allgemein gab es zwei verschiedene "Sklaven-Sorten" im Osm. Reich, die man unterscheiden könnte, einmal die "Sklaven" des Sultans, also praktisch die Pseudo-Aristokratie, der Hofstaat, in einigen Jahrhunderten oft aus der "Knabenlese" hervorgegangen, und dann die Sklaven, die man eher mit Sklaven aus anderen Reichen vergleichen könnte, wobei man sich aber hüten sollte, diese sofort zu 100% mit einem Kunta Kinte, also den "typischen" Sklaven auf amerikanischen Plantagen gleichzusetzen.
Beim Diagonallesen folgender Bücher scheint, dass letztere ("grausamere") Entwicklung im osm. Reich nicht in gleicher Weise wie in christl. Reichen erfolgte, dieses aber eher "zufällig" war, als aufgrund einer "edleren" "humaneren" Gesinnung eines Osmanen zuzuschreiben ist.
Es scheint aber so zu sein, dass die Forschung diesbezgl. noch nicht so weit fortgeschritten ist, und man etliches unter Vorbehalt sagen sollte. Trotzdem kann man sicherlich heute schon einigen Klischees entgegnen.
von Quaetert aus dem aktuellen osm.
Literaturtipp oben links im Menü:
"Already in the early fourteenth century, legal scholars were advocating that bureaucratic leaders and military commanders, despite their vast power, were in fact mere slaves of the sultan.
They were not slaves in the American sense since they possessed and bequeathed property, married at will, and moved about freely. In a particularly Ottoman sense, however, being a servant/slave of the sultan meant enjoying privilege and power but without the protection of the law that all Ottoman subjects in principle possessed."
aus dem Goffman aus obigen Literaturtipp mal ein bischen ausführlicher auf die verschiedenen "Sklavenformen", also z.B. die berühmten
Janitscharen, aber auch Sklaven in Manufakturen und im Haushalt. Beide Bücher liefern einen schönen überblicksartigen Beitrag, das osm. Reich zu "de-exotisieren":
"The Ottoman slave culture
In the sixteenth century, the culture as well as the institutions of Ottoman governance drifted closer to European standards. The bond deepened despite the fact that the foundations of Ottoman society seemed so Asiatic (Turkoman, Persianate, and Arab). A seemingly exotic type of slavery, so different from the chattel slaves of Europe and the Americas, is one example of such differences. This institution had emerged as a decisive component of a particular set of beliefs, behaviors, and education that defined membership in the Ottoman elite. What made Ottoman slavery seem so strange to the rest of Europe was not so much that the select of society owned slaves (although they certainly did) as that they themselves often were slaves: that is, members of the imperial family legally owned those very same viziers and pashas who administered the realm.
The Ottoman elite had not always been slaves of the sultan. Indeed, as we have seen, under Osman, Orhan, and Murad, Turkoman companions to the emirs had acted as military, administrative, and religious leaders. Such comrades often resented and occasionally defied Ottoman rule, and helped produce an unstable regime. In the late fourteenth century, the Ottoman ruling house adapted, perhaps from the Seljuk example, the idea of using captured slaves as the backbone of a new army or janissarycorps. Removed from their native cultures and presented with power through the person of their master the sultan, these foot soldiers acted domestically to neutralize the Turkoman cavalry and internationally to neutralize European innovations in military technology. Under Bayezid I, Mehmed I, Murad II, and Mehmed II, Ottoman authority rested more and more in the hands of the monarch himself through the power of his infantry troops.
