Abduction with (dis)honor: Sovereigns, brigands, and heroes in the Ottoman world

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/157006511X577005

Journal of Early Modern History 15 (2011) 311-329 brill.nl/jemh

Abduction with (Dis)honor: Sovereigns, Brigands, and Heroes in the Ottoman World

Leslie PeirceNew York University

AbstractThis essay is interested in the ways in which acts of abduction, their significations, and the identities of abductors changed over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the start of this period, abduction was a positive force for the honor and reputation of the Ottoman sultanate, but it gradually turned into an act that threatened the state’s authority. Powerful abductors—those whose deeds aroused public admiration or alarm, or perhaps both—are our principal subject. If at the start of the sixteenth century abduction was an act that could enhance a monarch’s renown, it was losing its force as emblematic conduct of the royal victor. By the mid-century, the ideal sultan was less a warrior of leg-endary prowess than a prudent statesman more interested in treaties with his enemies than personal violence against them. Moreover, he was now the prosecutor of abduction. Around 1540, imperial law began to crack down on abduction by prescribing the dire punishment of castration. As if in response, the uses of abduction as a public assertion of honor, power and valor began to be appropriated by opponents of the government’s vision of order—rebels and disaffected servants of the state.

Keywords Abduction, honor, Ottoman, sultan, bandit

Introduction

The phenomenon of abduction, in its shifting manifestations and mean-ings, can function as a measure of the shifting meanings of honor among the early modern Ottomans. An abduction might bestow an aura of heroic valor on the abductor, even though the law branded him a criminal. The abducted—in this period, women, girls and boys, rarely an adult male—suffered dishonor despite their innocence, largely because they were presumed to be sexually violated by their captors. Worse perhaps, the reputation of the sullied captive’s entire household could be destroyed,

312 L. Peirce / Journal of Early Modern History 15 (2011) 311-329

to the point that customary pressure forced shamed men to divorce abducted wives.

Both documentary and narrative sources demonstrate that abduction occurred at many levels of society in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As it is still today in parts of the former Ottoman domains, abduction then occurred among familiars, often a way for poor men or those rejected by the female’s elders to gain a wife. Bandits were notorious abductors and the epidemic of banditry in the early seventeenth century provoked an outpouring of complaint about bandit plunder of bodies. A mighty monarch might abduct an enemy’s wife or son, the violation of the loser’s household symbolic of his failure to defend his domains.

The profit derived from abduction was more than symbolic. While the taking of captive bodies could be specifically aimed at inflicting dishonor, abduction typically accompanied other forms of theft and usurpation. Sul-tans acquired territory, revenue, and the treasuries of defeated opponents. Lesser abductors—the petty bandit as well as bandit gangs of tens or hundreds—made away with horses, crops and staples, cash, and household goods. Moreover, while captives could be kept for personal service, they could also be sold for gain in slave markets and to individual buyers. Part of the mystique of abduction and the fear it provoked was the lucrative violence that surrounded it.

This essay is interested in the ways in which acts of abduction, their significations, and the identities of abductors changed over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The argument, briefly stated, is that at the start of this period, abduction was a positive force for the repu-tation of the Ottoman sultanate, but that it gradually turned into an act that threatened the state’s authority. Powerful abductors—those whose deeds aroused public admiration, alarm, or perhaps both—are our princi-pal subject. If, at the start of the sixteenth century, abduction was an act that could enhance a monarch’s renown, it was losing its force as emblem-atic conduct of the royal victor. By mid-century, the ideal sultan was less a warrior of legendary prowess than a prudent statesman more interested in treaties with his enemies than personal violence against them. Moreover, he was now the prosecutor of abduction. Around 1540, imperial law began to crack down on abduction by prescribing the dire punishment of castra-tion. As if in response, the uses of abduction as a public assertion of power and valor began to be appropriated by opponents of the government’s vision of order—rebels and disaffected servants of the state. Certainly abduction had never been a royal monopoly, but it is telling that it was in

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the early seventeenth century that the epic-romantic cycle of stories about the Anatolian bandit-hero Köroğlu began to take shape. It was because of the unjust blinding of his father by the local governor that Köroğlu was thrust into a life of crime, including abduction.

Heroic Abductions

In 1554, when the sixty-year-old sultan Süleyman was fighting his third campaign against the Safavids, the Shi‘ite dynasty ruling Iran, his wife Hürrem wrote anxiously from Istanbul. She cautioned him that the city was eagerly anticipating the arrival of good news from the front, and pre-dicted popular discontent when the lack of real progress became apparent. It was abduction that was her measure of success. “. . . Neither the son of the heretic1 nor his wife has been captured,” she wrote, “nothing has been happening. Now, if a messenger arrives saying ‘no progress here, nothing there’, no one is going to be happy, my sultan. . . .”2 As everyone under-stood, to abduct the enemy’s dependents—with the unstated presumption of using them for sex—was to level the greatest assault on his political honor. It provided symbolic proof of his inability to defend the very heart of his kingdom.

