Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History
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Muslim view of marriage as a mere contract, by the monogamy that prevailed
among Muslims, and by the legal rights of the Christian wife, to whom a mehr
was also provided. In 1718, the late Mustafa, a dweller in the Istanbul Kapusu
mahalle of Vidin, left behind as heirs the infants Fatime and Emine. However, his
Christian wife Anka had a claim arising from her mehr-i müeccel (in the amount
of 2000 akçe), as well as from a debt owed to her by her late husband (47 kuruş)
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that was confirmed by two Muslims. For these reasons, the house of the deceased
was sold, and Anka’s claims were paid off.108
Naturally, the question arises as to what may have motivated such marriages.
Folklore, as well as some Christian narratives in the Bulgarian language (and part
of the historiography based upon them), have created a belief in the exceptional
role played by direct coercion on the part of Muslim men with respect to Christian
women. However, we must not forget that both these sources had ideological
aims.109 Legal marriages involving a Muslim man and a Christian woman occur
in all types of historical sources. We cannot consider all these mixed marriages to
be the result of a direct brutal intervention by the official institutions, although a
Muslim man probably could hope to be favorably treated if he were to decide to
seduce, persuade, or force his chosen woman into marrying him. Official Ottoman
documents, however, demonstrate a clear distinction between cases where a
Muslim man and a Christian woman had normal marital relations, even marital
problems, and cases of outright abuse (including sexual abuse) of Christian and
Muslim women. The janissary Osman Beşe kidnapped Petkana, wife of Ilia. He
kept her in his house for an entire year, trying to persuade her to divorce her
husband. Ilia brought suit and Osman was forced to bring Petkana to court and
return her to her husband. Petkana, in turn, sued Osman, demanding the return of
her possessions that he had kept.110
Among the reasons for these marriages, we might point to the lack of an
adequate social security net for the most underprivileged Christian women,
which may have been an incentive for some to marry a Muslim. This was also the
only way a Christian woman could improve her standing, and the standing of her
children, within the Ottoman social structure. Natural human attraction should
not, of course, be underestimated either. After all, it was attraction that made a
Muslim man prefer a particular Christian woman to one of his own creed, and
the reverse may surely have held as well. Another factor was the desire of many
converts to Islam to marry a woman of their own original ethnic background.111
A key issue in the legal regulation of mixed marriages was the creed of the
children: they could only be Muslims. For that reason, while forbidding Muslim
women to marry or have intimate relations with Christians, Shari‘a law permitted
Muslim men to marry non-Muslim women whose children could, in practice,
only be brought up as Muslims. This is confirmed by available documents from
Rumeli.
A Christian woman could not inherit from a Muslim, and her rights would
be transferred to her children. The heirs of Ahmed, son of İbrahim, from the
mahalle Gökçe Baba in Vidin, were his infant sons Mehmed and Hüseyin and his
daughter Hanife. His wife, the widow Ivana, a Christian, was obviously pregnant.
According to the opinion of the respected men and the müftü s, only her child soon
to be born (and not the Christian mother) could obtain a share of the inheritance.
A partition of the estate was made on 10 October 1698. Marginal annotations on
the document, and some crossing-outs, reveal the dire situation in which Ivana
found herself, and the solution she came up with. The infant Hüseyin also died,
ivanova, marital ProBlems of Christian Women
181
and only his brother Mehmed and sister Hanife were recognized as his heirs—
Hüseyin’s mother Ivana once again being left out of the inheritance. She then
converted to Islam and took the name Fatime; following that, on 26 October 1698,
she was acknowledged to be an heiress of her son. In the meantime, while Ivana
was still Christian, the court had appointed a certain Mustafa, son of Hüseyin,
as guardian of the inheritance left to the juvenile children and the one soon to
be born. That part of the document is crossed out, and on 31 October 1698 (by
which time Hüseyin had died and Ivana had become Fatime), she asked the court
to provide her with an allowance from the inheritance of her infant children. The
court granted her 1 para per diem per child, and gave permission [ izin] to the
mother to spend the sum so defined for the children—and, in case of need, to
borrow additional sums. To the document thus composed, an additional bit of text
was added in the upper margin, containing a permission also in the name of the
guardian Mustafa Beşe, despite the fact that the document had been issued upon
a motion by the mother.112
***
My primary goal in this study has been to reveal the legal and institutional
options that were available to Christian women when dealing with their marital
problems, and I have selected and structured the material accordingly. For this
reason, many issues related to marriage and divorce were left out of this text,
whose primary focus is empirical material from the sicil s. The analysis is aimed
at circumstantiating generally familiar features of Ottoman court practices by
supplying anecdotal evidence concerning a particular period and region.
There is little passion in the material under review. More personal elements
such as love and hatred left traces in the documents of Orthodox institutions.