The
janissary corps was only one component of the kapıkulu, or “
slaves of the Porte,” which came to encompass also much of the Ottoman bureaucracy. After Mehmed II, most of the highest men of state, iincluding almost every grand vizier from Mehmed II’s Mahmud Pasha (r.1453–66) to the Köprülü triumvirate of viziers (r.1656–83) who served under Mehmed IV, were kuls. Indeed, by the reign of Mehmed II’s greatgrandson Süleyman, not only had being a kul become a virtual prerequisite to advancement, but also a new social class had emerged around the concept. If no Ottoman aristocracy ever issued in the style of the blood of European noble houses, the conceit of imperial slavery became a peculiarly analogous and equally powerful unifying factor. Blood played some role in this quasi-aristocracy, as the Köprülü case suggests; however, even more than lineage, possession of one human being by another marked this elite and made it seem somewhat misleadingly exotic to Europeans.
In other words, possession more than ethnicity, language, geography, or any other element identified this pseudo-aristocracy. The requirement that these kuls become Ottoman – that is, that they develop linguistic and cultural homogeneity and exclusivity – grew out of this peculiar status.
The roots of this slave culture lay in the Islamic creed, and especially in the stricture against enslaving fellow believers. This rule combined with the presence of a seemingly boundless sea of pagan nomads to the northeast of Arab lands had led to the development of a new form of slavery. As the Arabs pushed into Central Asia in the eighth and ninth centuries under the Abbasid dynasty, they confronted, traded with, fought, and converted Turkic-speaking nomads. The Arab leaders also began both to hire these steppe people as mercenaries and to choose for training as soldiers and scribes the most fit and most talented of those enslaved on the battlefield. By the tenth century, this tendency had evolved into a system, the ghulam, by which non-Muslim Turks were enslaved, converted, and trained to become warriors and statesmen.4 Many late-medieval Middle Eastern dynasties adopted this procedure, most notoriously in Egypt where the servants toppled the rulers and established the Mamluk Empire, a regime of former slaves. Probably beginning with Murad in the late fourteenth century, the Ottomans also adopted the ghulam, using it to build a loyal army and administration to stand in opposition to rival gazi warriors who might challenge the Ottoman house.
The Ottomans not only took up this practice that the Seljukid and other Turkic dynasties had introduced into Asia Minor, but also adapted it. As the expansion of their empire slowed, and with it their ability to capture persons and thus rejuvenate their army and ruling class as a consequence of conquest, the state began more and more to purchase (and sometimes have castrated) non-Muslims along its Empire’s northeastern and southern frontiers. It also initiated the more sustainable if problematic program of drawing from the millions of non-Muslim inhabitants of the Empire itself. In a process known as
devsirme [="Knabenlese"], state officials went especially into the upcountry towns and villages of today’s Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia and took a human “tithe” of young Christian boys to become the sultan’s servants.
Contemporary western Europeans (and many today) counted this practice as one of the most heathen and non-European of Ottoman innovations. Not only did the devsirme rip young boys away from their families and homelands, but it also forced upon them an exotic culture and religion perceived as profoundly hostile to their own. They were taught to believe in Islam rather than Christianity, to speak Turkish rather than Serbo-Croatian, and to affirm a binding loyalty to the Ottoman sultan, their new master (and family head). For loving parents and for those proud of their religious, ethnic, and linguistic identities (and especially for the modern nationalist), the forfeiture of these young boys constituted a bitter defeat and shame.5
There were, however, compensations.
First, their sons were lifted out of provincial, impoverished, and oppressed surroundings into the ruling class of arguably the most powerful and refined polity in the world. At worst, they would become infantrymen in the celebrated Ottoman legions; at best, they might become powerful statesmen such as the kapudanpasa, Piyâle Pasha, who began life as a Christian Hungarian, or the grand vizier, Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, who was born a Christian Bosnian.
Second, despite the insistence of many national historiographies that such personal fortune was attained only through the utter obliteration of heritage, evidence has recently emerged that the Ottomans were not always so insistent that these boys discard their birthrights. Sokollu Mehmed Pasha was only the most prominent of those selected by the devsirme who maintained contact with, protected, and even lent monetary assistance to parent, sibling, relative, and region.6 Consequently, these levies may not only have replenished a perpetually depleted elite, but also have served to bind Christian provinces to this Islamic state through a system of personal ties and favors. The outcome if not the method of this process resembled systems of provincial advocacy concurrently developing in southern and western Europe.