Süleyman probably had no intention of provoking the shah in this way. The following year a treaty was concluded between the two powers; the Ottomans and their other great opponent, the Habsburg emperors, had done the same a few years earlier. A courtly exchange of exquisite gifts enhanced the 1555 treaty. But in the eyes of his subjects, Süleyman would have done better to seal the Ottoman victory with an abduction. This sen-timent was surely goaded by memories of his father Selim I, who had captured the previous shah’s wife in a stunning defeat of the Iranians in 1514. The victorious Selim refused to return the captive woman to the

1 The shah, Tahmasp, the second in the line of Safavid sovereigns, was a “heretic” in Ottoman eyes because his father had declared Twelver Shi‘ism to be the religion of state, a schismatic break on the order of Protestant-Catholic strife in Europe of the period. In order to declare war on another Muslim state, the Ottomans needed to cast the Iranians as the enemy of correct Islamic practice.

2 Topkapı Palace Museum Archives, Document E 5038, transcribed in Çağatay Uluçay, Osmanlı Sultanlarına Aşk Mektupları (Istanbul, 1950), 42-43. Uluçay dates this letter to 1548, the second of Süleyman’s Iranian campaigns, but internal evidence suggests that it was written in 1553-1554.


shah, but instead added insult to injury by turning her over to one of his leading statesmen.3 It is hard to know if Selim too was under pressure to perform an abduction. His troops were probably cheered—Ottoman sol-diers were generally restless for booty, and the sultan’s prize legitimated their own taking of captives.

In 1554, the people of Istanbul could be said to be channeling a long-standing view of heroic abduction as casus belli and index of personal and national valor. There was a long past to the conjunction of abduction and political conflict in the Eurasian domain occupied by the Ottoman Empire. Herodotus had opened his Histories with a linked set of abductions—of Io, Europa, Medea, and finally Helen—that culminated in the long war between the Greeks and Persians, “merely on account of a girl from Sparta.”4 Zeus of course made a practice of abducting females and young boys, and sometimes spawned new races with captured women.5 A later exemplar of the melding of heroism and abduction is the protagonist of a medieval Byzantine epic—Digenes Akritas, the “two-blooded” son of an Arab Muslim and Greek Christian. An Anatolian frontier warrior, Digenes also exemplifies the tendency of abductors to cross ethnic, religious, or class boundaries in the choice of victims.

In the Ottoman world, the cult of royal abduction was peaking at the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century. The salience of kidnapped women in the regional discourse of sovereign power was underlined in a late fifteenth-century history of the Akkoyunlu, a rival Anatolian dynasty: to validate the dynasty’s claim to “distinguished origin,” the history listed six points, the second of which was that “the hand of a conqueror never touched their spouses.”6 The Ottoman dynasty could not claim such an unblemished record because the great Central Asian conqueror Timur (Tamerlane) had defeated and taken prisoner the fourth Ottoman sultan Bayezid I and his wife, the Serbian princess Maria, in 1402. Historical legend held that Timur inflicted further humiliation on the Ottoman

3 Saddedin Efendi, Selimname, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS. Suppl. Turc 524, 75r.4 Herodotus, The Histories, trans., Aubrey de Sélincourt, revised and ed., John Marin-

cola, (London, 2003), Book 1.4, 4.5 See the discussion of abduction by the Greek gods in Mary Lefkowitz, “Seduction and

Rape in Greek Mythology,” in Consent and Coercion to Sex and Marriage in Ancient and Medieval Societies, ed. Angeliki E. Laiou (Washington DC, 1993), 17-21; other articles in this volume are also illuminating.

6 Fadlullâh b. Rûzbihan Khunjî, Târîkh-i ‘Âlam-ârâ-yi Âmînî, abridged and translated by Vladimir Minorsky, Persia in A.D. 1478-1490 (London, 1957), 20.


dynastic house by imprisoning the sultan in an iron cage and by forcing his wife to perform menial service. Or rather, this was as much as Ottoman chroniclers were willing to admit. Whether the story was true is almost irrelevant: the magnitude of defeat summoned narrative tropes of extreme humiliation.

On the other hand, the Ottomans could certainly valorize their own abductor-sultans. A late fifteenth-century history of the Ottoman dynasty recounted a story of abduction involving Osman, the eponymous first ruler of the nascent state. In the brief account by the historian Neşri, Osman orders his followers to abduct a young village woman after she had rejected his offer of marriage. Neşri’s story was taken up and elegantly elaborated a decade or so later by the polymath Kemal Paşazade—historian, composer of romances, philosopher, legal scholar and teacher, and, at the end of his career, chief mufti of the empire.7 As recounted in his chronicle of the dynasty, the abduction story begins as a romance, a spring-time affair of the heart. It is also a “buddy” tale, as Osman is smitten while out hunting with his friends, and it is during a convivial drinking party that he boasts of the woman’s beauty—foolishly, as it turns out, for an erstwhile ally secretly connives to take the woman for himself. It is the revelation of this betrayal that provokes the abduction.

What ensues in Kemal Paşazade’s narration is an armed combat that engages several local lords and provides Osman with his first military vic-tory. Osman’s emergence as a leader of political and military consequence is immediately followed by the conversion of Mikhal, a local Byzantine lord captured in the fray, both to the cause of Osman and to Islam (the point being that the two are henceforth inseparable). By the turn of the fifteenth century, when the “House of Mikhal” had long since become one of the great warrior lineages fighting alongside the sultans, the story of Mikhal’s conversion had come to signal the validity in the eyes of God and man of the Ottoman imperial enterprise and to hint at the inevitable col-lapse of the Byzantine Empire. But what gets forgotten in this celebration of Osman’s first victory is the young woman who precipitated the affair. She is merely the object of a contest among men that is shorn of chivalric content. Only later in the narrative is she recuperated (incongruously) with a distinguished family pedigree.

