Slavery and Dependency in Ottoman Society

From its formation in northwestern Anatolia in the late thirteenth century to the empire’s dissolution in 1922, Ottoman slavery placed people under coercive ownership. Captives and trafficked people could be sold into household, agricultural, military, palace or maritime labor. Their routes into slavery and the conditions attached to their work varied. Some owners freed enslaved people directly, while others made freedom depend on years of service, payment or a specified amount of work.

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Acquisition and sale

War captivity, raiding and commercial trafficking brought people into slavery, and owners could sell or bequeath enslaved people. In early modern legal thought, enslavement depended partly on political status: non-Muslim foreigners from states at war with the Ottomans could be enslaved, while treaties protected people from certain allied states. Venetian subjects in peacetime and French subjects after the 1530s are examples of protected communities.

The Black Sea connected the Caucasus and southeastern Europe with Ottoman ports and markets. Slave trading linked its southern shore and Istanbul to the wider Mediterranean network; Ottoman political control brought older routes and markets into a connected commercial system. Other routes carried people from Africa into Ottoman territories; in 1857, an imperial prohibition specifically targeted the African slave trade.

Household, field and naval labor

Household slavery involved skilled tasks as well as general service. Ottoman court records sometimes identify enslaved people as washers, cooks, gardeners, blacksmiths or wet nurses. Women could also be held as concubines, a status that subjected them to an owner’s sexual access. Under the legal category umm al-walad, meaning “mother of a child,” an enslaved woman whose owner acknowledged a child as his could not legally be sold or inherited. The child was free, and she became free when the owner died. Ottoman court records also document disputes over this status.

Rural work followed local arrangements. Hacı İshak’s 1873 petition retrospectively described Caucasian practice before migration: slaveholders used enslaved people for agricultural or domestic work according to their needs. The Circassian migration of 1859–1864 brought free refugees as well as people exposed to fraudulent enslavement; the separate 1873 case of Mehmed shows how a refugee child could be wrongly claimed and sold.

Maritime service created a different form of state dependency. The Imperial Naval Arsenal in Istanbul, in present-day Turkey, organized rowers for the Ottoman fleet and expanded its labor force before campaigns. Seventeenth-century rowing ships used crews that included enslaved captives, convicts, paid rowers and men conscripted to meet tax obligations. A galley, an oared warship, is described in the seventeenth-century Ottoman writer Kâtib Çelebi’s account as carrying about 300 men, including 196 rowers. Historian Gül Şen describes galley slaves as state captives assigned to the fleet, distinct from the sultan’s servants, retainers of the Ottoman ruler who could rise into administrative or military posts. One captive’s memoir quoted by Şen describes five prisoners sharing a single oar, each chained by one foot to the rowing bench.

Devşirme and palace service

The devşirme was a compulsory state recruitment system that selected Christian boys from Ottoman communities, especially in the Balkans, for conversion and service. It was used under the Ottoman sultan Mehmed I in the early fifteenth century and formalized under Sultan Murad II. Officials collected names and identifying details in registers, then assigned boys to different routes. Some lived temporarily with Turkish-speaking households, worked in agriculture and learned Turkish before entering recruit corps; others received training in imperial palaces. The state placed recruits in its military formations or palace service.

Manumission and continuing ties

Owners could free an enslaved person through a direct declaration. Written attestations or credible witnesses could document the change in status. A mükâtebe was a contract through which an enslaved person agreed to earn freedom by meeting specified terms. Ottoman legal and court records describe agreements based on a lump sum, a period of service, or producing a set quantity of goods. A contract could combine these terms. Once the agreement was made, the person could earn and hold property toward payment; freedom followed when the full amount or obligation had been met.

Release did not necessarily end a household relationship. A former owner could remain a patron, and a freed person might continue working within the same network. Such continuing ties were different from the legal status of ownership, even when they still shaped access to work and protection.

Resistance and nineteenth-century restrictions

The Ottoman government closed Istanbul’s public slave market in 1846 and prohibited the African slave trade in 1857. These measures restricted trading channels; they did not automatically free people already held in slavery.

In 1873, a freeborn boy named Mehmed, a Circassian refugee from the Caucasus, the region between the Black and Caspian seas, was claimed by Osman Ağa and sold to Hacı İshak in Edirne, northwestern Turkey. The sale document described him as descended from slaves, but a government report said he had arrived free with his mother, who died soon after their migration. Hacı paid 6,000 piasters, Ottoman monetary units, and planned to resell the boy. Mehmed escaped and was sheltered by Selami Bey, a military officer temporarily posted in the region. Selami changed his name, hairstyle and clothes to make him harder to recognize, then entrusted him to the Austrian consulate in Edirne when he returned to Istanbul. Hacı petitioned the government to recover him, but the consulate’s jurisdiction put the boy beyond Ottoman authorities’ reach.