The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It - Course Information

9 ~ Conclusion
~ A common world
Arguably, the first and most important point made by the present study is that,
before the last quarter of the eighteenth century, or perhaps 1750/1163–4 if
stricter criteria are preferred, the Ottomans and their European neighbours still
inhabited a common world. Certainly this was not the way in which people of the
period would have seen themselves: in the thinking of Muslim Ottomans, non-
Muslim Ottoman subjects, and also the inhabitants of Christian states or empires,
religious denomination was a central criterion by which people defined themselves,
and were defined by others.
But viewed from a distance of two or three centuries, the shared social consequences
of living in societies in which trade and petty commodity production
largely depended on locally available agricultural resources, forcefully strike the
eye. It is rather ironic that these commonalities, which existed in many walks of
life, will have become especially apparent to the readers of this study in the treatment
of prisoners of war. Enslaving such people and making them row on the
galleys was an all-Mediterranean phenomenon, due to the capricious winds that
well into the seventeenth century made it seem dangerous to rely exclusively on
sailing ships. Forced labour in arsenals under dismal conditions was equally
common, and so was the practice of making the captives partially fend for themselves
whenever their labour was not urgently needed.
However, this commonality did not exclude significant nuances of difference.
Thus Muslim prisoners in early modern Italy suffered particularly from the fact
that there were so few free travellers from the sultans’ lands that could have
aided them through alms-giving and mediation; moreover, throughout Europe
standards of charity towards people not of one’s own religious denomination
were not particularly high either, given a society where life was determined by
such divisions. Last but not least, the arrangements by which Ottoman and
Habsburg prisoners of war of some prominence could be ransomed or exchanged
were, albeit informal, not too different from the agreements by which eighteenthcentury
European rulers among themselves ‘determined the value of a prisoner’. 1