7 Mevlana Mustafa Neşri, Kitâb-ı Cihan-Nüma: Neşri Tarihi, 2 vols, ed. F. R. Ünat and M. A. Köymen (Ankara, 1949), 1.74-77. Şemseddin Ahmed Kemalpaşazade, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osmân, I. Defter, ed. Şerafettin Turan (Ankara, 1970), 68-81.


The inescapable narrative logic of Neşri and Kemal Paşazade’s story is that the abduction affair launches Osman’s political career and thus the imperial venture. It is the first and precipitating event in Osman’s path to power. A threat to personal honor and manhood has again acted as casus belli. It does not seem to matter that Osman defies the authority of his father Ertuğrul—both his parental authority (the offer of marriage is made without the usual sponsorship of the father or even his awareness of it) and his political authority (the abduction precipitates factionalism among the allies of Ertuğrul, himself an acknowledged local lord). Rather, the abduc-tion and its aftermath appear to signal a new stage for the Ottomans, dem-onstrating that Osman has the desire, the daring, and the leadership skills to move the small principality onto the stage of history—“merely on account of a girl from the village of Dog’s Nose,” to paraphrase Herodotus. Not all historians of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries include the abduction story in their “Histories of the House of Osman,” which typically featured more sedate miracle stories sanctifying the initial mili-tary exploits of Ertuğrul and Osman. But it is noteworthy that Kemal Paşazade’s multi-volume history was commissioned by the sultan Bayezid II, who reigned from 1481 to 1512. The perpetuation of the royal abduction story was thus a product of imperial patronage.

Criminalizing Abduction

It was Bayezid II who first criminalized abduction. He did so by describing the act and penalizing it in his comprehensive recension of the Imperial Statute Book (Kanunname-i Osmanî ), first issued by his father, Mehmed II “the Conqueror.” Abduction may well have been prosecuted by Ottoman authorities earlier, but its inscription in this principal compendium of sul-tanic law made it a crime throughout the empire and signaled that the state would enforce prosecution. Bayezid’s ruling read: “A person who abducts [çeküb, seize and take away] a girl or a boy, or who enters a dwelling with subversive intent [to abduct], or who comes [on a raid] to abduct a woman or girl will have his penis cut off.”8 The invocation of castration underlines the gravity of abduction, especially since criminal penalties in the Statute Book usually took the form of monetary fines sometimes accompanied by

8 Ahmet Akgündüz, Osmanlı Kanûnnâmeleri ve Hukukî Tahlilleri, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1990), 2.42-43; Uriel Heyd, Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law (Oxford, 1973), 58, 97.


the bastinado. Only the most heinous crimes or large-scale disruptions of social order were penalized with brutal physical incapacitation or execu-tion. For an act associated with masculine daring, a more dishonoring form of punitive retaliation is hard to imagine.

Bayezid’s successors Selim I and Süleyman issued their own recensions of the Statute Book. The dates of the four iterations were spaced at roughly twenty-year intervals (around 1480, 1500, 1519, and 1540). In his updat-ing of the Statute Book, Süleyman endorsed his grandfather’s statutes con-demning abduction. His own contribution was to extend criminal penalties to accomplices of the abductor, that is, to the entire raiding party. Two punitive options were offered: castration or the bastinado plus a substantial fine (the second, less drastic, option nevertheless equaled or exceeded the most severe sentence for an act of fornication).9 As a criminal act that typically included rape and sometimes forced marriage, abduction was a complex legal problem. In Bayezid II’s and subsequent recensions of the Imperial Statute Book, a corollary statute regarding forced marriage ordered that the authorities must compel the abductor-husband to divorce the abductee-wife. Moreover, the religious functionary who married the couple must be punished by a heavy dose of the bastinado and by having his beard shaved off—a lesser form of emasculation.

Who or what was the actual target of these statutes? The statute on forced marriage could easily apply to the kind of abduction that ordinary individuals might undertake, where marriage was likely the intended out-come. Such abductions continue even today in parts of the former Otto-man domains, typically in rural communities. Sometimes planned by the couple, the abduction is usually aimed at getting around parental disap-proval or the inability to muster the considerable investment required for a properly contracted marriage.10 A court case in Harput, an eastern Ana-tolian garrison city, dated May 1672, presents a familiar scenario, an abduction within the extended family: Ebu Bekir has refused to give his sister Güllü in marriage to his paternal cousin Osman, who claims that Ebu Bekir’s now-deceased father had promised her to him. Osman, his father (presumably the family elder), his brother, and two others abduct

9 Heyd, Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law, 58-59, 97-98.10 On patterns of abduction in Turkey in recent times, see the Introduction and articles

by Daniel G. Bates and Ayşe Kudat in Kidnapping and Elopement as Alternative Systems of Marriage Special Issue, Anthropological Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1974); Kimberly Hart, “The Economy and Morality of Elopement in Rural Western Turkey,” Ethnologia Europaea (forthcoming).


Güllü, injuring and locking up her mother and tying up her brother as they struggle to take her. Ebu Bekir goes to court to request an investiga-tion, perhaps with the Statute Book’s provisions in mind.11 Güllü’s own thoughts are nowhere revealed, although it is plausible that she was happy to be with Osman and that her brother obstructed the marriage for his own reasons.

