Catch and Release: Piracy, Slavery, and Law in the Early Modern Ottoman Mediterranean.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the legal and administrative impact of piracy and amphibious slave-raiding in the eastern half of the Mediterranean basin in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rising maritime violence in the Mediterranean after the 1570s had a tremendous effect on the formation of international law, the conduct of diplomacy, the articulation of Ottoman imperial and Islamic law, and their application in local Ottoman courts. Utilizing a wide range of Ottoman, Venetian, and English archival and manuscript sources, the story told is about piracy, but it is not about pirates. Instead, this dissertation explores the murky legal waters in which piracy and amphibious slave-raiding flourished and the broad array of actors who were involved in and affected by Ottoman efforts to create order in the chaos. To date, little of the scholarship on Mediterranean maritime violence has made use of Ottoman source material. Thus, the principal power in the Eastern Mediterranean has been almost entirely left out of the story, which has been cast instead as a two-sided holy war at sea, with the corsairs of North Africa lined up against those of Malta and Livorno. This dissertation returns the Ottoman state to the story of the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mediterranean, shifting the reader’s gaze away from the pirates and onto the administrators, jurists, and victims—those who had to contend most with the consequences of rising maritime violence. In so doing, it argues that what made the eastern half of the Mediterranean the “Ottoman Mediterranean,” more so than naval supremacy or political control, was that it was a unified legal space. It was the challenge of piracy that helped to define its contours.