Ottoman seas,shared decks: Inter-religious dynamics in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Ottoman shipping

Abstract

This article investigates the shared maritime world of Muslims and Christians in the Ottoman Empire during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing on the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Through case studies of Christian captains employed on Muslim-owned vessels, inter-religious commercial investments and religiously mixed crews, this study highlights two features that are underemphasized in existing scholarship: first, the significant yet often overlooked role of Muslim seafarers and entrepreneurs in Ottoman commerce and, second, the pervasive ‘grey zones’ of collaboration fostered by everyday coexistence. By foregrounding these integrative practices, the article argues for a fundamental historiographical shift away from perspectives that treat Ottoman navigation through rigid confessional divides towards a more nuanced understanding of its interconnected nature.

Keywords

Black Sea early modern history Eastern Mediterranean inter-religious collaboration Muslim navigation Ottoman history Ottoman shipping

Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson, one of the most perceptive observers of the late eighteenth-century Ottoman Empire, remarked that ‘all the bulk of commerce is in the hands of the dominant nation’ – that is, the Muslims – noting the absence of dérogeance and the willingness of Muslim elites to invest in trade directly or through agents.¹ His statement stands in stark contrast to a large body of modern literature that depicts Muslim engagement in commerce – especially maritime trade – as marginal, overshadowed by non-Muslim subjects and European merchants.

This perception derives from a set of mutually reinforcing historiographical narratives that have converged into an orientalist image casting Muslims as ‘interlopers’ in the Mediterranean commercial world.² It is often assumed that Muslim participation in international trade was limited to supplying raw materials, which – when not channelled to large Ottoman towns – reached Europe largely through non-Muslim intermediaries. Maritime commerce in particular has been shaped by the long-standing stereotype of the ‘Turks’ – a term often used in western and Balkan sources to characterize Ottoman Muslims of non-Arab origin – as a land-based, quasi-nomadic people inherently ill-suited to the sea.³

This approach has been reinforced by historiographies in the successor Christian states, especially the Balkans, which have claimed much of the Ottoman commercial tradition for their own pasts. Since the 1960s, the image of the ‘conquering Orthodox merchant’ has dominated the literature, relying on an ethno-religious binary that equates Christian commercial ascent with Muslim decline or stagnation. In this framework, Muslim activity is reduced to ‘half-economic ventures’ or ‘violence-using enterprises’, while Christians appear as natural entrepreneurs unburdened by Muslim ‘xenophobia’. Traian Stoianovich's influential formulation of the conquering Balkan merchant epitomizes this paradigm: Christians were the dynamic force of the eighteenth-century Balkan economy, whereas Muslims remained domestic traders or ‘part-time bandits’, whose supposed aversion to foreign trade stemmed from a desire to minimize external influences and reserve political-military offices for themselves.⁴

The above-mentioned traditional narrative – deeply shaped by Eurocentrism – treats Ottoman commercial life as a zero-sum game, casting Muslim commercial decline as part of a teleological path leading to Christian economic predominance and, ultimately, the rise of the post-Ottoman capitalist nation state. In this model, the emergence of a commercially capable Christendom – both western and Ottoman – made the fall of the Muslim-dominated Ottoman Empire all but inevitable. The Ottoman state and its Muslim majority are thus portrayed as economic failures, left behind by the rising forces of domestic and international trade.

This interpretation typically rests on two assumptions: first, that non-Muslim commercial activity was independent from that of Muslims and can thus be measured separately and, second, that it far surpassed Muslim participation. Going against this traditional view of Ottoman commercial maritime activity, this article cautions against such a reading. The main argument is not only that Muslim participation in Ottoman shipping was not negligible, but, most importantly, also that the seemingly clear-cut religious divisions that characterized Ottoman navigation were, in fact, much more nuanced than hitherto believed. Aligning with the recent trend to study Greek maritime history within its Ottoman framework,⁵ this article makes a first, if incomplete, attempt to expand the focus by proposing a combined analysis of both Ottoman Christian and Muslim navigation.

