Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
In his article, ‘Some notes on the devshirme’, Dr. V. L. Ménage deals in some detail with the vexed problem of the status in law of the members of the Ottoman slave institution. His comments are directed toward what he gives as Dr. Papoulia' conclusion concering the problem, that ‘the čikma, the “passing-out” from the various training-schools, amounted to a modified manumission and bestowed a status comparable with that of the “client” (mawlā) in the classical Muslim world’. Having quoted passages from two documents of the mid-fifteenth century and a notation in the comtemporary histories of the same period, Dr. Ménage conculdes: ‘These three examples suffice to show that—in the middle years of the fifteenth century at least—a čikma did not automatically bring with it legal manumission; thus although the čikma as an institution seems to imitate the Mamluk kharj—and the term itself sounds very like a calque—it differed from it fundamentally in that the ič oghlani, unlike the Mamlūk, was not (or Perhaps not necessarily) then ceremonially manumitted’.
1 BSOAS, XXIX, 1, 1966, 64–78Google Scholar, especially 65–70. The article is in large part a critique of a recent work by DR. Basilike Papoulia on the devshirme system, the bibliographical details of which are given in Dr. mènage' article.
2 This work, hereafter referred to as the Katāib, has not been published. The text below is taken from Reisūlkuüttab MS no. 690 (dated 1086/1675–6) in the Sùlemaniye Library in Istanbul, and all further references are to that MS I should like to take this opportunity to thank the authorities of the Süleymaniye Library for making this MS available to me.
3 For the details of his life, see New‘I-zāde ‘Atā’ī, Hadā’ iq al-haqā iq fī takmilat al-Shaqā’iq, Istanbul, 1268/1852, 272–3.
4 al-Kaffawi refers in the Katā’ib to the fact Mullā Shams al D‛n Ahmad b. al-Qād‛ Badr al Dīn was Mufti (shaykh al;Islām) at the time of writing and that Mullā Muhyi’ I Dīn Muhammad b. Shaykh Muhammad Čivi-zāde was qā dī ‘asker of Rumeli: see the Katā’ ib, 402v, 39 lr, 400v, and ‘ Atā’ ī, op. cit., 260, 292.
5 Katāib, fol. 394v.