Slavery in the Ottoman Empire
was a major institution and a significant part of the Ottoman Empire's economy and traditional society.
The main sources of slaves were wars and politically organized enslavement expeditions in the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Central Europe, Southeast Europe, the Western Mediterranean and Africa. It has been reported that the selling price of slaves decreased after large military operations.
In Constantinople, the administrative and political center of the Ottoman Empire, about a fifth of the 16th- and 17th-century population consisted of slaves. The number of slaves imported to the Ottoman Empire from various geographic sources in the early modern period remains inadequately quantified. The Ottoman historians Halil İnalcık and Dariusz Kołodziejczyk have tentatively estimated that 2 million enslaved persons of Rus, Pole, and Ukrainian extraction, captured in Tatar raids, entered the Ottoman Empire between 1500 and 1700. However, other historians, most notably Alan Fisher, have argued that the propensity of contemporary sources on both sides of the Black Sea slave trade to inflate their estimates for the number of captives taken by Tatar raiders has rendered it impossible to accurately calculate the number of enslaved persons passing into Ottoman lands via this route. In addition, an estimated 1 to 1.5 million slaves entered the Ottoman Empire from the Mediterranean between 1530 and 1780. A smaller number of slaves also arrived in this period from the Caucasus, Africa, and other regions, but exact figures remain to be calculated.
Individual members of the Ottoman slave class, called a kul in Turkish, could achieve high status in some positions. Eunuch harem guards and janissaries are some of the better known positions an enslaved person could hold, but enslaved women were actually often supervised by them. However, women played and held the most important roles within the harem institution.
A large percentage of officials in the Ottoman government were bought as slaves, raised free, and integral to the success of the Ottoman Empire from the 14th to 19th centuries. Many enslaved officials themselves owned numerous slaves, although the Sultan himself owned by far the most. By raising and specially training slaves as officials in palace schools such as Enderun, where they were taught to serve the Sultan and other educational subjects, the Ottomans created administrators with intricate knowledge of government and fanatic loyalty.
Other slaves were simply laborers used for hard labor, such as for example agricultural laborers and galley slaves. Female slaves were primarily used as either domestic house servants or as concubines, who were subjected to harem gender segregation. While there were slaves of many different ethnicities and race was not the determined factor in who could be enslaved, there was still a racial hierarchy among slaves, since slaves were valued and assigned tasks and considered to have different abilities due to racial stereotypes.
Even after several measures to ban slave trade and restrict slavery, introduced due to Western diplomatic pressure in the late 19th century, the practice continued largely unabated into the early 20th century.
Background
The institution of slavery in the Ottoman Empire was modelled on the institution of slavery in the previous Muslim empires of the Middle East: the slavery in the Rashidun Caliphate, the slavery in the Umayyad Caliphate, slavery in the Abbasid Caliphate and slavery in the Mamluk Sultanate, which in turn were all built upon slavery in Islamic Law.Slavery was regulated by the Seriat, the religious Islamic Law, and by the secular Sultan's law Kanun, which was essentially supplementary regulations to facilitate the implementation of the Seriat law.
Islamic Law allowed for Muslims to enslave non-Muslims, unless they were zimmis, and slaves were therefore non-Muslims imported from non-Muslim lands outside of the Empire.
While Muslims could only enslave non-Muslims, the conversion of a non-Muslim slave to Islam after their enslavement did not require the enslaver to manumit his slave.
Since all non-Muslims outside of Muslim lands were legitimate targets of enslavement, there were slaves of different races. Officially, there were no difference made between slaves of difference races, but in practice, white slaves were given the highest status, with Ethiopians second and fully black African slaves given the lowest status among slaves.
Ottoman slave trade
Slaves were transported to the Ottoman Empire via several different routes, targeting different supply sources.The Ottoman Empire focused on three main slave trade routes: white slaves from the Balkans used for military slavery; black slaves imported from Africa, often from Sudan via Egypt; and white slaves imported via the Black Sea and Caucasus.
