Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean

Joshua M. White

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781503602526
• eBook ISBN: 9781503603929
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The 1570s marked the beginning of an age of pervasive piracy in the Mediterranean that persisted into the eighteenth century. Nowhere was more inviting to pirates than the Ottoman-dominated eastern Mediterranean. In this bustling maritime ecosystem, weak imperial defenses and permissive politics made piracy possible, while robust trade made it profitable. By 1700, the limits of the Ottoman Mediterranean were defined not by Ottoman territorial sovereignty or naval supremacy, but by the reach of imperial law, which had been indelibly shaped by the challenge of piracy.

Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean is the first book to examine Mediterranean piracy from the Ottoman perspective, focusing on the administrators and diplomats, jurists and victims who had to contend most with maritime violence. Pirates churned up a sea of paper in their wake: letters, petitions, court documents, legal opinions, ambassadorial reports, travel accounts, captivity narratives, and vast numbers of decrees attest to their impact on lives and livelihoods. Joshua M. White plumbs the depths of these uncharted, frequently uncatalogued waters, revealing how piracy shaped both the Ottoman legal space and the contours of the Mediterranean world.

PART ONE

Chaos and Captives

CHAPTER ONE

Ottoman Pirates, Ottoman Victims

Where do Ottoman pirates come from? The Ottoman bureaucrat, poet, and historian Mustafa Ali had a theory. In his didactic etiquette manual/book of rants, Tables of Delicacies Concerning the Rules of Social Gatherings, completed shortly before his death in 1599, he argued that they were predominantly Muslim Turks from northwest Anatolia who started off as small gangs of amphibious bandits preying on nearby Ottoman Christians. With time and success, they graduated to larger-scale piracy and ultimately abandoned illegal attacks on Ottoman subjects in favor of joining the ranks of the corsairs of North Africa, where they devoted themselves full time to marine jihad. He ascribed these obscure origins to the most famous corsairs of the sixteenth century, like Hayreddin Barbarossa, though he noted with somewhat less romanticism that the destructive process of local Ottoman-on-Ottoman piracy continued in his day.¹

Mustafa Ali’s conception of the multistage pirate life cycle, from local predatory raider to long-distance corsair, is borne out by the Ottoman documentary record of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.² It thus provides us with a ready-made, if incomplete, framework for understanding some of the differences and connections between local and long-distance piracy in the early modern Ottoman Mediterranean. While the line between the two was more porous and multidirectional than he suggested—and Ottoman-subject pirates had been joined by a host of others by the time he was writing—Mustafa Ali’s observations give some indication of the complex relationship between the practitioners of piracy and amphibious slave raiding, on the one hand, and government and victims, on the other. In the petri dish of the Mediterranean, Ottoman subjects—Muslims, Christians, and Jews—constituted the agar substrate that sustained pirates and enabled them to grow and reproduce.

Informed by Mustafa Ali’s insights, this chapter charts the connections between licit and illicit forms of maritime violence and their practitioners and chronicles the explosion of Ottoman-on-Ottoman piracy and amphibious slave raiding after 1570. Geographic, demographic, economic, political, and military factors account for why this activity flourished when and where it did and for the uneven Ottoman efforts to combat it. By comparing the manifestations of and responses to Ottoman-on-Ottoman piracy in the two regions where it was most pronounced—the Aegean until the 1590s and the southern Adriatic, Ionian, and Morean coasts—the impact of human and physical geography on piracy and the reasons for the discrepancies in Ottoman countermeasures become clear. Mustafa Ali’s remarks also invite us to reconsider the complex role—rhetorical, legal, organizational, tactical—that religion played in Ottoman piratical enterprise at all its various stages. And they underscore the fact that subjecthood as much as religious identity mediated the boundary between licit raiding and illegal piracy.

