Emigration of Refugees to the Ottoman Empire

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Starting in the 1840s thousands of refugees flooded into the Ottoman Empire in flight from oppression and massacres. By the Refugee Code (Muhacirin Kanunnamesi) of 1857, immigrant families and groups with only a minimum amount of capital (stipulated at 60 gold mecidiye coins, about 1500 French francs at that time) were given plots of state land with exemptions from taxes and conscription obligations for 6 years if they settled in Rumelia and for 12 years if in Anatolia. They had to agree to cultivate the land and not to sell or leave it for 20 years and to become subjects of the sultan, accepting his laws and justice. Such immigrants were promised freedom of religion, whatever their faith, and they were allowed to build churches where they settled if suitable places of worship were not already available. News of the decree spread widely through Europe and met with a ready response from various groups unable to find land or political peace at home. To process the requests and settle the refugees a Refugee Commission (Muhacirin Komisyonu) was established in 1860, at first in the Ministry of Trade and then as an independent agency in July 1861.

These measures were in fact belated responses to an influx that had begun long before. Most of the refugees came from the Turkish, Tatar, and Circassian lands being conquered by the Russians north and west of the Black Sea and the Caspian. Even though there was no official Russian policy of driving these Muslims from their homes, the new Christian governments imposed in the Crimea. (1783), in the areas of Baku and Kuban (1796), in Nakhcivan and the eastern Caucasus (1828), and finally in Anapa and Poti, northeast of the Black Sea, following the Treaty of Edirne (1829), made thousands of Muslims uncomfortable enough to migrate, without special permission or attraction, into Ottoman territory. Even earlier, hundreds of Russian "Old Believers" had fled from the reforms of Peter and Catherine, settling in the Dobruca and along the Danube near the Black Sea. Between 1848 and 1850 they were joined by thousands of non-Muslim immigrants, farmers as well as political and intellectual leaders fleeing from the repressions that accompanied and followed the revolutions of 1848, especially from Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland. While many of these were absorbed by Ottoman urban life, many also settled on the land as farmers or managers of the farms being built by the large landowners, contributing to both estate building and the improvement of cultivation.

The flow became a torrent after the Crimean War due not only to the Refugee Code but also to new persecutions elsewhere in Europe. The war itself led the Russians to change their relatively tolerant policy toward the Tatars and Circassians into one of active persecution and resettlement from their original homes to desolate areas in Siberia and even farther east. The result was mass migration into Ottoman territory, often with the encouragement of the Russians, who were glad to get rid of the old population to Russianize and Christianize the southern portions of their new empire. The overall figures of the total numbers of refugees entering the empire at this time are lacking, but from individual accounts we can assume that the number was immense. Some 176,700 Tatars from the Nogay and Kuban settled in central and southern Anatolia between 1854 and 1860. Approximately a million came in the next decade, of whom a third were settled in Rumelia, the rest in Anatolia and Syria. From the Crimea alone from 1854 to 1876, 1.4 million Tatars migrated into the Ottoman Empire. In addition, the Slavic migration begun before the Crimean War also intensified. Taking advantage of the Refugee Code, Cossacks who fled from the Russian army settled as farmers in Macedonia, Thrace, and western Anatolia. Thousands of Bulgarians—some of whom had earlier been settled in the Crimea by the Russians to replace the Tatars themselves now reacted to the alien environment and secured permission to return to their homes in the Ottoman Empire. The mass migration of Muslims continued, though at a somewhat less intense pace, during the early years of Abdulhamit II, mostly in consequence of the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878), the autonomy given to Bulgaria and Rumania, Austrian control of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the cession of northern Dobruca to Rumania and northern Macedonia (region) to Serbia. According to the official statistics compiled by the Refugee Commission, over 1 million refugees entered the empire between 1876 and 1895. As a result, the number of male Muslims doubled during the years from 1831 to 1882, with the proportion of Muslims to non-Muslims increasing substantially.

The immigrants settled widely through the empire, many being placed in villages that had been abandoned and some settling in eastern Anatolia, particularly in Cilicia, leading to conflict with the nomads there. Many of the settlers became paid laborers for the large landowners. Others settled on plots given them in accordance with the Immigration Law of 1857. But most of the latter eventually had to turn their holdings over to the large landowners, as poor cultivation methods, bad management, disease, nomadic attacks, hostility on the part of the older cultivators and notables, and the latter’s use of their positions on the administrative councils made it almost impossible for the small landowners to survive. The situation was not helped when the Circassians and some of the Nogai Horde Tatars settled in Bulgaria and central Anatolia reverted to their old nomadic pursuits, attacking the new settlers and old cultivators alike. Some of the Muslim settlers, remembering the persecution that had driven them from their homes in Christian lands, began to take vengeance from their non-Muslim neighbors in a manner hitherto unknown in the Ottoman Empire. Though landowners secured cheap labor, the undesirable consequences of mass settlement of refugees in the countryside led to new conflicts among the subject classes, and hostilities between cultivators and nomads were to last well into the present century.

Refugees entering the Ottoman Empire, 1876-1897^[1]

Year	Total People	Total Households
1876	276,389	69,000
1877	198,000	49,000
1878	76,000	19,100
1879	20,763	5,324
1880	13,898	3,460
1881	23,098	3,780
1882	33,941	6,396
1883	13748	2690
1884	13,522	2,816
1885	13,365	2,807
1886	12084	2614
1887	10,107	2,092
1888	11,753	2,506
1889	28,451	6,135
1890	23,220	4,835
1891	13,778	3,024
1892	18,437	3,901
1893	18,778	3,715
1894	14,040	2,888
1895	6,643	1,237
1896	5,846	1,224

[edit] See Also

• Crimean War
• Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878)
• Balkan Wars

[edit] Notes

[edit] References

• S.J. Shaw & E.K. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 2, 1977, Cambridge University Press