Inherited institution: Ottoman state slavery and war captives in the early modern era Nida Nebahat Nalc ¸acı Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey Until recently, slavery studies had been dominated by the field of Atlantic and ancient era slavery. Other regions and eras had mostly been neglected. However, slavery existed in nearly every society in differ- ent parts of the world, in accordance with geographical, cultural, and economic circumstances; it changed its form throughout the ages until it was finally abolished officially, although different ‘hidden forms of slavery’ nevertheless continue in the contemporary world. The very institution of slavery exists here and now. The medieval and the early modern Mediterranean world was no exception. The Ottoman empire was one of those societies that employed slave labour effectively in its workforce. The Ottomans inherited slavery as a form of forced labour from eastern Mediterranean societies and reformulated it according to Islamic law and tradition. For a long time, modern historians kept their silence when it came to slavery. The general idea is that the Ottomans ‘treated their slaves well’. This utterance can be heard from the university halls to the archive rooms. The absence of the death penalty for runaway slaves and variations in practice in contrast with the West lends this claim some credit. Nevertheless, this argument, when combined with the historiography that focuses on the fundamentals of the powerful state, led to a praxis, as pointed out by Toledano on multiple occasions: the habit of indifference towards diverse parts of the society such as minorities or slaves. 1 The studies that helped us to realize that slavery existed in every layer of the Ottoman society took a long time to appear in Ottoman historiography. In this context, embarking on the research that has not been done may be a way of unveiling the elephant in the room. The Ottoman historians (chroniclers) generally recorded the political events they observed within their own life spans and/or the narratives of preceding generations. Those studies, most of which are far from de- cent in terms of today’s academic criteria, almost always mention contemporary political facts and develop- ments by underlining the ideal of world domination of the ruler. It would not be wrong to say that the political actualities and developments perceived as being of primary importance were recorded, obviously in order to be learned from and recalled by future generations. Predictably enough, all rulers, such as kings, sultans, and shahs, were usually at the centre of the narratives of the chroniclers. The historians of the Ottoman era, who wrote epic histories of sultans, battles, or prominent statesmen, either mentioned slaves only as statistics among the spoils of victory or omitted them as a group. Thousands of people could have been forcibly relocated but since it was a common occurrence of the era, their stories were not mentioned in chronicles. 1 Toledano 2017a; Toledano 2020. V C The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Institute of Classical Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com  39 Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 2021, 64, 39–50 https://doi.org/10.1093/bics/qbab020 Original article Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bics/article/64/2/39/6510967 by Bingol Universitesi user on 19 January 2022