the refugees who decided to settle in Tunis, Algiers and Anatolia.4 In recent years this infor- mation has been supplemented by further documents, both imperial com- mands and records from the imperial registers of important affairs which document a more extensive Ottoman engagement than previously surmised with the plight of the Spanish Muslims, despite the ultimate failure to provide substantial armed assistance.5

“Péril ottoman et solidarité morisque (La tentative de soulevement desmorisques des années 1577–1583),” Revue d’Histoire Maghrébine 25 (1982), 33–50; Abdeljelil Temimi, Le Gouvernement Ottoman et le Problème Morisque,( Zaghouan: ceromdi), 1989; Pieter Sjoerd van Koningsveld and Gerard Albert Wiegers, “An Appeal of the Moriscos to the Mamluk Sultan and its Counterpart to the Ottoman Court: Textual Analysis, Context, and Wider Historical Background,” Al-Qanṭara 20–1 (1999), 161–190. For further bibliography on specific issues see the notes that follow. 3 The most comprehensive work on this topic is Andrew Hess, A Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth Century Ibero-African Frontier (Chicago: University), 1978. 4 See Abdeljelil Temimi, “Politique Ottomane face l’implantation et a l’insertion des Morisques en Anatolie,” in Etudes d’histoire Morisque (Zaghouan: ceromdi),1993, 9–24; id, “Evolution de l’attitude des autorités de la régence de Tunis face à ‘l accueil des Morisques, à la lumière d’un nouveau firman du Sultan Ottoman,” in Actes du Ve Symposium international d’Etudes morisques sur Le Ve centenaire de la Chute de Grenade 1492–1992 (Zaghouan: ceromdi), 1993, ii: 711–722. On Ottoman policies for settling the Moriscos see also Abd al-Rahman Abd al-Rahim, “Morisco Settlement in Egypt through the Religious Court Documents of the Ottoman Age,” in L’expulsió dels moriscos: Conseqüències en el món islàmic i en el món cristià (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya), 1994, 158–163; and Mustapha Ben Hamouche, “De Grenade à Alger, ou la politique urbaine ottomane face au problème andalou,” Arab Historical Review for Ottoman Studies 11–12 (1995), 31–48. 5 See Chakib Benafri, “Endülüs’te Son Müslüman Kalıntısı Morisko´larin Cezayé Goçu Ve Osmani Yardimi,” [“The Migration to Algiers of the Moriscos, the Last Muslims of al-Andalus, and the Ottoman Assistance (1492–1614)”] unpublished M.A. thesis (Ankara: Hacettepe