Ransom Slavery along the Ottoman Borders (Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage)

277 Pages·2007·1.72 MB·English

by  G. David

Ransom Slavery along the Ottoman Borders
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The Ottoman Empire
and its Heritage
Politics, Society and Economy
EDITORS BY
Suraiya Faroqhi and Halil Inalcik
Associate Board
Firket Adanir • Idris Bostan • Amnon Cohen • Cornell Fleischer
Barbara Flemming • Alexander de Groot • Klaus Kreiser
Hans Georg Majer • Irène Mélikoff • Ahmet Ya(cid:2) ar Ocak
Abdeljelil Temimi • Gilles Veinstein • Elizabeth Zachariadou
VOLUME 37
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Ransom Slavery along the
Ottoman Borders
(Early Fifteenth–Early Eighteenth Centuries)
Edited by
Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2007
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This book was compiled at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of
Sciences with the support of the National Foundation for Scienti(cid:2) c Research (Országos
Tudományos Kutatási Alap/OTKA).
A CIP record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
ISBN 9004157042
ISBN 978 90 04 15704 0
© Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated,
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Fees are subject to change.
printed in the netherlands
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CONTENTS

PREFACE................................................................................................. VII
ABBREVIATIONS.................................................................................... IX
INTRODUCTION...................................................................................... XI
ENIK(cid:2) CSUKOVITS Miraculous escapes from Ottoman cap-
tivity..................................................... 1
ISTVÁN TRINGLI Litigations for Ottoman prisoners of
war and the siege of Buzsin (1481,
1522).................................................... 19
ÁRPÁD NÓGRÁDY A list of ransom for Ottoman captives
imprisoned in Croatian castles (1492).. 27
GÉZA PÁLFFY Ransom slavery along the Ottoman–
Hungarian frontier in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries........................... 35
KLÁRA HEGYI Freed slaves as soldiers in the Ottoman
fortresses in Hungary........................... 85
FERENC SZAKÁLY The ransom of Ali bey of Koppány.
The impact of capturing slaves on trade
in Ottoman Hungary............................. 93
ISTVÁN GYÖRGY TÓTH Catholic missionaries as Turkish prisoners
in Ottoman Hungary in the seventeenth
century.................................................. 115
ZSUZSANNA J. ÚJVÁRY A Muslim captive’s vicissitudes in
Ottoman Hungary (mid-seventeenth
century)................................................ 141
JÁNOS J. VARGA Ransoming Ottoman slaves from Mu-
nich (1688)........................................... 169
GÉZA DÁVID Manumitted male slaves at Galata and
Istanbul around 1700............................... 183
MÁRIA IVANICS Enslavement, slave labour and treat-
ment of captives in the Crimean Khan-
ate......................................................... 193
PÁL FODOR Maltese pirates, Ottoman captives and
French traders in the early seventeenth-
century Mediterranean......................... 221
INDEX..................................................................................................... 239

PREFACE

In the preface to an earlier volume compiled by us (Ottomans, Hungar-
ians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe. The Military Confines in the Era
of Ottoman Conquest. The Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage, 20. Leiden:
Brill, 2000), we announced that as part of a project launched at the Insti-
tute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences we were putting
together another volume, this time on the subject of ransom slavery along
the Ottoman borders. It gives us great pleasure to report that this new
collection is now ready and will join its predecessor in the series “The
Ottoman Empire and Its Heritage”. This indicates that the editors wish to
maintain a balance among the different schools of research, and that they
appreciate the new findings in Hungary concerning the Ottoman period.
As on the previous occasion, efforts have been made to avoid the one-
sidedness that results from speaking only about areas under Ottoman
control in the strict sense of the word and from including solely those
authors who use Turkish and Crimean Tatar sources. Instead, scholars of
Habsburg–Hungarian history, relying on different archival materials,
were also asked to contribute. It should be emphasised that this two-
sided, complex, approach is a Hungarian speciality that stems from the
merely partial conquest of the country by the Ottomans and from the
abundance of written records here. A similar, but less marked, duality
characterised the situation in some other European territories. Finally,
although the degree of dividedness in certain other regions was com-
parable, depiction of the two sides there is difficult, since autochthonous
archival material is scarce.
As the Introduction makes clear, the question of captives and slaves
has been in the focus of attention in recent years, without, however, being
fully explored. Probably the most intriguing question is the number of
people whose lives were changed by the fact that they had to spend long
years in captivity. There is no hope to correctly answer this question,
since no systematic documentation was prepared concerning the individ-
uals involved. The Ottoman treasury could, apparently, not enforce its
claim to collect the “one-fifth tax” (pencik), which in any case did not
even theoretically extend to the totality of captives over the whole period.
VIII PREFACE
Nevertheless, by assembling scattered data, the scale of the tax levied or
collected will perhaps be gauged sooner or later. This would help us to
judge the accuracy of contemporary or modern figures that speak of hun-
dreds of thousands of captives.
In this matter the present volume cannot offer orientation, even if it
does suggest, and convincingly, that the ransoming of slaves was a wide-
spread activity, a species of trade in the period under consideration. It
contains much information on the techniques for taking captives and on
the procedures for extracting money and goods from them, their families
and their communities.
Here we should like to express our gratitude to Suraiya Faroqhi, who
encouraged us with a short but decisive sentence confirming her interest
in the topic. Additional motivation came from Brill’s Trudy Kamperveen,
the ideal editor, who supplied the necessary reminders always well in
time and invariably with humour and goodwill. We also wish to thank
colleagues for their readiness to contribute to the book and for their pa-
tience during the editorial process. We are especially indebted to Ferenc
Glatz, the director of the Institute of History, for providing the conditions
for our work (nine out of the twelve contributors to the book were or had
been on its staff) and to the National Foundation for Scientific Research
(Hungary’s central academic funding body) for granting our project the
necessary financial support. Also, we should like to thank Éva Figder,
Veronika K. Fodor, Andrew Gane, Tamás Pálosfalvi, Judit Pokoly, Chris
Sullivan, and Albert Vermes for their linguistic assistance.
During our editorial work we suffered grievous losses when two col-
leagues and friends, Ferenc Szakály and István György Tóth, passed
away, leaving an aching void. We dedicate this book to their memory.

Géza Dávid Pál Fodor
ABBREVIATIONS

APF Archivio Storico della Sacra Congregazione de Propa-
ganda Fide, Roma
BHStA Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, München
BOA Ba(cid:2)bakanlık Osmanlı Ar(cid:2)ivi, (cid:3)stanbul
DF MOL Diplomatikai Fényképgy(cid:4)jtemény, Budapest
DL MOL Diplomatikai Levéltár, Budapest
HHStA Haus, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Wien
HL Hadtörténelmi Levéltár, Budapest
KA Kriegsarchiv
MAD Maliyeden Müdevver Defterler, BOA, (cid:3)stanbul
MD Mühimme Defterleri, BOA, (cid:3)stanbul
MKA Magyar Kamara Archivuma, Budapest
MOL Magyar Országos Levéltár, Budapest
MTA Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, Budapest
ÖNB Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Wien
ÖStA Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Wien
TSMA Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Ar(cid:2)ivi, (cid:3)stanbul
TSMK Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi, (cid:3)stanbul