chapter 2

Slave Labour in the Early Ottoman Rural Economy:

Regional Variations in the Balkans during the
15th Century
Konstantinos Moustakas

Slavery in general occupied quite an important position in the state structures

and social forms of medieval and early modern Muslim empires, including the
Ottoman. There were, however, different forms of the phenomenon of slavery
in those empires in terms of ownership, status and the occupations of slaves,
determining the relative importance of slavery in different areas of the politi-
cal, social and economic sphere. A major distinction between different cat-
egories of slavery can be first made in terms of ownership, between state (or
sultanic) slaves and private ones. The former, who are known in the Ottoman
case as gulâm-i mîr or kapıkullu, can be further distinguished into separate
groupings depending on whether they carried out labour services, or whether
they manned the army (the janissary corps), and the administration, often ris-
ing to the highest positions and becoming pașa, beylerbey, even grand vizier.
Private slaves too could be given military and administrative duties if owned by
high-post dignitaries, however, the bulk of private slaves were used as labour
force. Halil Inalcik has given an overview of slave labour in the early Ottoman
Empire and points out its presence in all of the major areas of the economy,
including domestic services, the crafts, as well as agriculture.1
In any case, the importance of slave labour as a force of production was
not primary in the Ottoman economy, and irrespective of how common it
was, it only played a secondary and supplementary role to the work of free
small-­owning peasants or craftsmen. This was especially true for agriculture,
which was based on the work and production of independent reaya peas-
ants, Christian and Muslim alike, through prolonged holding of officially

1 Inalcik, Halil, “Servile Labor in the Ottoman Empire”, in H. Inalcik, Studies in Ottoman Social
and Economic History, Collected Studies (London: Variorum, 1985), n. vii. Recent specialized
studies in Ottoman slavery focus on the late period with a special emphasis in the subject of
abolition: Erdem, Hakan Y., Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise, 1800–1909 (London –
New York: Macmillan, 1996). Toledano, Ehud R., Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle
East (Seattle – London: University of Washington Press, 1998).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004283510_004

30 moustakas

s­ tate-owned plots of land under the forms of tapu and tasarruf. The use of
slave labour in agriculture during the 15th and 16th centuries is mostly observ-
able in the large sultanic estates (padışah hassları) that were mostly located in
Thrace and Bithynia and were exploited through the allocation of parcels of
land to people of a sultanic slave status (the ortakçı kullar) on share-cropping
arrangements. In those cases, the conditions of work and production pertained
more to some type of servile labour, somehow resembling western medieval
serfdom, than to a plantation type slave-operating production.2
Slaves were occasionally used in private farming too, and the general view on
the subject places them in the large, market oriented estates, çiftlik, that were
held by members of the ruling class, or by pious endowments.3 In fact, very
little is actually known about agricultural slave holding during the 15th century,
outside the ortakçı kullar of the sultanic estates, the more so since private çiftlik
estates are not supposed to be common during this early period. Moreover, little
if any attention has been paid to the fact that common reaya peasants could be
slave-holding.4 In fact, wealthy peasants occasionally appear to possess some
slaves, who were presumably used as labour force, assisting those peasants in
maintaining and even expanding their farms.5 In this respect, a localized study
at a regional level may shed some light on the phenomenon, concerning the
question of the very existence of agricultural slavery, its spreading and its rela-
tive importance in private farming, relating these matters with the particular
historical conditions of the regions under examination.6

2 Barkan, Ömer Lütfi, “Les formes de l’organisation du travail agricole dans l’empire ottoman
au xve–xvie siècles”, reprinted in Greek translation in Asdrachas, Spyros (ed.), Η οικονομική
δομή των βαλκανικών χωρών στα χρόνια της οθωμανικής κυριαρχίας (The economic structure of
Balkan countries during Ottoman rule) (Athens: Melissa, 1979), 47–86. Inalcik, Servile Labor,
30–33.
3 Inalcik, Servile Labor, 30–31. idem, “The Emergence of Big Farms, Çiftliks: State, Landlords and
Tenants”, in H. Inalcik, Studies, n. viii (p. 108).
4 Some discussion of this subject is included in Asdrachas, Spyros, Μηχανισμοί της αγροτικής
οικονομίας στην τουρκοκρατία (ιε΄–ιστ΄αι.) (Mechanisms of rural economy under Turkish rule—
15th–16th c.) (Athens: Themelio, 1978), 72–74.
5 S. Asdrachas, Μηχανισμοί, 74–75, suggests that private agricultural slaves were generally share
croppers. However, this is a speculation based on a projection of the status and working con-
ditions of the ortakçı, of the sultanic and other estates, upon the whole of agricultural slaves.
In fact, there is no evidence of share cropping arrangements, or of any other generalized form
of work, in so far as the occasional slaves of ordinary reaya farmers are concerned.
6 The present study is based on research that is carried out under the project “Settlements,
Population and Economy in the Greek Lands, 13th–16th Centuries” of the Institute of
Mediterranean Studies / Foundation of Research and Technology Hellas.