Like all empires, the Ottoman Empire was built by slaves of varying legality. Many of them were taken as children from their families in Africa, Eastern Europe, or the Caucasus, and their descendants grew up with no knowledge of their family’s history bar a vague notion of geography. The huge demand for concubines meant that the Ottoman noblesse continued to buy female slaves long after the sultans of the late Nineteenth Century issued firmans (decrees) against the trade, in much the same way that illegal human trafficking is still alive and well in the Twenty-First Century. In fact, most of the sultans of the empire were sons of Christian slave women who ended up in the harem. The most famous of these women was Roxelana (later Hürrem Sultan), an ethnic Ukrainian captured from the Kingdom of Poland at the age of fifteen at some point in the 1520s, and taken to the haremlik of Suleiman the Magnificent, where she became his favorite concubine, converted to Islam, and contrived to make herself the first legal queen of the Ottoman Empire, spectacularly breaking the infidel glass ceiling.

Slavery was never banned in the empire, although in 1857 the British government managed to pressure the sultan into stopping the trade. Existing slaves were only freed in 1924 when the Republic’s new constitution granted equal rights to all citizens. For centuries, Christian boys were taken from their families in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in a kind of “blood tax” called the devşirme, converted to Islam, and trained up to serve the state. Some of them ended up as köçekler, effeminate belly dancers who performed in social contexts where women were not allowed. Others received sizeable salaries as janissaries (yeniçeri, “new troops” in Turkish), soldiers of the sultan. Since slaves were not technically allowed to serve in the Ottoman armed forces, in 1860 male Circassian slaves from the region just north of Georgia were bought from their owners by the Ottoman government and freed so that they could be recruited, a measure which was also partly designed to stop a nationalist-inspired slave revolt in the turbulent years of the late Nineteenth Century, when Russia and Turkey were at war.

Until the late Nineteenth Century, around 16,000-18,000 African slaves were taken every year by Ottoman traders from Eritrea, Sudan, and Egypt. They were put on boats and often “sorted” in the holding port of Alexandria on Egypt’s northern coast before being shipped to Istanbul, Izmir, the Aegean islands, and Cyprus. Black eunuchs wielded great power in the sultan’s haremlik, especially from the Eighteenth Century onwards, and black slave children were occasionally presented as imperial gifts. The Russian writer Alexander Pushkin’s great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was kidnapped as a child from the shores of Lake Chad and taken to serve in the court of Sultan Ahmet III. In 1704, aged just six, he was sent to St. Petersburg as a gift to Peter the Great, who brought him up as his godson and propelled him to great fame as a military engineer. The vast, anonymous majority of African slaves, however, had no such illustrious royal transfer or career. They worked menial tasks and have disappeared almost without trace from the history books.

From Alev Scott’s Ottoman Odyssey: Travels through a Lost Empire, New York and London: Pegasus, 2019, pp. 26-28.

Addendum I (November 4, 2019)

Given my growing unwillingness to procure any new books, Scott’s book is yet another recent surprise in my magnum opus (see, e.g., Addendum II of August 3, 2019, to “China is Planning for the Future,” July 30, 2019). As it happens, the book is an unexpected gift from Pawlo Dlaboha, a friend of Ukrainian origin, who shares many of my views of Eastern Europe and the environs. After our last meeting in Motovun, where he stayed for about a week, he thought I would enjoy a new take on the Ottoman Empire, which he sent me via Amazon. And he was right, it goes without saying. Given my growing interest in slavery, the quote I plucked from Scott turned out to be very close to my heart. Indeed, the ancient practice is much closer to our times than is appreciated nowadays. It is part and parcel of the so-called civilized world, and it survives in many forms to this day. Although largely undetectable, slavery is alive and well still. And it is bound to bounce back to its former glory after the civilization’s imminent collapse. Whence my growing interest in the nearly forgotten subject.

Addendum II (September 7, 2024)

As I learned earlier today from Pawlo Dlaboha’s younger son, Markian, he passed away yesterday. He had been seriously ill for a while, but I still hoped he would get well sooner or later. I sent him an electronic-mail message a week or so ago, but there was no reply. It was clear he was not in the best of shapes, but I nevertheless remained hopeful. Today’s news shook me pretty hard. Pawlo was very close to my heart. Married to Marina née Braunschweiger, whose parents were also very dear to me since my move to Istria, he was a part of a Motovun family I loved dearly. Although Pawlo and Marina divorced a decade or so ago, they remained close friends. Every now and then they would come over from Lucerne in Switzerland, where the whole family had lived for many years. Anyhow, I loved to talk to Pawlo about the history of Slavic people, and we also enjoyed discussing the origin of many words that hailed from the Old Slavonic, the ancient language of all Slavs. As of late, we would occasionally exchange a few words about the war in Ukraine, which had been very painful to Pawlo. Actually, it hurt him to the bone. One reason I always wished for that war to end was Pawlo’s wellbeing. Chances are that nearly three years of horrors in the land of his family’s origin only added to his illness and its painful end. In my own mind, the twain will remain bonded forever. To be sure, the never-ending war was most painful to him. Indeed, it might have turned out to be no less than deadly.