A further methodological aspect highlighted by the current study concerns the sources used in studying eighteenth-century commerce in the Eastern Mediterranean. So far, scholarship dealing with the subject has relied heavily on western – primarily French and English – archives, which offer more continuous and quantifiable documentation than the dispersed, largely fiscal, state-centred Ottoman records. As will become evident throughout this article, however, despite the shortcomings of official Ottoman sources, the latter can reveal important aspects of Ottoman commercial activity that are largely absent from western archival perspectives, and should thus be treated as essential for the study of maritime history in the region.

Muslim Entrepreneurs, Christian Captains, and Inter-Religious Collaboration at Sea

Arguably, no historian has offered more insights on Ottoman Muslim domestic trade in the eighteenth-century Mediterranean than Daniel Panzac. In a series of articles on the French caravane maritime in the Ottoman Empire, published between 1980 and 1993, Panzac has shown that, contrary to what one would expect when reading the relevant literature, the vast majority of merchants who chartered French ships employed in Ottoman coastal shipping were Muslims.⁶ Panzac's findings have been summarized elsewhere and there is no reason for me to expand on them here;⁷ suffice to say that his analysis, which is based on French archives and covers substantial periods of the eighteenth century, refers to some of the Empire's commercially busiest port cities, islands and regions (Chios, Smyrna, Lebanon, Palestine, Alexandria, Crete, Istanbul and the Maghreb) and shows that Muslim traders largely dominated the chartering of French ships in most of them.

Although this evidence represents in itself a strong challenge to the traditional view that saw the role of Muslim merchants in the Ottoman Mediterranean as marginal, Panzac's work did not set out to challenge the largely impressionistic argument (which he also partially embraced)⁸ that shipping in the Ottoman Empire was almost exclusively in Christian – mainly European – hands.

Of course, one would not reasonably expect a series of publications on the French caravane in the Ottoman seas to investigate the topic of Muslim navigation and/or produce research on the contribution of other countries’ shipping in the Empire's trade. However, for those inclined to accept the stereotype of the Ottoman Muslim as ill-suited for maritime commerce, the absence of such a comparative perspective may appear to reinforce the notion that Christians indeed dominated the Empire's maritime activity. Relying on foreign vessels to transport goods can easily be interpreted as evidence of lacking one's own cargo ships. Has it not, after all, been repeatedly demonstrated that the Empire's Orthodox population was the undisputed leader in Ottoman domestic navigation?

Written in an era when the theory of the ‘Northern Invasion’ in the seventeenth-century Mediterranean's trade had not yet been essentially challenged,⁹ Bruce McGowan's seminal work on economic life in Ottoman Europe, published in 1981, summarizes the dominant view of the time concerning the Levant maritime trade in the 1780s; he uses Volney's account, based on the archives of Marseilles’ Chamber of Commerce, according to which all trade in the region was captured by western powers: ‘France 4/8; the Dutch 2/8; England 1/8; Venice 1/8’.¹⁰ While using this estimation in his graphs, McGowan understands that these numbers are problematic in many ways: ‘Alas we must make do with what we have in hand’, he writes.¹¹ One of McGowan’s main reservations was related to Stoianovich's claims regarding Ottoman participation in maritime commercial activity, which he outlined as follows:

The disruption of French trade in the eastern Mediterranean during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) resulted in the displacement of the French caravanaire fleet by a new group of sea-going merchants – [Orthodox] Greek and Albanian subjects of the Porte who used this opportunity to their advantage. It was this group which flew the Russian flag after 1783 … taking up the slack after the collapse of French trade after 1789.¹²

The notion that Orthodox Greek- and Albanian-speaking populations came to dominate Ottoman maritime trade in the late eighteenth century gained traction in Greek historiography of the 1970s and 1980s, which nonetheless questioned the idea that this dominance stemmed primarily from Russian or western protection. Georgios Leon (Leontaritis), in his pioneering 1972 work on Greek maritime commerce, cited Pouqueville's list of ‘Greek’ ships, recording 615 vessels in 1813 – a figure that, according to a second account by Pouqueville, had dropped to 530 by 1816, as another Greek historian, Konstantinos Svolopoulos, showed less than a year later.¹³ Leon argued that even these large figures underestimated the true scale of Greek shipping, as Pouqueville excluded vessels from the Ionian Islands, Messolongi, the Peloponnese and Piraeus, as well as those based in Istanbul engaged in Black Sea trade or the Alexandria convoys. Leon even concluded that at least half of Istanbul's maritime commerce was likely under Greek control.¹⁴

