The Black Sea

by Charles King

  “The Source of All the Seas”

  The sultan often styled himself the “ruler of the two seas”—the Black Sea and the Aegean—and it is not difficult to understand the Ottoman fixation on commanding the passage between them. Holding the Straits had been one of the keys to the seizure of Constantinople. It remained the quintessential element in the security of the new Ottoman capital after the conquest. It also ensured easy travel between the two major components of the Ottoman state; western and central Anatolia on the one hand, the southern Balkans and the Aegean littoral on the other. Most importantly, the sea was critical to the Ottoman economy. Products from the north fed the growing metropolis. When Mehmet II entered Constantinople in 1453, he found a city virtually deserted. By the sixteenth century, the population had grown to perhaps 700,000, making Istanbul the largest city in all of Europe at the time.4 That spectacular increase owed much to the deliveries of foodstuffs, especially wheat and salt, from the northern shore.

  For all these reasons, the Black Sea held a particular place in the Ottoman imagination. It was considered a distinct region of the sultan’s domain, bounded on the south by the Anatolian heartland and on the north by the Dasht-i Qipchaq, the open “Kipchak Steppe,”5 which served as a buffer between the sea and the Poles and Muscovites to the north. In 1538 the Ottomans formally annexed the last piece of the littoral, the Bujak district lying between the Prut, Danube, and Dnestr rivers, and from that point the entire coastline was integrated into the well-guarded dominions of the House of Osman.

  The western coast from the Bosphorus around to the Dnestr river, the Crimean ports and the coastal areas that connected them, and the straits of Kerch became sancaks, or sub-provinces, governed by appointed administrators. The southern coast was likewise divided into provincial administrations. The Caucasus coast, although never a directly administered district, was commanded by garrisons inside fortified ports. Areas farther inland were either directly administered or paid tribute to the sultan. Piracy, which remained a perplexing problem in the Mediterranean, seems to have been wiped out by the late 1400s, allowing cross-sea commerce to flourish.6 Evliya Çelebi, the greatest of Ottoman travelers, spent time in nearly every corner of the Ottoman world, but he was convinced that the real center of the empire’s strength lay in its command of the Black Sea. “But if the truth of the matter is looked at,” he wrote in his Seyahatname, or Record of Travels, “the source of all the seas is the Black Sea.”7

  The wealth that the Ottoman state extracted from the coasts enhanced this image of the sea as the heart of the empire’s maritime power. The Byzantine trade routes that had been controlled by the Italians remained in place even under the Ottomans, although with some important changes. Local merchants—Orthodox Christians, Armenians, Jews—who had flocked to the port cities under the Byzantines had long resented the Italian monopoly on commerce. The Ottomans, mindful of the lessons of Byzantine decline, were likewise eager to break the stranglehold of the “Franks,” as Catholic Europeans were generally known. These twin interests came together in the late fifteenth century. Native merchants, of whatever religion, probably welcomed the arrival of the Ottomans as restorers of the system that had flourished under the Byzantines before the arrival of the interloping Italians. Many Byzantine citizens had no doubt benefited from the Italian domination of commerce; as in any system, political and economic elites found ways to accommodate themselves to the new realities and ensure that they made money. But with the coming of the Ottomans, perspicacious merchants saw an opportunity to undo a system that had been in place for two centuries and to make their own preferential deals with the new sovereign power.8 That logic went even further for inland powers, such as the Tatar khans of Crimea or the princes of Moldova, who had often attempted, unsuccessfully, to exert their own control over the port cities. They, too, saw in the Ottomans a useful counterweight to the dominance of the Italians and, moreover, a helpful ally against northern powers such as Poland, Hungary, and Muscovy.