Cases like Güllü’s, however, turn out to be relatively uncommon in sources where one might expect them, for example local court records. This type of local abduction, often among familiars, suggests that, unlike Ebu Bekir, families preferred not to air such affairs publicly but to settle them privately. This, plus the fact that young boys were not uncommonly the target of the abductor (with marriage clearly not the goal), prompts the conclusion that the principal aim of the imperial crackdown on abduction was to combat it as a tool in the hands of the brigand or the politically ambitious strongman. This hypothesis is more strongly borne out by com-paring the exceptionally harsh sentence of castration with the penalty for adultery, a serious crime highlighted by Islamic as well as sultanic law. The Statute Book punished adultery with a heavy fine, the apparent assump-tion being that normal married (and sexual) life would continue unim-paired, for the man at least.12 The abductor, by contrast, was to be wholly unmanned.

Were the statutes on abduction more than symbolic statements of right and wrong? That is, was castration actually meant to be carried out? Cer-tainly some abductors were being punished, following conviction by a judge’s court, but whether castration was actually part of the outlaw’s grue-some end is hard to say. The more spectacular offenders, those committing the whole menu of violence, might be summoned to Istanbul for trial in the sultan’s Imperial Council and sentenced there. Where we have the lan-guage of sentencing, it is indirect—“let justice be rendered.”13 It is clear,

11 362 Numaralı Harput Şer‘iyye Sicili H. 1082-1082 (M. 1671-1673) case #69, Bekir Koçlar, “Introduction” and “Transcription” (T. C. Yüksek Öğretim Kurulu Dokümanta-syon Merkezi: M. A. Thesis, Fırat University, 1990), 171-72. I am grateful to Günhan Börekçi for providing me with a copy of this study.

12 Adulterous women however could be divorced by their husbands, a practice going back to Biblical times and beyond. The Shari’a penalty for the adult, married, sane Muslim adulterer with no past record of sexual misconduct was stoning to death, but it seems to have been almost never applied (at least it is not mentioned in sources for the period).

13 The evidence comes mainly from the Registers of Important Affairs (Mühimme Deft-erleri), record books of orders sent out by the Imperial Council in Istanbul in the reigning sultan’s name.


however, that some form of execution was carried out, at least for egregious cases, but to what degree these executions served as spectacle intended to publicize the “war on abduction,” so to speak, is also hard to know.

Bayezid II was an administrative innovator and the first whose Statute Book was implicitly addressed to all subjects of the empire.14 He incorpo-rated a number of customary punishments into imperial law—branding the forehead of the male pimp, severing the hand of the habitual cutpurse or parading the first-time cutpurse around with a knife in his arm—sug-gesting that castration of abductors may have been such a customary prac-tice, at least among some elements of the population. What Bayezid did was to arrogate control of criminal discipline to the state.

Like other early modern polities, the Ottoman sultanate was taking on more responsibility for the lives of its subjects. One mechanism for doing so was the attempt, if not to monopolize the means of force and violence, at least to minimize their use by Ottoman subjects. In addition to abduc-tion, other perceived abuses of sexual and familial order were also being criminalized, for example improper mixing of the sexes in public and sod-omy. The latter was outlawed in Süleyman’s Statute Book around the time that it was in Europe (it became a capital crime in England in 1535; Flor-ence had already passed statutes in 1325 that punished the sodomite with castration, harsh fines, and other corporal penalties).15 That honor was at stake in much of this Ottoman socio-sexual legislation is obvious, as is the fact that new definitions of respectability were emerging. From the per-spective of the Statute Book at least, the male ideal was the sober house-holder who managed the conduct of his family and also contained his own wayward desires.16

The Age of Brigands

Süleyman was the last sultan for several generations able to even contem-plate a royal abduction. The Ottoman age of conquest was tapering off by his death in 1566, and his successors were mostly palace sultans who del-egated supreme military command to their pashas. Süleyman soldiered on, dying in the saddle in 1566, and it was not until the 1630s that there

14 Leslie Peirce, “Domesticating Sexuality: Harem culture in Ottoman Imperial Law,” in ed. Marilyn Booth, Harem Histories: Lived Spaces and Imagined Places (Durham, 2010), 104-135.

15 Katherine Crawford, European Sexualities, 1400-1800 (Cambridge, 2007), 157.16 Peirce, “Domesticating Sexuality,” 116-119.


emerged another risk-taking warrior sultan, Murad IV. The sultans’ with-drawal from personal command was partly due to the risk of defeat and its potential dishonor for the sovereign; defeated pashas on the other hand could be fired or executed, to keep the sultan blameless. With respect to abduction, the sultan’s principal role now was to protect the honor of his subjects and to prevent them from inflicting shame on one another. But abduction as an emblem of dominance and defiance did not disappear. As a language of competition inherited from the region’s ancient past, it was too deeply embedded in the mental world of the Ottomans.

Whether shaming was deliberately intended or not, abduction brought humiliation as an act of force by men that targeted other men’s wives and children. In 1630, when an Anatolian judge, Mevlana Mustafa, called in a loan of 50,000 silver coins from a certain Hüseyin, the latter used it as a pretext to carry off the judge’s wife Emine and hand her over to one of his followers “to use” (for sex). In a rare admission of collective frustration and perhaps embarrassment, the petition of complaint against Hüseyin sub-mitted to the Imperial Council in Istanbul noted that “not one of the lead-ing men of the province was capable of rescuing her.”17 This appeal to the sultan underlined the damage that such acts of violence could do to the collective honor of the local community and by implication to the state, now charged with the responsibility for the unfortunate woman’s rescue.