There are a few points concerning Pouqueville's ‘Greek’ ship lists that call for clarification. First, the accounts make clear that most of these ships were flying Ottoman and not foreign flags – an idea that would also be supported by several Greek maritime historians in the decades that followed Leon's publication.¹⁵ This historiographical turn reflects a wider revision of Braudel's view of the role of western (or ‘northern’) Europeans in Mediterranean shipping, which is now seen as having remained mainly in the hands of local Mediterranean fleets in the seventeenth century and beyond.¹⁶ Second, almost half of the ships in Pouqueville's lists (300 out of 615 in the first list and 260 out of 530 in the second), carrying more than two-thirds of the total recorded tonnage (105,000 out of 153,580 tons in the first list; the second list does not contain such data), belonged to only four islands: namely, Hydra, Spetses, Psara and Crete. Recent Greek historiography has revised this claim, together with many figures given by Pouqueville, while adding a number of locales missing from his lists.¹⁷

Concerns about the validity of Pouqueville's calculations aside,¹⁸ there is no doubt that the first three islands were inhabited by Orthodox communities – Greek-speaking in the case of Psara, and Albanian-speaking in the cases of Hydra and Spetses. Crete, however, had a mixed population at the time, with its Muslim inhabitants comprising, according to numerous accounts, nearly half of the total.¹⁹ So, how could Pouqueville determine whether a Cretan ship belonged to a Christian or a Muslim? The same question, of course, applies to several other locales with mixed populations included in the lists, such as Rhodes, Lesvos, Salonika, and so on. In the case of Rhodes, Pouqueville notes that there were two ‘Greek’ ships, clarifying, however, that ‘the ships of Rhodes are Turkish [that is, Muslim] properties. This island has moreover ten decked boats employed in the great cabotage’.²⁰ In other words, the two ships of Rhodes mentioned in the lists, and even 10 more that were excluded, all belonged to Muslims. So, one may ask, what qualified two boats among the 12 to be listed as ‘Greek’ ships and 10 to be excluded, despite the fact that all 12 ships belonged to Muslims? The most obvious and logical explanation is that Pouqueville classified ‘Greek’ ships based on the religion of the captain rather than the shipowner. This makes sense, given that both western and Ottoman officials typically recorded only the captain's name when documenting vessels entering their ports. After all, who can fault Pouqueville for using the captain's religion to determine whether a ship was ‘Greek’ or ‘Turkish’ when even the most recent, extensive and groundbreaking studies of Ottoman Greek shipping still rely primarily on the religious or ethnic identity of captains?²¹

All the same, this observation inevitably creates a few concerns regarding the methodology and data presented by the relevant literature: how accurate an assessment of Ottoman Muslim (or, for that matter, ‘Greek’) maritime trade based solely on the religion of the captain can be or, put differently, how common was it for a ship to have an owner and a captain of different religions? This question becomes even more difficult to answer if we consider that the capital for building or buying ships in the Ottoman Empire was often raised by means of partnerships, which could involve several shareholders.²² In fact, as research on the Greek-owned shipping of the time has shown, such partnerships constituted the most widespread method of financing ship enterprises, with cases of exclusive ship ownership by a single individual usually being an exception.²³ As it will become evident from my analysis here, when it comes to ship ownership, inter-religious investments were nothing but rare during the period in question.

If we examine the case of Crete's ships – the fourth largest ‘Greek’ commercial fleet recorded by Pouqueville – the findings are, to say the least, troubling. According to an Ottoman registry of the ships of Candia from 1751, the town's commercial fleet comprised 48 vessels, of which nine were Christian-owned and 39 – 81 per cent of the total – were Muslim-owned. Furthermore, when examining the capacity of the recorded vessels, this difference increases even more, as the tonnage of Muslim ships represents 89 per cent of the total. Yet this picture is completely reversed when looking at the number of captains – of the 48 recorded individuals, only two were Muslims.²⁴ In other words, although the overwhelming majority of local ships and actual volume of local commercial transports was controlled by Muslims, if one were to calculate the religious identity of the captains, one would arrive at the exact opposite conclusion. But, why, one may ask, would a Cretan Muslim shipowner opt to employ a Christian captain in the first place? The French archival sources give us a good idea of the reasons behind this choice.

