The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

130 ~ THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE WORLD AROUND IT ~
In the Ottoman context, women were significant as alms givers. When
describing his life as an oarsman on an Ottoman galley, Heberer tells us that a
royal woman, returning from the hajj and escorted home by the galley belonging
to his master, had the brutal owner of the ship upbraided and warned about the
consequences of the evil deeds he had perpetrated against his slave rowers. More
practically, she also made sure the men were treated, at her own expense, several
times during the trip from Alexandria to the Ottoman capital. Bread, cooking oil
and some meat were distributed among the unfortunate slaves in the name of the
royal lady, whom Heberer did not identify but who, judging from the reception
she was given upon disembarking, may well have been a princess. 43
Less exalted female inhabitants of Istanbul also showed charity towards
slaves. Heberer told a remarkable story about women in the company of servants
to a powerful man, who were probably of servile status themselves, and who
gave out alms when taken by their men-folk to see the galley slaves at work. 44 In
another instance, when spending the winter season in the prisons of the sultan’s
arsenal, he went out to earn some money by doing a job in a private home; he
recorded that the wife of the man for whom he worked not only fed him, but
admonished her husband to do something for the poor servant as well. 45
By contrast, Hans Wild (1585–after 1613/992–after 1022), a former Nuremberg
soldier and a prisoner of war in Ottoman lands between 1604/1012–13 and
1611/1019–20, who as an Islamized slave had visited both Jerusalem and Mecca,
records only charity received from men, above all from the last of his numerous
masters. After his manumission in Cairo, Wild pretended to his former owner, a
janissary commander, that he wanted to earn his living as a petty trader. If his
later claims were true, in actual fact he was trying to make his way home. However,
things went wrong almost from the start, and the ship on which he had
embarked sank not too far from Cyprus. Wild was picked up by a passing Ottoman
craft, where the merchant passengers supplied him with food and clothes, as
he had nothing much on him apart from his manumission document. After having
proven his freedom in the kadi’s court of Limassol/Lemiso, the kadi himself
gave him a substantial sum as alms. Wild continued on his way to Antalya, where
he fell seriously ill. Penniless and with a high fever, he was kept in food by charitable
local Muslims, until his vigorous constitution gained the upper hand. Thus
the merchants on the ship, the kadi and the unnamed Muslims of Antalya all
were generous towards a poor stranger, whose foreign background must, moreover,
have been obvious from his accent. 46
Heberer and Wild were not the only captives to write about charity dispensed
by Ottoman subjects. Claudio Angelo de Martelli’s memoirs especially highlight
the miseries of a captive in the dungeons of diverse Ottoman fortresses in Hungary
and Serbia and, as we have seen, should probably be regarded as a piece of
wartime propaganda. Thus it is all the more notable that the author has a good
deal to say about the charity he received from inhabitants of the Ottoman
Empire. Some of this aid came from fellow Catholics, particularly from the congregations
with whom he sometimes attended church. 47 While in Belgrade, he