Pirates, Bureaucrats, and the Illegal Captive Trade in the Early Modern Ottoman Mediterranean

In 1617, Mahmud, the Ottoman governor of the district of Karlieli (present day Agrinio, Greece), came up with an innovative way to turn a profit during his tenure in office. Eschewing more typical abuses like extortion, Mahmud raided nearly every village in his district, seized numerous Christian Ottoman subjects, and put them to the oar on his own ship. Then he forced them to row across the sea to de facto independent North Africa, where he exchanged his illegally captured Ottoman subjects for “küffar esir” – the North African corsairs’ infidel captives who had been legally enslaved. It was essentially money laundering—but with slaves.
    The demand for slaves in Ottoman domains meant that there was always money to be made in slave raiding, but restrictions imposed from above on who could be enslaved and when drove a significant proportion of the peacetime trade in captives into the shadows. “Ottoman” pirates and opportunists like Mahmud often raided Ottoman coastal possessions, capturing Ottoman non-Muslim subjects who were supposed to be protected under Islamic (and Ottoman) law; and they captured and enslaved the subjects of powers (like Venice) whom they were treaty-bound not to molest. Such raiders employed various techniques to disguise the provenance of their captives. They sold them in distant Ottoman ports where no one could identify them, claiming they were legally enslaved enemy infidels, and they relied on long-distance networks of friendly officials and slave dealers who looked the other way for a share of the profits. Based on research in Ottoman administrative documents and court records, this paper explores the trade in illegal captives by pirates and their accomplices in the Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean, and it examines the administrative and legal tools the Ottoman central government employed to combat this trade and effect the return of the wrongfully enslaved.