Ottoman Empire and the World around it, The (Library of Ottoman Studies) by Suraiya Faroqhi

Author:Suraiya Faroqhi [Faroqhi, Suraiya]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780857730237
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Published: 2005-12-20T05:00:00+00:00

~ In conclusion

As these paragraphs have demonstrated, research concerning prisoners of war on Ottoman territory, and on Ottoman captives abroad is still in its beginning stages: this accounts for the ‘patchiness’ of the present chapter. Attempts have been made to find out what happened to formerly Ottoman captives living out their lives in central Europe through the study of church records, though in all likelihood, many of these documents are still unexplored.65 Where prisoners of non-Ottoman background in the Empire are concerned, a systematic collection of the rather numerous references to such people in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European travel accounts also seems promising. Perhaps it will be possible to follow the example of the historians of antiquity in scanning the published travel accounts into a computer and then conducting electronic searches; these data can then be collated with the growing body of studies of Ottoman slavery based on Ottoman sources. But at present a major deficiency remains: even though the study of captives taken in wars between European rulers and the Ottoman sultans has for the most part been undertaken by Ottomanists, work on the different categories of primary sources has typically been carried out with little coordination between the different specialists.

However, some preliminary results are important and should be retained. First of all, the enslavement of prisoners was by no means an Ottoman peculiarity. Quite to the contrary, until 1699/1110–11 this procedure was officially sanctioned by the Austrian side as well, and even though the numbers had diminished, there were still enslaved Muslim captives in southern Italy in the early 1800s. In the Marseilles arsenal there were quite a few Muslim slaves who had been the victims of raiding by Christian freebooters. Yet this obvious fact did not help them to obtain their freedom, except for the rare event of a special agreement by the French kings with one or another of the North African rulers. Not even a kingdom that normally maintained friendly relations with the Ottomans was willing to forgo Muslim galley slaves. Secondly, agreements to exchange captives of officer status were common enough at least in the seventeenth century as far as Habsburg–Ottoman wars were concerned. It is thus clear that such understandings were by no means limited to wars among Christian potentates, as has often been assumed. In this respect at least, the Ottomans and their opponents inhabited one and the same world.

Up to this point our concern has been mainly with what might be called political and military ‘hard facts’, and but rarely with peaceful exchanges of goods and people. Yet there were quite a few foreign merchants, both Muslim and non-Muslim, present on Ottoman soil. This could not have been possible without the toleration of the sultans and their advisors, and we must ask ourselves what advantages the servitors of the Ottoman state hoped to derive from foreign trade. What could these merchant sojourners offer that compensated for the frequent disruptions that their presence caused in the sultan’s ‘well-guarded domains’?

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