Freeing of Slaves
The fact that slavery in the Ottoman Empire was not always a life-long sentence probably made it a bit more tolerable for Turkish bondsmen. In fact, in both the Crimea and Turkey proper the example of the Prophet, Islamic law, and popular practice encouraged both kindness to slaves and frequently their manumission.
The Koran itself encouraged pious Muslims to free their slaves. There were several categories of manumission: unconditional (melva), made while the owner was still alive; conditional (tedbir); contractual (mukataba), usually on payment of some kind by the slave; umm-i veled, for a female slave who bore her master a recognized child; and even court-ordered, resulting from an owner's misbehaviour. Indeed, by the nineteenth century it became customary to emancipate slaves after only seven or nine years of service. (This seems to have been a distant echo of the ancient biblical injunction to free one's slave on the seventh year, although, unlike that injunction, it applied to a slave regardless of his or her origin, not just to a fellow “Hebrew,” as stated in Deuteronomy, 15:1-3, 12-14.)59 All this, together with the general lack of a colour bar in Islam, meant that Ukrainian and other Slavonic captives in Turkish service integrated quickly into Ottoman society, which helps explain why so few chose to return to their European homeland if they were eventually freed.Such slaves who integrated into Ottoman society, converted to Islam, and “turned Turk,” as it was said, proved very problematic for the Ukrainian folk tradition and are almost always denigrated. Thus, in the duma about Samuel Kishka, the overseer of the galley slaves was the “renegade” Liakh Buturlak, who asks Kishka to:
Trample the Christian faith underfoot, Break the cross with your hands.
If you will trample the Christian faith underfoot,
You will be like a brother
To our young Pasha!60
It is highly doubtful, however, whether such outright hostility of the converts to Islam was more common than lingering affection for the land and faith of their youth.
The contemporary historian of Ottoman Turkey Suraiya Faroghi gives several examples of rich and prominent Turks, especially women, probably former Christian slaves, who out of simple charity openly sympathized with mistreated captives and even admonished their masters to treat them better.61 Thus it is clear that the Ukrainian folk tradition more probably reflects the attitudes of those who remained in the Christian homeland than the attitudes of those who survived the initial rigours of captivity and lived to be fully absorbed into Ottoman societ y.Of course, not all the slaves sold in the market in Kaffa went on to Istanbul and other parts of the Ottoman Empire. The Tatars retained many and used them in domestic work or as farm hands. For these slaves, as for many in Istanbul, often life improved dramatically after purchase, for many domestic servants were treated as family members, and work in the fields was no worse and perhaps sometimes much better than being exploited serfs on the estates of the Polish or Ukrainian gentry and aristocracy. Moreover, according to Herberstein, no great admirer of the Tatars, agricultural slaves in the Crimea, as in Turkey, were generally freed after six years of servitude, but not allowed to return to their homeland.62
Once again, many of them seemingly did not even want to. For example, the Ukrainian chronicle of Velychko (early eighteenth century) tells the story of how the Zaporozhian Cossack leader Ivan Sirko (d. 1680) freed a large number of Ukrainian slaves and gave them the choice to come with him or return to the Crimea. When a large portion (three thousand, or almost half) chose the Crimea, saying they had property and work and could live better there than in Ukraine, where they had nothing at all, he had them all slain, after which he turned to the corpses and said: “Forgive us, brothers, but it is better that you face the judgement of the Lord God here instead of strengthening the Muslims in the Crimea to the detriment of our young Christian men and to your own eternal damnation.”63 The story, like so many folktales, may be somewhat apocryphal, but it does make the point that Tatar captivity did not always last and could have compensations over time.