In Mustafa Ali’s view, the metamorphosis from local pirate to long-distance corsair comprised four distinct stages. It began on land with just five or ten men:

They attack a little boat owned by tax-paying infidels [i.e., Ottoman-subject Christians], board it, and take it to the islands. With that one boat, they launch their important career in plundering and severing family lineages, capturing men, and filling out their stores of articles of war. They bind the Ottoman-subject zimmi sailors and put them to the oar. At first they think they have but acquired galley slaves, then as they attack whatever vessel transporting day-laborers that strikes their fancy, they set off in pursuit of wealth. Still, they do not abandon Islam all at once; they do not put merchants and sailors to the sword out of spite. As things develop, they in no way hesitate to seize bows and arrows useful to them or limitless numbers of weapons, or beardless lads or youths who comfort the hearts of the afflicted.³

Small criminal bands of amphibious raiders, employing repurposed fishing boats to raid seaside villages and coastal traffic, appeared before the sixteenth century, but they flourished in its final decades. Their proliferation was paralleled by the rise of banditry throughout Anatolia and the European provinces in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Both were symptoms of growing numbers of armed, demobilized irregular infantry, unemployed provincial law school graduates, and desperate peasants, the products of constant war, famine, and financial collapse. The main difference was that enterprising gangs in coastal areas enjoyed the opportunity provided by geography to take their activities onto the water. Starting in the 1570s, such bands popped up with alarming frequency not only along the Anatolian coastline but especially along the remote and perpetually unruly Adriatic-Ionian-Morean littoral.

Their targets at this stage were, essentially, their neighbors. Predators and prey were often already known to one another. The victims were “tax-paying Ottoman subjects,” a phrase that appeared constantly in Ottoman administrative records describing the raids. These were unambiguously criminal attacks. Both in terms of Islamic and Ottoman sultanic law, the enslavement of non-Muslim Ottoman subjects was patently illegal, in contrast to the enslavement of “enemy infidels” (harbi kafirler/kefere/küffar) from the Abode of War, which was permissible under Islamic law but restricted in practice. Ottoman Christians and Jews, by virtue of paying a tax (cizye; Arabic: jizya) signifying their acceptance of Ottoman overlordship, were ahl al-dhimma, or zimmis in Ottoman usage, people of the pact. This pact could be repudiated (nakz-i ahd) by flight to the enemy, which resulted in the loss of protected status and implicitly of Ottoman subjecthood. But so long as zimmis paid their taxes and obeyed their sovereign, they were permitted to keep their faith and their property and were entitled to the state’s protection.

Their enslavement was thus a grave violation of ancient Islamic legal strictures and the dynasty’s solemn obligation to protect its subjects—one sufficiently serious that Mustafa Ali considered such pirates to be on the verge of abjuring Islam. Nevertheless, human booty was, besides grain in this age of frequent famine, that which pirates in the Mediterranean most prized, and nearby zimmis provided an irresistible target. Word of small-scale activity of this sort rarely reached the Ottoman center, which would typically not be informed of the fledgling pirate band’s actions before they advanced to Mustafa Ali’s second stage:

But over time that boat can carry them no more, which is to say it becomes apparent that the cargo of sin they have loaded has become too ponderous a burden. When this happens they attempt to obtain a small frigate. By taking these steps they gradually expand ranks and become a gang.⁴

Success meant expansion. With more men joining the gang, by this point possibly numbering up to a few dozen, and the regular haul of captives and loot threatening to capsize the boat, the pirate band would have the motive and the means to trade up to a larger vessel. This of course meant the ability to range farther out to sea and thus to engage larger prizes. At this stage, the enterprise could move beyond attacking small fishing boats and focus on larger coastal traders, as well as engage in amphibious raids on larger and more distant villages. Already engaging in the lucrative on-the-spot ransom and extortion business, the upgrade to a frigate enabled full entry into the illegal slave trade.

Whereas before the pirates’ abductions of Ottoman subjects primarily served their needs for a captive workforce or—as Mustafa Ali repeatedly mentioned elsewhere—to satisfy their lust, the ability to carry off more people longer distances facilitated selling Ottoman Christian subjects just far enough away from their homes to pass them off as legally enslaved “enemy infidels.” In the Ottoman world, slavery was widespread, but so too was manumission, generating constant demand. The transition from keeping slaves to selling them was a critical aspect of this stage in the pirate life cycle, for it exposed both pirates and slave buyers to the Ottoman legal system. Slaves, women and children in particular, were most often employed in domestic (including sexual) service and were frequently resold, with buyers and sellers often registering the transaction with the local courts. Brought before the judge, enslaved persons could and often did file freedom suits with the courts; if they could produce two male Muslim witnesses who could attest to their free (Ottoman) origins, they would be released with their erstwhile owner left holding the bill. Deprived of his slave, he could sue the seller to recover his losses, kicking off a chain of lawsuits that could lead back to the perpetrator of the illegal raid. Consequently, pirates trafficked their captives across the sea to complicate efforts to find them and to protect themselves from the repercussions if the slaves’ free origins were discovered. Engaging in larger slaving raids, it was often at this point that the local frontier pirate might, through the complaints of villagers and provincial officials, attract the attention of the central government.