Long before the nineteenth century—as early as the twelfth—we read in a record
of the Ohrid Archbishopric that Ana from Prespa had, after a brief marriage to
Niko, conceived a hatred for him. She “was escaping to other people and places”
in order to avoid meeting him, even though “he was looking for her and was
begging her to come back.” She declared before the archbishop of Ohrid that
if she was not allowed to divorce, she would “jump off a rock, or drown, or
strangle herself.”113 Because the bishop’s court carefully scrutinized the personal
motives of the parties, it would sometimes hear—and, in the nineteenth century,
record—the full range of emotions expressed by the spouses. The wife could
describe her husband’s insults and indignation, and he could state his complaints
about her infidelity.
Kadı records, on the other hand, are dry and dispassionate. Nevertheless, from
time to time one can get glimpses of the emotions involved: husbands who wished
to make their wives return home, or wives who wanted to marry someone else.
Between the lines of some of the sicil documents cited here, love shows through
as an important factor. Along with powerful financial considerations and changes
in women’s status within the family, love affected the slow transformation of
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
marriage—from a relationship be
tween two families, into one between a man
and a woman; and from a material contract into a knot of social relations and
emotions.114 This trend was realized, among other ways, through the slow
expansion of the perimeter of institutionalized marriage and divorce, which was
of particular import for the women. Through the entire period under study, these
marriages and divorces were made possible thanks in large part to the court of
the kadı.
Studies on the status of women in the Islamic world and the Ottoman
Empire115 show that women often had to turn to courts to seek remedy for their
economic interests, because of their weaker position in society. When taking part
in transactions involving property, they were usually sellers rather then buyers.
According to researchers focusing on family relations, women in the Ottoman
empire were extremely dependent on men.116 At the same time, however, women
had inheritance rights that were enforced effectively, and had access to legal
protection and utilized the available opportunities to obtain a divorce. The
Ottoman kadı courts treated Christian women as they treated Muslim women, and
the marital status of the wife under Orthodox canon law itself was not as unequal
as it was in the Catholic tradition.117 These facts contradict received ideas about
the unchallenged domination of patriarchal practices in matrimony. Institutional
marriage, which was much more favorable to women than informal practices, was
a reality in the Rumeli provinces of the Ottoman Empire.118 However, important
questions remain as to how widespread the practice of institutional marriage
actually was, and what was the proportion of its incidence in comparison with
persisting informal and much more patriarchal practices under customary law.119
As noted earlier, the sources cited here have their limitations, and these curtail
our direct knowledge of the exact percentage of the women who actually had
access to institutionalized marriage and divorce. The opinions and views of
contemporaries could perhaps aid us in compensating for this deficiency. To that
end, let us return to the very beginning of the article, and to the claims of the poor
and isolated Pavlikian heretic villagers, which demonstrate that not just the elite
but even people of the most modest and marginalized standing were aware of the
different remedies and opportunities available in dealing with marital problems.
Notes
1. Milev 1914: 150.
2. My past work focuses primarily on Muslim women and their marriage
problems: S. Ivanova 1996a, 1998, 2002. On the marriage problems of both
Christians and Muslims, see also S. Ivanova 1996b, 1999a, 2001a.
3. S. Georgieva 1999: 245–86; Gradeva 2004a: 181–89; Grozdanova and
Andreev 1998; M. Todorova 1993; O. Todorova 1991, 1992, 1996a, 1996b,
2001, 2003, 2004.
4. Agmon, 1996; Göçek and Baer 1997; Çiçek 1992; Gerber 1980; Gradeva
2004a; Imber 1997a; Jennings 1995, 1975; Layish 1991; Marcus 1989: 202–
208; Matkovski 1973; Meriwether 1999; Peirce 2003: 129–34, 185–94, 351–
ivanova, marital ProBlems of Christian Women
183
74; Reindl-Kiel 1999; Tucker 1985, 1988; Würth 1995; Ze’evi 1995, 1996:
173–85; see also the references in note 2.
5. O. Todorova 1989; Angelov and Andreev 1974; Levin 1991: 32–46;
Pantazopoulos 1967: 45–51. I have used some documents of Church institutions
from the nineteenth century, for which bibliographical information is included
at the relevant places.
6. The sicil quoted in this paper is from the collection of the Oriental Department
of the National Library St St. Cyril and Methodius (hereafter, OrO; on this
collection, see S. Ivanova 2000), as well as some published kadı sicilleri cases
from Manastır (Bitola in Macedonia), which was part of the autocephalous
Ohrid Archbichopric diocese. I have used some of the documents cited in
this paper in earlier publications (see note 2 above), and some appeared in
works by Olga Todorova and Rositsa Gradeva (see note 3 above). Here, I
shall only provide the call number of the original documents, and shall include
information on the publications only for those quoted in extenso.
7. Imber 1997a: x–xi and passim; see also note 4 above.
8. Baltacı 1987; İnalcık 1953–54; Jennings 1978; Mandaville 1966; Peirce 1998;
Rafeq 1979; Seng 1991: 308; Ze’evi, 1998.
9. R. Ivanova 1984.
10. Andreev
1965; Angelov and Andreev 1974; Levin 1991; Pavlov 1897: 170,
326, 367–70; Snegarov 1926: 28–31; Hristodulova 1976, 1981; Shaguna
1872; S. Georgiev 1990, 2003, 2002.
