Slaves and Freedmen in 17Th- and Early 18Th-Century Ottoman Crete

Yannis SPYROPOULOS 177 SLAVES AND FREEDMEN IN 17TH- AND EARLY 18TH-CENTURY OTTOMAN CRETE B eing one of the last major Ottoman conquests, Crete is often con- sidered to be a province that was treated by the Ottomans as a ground for institutional experimentation in the framework of the new economic and political realities that were being shaped within the Empire from the late 16th century onward.1,2 Yet, so far, neither the application of Ottoman institutions on the island nor the Cretan population’s responses to them have drawn sufficient systematic scholarly attention. In this paper, I will try to put a few pieces of this rather big and complicated puzzle together, and demonstrate some aspects of the practice of chattel slavery and slave manumissions on the island. I will argue that, together with other institutions, such as the army and the vakıfs, slavery was used by the local Muslim community as a means of bridging the gap between them and the non-Cretan elite that was settled on the island during the War for Crete (1645-1669). Yannis Spyropoulos, boursier postdoctoral Fernand-Braudel IFER, Centre d’études turques, ottomanes, balkaniques et centrasiatiques (Cetobac, UMR 8032, CNRS – EHESS – Collège de France), Collège de France, Institut d’études arabes, turques et islamiques, 52 rue du Cardinal-Lemoine F75231 Paris cedex 05. [email protected] 1 This article is based on a paper I presented at the International Workshop on Slavery in the Ottoman Empire organized by Cetobac in Paris on November 23, 2012. I would like to thank the organizers and the participants for their contribution to a very fruitful meeting that gave me the chance to revisit some old research of mine and prompted me to write this article. Especially, I would like to thank Nicolas Vatin and Hayri Gökşin Özkoray for their valuable comments and suggestions. 2 Greene, ASharedWorld. Turcica, 46, 2015, p. 177-204. doi: 10.2143/TURC.46.0.3087634 © 2015Turcica.Tousdroitsréservés. 997971.indb7971.indb 117777 113/07/153/07/15 008:078:07 178 YANNIS SPYROPOULOS Most of the documents used for my study come from the Kandiye judicial registers (sicillat) preserved at the Vikelaia Library of Herakleion. In particular, I have used entries from the registers 1-12, 14, and 15, covering the period from 1657 to 1720. In order to explore the institution in an even earlier period, not covered by the extant records of Kandiye, I have also used Mustafa Oğuz’s transliterations of the two judicial registers of Resmo (mod. Rethymno)3 referring to the period from 1650 to 1656.4 Unfortunately, due to the unavailability of other documentation on slavery in early Ottoman Crete, most of my data is based on a type of source that leaves little room for the examination of the slaves’ private life, attitudes, and views. Bearing this limitation in mind, I will try to create an overview of some of the most important aspects of the institution’s application on the island and to interpret them both in an imperial and a provincial framework. ENSLAVEMENT The period under examination was a time of war both for Crete and for the Ottoman Empire in general, a fact that is clearly reflected on the slaves’ ethnic identities. Before 1715, about two thirds of the 152 slaves with an identified place of origin mentioned in the registers came from areas that were either at war with the Ottomans or on the routes of Ottoman military campaigns.5 In particular, most of the registered slaves were characterized by the local kadıs as Russians or Rum (Greek-speaking Orthodox Chris- tians), most probably enslaved during the consecutive Russo-Ottoman wars of the period and the War for Crete. Besides these two large ethnic groups one also finds several slaves of other ethnicities, such as Hungar- ians, Austrians, Poles, Croatians, Moldavians and Venetians, who were also quite possibly enslaved during Ottoman military operations (fig. 1). 3 Oğuz, Girit(Resmo)Ser‘iyeSicilDefterleri (hereafter: M.O.). 4 From the above-mentioned registers the ones that were studied in their entirety were the last two as well as the Turkish Archive of Herakleion (T.A.H.) registers 3, 5 and 7. For the study of the rest of the registers I mainly used as a guide Stavrinidis, Μεταφράσεις. In my research, the following publications also constituted a valuable guide: Karantzikou, Photeinou, Τρίτος Κώδικας; Varoucha etal., Πέμπτος Κώδικας. 5 1645-1669 (war against Venice), 1663-1664 (war against the Habsburgs), 1672-1677 (war against Poland), 1667-1681 (several campaigns against Russia), 1683-1699 (war against the Habsburgs, Poland, Venice and Russia), 1710-1711 (campaign against Russia), 1715-1718 (war against Venice and the Habsburgs): Shaw, History, p. 201-202, p. 212-215, p. 217-218, p. 223-225, p. 229-233. 