Slavery in the Ottoman Empire

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Chattel slavery was a major institution and a significant part of the Ottoman Empire's economy and traditional society.^[1]

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.^[2]

In Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), the administrative and political center of the Ottoman Empire, about a fifth of the 16th- and 17th-century population consisted of slaves.^[3] 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.^[4] 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.^[5] 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.^[6]

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.^[7] A large percentage of officials in the Ottoman government were bought as slaves,^[8] 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.^[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.

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 (sex slaves), 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.