11. Andreev
1956: 6, 1979; Baldzhiev 1891: 189; Bobchev 1923, 1896; Marinov
1892: 2: 185, 220, 3: 153, 149–50; Papastathis 1974: 189–96.
12. Andreev
1954; Baldzhiev 1891: 187; Blagoevich 1974: 9–13; Papadopullos
1967: 205; Pantazopoulos 1967: 46, 107–108; O. Todorova 1997: 162–77.
13. Petrushevskii
1966: 175; Serebriakova 1979; Anderson 1950: 2; Meron 1969:
99–100; el-Nahal 1979: 45; Imber 1997a: 165–83; Schacht 1979: 161.
14. V
agabov 1968: 39; Galabov 1924: 50–64; Cin 1974; Fyzee 1974: 90–98;
Verma 1971; Imber 1997b, 1997a: 175–78; Ortaylı 1985: 127–29.
15. S.
Ivanova 1998: 56–57. On the practice of marriage contracting before a
Shari‘a court and in compliance with Shari‘a requirements in the central
parts of Rumeli, see the following cases from the sixteenth century: one
marriage between Christians and one between Muslims in a Sofia sicil of
1550—unfortunately the documents were probably destroyed during World
War II, but they have been published in annotated form (Galabov and Duda
1960: docs. 65 and 139). The following terms were used in seventeenth and
eighteenth century documents: taht-ı nikâhında olup, beni tezvic idüp, akd-
ı nikâh-ı şer’i etmek (OrO, S8, p. 47, doc. I; S8, p. 69, doc. II, R51, f. 1-a,
doc. II). Clearly the agreement of mehr was on obligatory practice, since it
is mentioned in all inheritance lists of deceased Muslims. Similar data about
contracting marriage according to the Shari‘a also appear in the Ankara
sicil s; see Ongan 1974; also el-Nahal 1979: 44–45; Imber 1997b: 165–83. On
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
marriage contracts and especially on the registration of marriages of Muslims
in the Balkans, see Mujic 1987.
16. ОrО, S12, p. 1
11, doc. III.
17. ОrО, R51, p. 34-а, doc. I. See also
Aydın 1984: 8–9.
18. Imber
1997a: 165. Some documents stated very definitively that the marriage
contract had been concluded in court. Claiming her mehr through legal action,
the widow Havva, daughter of Ahmed Bey, produced eyewitnesses who had
been present at the time of the conclusion of her marriage in court, to testify
to the sum of 8000 akçe as mehr. (OrO, S8, p. 69, doc. II.)
19. ОrО, R51, f. 1-а, doc. II.
20. ОrО, S1bis, p. 269, doc. I.
21. A
ydın 1984: 8–9.
22. Fetva s and ferman s decree that the renewal of ma
rriage should follow an
act of repentance. For example, in his reply to the question “What does the
Shari‘a provide against those who … refuse to take part in the fight against
bandits in the surrounding villages?” Şeyh Mehmed Sadaki said: “It has been
established by indubitable texts that war is a religious duty. Those who object
to this should renew their faith and marriage.” ( Turski dokumenti 1961: 1: 53;
Turski dokumenti 1969: 3: 193.)
23. ОrО, S149, p. 26-b, doc. II.
24. S. Ivanova 1999a: 165.
25. In
some cases they put nikâh akçesi—see ОrО, S14, f. 19-b, doc. I. On the
value of the mehr in the region under consideration, see O. Todorova 2004:
127–30.
26. Galabov
1924: 52, 59; Petrushevskii 1966: 175; Imber 1997a: 175–78;
S. Ivanova 1992: 80.
27. S.
Ivanova 1992: 80. For example, the Sofia sicil S12 from 1681–87 contains
239 description of the inheritances of Muslims (132 men and 98 women) and
27 of non-Muslims. We come across 5 Muslims with two wives, and one with
three. (See also OrO, R5, f. 3-, doc. 2; S8, p. 49, doc. I; R50, f. 62-a, doc. II;
R53, f. 3-a, doc. V.) Along with Lady Montagu’s popular statements, the same
conclusions have been reached on the basis of legal documents; see Gerber
1988: 232; Ortaylı 1982a: 37. Nevertheless, we should keep in mind that this
was the pre-modern period and the epoch of regionalism. Still in Rumeli—but
in Sarajevo—polygamy seems to have been quite widespread according to the
narrative of one local imam: see Bašeskija 1987.
28. ОrО, S149, f. 26-а, doc. III.
29. Schacht 1979: 164–65; Imber 1997a: 197–207.
30. Galabov 1924: 60–61; el-Nahal 1979: 81.
31. ОrО, S149, f. 9-b, doc. I.
32. ОrО,
S309, p. 90, doc. III, published in Turski izvori 1971: 2: 169–70. A
similar case was registered in a sicil from the town of Silistra. The vekil of
Zübeyde Hatun, daughter of Mustafa Ağa, declared that she and her husband