At the turn of the sixteenth century, a time of troubles in the Ottoman empire as in other parts of the world, an epidemic of brigandage spread across the Rumelian and Anatolian domains of the empire and continued in waves well into the seventeenth century.18 Individuals, bands and gangs, civilians and soldiers, imperial officials, and even the occasional judge seized married women, young boys, and young girls (virgin girls, as con-temporary sources took care to note).19 In communications circulating between Istanbul and the provinces, a rich vocabulary of defiance and insubordination was leveled against these outlaws: countless accusations employed epithets such as brigand; fomenter of disorder, sedition, and/or insurrection; robber; bastard villain; rebel; and the cruel, the unjust, or

17 85 Numaralı Mühimme Defteri (1040-1041/1630-1631) [Register of Important Affairs No. 85, 1630-1631] (Ankara, 2002), Order #381 ( June 3, 1631), 232-233.

18 For a useful discussion of historiographical typologies of the bandit, see Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats: The Ottoman Route to State Centralization (Ithaca, NY, 1994), 176ff.

19 On occasion an adult male was abducted, but the fate of men at the hands of soldiers and brigand was usually injury or death, the latter either intentional or as collateral damage.


the “tyrannous,” and, most commonly “brigand” (eşkıya).20 Hüseyin, the captor of the judge’s wife, was described as “brigand captain” of a gang of forty-some men.21 Often summed up in official parlance as “pillage and plunder” ( yağma ve garet), the brigand repertoire included, in addition to kidnapping, raiding homes and stealing goods, demolishing or setting fire to dwellings; imposing illegal taxes; robbing travelers and caravans; mur-der; and general mayhem and fear-mongering. Although not always pres-ent in the menu of violent acts, abduction and murder, as capital crimes, raised the criminal stakes. The irony was that communities that suffered the worst had the greater chance of garnering Istanbul’s attention.22

The criminalizing rhetoric deployed by the state of course masked the complex motives that drove men to abduct, rather as the label “terrorist” today reduces a spectrum of ideological and economic forces to a single act of violence. In an empire that had begun to experience financial strains and economic straits, the model male householder of early modern Otto-man socio-legal discourse was an ideal beyond the reach of many. For some at least, it was economic desperation that drove them to take human along with material plunder. Predictably perhaps, in no case where abduction figured in the brigand’s repertoire of crime do we find his side of the story. In the case of the judge’s wife, a possible tangled history of financial and perhaps other dealings may have exacerbated relations between Mevlana Mustafa and Hüseyin.

Who were these brigands whose depredations challenged social and political order? Brigandage was hardly a new phenomenon in Ottoman times, as Brent Shaw’s studies of banditry in Roman Anatolia demon-strate.23 However, there were several linked factors that conspired to raise

20 Terms of opprobrium found in the 1630-1631 Register of Important Affairs (Müh-imme Defteri) include şaki/eşkıya [eşkıya is the plural of şaki, but was used as a singular noun as well], ehl-i fesad, zalim/zalemen, te‘addi [eden], fırkateci, haramî, haramzade, ‘âsi, eşirra; also levend [taifesi], sekban eşkıyası, and even sekban eşkıya levendi.

21 In stating the size of a band of brigands, the Registers typically estimate a range, e.g. four to five, thirty to forty, here forty to fifty, and so on. Forty may be a trope for a good-sized band (as in the tale of Ali Baba and the forty thieves).

22 For the possibility that accusatory language was inflated during the petitionary pro-cess, see Başak Tuğ, The Politics of Honor: The Institutional and Social Frontiers of “Illicit Sex” in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Anatolia (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2009).

23 On abduction by strongmen in Cilician Anatolia in the Roman period, see Brent Shaw, “Bandit Highlands and Lowland Peace: The Mountains of Isauria-Cilicia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 33.3 (1990): 259-260; also “The Bandit,” in The Romans, ed. A. Giardina (Chicago, 1993), 300-341.


the level of domestic violence toward the end of the sixteenth century and that comprised the Ottoman experience of “the crisis of the seventeenth century.”24 For one thing, the numbers of soldiers enrolled in the various bodies of the Ottoman military swelled toward the end of the century, not all of them legally enlisted and not all interested in mustering for duty. Global fiscal currents added to constraints on the Ottoman budget, so that keeping soldiers paid up and supplied with accession bonuses every time a new sultan mounted the throne became increasingly difficult (there were six accessions between 1595 and 1623). The result was that protest dem-onstrations and insurrections became familiar occurrences, especially in the imperial capital, from around 1585 onward. Outside Istanbul, mili-tary-administrative officials—regional governors, provincial governors, and the officials and soldiers under their command—found their own incomes shrinking.25 The ready solution was to squeeze the reaya, as male tax-paying subjects of the sultan were commonly called. The near-constant warfare pursued by the empire in this period made it easier for governors to exploit the reaya, for example by levying unauthorized taxes in the name of military exigency. Conversely, the absence of many provincial com-manders, called away to fight, made it easier for brigands to squeeze the same victims.

“Civilian” brigands certainly wreaked havoc, but soldier-brigands began to outnumber them in the early seventeenth century, when the authority of the sultanate was weak and periodically challenged. Disaffected soldiers of modest rank crossed the line into a life of outlawry as did powerful pashas, who could tie up whole provinces in their overt resistance to Istan-bul.26 Exacerbating the problem of “government outlaws” was the fact that

24 The classic (and as yet fundamentally unchallenged) formulation of these linked phe-nomena was made by Mustafa Akdağ in various publications in the 1940s to 1960s. See also the important study by Halil İnalcık, “Military and Fiscal Transformation in the Otto-man Empire, 1600-1700,” Archivum Ottomanicum 6 (1980): 283-337; the footnotes are particularly rich in citations of other scholarly literature and in quotations from primary sources.