  Soon after the conquest, the fortifications around port cities were dismantled and the Italian consuls thrown out of office. The autonomy of the old Genoese and Venetian communities, including the administrative center at Pera, was ended. Ottoman tax inspectors were put in place and trade redirected; the freewheeling commerce of individual merchants gave way to the demands of provisioning and enriching the imperial city. Individual Italians remained on the scene, and some in time even converted to Islam. Such conversions, along with immigration from Anatolia and the Balkans, led to a growth in the Muslim component of the populations. Almost half of Caffa’s population was Muslim in the census of 1542, up from less than a quarter a few decades earlier.9

  Many of the old trade connections that had prospered under the Italians now became dominated by other classes of merchants, but business remained vigorous. Cotton cloth from looms in Anatolia was transported from Sinop across the sea to Caffa and from there north to Russia and Poland; merchants returned with woolen cloth from western Europe or precious furs from the Russian north. Animal hides from the vast cattle herds and sheep flocks along the northwest coat, in the fertile pasturelands between the Danube and Dnepr rivers, came south to Anatolia, while pepper and other spices followed these routes to Hungary and Poland and on to the rest of Europe. The famous butter of Caffa, much prized in Istanbul, was packed for transport across the sea.

  Ottoman tax authorities compiled registers of commercial transactions in the Black Sea ports, and those that have survived provide a vivid snapshot of the diversity of commerce in the early Ottoman period. In Caffa of the 1480s, for example, the fact that a new political elite was now in control seems to have done little to dampen the vibrancy of trade or the diversity of traders. Lorenc, a “Frankish” captain from Tana, was recorded as carrying a cargo of dried fish and cups. A captain Haracci-oglu, probably a Turkic Muslim, sailed from Trabzon to Caffa with a company of Orthodox merchants on board; their wares included cotton goods, wine, and arak, the anise liqueur favored throughout the Near and Middle East. Ali Rayis, a Turkoman from Samsun, transported furs. Other ships carried a remarkable array of goods: cotton, flax, and hemp; wheat, millet, and rice; olives, hazelnuts, walnuts; skins and hides of fox, marten, sheep, and cows; opium and beeswax; and, of course, silk.10

  As under the Byzantines, Caffa occupied a central place in the Ottoman administration of the northern coast and in the integrated commerce of the entire Black Sea. Its superb harbor and port facilities made it an easy outlet for goods from the north and the natural partner of Sinop and Trabzon across the water. By the middle of the sixteenth century, it was home to perhaps 16,000 people, placing it just below such major imperial centers as Aleppo, Damascus, and Salonika.11 Its important status earned the city the popular epithet of küçük İstanbul, little Istanbul.

  But the bundles of cotton cloth and stacks of cattle hides piled along the quay were insignificant compared to the most profitable good trafficked there. As any traveler to Caffa during the Ottoman centuries would have discovered, the real source of that city’s wealth, and of the Black Sea ports in general, was the trade in people.

  “To Constantinople—to be Sold!”

  The northern and eastern coasts had long been important suppliers of slave labor, even in antiquity.12 Many ancient authors mention the trade in slaves in the Greek cities and emporia, and Athenian comedies included slave characters whose names gave away their Black Sea origins: “Thratta,” a feminine form of the word for Thracian; “Getas” and “Davos,” clearly of Geto-Dacian provenance.13 Under the Byzantines, much of the wealth of Italian merchants came from their serving as middlemen in the movement of slaves from the northern and eastern coasts to Byzantium and then on to western Europe. The Black Death had caused a severe labor shortage in Europe, and merchants were eager to meet the demand for household servants and agricultural laborers. Although the enslavement of Christians was frowned upon by the pope, Catholic merchants were given license to buy their fellow Christians as a way of prev
enting their falling into the hands of infidel Muslims. Visiting in the early 1400s, several decades before the fall of Constantinople, the Spanish traveler Pero Tafur found the slave trade in Caffa to be the city’s biggest business and one with a global reach. “In this city they sell more slaves, both male and female, than anywhere else in the world,” he wrote. “The Sultan of Egypt has his agents here, and they buy the slaves and send them to Cairo.” Tafur even took away clear evidence of the booming commerce in people: a man, two women, and their children, whom he brought back with him to Cordoba.14

  The slave trade accelerated under the Ottomans, who instituted a system of taxation to regulate it. Slaves were by far the most significant single source of revenue on the Black Sea littoral. In the sixteenth century, the tax on slave sales accounted for 29 percent of total revenues coming to the Ottoman treasury from Crimean ports.15 The average sale price was between twenty and forty gold pieces, enough for the living expenses of an adult for two or three years. From 1500 to 1650, the annual slave population trafficked via the Black Sea from Poland, the Russian lands, and the Caucasus probably reached over 10,000 people per year16—a small figure compared to the forced movement of people from west Africa to the Americas, but still the greatest volume of “white” slavery in the world.

