Slavery (Ottoman Empire)

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	Social structure of the Ottoman Empire
Millet (Ottoman Empire) Jews - Armenians - Greeks
Rise of nationalism - Ottomanism
Lifestyle - Ottoman court
See also	Slavery – Devşirme

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The Slavery was an important part of Ottoman society.^[1] As late as 1908 women slaves were still sold in the Ottoman Empire.^[2] In Istanbul, about 1/5 of the population consisted of slaves.^[3] It was Arab traders who started the trans-Saharan slave trade, exporting black slaves from Ghana and other West African countries as far back as AD 1100 and the practice carried over into Ottoman reign. The Ottoman slave could achieve high status. Harem guards and janissaries are some of the better known positions a slave could hold, but slaves actually were at the forefront of Ottoman politics. The majority of officials of the Ottoman government were bought slaves, obviously they were raised free, but they were integral to the success of the Ottomans from the fourteenth century to the nineteenth. By raising and specially training slaves as officials, not only did they get administrators with intricate knowledge of government and fanatic loyalty, but they cut back corruption as an administrator would have no ties in the region, thus he would not favor one person over another when granting contracts.^{[citation needed]}

In the middle of the 14th century, Murad I built his own personal slave army called the Kapıkulu. The new force was based on the sultan's right to a fifth of the war booty, which he interpreted to include captives taken in battle. The captive slaves were converted to Islam and trained in the sultan's personal service. The Devşirme system could be considered a form of slavery, in that the Sultans had absolute power over its members. However, the 'slave' or kul (subject) of the Sultan had high status within Ottoman society, and this group included the highest officers of state and the military elite, all well remunerated.

In the devşirme (translated "blood tax" or "child collection"), young Christian boys from the Balkans were taken away from their homes and families, converted to Islam and enlisted into special soldier classes of the Ottoman army. These soldier classes were named Janissaries and were the most famous branch of the Kapıkulu. The Janissaries eventually became a decisive factor in the Ottoman invasions of Europe.^[4] Most of the military commanders of the Ottoman forces, imperial administrators and de facto rulers of the Ottoman Empire, such as Pargalı İbrahim Pasha and Sokollu Mehmet Paşa, were recruited in this way.^[5]^[6] By 1609 the Sultan's Kapıkulu forces increased to about 100,000.^[7]

Rural slavery was largely a Caucasian phenomenon, carried to Anatolia and Rumelia after the Circassian migration in 1864.^[8] Conflicts emerged within the immigrant community and the Ottoman Establishment, at times, intervened on the side of the slaves.^[9]

For a long time, until the early 18th century Crimean Khanate maintained massive slave trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. In a process called "harvesting of the steppe" Crimean Tatars enslaved many Slavic peasants. The Crimean Khanate was undoubtedly one of the strongest powers in Eastern Europe; the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russia suffered a series of Tatar invasions, the goal of which was to loot, pillage and capture slaves into jasyr.^[10] The borderland area to the south-east was in a state of semi-permanent warfare until the 18th century. It is estimatad that up to 75% of the Crimean population consisted of slaves or freedmen.^[11]

Hundreds of thousands of Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves to North Africa and the Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 19th centuries.^[12]^[13]

During the 19th century the Empire began to outlaw the practice - which had been generally considered valid under law effectively since the beginning. Policies developed by various Sultans throughout the 19th century attempted to curtail the slave trade

Eventually, trafficking in slaves was expressively forbidden by utilizing what were effectively clever loopholes in the application of sharia, or Islamic law. For example, by the terms of the sharia, any slaves who were taken could not be kept as slaves if they had been Muslim prior to their capture. They could also not be captured legitimately without a formal declaration of war, which could only be issued by the Sultan. As late Ottoman Sultans, who wished to halt slavery, obviously did not authorize raids for the purpose of capturing slaves, it effectively became illegal to procure any slaves at all, although those already in slavery would remain slaves, allowing slavery to die a slow and quiet death in the Ottoman lands. ^[14] ^[15]