The Ottoman legal system did afford protections to enslaved peoples, but it is certainly murky as to how strictly this was followed. We may argue that these rights only extended so far as a master allowed them.
Under these rights, a slave could bring his or her master to court and make the case that their rights had been violated (As If Silent and Absent : Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East by Toledano, see page 61). If successful, which was not uncommon, the slave would be set free or some deal would be reached.
But, even here, we must ask “How many slaves had access to the court system and were actually able to successfully argue for their manumission under these rights?”
In fact, between 1640-1700 in Aleppo, only 259 manumissions are recorded in the courts (Slavery and Household Formation in Ottoman Aleppo by Wilkins, see page 368).
However, due to a lack of detailed records, it is difficult to tell why these slaves were released.
Nonetheless, this suggests that a majority of manumissions, which were surely more than those recorded by the courts, were not gained through a slave arguing that their rights had been violated.
At this point, one could argue that the lack of court cases arguing abuse means that there was very minimal violation of these protections. However, this simply wasn’t the case. Beyond Aleppo, we have evidence from numerous first-hand accounts of abuse at the hands of slave masters.
For example, in the Arabic and Ottoman Turkish collections at the Egyptian National Archives, there are detailed police records and testimonies by slaves.
In one such case, a woman named Şemsigül is raped by her captor on multiple occasions, impregnated, and then sold to a harem in Ottoman Egypt (Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East by Toledano, see page 61).
Later during her pregnancy, she is visited by her rapist and his wife. Here, Şemsigül is beat by the rapist’s wife until the wife is satisfied that she has killed the child that Şemsigül was carrying.
Despite this, the baby survived and was born months later. Immediately following the birth of the child, the child was taken by the rapist’s wife and Şemsigül was informed that her child had not survived birth. Unknown to her, the child was still alive.
While this is a very remarkable case, what we should take away from this account, and numerous others like it, is that a slave’s right were not always respected.
This story obviously conflict with several things we know about Ottoman and Islamic law and is rife with abuse. For example, regarding Islamic law, a master cannot sell a slave he has impregnated.
What we see in this case, and cases like it, is that Ottoman legal protections were reactionary and therefore not proactive. That is to say that the Ottoman law only became involved when crime had occurred and didn’t have systems in place to ensure that slaves wouldn’t face abuse in the first place.
Additionally, regarding access to the courts, Şemsigül did not report her abuse, because she felt scared of what would happen to her. When asked by she didn’t report her pregnancy or abuse, she said “As a slave, I was afraid to say anything about my suffering…”
It becomes clear that reporting one’s abusive master carried possible threatening or dangerous circumstances. Like in Şemsigül’s case, it is possible that many slaves did not exercise their legal rights in court for fear of further abuse.
Besides cases of abuse like this, there are many others regarding violations of contractual manumission and runaway slaves who claimed abuse. From these cases, we can see that abuse or violations of the slave’s right was not uncommon. This abuse is recorded both by Ottoman courts and British consuls in the empire.
Regarding wages, some slaves were paid. Certainly the administrative elite, who were enslaved through the devshirme system, were able to amass wealth through their high social status in the empire. However, upon their death, their wealth was transferred to the sultan as he was technically their master.
Many slaves existed within what Toledano calls a “patronage” system, in which the slave’s needs are met and negotiated by their owner. In this case, we could expect that the slave was supported, but not paid for their labor. While true, it is unclear how often patronage also came with a wage.
We do know that some contractual manumissions were based upon a payment to be released. Therefore, we can assume that in some circumstances, slaves were paid. But, these payments would go towards buying their own freedom, so it is difficult to truly say this is a wage that benefited the slave outside of this relationship.
The argument that slaves were treated well actually stems from the time of the Ottoman Empire itself. Under pressure from western powers, especially Great Britain, to abolish slavery, the Ottoman government argued that its form of slavery was extremely mild compared to western slavery. The Ottomans argued their case as so:
“The crux of the Ottoman argument was that slavery in the empire, as in other Muslim societies, was fundamentally different from slavery in the Americas. In the main, it was far milder because slaves were not employed on plantations, were well treated, were frequently manumitted, and could integrate into the slave-owning society. Islamic law, it was further maintained, encouraged owners to treat their slaves well, and manumission was considered a pious act, for which the believer could expect remuneration.” (Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East by Toledano, see page 15.)
However, we find contradicting evidence of every single one of these points through court cases and other evidence:
While plantation slavery was uncommon in the Ottoman Empire, wide-scale plantation slavery was used in the 1860s during Ottoman Egypt’s cotton boom. (As If Silent and Absent : Bonds of Enslavement in the Islamic Middle East by Toledano, see page 14)
While protections existed by the Ottoman legal system and Islamic law, they only truly existed if the master extended these rights to their slaves.
Slaves were frequently manumitted, but we have a wealth of evidence that contractual manumission was violated in many legal accounts.
Even though freed slaves could integrate into society, they were often left disenfranchised and poor. Thus many sought another patron system, similar to their former condition.
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