“After Being So long Prisoners, They Will Not Return To Slavery In Russia”: An Aegean Network Of Violence Between Empires And Identities

Abstract

A fortuitous congruence in Ottoman, Russian, and British archival sources has preserved all three imperial views of this incident, and in each case, the views of the captives themselves sometimes filter through in the official narrative. In telling this story, I hope to explore the complicated nature of “who was an Ottoman” with reference to one particular group of captives whose membership in the Ottoman community was complex, changing—but ultimately decisive in determining their lives and fates.Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian Ottoman subjects, as several scholars have recently shown, occupied an unusual position in the seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Mediterranean: they owed political allegiance to the Muslim Ottoman sultan, and yet they had strong religious ties to Christian states.4 Ottoman Greeks had especially strong ties to the only major Orthodox power in Europe, namely, Russia.