Slavery in the Ottoman Empire

[9] 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.

[13][14][need quotation to verify] One way for Zanj slaves to serve in high-ranking roles involved becoming one of the African eunuchs of the Ottoman palace.

[17] 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.

The Swiss traveler Johann Ludwig Burckhardt estimated that 5,000 Ethiopian slaves passed through the port of Suakin alone every year,[24] headed for Arabia, and added that most of them were young women who ended up being prostituted by their owners.

Failure to pay the jizya could result in the pledge of protection of the Christian's life and property becoming void, facing the alternatives of conversion, enslavement, or death.

[47][48] In the devşirme, which connotes "draft", "blood tax" or "child collection", young Christian boys from the Balkans and Anatolia were taken from their homes and families, forcibly converted to Islam, and enlisted into the most famous branch of the Kapıkulu, the janissaries.

Most of the military commanders of the Ottoman forces, imperial administrators, and de facto rulers of the Empire, such as Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, were recruited in this way.

One of the concubines (sex slaves) in the Ottoman Imperial harem of Sultan Mehmet II was Çiçek Hatun, who was also referred to as a slave-girl captured during the fall of Constantinople.

[57] In 1537, the Ottoman fleet under Admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa raided the Aegean islands and brought 2,000 captured people back to Constantinople as slaves, one of them being Nurbanu Sultan.

Peter Stern von Labach described it: Approximately 20,000 persons are estimated to have been captured and kidnapped into slavery, of which few ever returned: the Ottomans reportedly preferred young boys and girls and members of the clergy.

[65][66] Perchtoldsdorf had resisted the invasion and barricaded themselwes in the church fortress of the village, but agreed to surrender when the Ottomans promised them safety of their lives and property in exchange for capitulation.

[69] After the Battle of Mohács (1526), the Ottoman army pillaged Hungary on the way to Budapest, during which men were massacres and women captured, raped and sold as slaves.

[71] Between 1522 and 1717, Tatars, soldiers from the Crimean Khanate, often participated in the Ottoman campaigns in the Hungarian border zones, and during these campaigns the tatars often captured slaves in Hungary and Austria; the long way back to the Crimea did provide opportunity for prisoners to escape, but many were abducted to Crimea, where they were either ransomed (if they were rich), or (if they were poor) sold on the Crimean slave trade.

At the time, the Knights Hospitaller who ruled Malta were in a state of perpetual war against the Ottomans, and the capture of inhabitants as slaves was a regular occurrence during these attacks.

[78] A number of surviving court cases and other records from the 1550s and 1560s make reference to Gozitan slaves in the Ottoman capital, including some who were eventually freed or ransomed, some who converted to Islam, and others who died in slavery.

I have it on the authority of a respectable slave-broker that at the present moment there have been thrown on the market unusually large numbers of negresses in the family way, some of them even slaves of pashas and men of rank.

According to Nicolas de Nicolay, there were slaves of all ages and both sexes, most were displayed naked to be thoroughly checked – especially children and young women – by possible buyers.

This taxation was based on verses of the Quran, according to which one fifth of the spoils of war belonged to God, to the Prophet and his family, to orphans, to those in need and to travelers.

[103] One of the most powerful Chief Eunuchs was Beshir Agha in the 1730s, who played a crucial role in establishing the Ottoman version of Hanafi Islam throughout the Empire by founding libraries and schools.

[106][107] In the Ottoman Empire, female slaves owned by men were sexually available to their masters, and their children, if acknowledged by their owners, were considered as legitimate as any child born of a free woman.

[111] Circassian girls were described as fair and light-skinned and were frequently enslaved by Crimean Tatars then sold to Ottoman Empire to live and serve in a Harem.

[113] Moreover, the visual illustrations during this period of exposing a sodomite being stigmatized by a group of people with Turkish wind instruments shows the disconnect between sexuality and tradition.

Ibrahim bin Ahmed, successor to Murad IV, inherited the throne in 1640 and famously squandered public funds to conduct massive orgies in the palace with such frequency that lurid stories of the sexual excesses of the sultanate became emblematic of dynastic life throughout the seventeenth century.

While some interpretation of Islamic law forbade the emasculation of a man, Ethiopian Christians had no such compunctions; thus, they enslaved members of territories to the south and sold the resulting eunuchs to the Ottoman Porte.

[119][120] Henry G. Spooner claimed that Coptic priests at Abou Gerbe monastery in Upper Egypt participated extensively in the slave trade of eunuchs.

[121] Boys were captured from the African Great Lakes region and other areas in Sudan like Darfur and Kordofan, enslaved, then sold to customers in Egypt.

A circular by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in October 1895 warned local authorities that some steamships stripped Zanj sailors of their "certificates of liberation" and threw them into slavery.

Another circular of the same year reveals that some newly freed Zanj slaves were arrested based on unfounded accusations, imprisoned and forced back to their lords.

George Young, Second Secretary of the British Embassy in Constantinople, wrote in his Corpus of Ottoman Law, published in 1905, that at the time of this writing, his impression that the slave trade in the Empire was practiced only as contraband.