25 Ayşegül Hüseyiniklioğlu, Mühimme Defterlerine Göre Eşkıya Olayları (1594-1607) [The Eşkıya Phenomenon in the Registers of Important Affairs (1594-1607)] (T.C. Yüksek Öğretim Kurulu Dokümantasyon Merkezi: M.A. thesis, Fırat University, 2001): 251-253, 261-268. I am grateful to Ünver Rüstem for providing me with a copy of this study.

26 For major studies of this period and phenomenon see Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats; also Oktay Özel, “The Reign of Violence: The Celâlis (c. 1550-1700),” in The Ottoman World, ed. Christine Woodhead (London, forthcoming). For a fresh look at the so-called crisis of the seventeenth century, see “AHR Forum: The General Crisis of the Seventeenth


the line between civilian and soldier was sometimes indistinct. Especially in the wave of brigandage that occurred in the 1620s and 1630s, soldier-brigands often had armed civilian mercenaries (sekban) in their following. For example Kazıklıoğlu, a rogue cavalryman in Bursa, perpetrated abduc-tions, robbed the poor, and threatened to shoot officials who summoned him to trial. He was supported by—and no doubt supported—his com-pany of “more than one hundred mounted men and sekbans.”27

A particularly egregious example of soldier-brigand collaboration in these years was a direct challenge to the sultan’s mastery of his empire. Not only had the culprits in this incident failed to muster for a major military campaign aimed at rectifying the humiliating loss of Baghdad to Safavid Iran, but they were misusing their arms to make profit from human traf-ficking. An imperial order to apprehend and presumably execute the out-laws, issued in the voice of Murad IV, summed up the situation:

At present, most of my Janissaries who are stationed in the capitals of your judicial districts do not muster for my imperial campaign. And some of them go to Akkirman province to engage in trade and purchase slaves. They are of one heart and one mind with brigands. And some of them enter the homes of the reaya and try to take their wives and sons. And they seize many girls with the intention of raping them. And they set fire to the houses [of the reaya]. And they murder people. Moreover . . . . they do not muster for my imperial campaign. In particular, [when] the community of Muham-mad is united in its labor in the trenches of Baghdad, City of Peace, sacrificing body and soul, these individuals pursue only their own profit and gain and seek only [the satisfaction of ] lust and luxury.28

The “national” scope of the disaster is underlined by the dispatch of the sultan’s order to judges—the provincial nerve centers of the empire—along the western arc of the Black Sea and judges on the route from Sofia in Bulgaria to Istanbul. In other words, the dragnet mobilized all judges along two of the three military arteries that serviced Ottoman lands in Europe.

Century Revisited,” in American Historical Review 113.4 (October 2008): 1029-1099. Recent work has linked the disorders in Anatolia to the climatic disruptions of the “little ice age”; see Sam White, The Little Ice Age Crisis of the Ottoman Empire: Ecology, Climate, and Rebellion, 1550-1750 (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2008).

27 Mühimme Defteri No. 85, Order #266 ( January 6, 1631), 162. For other combina-tions of soldiers and civilians, see #4 (cavalryman and eşkıya, Gypsies) and #115 (imperial herald/agent [çavuş], and 40-50 sekban).

28 Mühimme Defteri 85, Order #103 ( January 7, 1631), 64-65.


A further challenge to Istanbul in containing disorder was another blurred distinction—that between the outlaw and “men of law and order” (ehl-i örf ), as the local representatives of government were collectively known. The problem was that brigands and officials might collaborate.29 Such was the case of Buyo, “general” of a gang of Christian brigands in Albania, who committed crimes of pure sadism—skewering out a man’s eye, cutting off a woman’s breasts, chopping up a civilian, and quartering a cavalryman—along with more mundane acts such as theft and simple murder. A special agent dispatched from Istanbul to apprehend him failed because Buyo was protected by the provincial governor’s deputy and numerous military personnel stationed in the province, some of them high-ranking.30 What profit Buyo provided his collaborators, or what ene-mies of theirs he took care of, is left to speculation. However, it is hard not to suspect that Buyo’s acts of gratuitous violence contributed to his value as an effective strong man. This and other instances of brigands harbored by Ottoman officials—and even by local townsmen and villagers, the very victims of brigandage—suggest that to dismiss violent crime as symptom-atic of socio-legal breakdown is to mask the uses of violence as a mecha-nism of local negotiation over power. It was an uphill battle for the seventeenth-century sultanate to maintain control over the countless local contests that spanned the empire.

