Captivity, Conversion, Local Administration, and the Diplomacy of Freedom in the Ottoman Empire, 1739–94

Ottoman-Russian and Ottoman-Habsburg peace treaties throughout the eighteenth century were marked by almost identical provisions on captivity, mandating the return of prisoners without ransom, but these treaties’ implementation proved difficult. Ottoman, Habsburg, and Russian diplomats all faced similar challenges in retrieving their captured subjects, and these struggles provide an important study of the interaction between captivity, diplomacy, and religious conversion.
This paper focuses on the Ottoman side of these disputes, using the sefaretnames, as well as Ottoman chronicles and archival documents, and foreign diplomatic correspondence. While such sources portray these struggles as a matter of diplomacy, as a struggle by each state to make its rival act according to its will, I argue that a careful reading show, in fact, that each state was involved in a struggle against the local authorities and subjects of its rivals, and sometimes, even against captives themselves. None of the states had the absolute centralized authority that it claimed, and persuasion or coercion of local administrators and individual slaveowners proved challenging. My paper explores the economic and social negotiations between these three actors.
Just as importantly, I show, captives themselves could exercise some control over their fate by changing their religion, since every treaty specified that those who converted voluntarily would not be returned. But owners, local officials, and captives defined these provisions differently. Was conversion an act of cultural assimilation? Individual spiritual choice? Cynical manipulation of the rules? Each of these factors played a role, at least in the perception of some actors. Further, I show that states frequently came to emphasize precisely the issue which has attracted the most attention from modern scholars: individual sincerity. Thus, I provide a new perspective on one of the most significant theoretical debates on early modern religious conversion.