Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews. Mark Mazower
Spaniards etc., Catholics, Huguenots and infidels’ he had sent on to Marseilles. The Alsace man redeemed by another French consul in 1792, or the deserter who fled his master and made his way to Cavalla were among the dozens of fortunate individuals who were thus returned to Christendom many years after failed campaigns had first brought them to the Ottoman lands.26
The fog of war enshrouded this human traffic in a penumbra of legal uncertainty. Two Hungarians sold in the Larissa market in 1721 had to be released on the emperor’s orders after it turned out that they were not captured in battle but had merely been seized by some enterprising janissaries while about their master’s business. Moreover, peace treaties often stipulated that prisoners of war were not to be sold. ‘I learned ten days ago that in Larissa there are two Venetians, prisoners of some Albanians, who are negotiating their sale,’ writes the Venetian consul in 1739. ‘I immediately sent a trustworthy man there to the kadi with a letter informing him that they are Venetians and that according to the terms of the peace they cannot be sold as slaves. The kadi read the letter, imprisoned the Albanians and gave up the two men into my care.’
But because so many of the sultan’s troops saw the acquisition of slaves as their right, official orders were often ignored and the problem of illegal enslavement persisted, complicating efforts by the Ottoman state to organize prisoner exchanges. After the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–74, with a large number of Ottoman troops in Russian captivity, the sultan ruled that all Russian prisoners still in Ottoman hands should be released. Only those ‘Muslims willingly staying in Russia and embracing Christianity’ and ‘those Christians willingly embracing Islam in My supreme empire’ were to be exempt. One year on, however, few of the ‘Russians, Poles, Moldavians, Vlachs and Moreotes’ in Turkish hands had been liberated. The sultan accused Turks and Jews in Salonica of holding on to their captives out of sheer greed, and warned them that until they handed them back, the religious obligation to free ‘brothers of the faith’ in Russian hands remained unfulfilled. As in so many areas of eighteenth-century life, what the sultan ordered and what actually happened were two quite different things.27
The traffic in bodies formed part of the Mediterranean economy until late into the nineteenth century. During the long and complex struggle between Muslim and Catholic powers all sides bought and sold slaves, and the markets of the Barbary coast had their counterparts in the little-studied dealers of Christendom. Salonica’s own inhabitants had been sold into slavery after 1430, but as the Ottoman city grew and flourished, its new residents – Christians, Jews and Muslims – all bought slaves for domestic use, many of whom settled there in their turn. Poland, Ukraine, Georgia and Circassia, the Sudan and north Africa were the main sources of supply, and slaves from all these regions were to be found there. We do not know where its slave market was located but wars kept it well-stocked. Large numbers of Christian women and children were sold off in 1715, after the Venetian campaign, and again in 1737 after the Habsburg invasion.28
This was not, as in the Americas, a cheap route to the plantation economy, but rather a feature of the domestic household life of the well-to-do in an empire where slaves had until very recently occupied some of the highest positions in the state. In Salonica, slaves cost far more than domestic servants, especially if the latter were children; there is no evidence for their being used as cheap labour en masse in public works in the way that occurred in north Africa. Some accumulated money of their own, enabling them to buy their way out of service. Others were freed with a legacy on their master’s death. Probably worst off were those who had fled their employer’s service, or were released from the galleys with no money to support them: such individuals eked out a very precarious existence on the margins of society, joining the beggars, gypsies and wandering dervishes at one of the city’s half a dozen soup kitchens. Groups of African beggars roamed around the city and its hinterland, and these were almost certainly manumitted slaves, banding together for protection. Those on their own, in particular women, were frequently kidnapped and sold as slaves by dealers. This happened, for instance, to Amina bint Abdullah, a convert from Christianity, despite the fact that ‘she did not have anything to do with slavery in her genealogy’.29
What worried non-Muslims was not so much the idea of slavery itself – for this they were familiar with – as the prospect that enslavement might lead to conversion and the loss of Christian [or Jewish] souls. ‘Various Turks have come here,’ reports the Venetian consul in June 1770, following unsuccessful Greek uprisings in the islands and on the mainland, ‘with twenty of those children, male and female, and they sell them to other Turks, who make little Turks [tourkakia] of them.’ The Jesuits and Jews had organizations devoted to redeeming slaves who were of their faith. Other Christians handled matters more informally. In the 1720s, for instance, a female Ukrainian slave who had been badly treated by her captors was brought to Salonica to be sold. She had some hidden savings and sought help in arranging a ransom, or at least a Christian buyer, ‘so that she does not fall into the hands of a Turk’. Because the woman belonged to the Orthodox rite, some of the town’s European merchants questioned whether, being Catholics, they should be involved and proposed that ‘Mikalis, the Greek physician’ should take responsibility, especially since he knew that ‘she can sew and embroider excellently and weave and can cook in the Turkish style very well.’ But Mikalis did not want to pay the asking price, and anyway the Greeks had a reputation for being more reluctant than the Turks to manumit their slaves, ‘especially when the slaves are Polish or Kazak or of any different nation.’ The Catholic Father Superior found a solution by organizing a lottery among the French merchants in the city: within three days he had raised the money and arranged for the woman to be bought and given to the winner. The sale was completed and the necessary deed of sale was signed by the local customs officer, handed over with the woman herself. She was lodged in a French-owned house ‘until she learns the catechism and other mysteries of the Christian confession, which the priest promised to teach her in Turkish, because [she] speaks only Turkish and Russian.’ She had not been freed, but her soul at least was safe.30
Captives of a different kind, fewer in number but equally reliable indicators of far-off troubles were the distinguished guests whom the authorities in Istanbul sent to Salonica as political exiles. The city provided a suitable home where they could live in some style, hunt if they wished and hold court at official expense, remaining all the while under the watchful eye of the authorities. At a time when many were living on the margins, they were treated extremely well. We still have the list of foods provided for Mirza Safi, a Persian pretender, when he was held there in 1731. It includes ‘bread, rice, clarified butter, yoghurt, cumin, sugar, starch, boiled grape-juice, clove, cinnamon, chicken, eggs, almonds, pistachios, pepper, saffron, coffee, coriander, olive oil, flour, honey, bees-wax, grapes, salt, chick peas, vinegar, onions, lemon-juice, black cumin, chestnuts, quinces, tobacco (from Shiraz), soap, meat, barley, straw and vegetables’ – a respectable diet by any standards.31
Patriarchs and grand viziers were parked there when their careers suffered eclipse. Sultan Abdul Hamid II himself was deposed by the Young Turks in 1909 and sent into gilded captivity. Hungarian aristocrats passed through, as did the Pole Jan Potocki, the multi-talented author of that remarkable novel, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, who blew his brains out with a silver bullet a few years later. Following the suppression of the Wahhabi uprising in 1814, the Sherif of Mecca arrived with an entourage of forty and was treated with the greatest honour: he lasted a few years before succumbing to the plague. His son and successor, Abdul Muttalib – ‘a grand old man of sixty, tall, but slender, with the grand manner, distinguished in every way, of very brown colour, almost black, fine skin, a long blue robe, a Kashmir turban’ – eventually followed in his father’s footsteps and even erected a domed tomb in his father’s memory which survived into the early twentieth century.32
Among all these, however, the man who stayed the longest and left the most important record of his experiences was a little-known