The Question of Honor

It is rare to find explicit mention of honor in contemporary sources dealing with abduction or other acts that might appear to us as honor-laden. The concept of honor certainly existed in early modern Ottoman discourse, where it consisted principally in maintaining and defending one’s reputa-tion. Reputation was a positive attribute gained by moral conduct—a woman of virtue, a man of rectitude. When reputation was damaged, the dishonored typically did not speak of loss of honor but rather expressed outrage against the destroyer of their reputation.31 The appropriate response of persons who brought dishonor on themselves was penitence. As for the sultanate, it seldom cited honor as an attribute of the state, but when it

29 Hüseyiniklioğlu, Mühimme Defterlerine Göre Eşkıya Olayları, 261-268.30 Mühimme Defteri No. 85, Order #204 (March 14, 1631), 123-4, (baş u buğ).31 Leslie Peirce, Morality Tales: Law and Gender in the Ottoman Court of Aintab (Berke-

ley, 2003), Chapter 5 and passim.


did, it used standard vocabulary: in rewarding the vezir Mehmed Pasha in 1631 for his outstanding service in the defense of Bosnia, Murad IV urged him to continue excelling in a manner “worthy of the honor and integrity (‘ırz u namus) of my sultanate.”32

Despite infrequent lexical reference to honor, the shaming components of abduction were patently clear to everyone: the violation of sexual integ-rity and the violation of the integrity of domestic space. When the Register of Important Affairs, which recorded orders emanating from the Imperial Council, cited abduction as a crime it was typically the compound act that was criminalized in the Statute Book (parallel to that of theft): breaking into a dwelling plus seizing/taking away the victim/the goods. For females, their supreme virtue, sexual purity, was destroyed through this act. The tragedy touched men as well, who were under pressure to comply with the ancient custom of divorcing a wife who had sex even against her will with another male. Boys too suffered the dishonor of being raped, although stigma was permanent only for the willing catamite. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the threshold for a sound sexual reputation rose as the new morality reflected in law took hold.33 Parents bore the shame of failing to protect family reputation—especially the father, whom Selim’s Statute Book charged with responsibility for the conduct of his household mem-bers. The head of household was helped by the state, however, when Süley-man made the habitual sodomizing of boys a heavily penalized crime.34

The plight of parents is audible in the record of court action from the eastern Anatolian city of Harput, where the rogue cavalryman Halil and his band of men had been committing countless crimes against the local populace.35 A local strong man—perhaps the local strong man—Halil and his men were arraigned in June 1631 for seizure or destruction of homes, repeated illegal taxation, beatings, abduction, and murder. Of the numer-ous plaintiffs at court, three (an uncle and two mothers) cited the abduc-tion of boys: “they seized my brother’s son Kesbir and made him his [Halil’s] boy,” “they seized my young son,” “[they] seized my son Murad, claiming that his father owed him [Halil] some money, and they sold him.”

32 Mühimme Defteri 85, Order #632 (February 2, 1631), 383-384.33 Crawford, European Sexualities, 33 and passim.34 Heyd, Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law, 64, 103.35 Elazığ/Harput Şer‘iyye Sicili No. 181, folios 11 and 12 (Ankara, Milli Kütüphane

Başkanlığı, Microfilm 7213). I am grateful to the library staff at İSAM (Center for Islamic Research) in Istanbul for obtaining permission for me to photocopy parts of this court register.


The summary indictment singled out the worst of Halil’s many crimes, capital offences that merited execution: “he has unjustly committed four or five murders, broken into houses, abducted boys, and cruelly taken many women from their husbands, causing [the latter] to repudiate them.” The absence of these husbands from the roster of plaintiffs was probably to spare them the humiliation of verbalizing their loss for the public record.

The court action in Harput was almost certainly a preliminary to mount-ing a petition for redress to the Imperial Council in Istanbul. Consensus on Halil’s guilt, however, had been hard won. The judge’s records suggest that city leaders and factions of the local military had been reluctant to testify that Halil’s acts were indeed crimes that caused widespread suffer-ing, endangering the security of provincial life. The case of Halil appears to be another instance of a thug supported or sponsored by local power bro-kers, until it all became too much for the victims to bear. That Halil’s depredations included abduction is virtually predictable. The audacity to commit the capital(ized) crime was an unmistakable claim to dominance.

It was this play between the dishonor of the victim and the valor of the abductor that caught up the people of Istanbul during Süleyman’s 1554 campaign against Iran. During the long era of Ottoman conquest, the sultans were successful challengers of the political status quo, hence the literary celebration of the first sultan’s debut in an abduction contest. Gradually, however, active royal embodiment of heroic valor was put aside as unbecoming to a modernizing polity, and the performance of imperial heroism assigned to top-ranking delegates of sultanic authority. But the sultanate could hardly maintain a monopoly on abduction. After all, it permitted its soldiers liberal taking of war prisoners, an entitlement with which soldier-brigands rewarded themselves in the form of abductees. Moreover, as the Ottoman regime became a hegemon across its domains, there emerged a palpable sense of “regional honor,” especially perhaps in Anatolia. Already in 1522, Süleyman’s execution of the last prince of Dulkadir, a principality in southeastern Anatolia that had been ally then vassal of the sultanate, gave rise to a popular saying, “the Ottoman is the oppressor of the brave” (Osmanlı yiğit basandır).36

A century later this sentiment emerged full blown in the figure of Köroğlu, “son of the blind man.” A Robin Hood-like good outlaw, Köroğlu was the celebrated subject of popular tales set in northwestern Anatolia.37

36 Refet Yinanç, Dukadir Beyliği (Ankara, 1989), 105.37 Many versions of Köroğlu tales can be found in Caucasian and other Turkic lan-

guages, and the Anatolian cycle itself has numerous variations. The classic study is Pertev


The fact that his legend emerged in the early seventeenth-century heyday of brigandage prompts questions about the honorable uses of violence and resistance—namely, whether the “crime” of the abductor-outlaw might be seen as a justifiable response to misgovernment. What pushes Köroğlu into a life of brigandage is the unjust blinding of his father by the man to whom he served as equerry—an act that casts father and son into poverty. The anti-hero of injustice is usually Bolu Bey, the governor of Bolu, a forested mountain region northwest of Ankara; sometimes however it is the Otto-man sultan (who in any case is ultimately responsible for his governors’ conduct). Certainly Köroğlu is rendered more admirable than the authori-ties who blinded a man who served them.