Upon learning of such incidents, Istanbul typically ordered administrators in the affected district to investigate, find and free the enslaved Ottomans, and punish the offenders. Yet by this point, pirate bands were often entrenched in their areas of operation. In many such cases, local forces were simply not strong enough to take them on directly (and lacked the capacity to do anything at sea) or had already been co-opted by them for a share of the profits; in those instances, the center was casting its orders into the wind. In the meantime, continued success permitted further upgrades and opened up a far richer buffet of potential targets farther offshore:

In the third stage they come to rely as they must, upon those infamous perpetrators of malice and those evildoers of the human race known as “shipmaster’s sailors.” They comb their hair and get some new clothes—which is to say they obtain some arms and provisions. Following upon this, they accumulate arms and provisions and weapons and tools, and enough money to build a galliot, which is a vessel somewhat smaller than a galley but slightly larger than a frigate, and they become rich. Sometimes, on the coast of the Morea and Lefkada (Aya Mavra), with the collusion of one of the sea captains there, they build the kind of boat they want. Or they find one already built and buy it. But sometimes they don’t trust those captains, and when the captains give safe quarter they do not believe the agreement is truthful, so they weigh anchor and head for Samos. Or they conceal themselves on some similarly wooded island. Incorporating within it a thousand fears and precautions, they construct a ship. As soon as it is ready they board it, cast off, and meet up with one of the corsair (levend) admirals wintering in Algiers. They offer gifts and present themselves for service and are honored with being recruited into their ranks.⁵

Upon acquiring a large enough ship, the pirates no longer needed to limit themselves to attacks on Ottoman shores and subjects. On the Adriatic and Ionian coasts, they could now profitably expand their target list to include Venetian and Ragusan regional trading vessels carrying salt, timber, or grain.⁶ Although the enslavement of the subjects of both powers was similarly illegal thanks to the sultan’s treaties, these captives might be sold off rapidly or ransomed on the spot, and the same was true for their cargoes.

Mustafa Ali did not single out Lefkada, the Morea, or Samos on a whim. The only Ionian island held by the Ottomans (the others belonged to Venice), Lefkada hosted a fortress manned by naval irregulars that was a perennial source of anti-Venetian and anti-Ottoman piracy and abetted the predations of those coming from farther afield. The rugged, inaccessible coast of the Morea, parts of which could be reached only by sea, was also a hotbed of piratical activity, while Aegean islands like Samos provided the isolation and timber necessary for more independent-minded, upwardly mobile pirates to engage in clandestine shipbuilding and hide their loot and captives far from prying eyes. With at most a light Ottoman administrative presence, these advantages would soon attract foreign Christian pirates in search of safe harbor as well.

Finally, with a seaworthy vessel and a large enough crew of pirates and galley slaves, the band could embark upon the final stage of Mustafa Ali’s pirate metamorphosis, emerging from the chrysalis of local marine banditry as mature, high-seas raiders bound for the big time in Algiers. “Having reached this stage,” Mustafa Ali declared, “they no longer attack Muslims and merchants and tax-paying [i.e., Ottoman] infidels.” Drawing a firm line between their past activities and their new careers, he argued:

They never venture one step from Algiers except in jihad and gaza. They even abundantly repent their earlier sins. Not postponing any of their prayers, they make righteousness and piety their example. Certainly Barbarossa, whose name was Hayreddin Pasha, Salih Pasha, Yahya Pasha, and Turgutça [i.e., Turgud Reis] all emerged along this path. They all came from one of the villages or towns on the Anatolian straits and rose up the ladder first through banditry, secondly through piracy, and thirdly through ownership outright of a galliot and supremacy over others in what is known as captaincy (riyaset, the act of being a reis).⁷

Although Mustafa Ali was mostly correct about the small-scale piratical origins of men like Barbarossa in the late fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean (though Hayreddin Barbarossa was actually originally from Mytilene and Turgud was a Greek Christian by birth from near Bodrum), the situation he was describing was actually a late sixteenth-century rea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Note on Place-Names, Transliteration, and Dates
• Introduction
• Part I: Chaos and Captives
• Part II: Piracy, Diplomacy, and International Law
• Part III: Ottoman Mediterranean, Abode of Law
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index