INTRODUCTION

From the middle of the fifteenth century until its demise after World War I, the Ottoman Empire was arguably the most important Islamic power on the face of the earth. At the height of its expansion, it ruled a vast territory from the western Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, from southern Poland to southern Sudan. Many of the sultan's subjects were not Muslim, did not speak Ottoman Turkish, and were illiterate, poor, and lived in villages, not in cities. Yet they were all governed by a Muslim, Turkish-speaking, urban, affluent, and predominantly male elite of officeholders. Perhaps the only phenomenon that cut across all these social barriers was enslavement, for despite the at times enormous differences in lifestyle, enslaved persons came from all walks of life: They were male and female, rich and poor, powerful and powerless, rural and urban, Muslim and non-Muslim, and speakers of all the dialects in the empire, with origins as far-flung as central Africa and the eastern Caucasus. What united them was a shared legal status of bondage, with the variety of social impediments it entailed in each predicament.

Perhaps more than anything else, it was this mélange of types that made Ottoman enslavement unique, complex to study and explain, and highly intriguing as a social phenomenon. For its significance lay mostly in its social and cultural aspects rather than its role in the Ottoman economy.