Predictably, the legends conspicuously recount Köroğlu’s abductions. Love and longing drive his kidnapping of Ayvaz, the son of a butcher. He also abducts one or more women, usually daughters of royalty. Köroğlu is an honorable abductor who does not abuse his victims; indeed, he is humanized by his abductions—he addresses eloquent poetry to his cap-tives. Over the centuries Köroğlu’s story was euphemized—for example, it is because his barren wife longs for a son that he abducts the boy—but it is important to note that the abductions were not erased from the legend. Today Köroğlu is commonly remembered in Turkey as a hero who fought for justice for the poor—but not as an abductor. Balladeers sing of him.38

The idea of the sultan as enactor of national valor had not entirely disap-peared, however. Breaking with the style of the sedentary palace sovereign, Murad IV had a brief but spectacular military career reminiscent of his illustrious forebears. Murad’s outsized physical heroism was perhaps inspired by the debilitating combination of the rash of regional strongmen and the stunning loss of territory in Iraq and the Caucasus to the redoubt-able Safavid monarch Shah Abbas. The first decade of the young sultan’s reign was marked by persistent political unrest and military failure. By the summer of 1632, however, Murad finally was able to assert control over his unruly government. By the end of his reign he had personally led his armies to Ottoman dominance in the east, and he had reestablished domestic order through a crackdown of draconian proportions. Moreover, Murad’s performance as warrior sultan helped to restore the honor of sultanate in

Naili Boratav, Köroğlu Destanı (Istanbul, 1931). See also Nurettin Albayrak, “Köroğlu,” Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi (Ankara, 2002), 26.268-270; Albayrak’s bibliog-raphy includes recent studies.

38 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDItvvbRtts&feature=related


Anatolia: the long marches from Istanbul to Yerevan (1635) and Baghdad (1638), and especially the victorious return marches to the capital were occasions to impress local populations with the might of their ruler. What more Murad might have done had he not died in 1640 at the age of 29 is one of those historical imponderables.

The body of the king still counted. Murad, literally a strong man, culti-vated the profile of the yiğit, the valiant youth. The age of royal abduction now eclipsed, the sultan’s sexual prowess had for its audience the courtiers of the royal palace. Evliya Çelebi, international traveler, intimate of the court, and (here) jester related the following incident:

One day the sultan emerged from the harem bath glowing with perspiration. As he entered the privy chamber he met one and all with greetings from the bath, and every-one responded with “Good health!” “My sovereign,” said I, “now you are clean as a whistle. I’m sure you won’t want to get oiled for wrestling today. You have already indulged in some exhausting wrestling-matches inside the harem, and I’m sure you haven’t the strength to meet such opponents as Hattat and Melek.” “Haven’t the strength, you say? Just watch!” He seized me by the belt just as an eagle seizes its prey, lifted me up and spun me around his head like a falconer’s lure or like a children’s top. “My sovereign,” I cried, “please don’t let me fall!” “Just hold on tight!” he replied. I kept on wailing and praying to God not to let me go, and he kept on twirling me like a mace. “My sovereign,” I cried, “I’m getting nauseous from spinning about. I’m going to throw up, or even something worse, all over your royal self!” At this he almost died laughing, and rewarded me with 48 gold pieces.39

No doubt such stories spread among a populace starved of satisfying news of their sovereign. Murad was a throwback, the last heroic public victor. The dramas of his dominance both within the palace and across a good portion of his empire helped to restore the stature of the sultanate and pave the way for the succession of powerful grand vezirs that would take charge of the empire in 1656. Looking back on this period, the early eighteenth-century historian Mustafa Naima commented:

In Anatolia and other regions, sedition and disorder became manifest, and brigands began to cause trouble everywhere. . . . Indeed, [even] the sultan’s men became increas-ingly emboldened and undisciplinable in those days. . . . The voice of command lost its force and the people of the world were grieved. . . . Whenever dominion is not

39 Quoted in Robert Dankoff, An Ottoman Mentality: The World of Evliya Çelebi (Leiden, 2006); the translation is Dankoff’s.


confined to an absolute sovereign and an all-powerful ruler who settles and decides affairs, usurpation of rightful authority occurs. Divine order has always been thus.40

But Murad’s bloody path to the “absolute sovereignty” desired by Naima was strewn with ambiguities regarding violence and honor. His success in restoring imperial control was necessarily opportunistic: the sultan par-doned and even rewarded a rebel governor who had massacred scores of Janissaries, while he executed the popular commander who had captured the rebel on the charge of a failed siege in the long war to retake Baghdad. The contest over honor was ultimately unresolvable.

40 Mustafa Naima, Târih-i Na‘îmâ, ed. Mehmet İpşirli (Ankara, 2007), 2.499. It would not have been lost on Naima’s readers that the indivisibility of sovereign authority here mirrored the indivisibility of Allah, prime tenet of Islamic belief.

Abduction with (dis)honor: Sovereigns, brigands, and heroes in the Ottoman world

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