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AMEDOSKI, Dragana- KOÇAK, Zülfiye
Ottoman Woman as Inheritress in the North-Western Rumelia in the 18 th Century
The objective of this paper is to deal with the hereditary law of the women in the Ottoman Empire. The paper
shall present legislative grounds of the Law, regulated as per Sharia and Kânûn, and subsequently methods of implementation
the law into the real life with sufficient examples. The territory taken into consideration is the North-western Rumelia,
the territory of nowadays Serbia respectively, and the timeline is the 18 th Century.
Judicial records of the Ottoman court (sicils) are primal and the best sources for the study of this topic. Hence
our study has certain limitations, due to the fact that sicils for nowadays Serbia, former North-western Rumelia, are all lost.
Therefore we have used the sources from the 18 th century dealing with relationship between the women and the court; they
are preserved in different archival series in the Prime Ministers Archive in Istanbul. Employed Ottoman documents are
completely new, so far not processed.
Our paper presents that women property holders were nearly as numerous as men. Heiresses represented themselves
in front of the court of law and proceeded formalities independently. They inherited regularly from a wide circle of
relatives. In case that woman’s parent, offspring, husband or sibling had died woman in subject would inherit majority of
assets. She might even inherit some share of estate of an uncle, aunt or cousin. According to the Sharia, Ottoman woman
could spend inherited money or property in a way she wanted to. This shows that women participated actively in the economic
life.
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