997971.indb7971.indb 117878 113/07/153/07/15 008:078:07 SLAVES AND FREEDMEN IN 17TH- AND EARLY 18TH-CENTURY OTTOMAN CRETE 179 Fig. 1. Number of slaves per identified place of origin (1650-1715). Following 1715, there was a great influx of war captives into the Cretan slave market as a result of the conquest of the fortified islet of Spinalonga by the northeastern coast of Crete. The case of Spinalonga represents a well-documented example of a massive capture and sale of slaves, since the process of registration, transfer, and sale of the captives, their prices, the taxes collected by the state and the local officers, as well as detailed descriptions of the enslaved are preserved in the Ottoman sources in their entirety. According to the documents, the total number of captives taken by the Ottomans was initially 473 —230 men and 243 women— and increased to 616 due to new captivities and births. Amongst them, the 139 slaves seen as being the most robust and suitable for rowing, were sent to the imperial arsenal of Istanbul as oarsmen, and 19 of them died during the trip. The remaining 466 —after the delivery 997971.indb7971.indb 117979 113/07/153/07/15 008:078:07 180 YANNIS SPYROPOULOS of 11 to the paşa of Kandiye— were sold at the local slave market for 34,368.5 guruş, and their belongings for 1,337 guruş, while the Ottoman state collected an extra 1,018.5 guruş as pençik tax.6 The gross profit from the sale of the captives amounted to 36,724 guruş out of which 3,062.5 were spent on food (çorbalık) for the captives that were sold in Crete and 310 were given for the rusk (peksimet) used for the sustenance of the 120 captives that were sent to Istanbul.7 Despite the detailed physical descriptions of the captives of Spinalonga given in the registers, there is no mention of their origins, although from their names it becomes easy to understand that most of them were local Orthodox Christians. What is more interesting, though, is the existence among them of several people with Muslim names described in the registers as apostates from Islam (murtad). Although, according to the most common interpretation of Islamic law at the time, apostasy from Islam was punishable by death,8 in this instance the captive Muslims were either sold at the local market of Crete or sent to the imperial arsenal together with the enslaved Christians. This case is indicative of the flexibility with which the Ottoman state could treat the application of its existent Islamic legal tradition when profit was involved. On a local level, a similar flexibility was displayed by the island’s Ottoman administration in the many cases of Cretan children that were sold or traded by their own parents to wealthy individuals that often belonged to the local administrative elite.9 Despite its strict prohibition by Islamic law,10 this practice had reached such immense proportions that in 1659 the Ottoman chief admiral (kapudanpaşa) had to issue an order prohib- iting the treatment of children as commodity.11 Yet the sicils clearly show that the practice went on uninterrupted in the following years. In some cases, the terms used in such transactions are similar to those used for 6 For the pençik tax and its real amount in the case of the Spinalonga captivities, see the next section of the paper. 7 Τ.Α.Η.14:122, 125, 127, 132; 15:88; Spyropoulos, “Το οθωμανικό φρούριο;” Stavrinidis, “Η τύχη.” 8 Heffening, “Murtadd.” 9 Out of the 20 cases of children treated as commodity found in the registers, 19 were sold to Muslim individuals, 18 of which belonged to the askeri class. See, for instance T.A.H.1:68, in which the very kadı of Resmo buys a child from a Christian for the price of 30 riyalguruş. 10 Kermeli, “Children,” p. 269-271, p. 274. Also, for the cases in which someone could or could not be legally enslaved according to Islamic law, see Vatin, “Une affaire interne,” p. 150-152. 11 T.A.H.1:104. 997971.indb7971.indb 118080 113/07/153/07/15 008:078:07 SLAVES AND FREEDMEN IN 17TH- AND EARLY 18TH-CENTURY OTTOMAN CRETE 181 any other sale of property witnessed in the sources, with the parent either openly declaring that he is selling his child (“bey‘etdim”) or just stating that he gives it away to the service (hizmet) of a creditor to whom he is indebted because he “cannot provide clothing and money for its subsist- ence” (“kisveveinfakakadirdeğilim”).12 Besides the above-mentioned categories, many slaves came from areas where organized enslavement expeditions were taking place, such as Africa and Circassia. In fact, Africans constituted the third largest ethnic- ity among the slaves found in the registers (fig.

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