  As with any form of commerce, the slave trade was driven by both supply and demand—a supply of humans taken in war and in raids on sedentary populations in the forest zone north of the Black Sea steppe and in the Caucasus mountains, and a demand for servants and laborers in the Ottoman empire and Europe. Islamic law recognized only transmission of slave status from an enslaved parent to a child and capture in battle as legitimate routes to servitude.17 Hereditary slavery was actually rare under the Ottomans, but war provided a steady supply of prisoners, who were either sent to slave markets or enrolled in the imperial corps of elite soldiers, the Janissaries. When the Ottoman army conquered the fortress of Maurocastro in 1484, some 2,000 prisoners were sent as gifts to the khan of Crimea, 3,000 boys were made Janissaries, and another 2,000 girls were delivered to the slave markets and harems of the imperial capital.18 An equally important supply of slaves came from raids on villages lying north of the Eurasian steppe, along the edges of Poland and Muscovy, as well as in the uplands of the Caucasus. The Crimean khan and the nomadic Nogay Tatars, both vassals of the sultan, derived considerable revenue from the kidnapping and sale of Christian peasants. It is no exaggeration to say that, until the eighteenth century, the entire economy of Crimea, much of the northern steppe, and the Caucasus uplands rested on the commerce in people.19 When Evliya Çelebi visited the northeast coast, he noted down several useful phrases in the local language that any future traveler might need to know. “Bring a girl” was one. “I found no girl, but I found a boy” was another.20

  The supply of slaves from these sources fulfilled a lively demand. Owning slaves was a mark of social prestige, and households measured their wealth and status in part by how many slaves they were able to maintain. Most slaves were used as domestic servants; female slaves also served as wives or in the harems of the wealthy. Some engaged in a variety of other work, as agricultural laborers, craftsmen, and even mercantile assistants. Slaves who were taken or purchased by agents of the Ottoman state often wound up in military service, as infantry in the Janissary corps or as rowers on galleys. (The latter might, in turn, find themselves serving in the same capacity on French or Italian ships in the Mediterranean if they were captured in war.)

  There was sometimes also a double demand equation at work in the Black Sea slave trade. Not only was there a desire for slave labor on the part of potential buyers, but there also seems to have been a willingness by some potential slaves to be bought. As late as the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, numerous western travelers were impressed by the degree to which slaves and their families seemed, incongruously, to embrace servitude as a route to wealth and success. Individuals in economic straits might offer themselves to a Tatar slaver or an Ottoman ship captain for transport to a market in Caffa or Trabzon. Families might sell a son or daughter for similar reasons and, thus, if the child were placed with the proper wealthy master, forge a connection with a potentially helpful patron. Marie Guthrie, visiting Caffa in the 1790s, found these calculations among women who had been shipped there from Circassia in the north Caucasus:

  I was more surprised, probably, than I ought to have been … at the perfect indifference with which the inhabitants of Caffa behold this traffic in beauty that had shocked me so much, and at their assuring me, when I seemed affected at the practice, that it was the only method which parents had of bettering the state of their handsome daughters, destined at all events to the haram; … in short, that, by being disposed of to rich mussulmen [Muslims], they were sure to live in affluence and ease the rest of their days, and in a state by no means degrading in Mahometan countries, where their Prophet has permitted the seraglio. But that, on the contrary, if they fell into the hands of their feudal lords, the barbarous inhabitants of their own native mountains … their lot was comparatively wretched, as those rude chieftains have very little of either respect or generosity toward the fair sex.21

  Even observers who condemned most other elements of Ottoman society admitted that there was a certain logic to such seemingly perverse preferences. In the nineteenth century, the Prussian noble August von Haxthausen recounted his own experience with a group of six female slaves from Circassia, who were found on board an Ottoman transport vessel and “liberated” by a Russian warship:

  In announcing to the girls their liberation, the [Russian] General ordered them to be informed that the choice was open to them, to be sent back to their homes with the Prince of their own race, or to marry Russians and Cossacks of their free choice, to return with me to Germany, where all the women are free, or lastly to accompany the Turkish Captain, who would sell them in the slave-market at Constantinople. The reader will hardly credit that, unanimously and without a moment’s consideration, they exclaimed, “To Constantinople—to be sold!”22

  In many, perhaps most, instances the experience of entering into servitude was obviously traumatic, especially for those taken in the most violent circumstances: captured on the battlefield or at sea, abducted from a frontier settlement on the Eurasian steppe, or pulled from a village in the Balkans. And since the quality of life as a slave depended very much on the social status of the master, generalizations about Ottoman slave-holding are difficult to make. But as observers such as Guthrie and Haxthausen recognized, the nature of slavery in the Ottoman empire sometimes made servitude a viable choice. The Ottomans had no conception of a “slave race.” Slave status was not coupled with the idea of biological inferiority, it was rarely for life, and it was hardly ever transmitted from parents to children. There were social prohibitions on who could buy and be bought; Muslims were generally not to be sold to Christians and Jews, for example. Some distinction was made between “white” slaves from the Black Sea region and “black” slaves from North Africa, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf; but being in a position of servitude was not the province of any particular cultural group, and therefore held no connotation of inherent racial inferiority, as did black African slavery in the Americas.

  There were also numerous routes to manumission, such as marriage to a free person or simply outliving one’s master. Islamic law also encouraged good Muslims to free their slaves, and Ottoman practice allowed slaves to be paid wages and to purchase their freedom over time.23 Slaves were not a self-perpetuating social category—the idea of “breeding” slaves was abhorrent in Islamic societies—and the frontier lands of the empire were the only source of new inputs into the system. For young men and women from the Balkans, the Eurasian steppe, and the Caucasus, servitude could thus represent a route to privileged status in the Ottoman state. Many took that road all the way to the top of the imperial administration and society, serving as grand vezirs, military commanders, and wives of the sultan. In eastern Europe, romantic nat
ionalists would later decry the rapacity of Ottoman slavers, who sold the youthful flowers of the nation into Muslim bondage. But for most of the Ottoman period, a sizeable number of the trafficked no doubt saw the voyage across the sea to Istanbul as something of an opportunity—for wealth, social advancement, and a new life at the center of the imperial system.

  Domn, Khan, and Derebey

  For later historians, the slave trade was one of the most loathsome aspects of the “Ottoman yoke,” which delayed economic progress and alienated people from their proper homelands. Especially in the history-writing traditions of the Balkans, the Ottoman experience in general is still seen as a regrettable impediment to the social, cultural, and economic flourishing of the subject peoples. But the political and military relationships among the Ottoman state and the various vassal regimes in the region were far more complex than such an interpretation allows.

  In the two centuries before the Ottoman conquest, the geopolitics of the sea was defined by the sorting out of new political arrangements and military competition among the remnants of two Eurasian empires, the Byzantines and the Tatar–Mongols. The Latin subjugation of Constantinople in 1204 had effectively ended the Byzantines as a major military and political force. Even after the reestablishment of Byzantine control over the city in 1261, the empire found itself overshadowed by other regional powers. In the south Balkans, the Serbian empire of the Nemanjid dynasty stretched all the way from the Adriatic to the Black Sea. North of the Danube, two Christian principalities, Wallachia and Moldova, were beginning to consolidate themselves after the decline of Byzantine power and the multiple migrations of eastern peoples. Similar processes were at work in the south Caucasus. The contraction of the Byzantine borderlands in the face of the Tatar–Mongol incursion of the thirteenth century left a region of many principalities and a few small Christian kingdoms—Kartli, Kakheti, Imereti—which battled one another more often than they stood united against a common invader. To the north, the demise of the Golden Horde had produced a political void in the steppe, which was now traversed by the nomadic Nogays, a Turkic people who were the successors to the Pechenegs and Cumans of centuries past. In Crimea, the last remnant of the Golden Horde held on in the person of the khan of Crimea, a member of the Giray dynasty that traced its heritage back to Chingis Khan.