African slave trade
Africa was a major supplier of slaves for the Ottoman empire. The Africans were largely pagans and therefore viewed, under Islamic law, as legitimate targets for enslavement. Slaves were brought to the Ottoman empire by three main routes: the trans-Saharan slave trade, to Egypt and Libya; the Red Sea slave trade, across that sea; and the Indian Ocean slave trade, from East Africa via the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Peninsula. These slave routes were all inherited from the Muslim empires which had preceded the Ottoman.Indian Ocean slave trade
As there were restrictions on the enslavement of Muslims and of "People of the Book" living under Muslim rule, pagan areas in Africa became a popular source of slaves. Known as the Zanj, these slaves originated mainly from the African Great Lakes region as well as from Central Africa.The Zanj were employed in households, on plantations and in the army as slave-soldiers. Some could ascend to become high-rank officials, but in general Zanj were considered inferior to European and Caucasian slaves.
One way for Zanj slaves to serve in high-ranking roles involved becoming one of the African eunuchs of the Ottoman palace. This position was used as a political tool by Sultan Murad III as an attempt to destabilize the Grand Vizier by introducing another source of power to the capital.
After being purchased by a member of the Ottoman court, Mullah Ali was introduced to the first chief Black eunuch, Mehmed Aga. Due to Mehmed Aga's influence, Mullah Ali was able to make connections with prominent colleges and tutors of the day, including Hoca Sadeddin Efendi, the tutor of Murad III. Through the network he had built with the help of his education and the black eunuchs, Mullah Ali secured several positions early on. He worked as a teacher in Istanbul, a deputy judge, and an inspector of royal endowments. In 1620, Mullah Ali was appointed as chief judge of the capital and in 1621 he became the kadiasker, or chief judge, of the European provinces and the first black man to sit on the imperial council. At this time, he had risen to such power that a French ambassador described him as the person who truly ran the empire.
Although Mullah Ali was often challenged because of his blackness and his connection to the African eunuchs, he was able to defend himself through his powerful network of support and his own intellectual productions. As a prominent scholar, he wrote an influential book in which he used logic and the Quran to debunk stereotypes and prejudice against dark-skinned people and to delegitimize arguments for why Africans should be slaves. Today, thousands of Afro Turks, the descendants of the Zanj slaves in the Ottoman Empire, continue to live in modern Turkey. An Afro-Turk, Mustafa Olpak, founded the first officially recognised organisation of Afro-Turks, the Africans' Culture and Solidarity Society in Ayvalık. Olpak claims that about 2,000 Afro-Turks live in modern Turkey.
Red Sea slave trade
The Upper Nile Valley and southern Ethiopia were also significant sources of slaves in the Ottoman Empire. Although the Christian Ethiopians defeated the Ottoman invaders in the Ottoman–Ethiopian War of 1557–1589, they did not tackle enslavement of southern pagans and Muslims as long as they were paid taxes by the Ottoman slave traders. Pagans and Muslims from southern Ethiopian areas such as Kaffa and Jimma were taken north to Ottoman Egypt and also to ports on the Red Sea for export to Arabia and the Persian Gulf via the Red Sea slave trade.In 1838, it was estimated that 10,000 to 12,000 slaves were arriving in Egypt annually using this route. A significant number of these slaves were young women, and European travelers in the region recorded seeing large numbers of Ethiopian slaves in the Arab world at the time.
The Swiss traveler Johann Ludwig Burckhardt estimated that 5,000 Ethiopian slaves passed through the port of Suakin alone every year, headed for Arabia, and added that most of them were young women who ended up being prostituted by their owners. The English traveler Charles M. Doughty later also recorded Ethiopian slaves in Arabia, and stated that they were brought to Arabia every year during the Hajj pilgrimage.
In some cases, female Ethiopian slaves were preferred to male ones, with some Ethiopian slave cargoes recording female-to-male slave ratios of two to one. Zubayr pasha of Sudan, whom achieved the rank of bey and pasha was an infamous slaver, slave trader and governor.
Trans-Saharan slave trade
was a major route for the Trans-Saharan slave trade from Sub-Saharan Africa across the Sahara to the Ottoman Empire.Even though the slave trade was officially abolished in Tripoli by the Firman of 1857, this law was never enforced, and continued in practice at least until the 1890s.
The British Consul in Benghazi wrote in 1875 that the slave trade had reached an enormous scale and that the slaves who were sold in Alexandria and Constantinople had quadrupled in price. This trade, he wrote, was encouraged by the local government.
The slave trade in Libya continued throughout the Ottoman period. Adolf Vischer writes in an article published in 1911 that: "...it has been said that slave traffic is still going on on the Benghazi-Wadai route, but it is difficult to test the truth of such an assertion as, in any case, the traffic is carried on secretly".
The Trans-Saharan slave trade via Libya was not eradicated until late into the Italian colonial period of Libya.