Furthermore, the targets of these levies understood such compensations so well that some parents even implored and paid off officials to conscript their son rather than someone else’s.
During the sixteenth century, a grand vizier stood at the pinnacle of the quasi-aristocracy that developed out of this arrangement. It was not a strictly vertical hierarchy, however, for this “slave culture” became diffused across the Ottoman ruling estate and through the imperial household. Servants, for example, had servants, most curiously and nefariously the
eunuchs who oversaw not only the imperial household, but also the intimate worlds of other notables’ harems. The sultan’s servants also developed political networks of their own through artifice, patronage, payoffs, and matrimony. One result was the late sixteenth-century formation of political cliques, usually created through the union of a princess and a statesman and often including an imperial eunuch, whose power derived from his unique ability to pass easily between the sultan’s private and public domains.
Despite Qur’anic admonitions to treat slaves kindly and manumit them whenever possible, the early modern Ottomans did not forbid more powerless forms of household slavery, or even
plantation slavery of the sort that became so notorious in the Americas during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Most lamentable perhaps was the Ottoman exploitation of captives for the cultivation of rice, which the imperial court fancied. Since there was no ideological logic that proscribed plantationstyle slavery, the principal reason it remained secondary was geographical and institutional: rice, cotton, and other crops appropriate for the intensive agriculture in which slavery tended to thrive developed only on a few littoral fringes of the Empire.
In short, the kul system, which seemed so exotic to the western European mind, looked less and less strange with time. Indeed, within the order lay the potential for both a pseudo-aristocracy and a system of plantation-style slavery.7 That the first rather than the second of these options developed was little more than happenstance.
Fussnoten:
4 On which see “Ghulam,” EI; and Matthew Gordon, The breaking of a thousand swords: a history of the Turkish militaryof Samara. 200–275 AH/815–889 CE (Albany, NY, 2001).
5 The epigram that begins this chapter’s vignette, damning the sultan for enslaving Greek children, is only one of many reflections of this attitude.
6 For a more modest example, see Cemal Kafadar, “On the purity and corruption of the janissaries,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 15.2 (1991): 273–80.
7 Most works on Ottoman slavery deal with the late period, on which see Y. Hakan Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman empire and its demise (Oxford, 1997); and Ehud R. Toledano, Slavery and abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle, WA, 1998). On the earlier period, there is Shaun Elizabeth Marmon (ed.), Slaveryin the Islamic Middle East (Princeton, 1999).
weitere Lesetipps zur Vertiefung in die Materie, teilweise online durch googlebooks lesbar:
A revealing work on the sultan and his household is Leslie Peirce, The imperial harem: women and sovereigntyin the Ottoman Empire (Oxford, 1993). For a narrative of that period on gender relations in other elite households, see Evliya Celebi,
The intimate life of an Ottoman statesman: Melek Ahmed Pasha (1588–1661), intro. and trans. Robert Dankoff, historical comm. Rhoads Murphey (Albany, NY, 1991). On elite careers, see in general I. Metin Kunt, “Ethnic-regional (cins) solidarity in the seventeenth-century Ottoman establishment,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 5 (1974): 233–39; and, for a particular case, Cornell H. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: the historian Mustafa Âli (1541–1600) (Princeton, NJ, 1986). The early chapters of Ehud R. Toledano, Slaveryand abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle, WA, 1998) constitute a concise introduction to Ottoman slavery. Athorough discussion of the end to Ottoman slavery is Y. Hakan Erdem, Slaveryin the Ottoman Empire and its demise (Oxford, 1997).
Wenn jemand nicht so gut englisch kann, bitte fragen und jemand oder ich kann mal einige Punkte übersetzen.
Ciao und LG, lynxxx