In 1761–1763, amid the Seven Years War (1756–1763), Peyssonnel, the French consul in Chania, sent a number of letters to the foreign minister of France that touch on the issue of Muslim navigation in the region. In a letter written in May 1761, he notes:

The merchants of Candia have developed the habit of building ships called ‘Londres’ for transporting their own merchandise; irrespective of that, they have also bought a large number of ships of our own captains whom the war forced to sell their vessels. Finally, they gave our caravane the final blow by paying an annual tribute to the Order [of the Knights Hospitaller] of Malta in order to enjoy the protection of the corsairs of the faith, the only enemies they used to be afraid of and who forced them to freight foreign ships … nowadays we see very often ships bearing the Turkish flag, which travel to Livorno, Trieste, and many other areas of Christendom.²⁵

In a letter from November 1761, he writes:

The Turks have established soap industries in order to use their own olive oil and no longer be in the need to sell it to foreigners. Through their craftiness they have raised their own caravane on the debris of our own and on the facilities that have been given to them, becoming the suppliers of Livorno and of other ports with the goods that we are bringing to them … The Turks here order the construction of their ships in Sfakia [an area in south-western Crete inhabited exclusively by Christians]. They already have quite a large number of them and entrust their command to Greek captains or patrons who come to terms with the Maltese to whom they pay a tribute, which is usually in the form of wax and which the Turks call, rather openly, ‘the Law of Saint John’. They are very meticulous in deducting it from the profits of the trip and, in order to give it to Malta, they use the mediation of the Maniots [Christian inhabitants of the south-eastern part of the Peloponnese] of the Morea who have continual contacts with the Maltese.²⁶

In December of the same year, Peyssonnel repeats the same arguments while referring to a case of a ‘Greek’ ship that belonged to ‘Turkish merchants’ and was given a patent of Maltese protection.²⁷ Ιn March 1762, he once again complains about the protection offered to Muslim ships by Malta, explicitly mentioning that ‘all the Sfakian ships, which are very numerous in this port [Chania], belong to the Turks of this town’,²⁸ and, in February 1763, he reports that

there is an infinite number of ships that the Turks are having constructed and navigated … there are in the port of Chania alone around 40 ships with a capacity of 1,000 to 2,500 quintals [around 49 to 122 tons] that each make three or four trips in the course of a single year.²⁹

Furthermore, in a French guide for seamen created between 1759 and 1762, the author refers to the issue of Cretan Muslim navigation in the following words:

The ease by which the Grand Master of Religion of Malta grants guarantees and permissions to navigate, in return for a certain fee, which the [Cretan] Turks publicly call ‘the Law of Saint John’; this puts them in a position to make trips in complete safety even to Malta itself, from all over Greece, Istanbul, Smyrna, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, Trieste, Venice, Ancona and Livorno, and lets them procure, in these last places, textiles, imperial fabrics, dyes, and other goods of our production and of other countries, which, as a result, we can no longer supply them with, and they transport there in return their oil, their soap, their wax, their silk, etc., a fact that causes considerable damage, either to our own trade or to our caravane, which is no longer employed, whereas formerly they dared not go away from the coast.³⁰

In other words, what the French consular and other reports were protesting about is that, after the Muslim merchants of Crete managed to verticalize the production of soap and olive oil on the island,³¹ they started building their own ships to export them, together with other products, taking advantage of the war between England and France in order to replace the French transit and export trade in the region with their own. This process led to the development of a strong local commercial fleet connecting Crete with a number of western and Ottoman destinations by means of Muslim ships that passed under the protection of the Order of the Knights of Saint John, and sometimes also involving the mediation of the Orthodox Christian Maniot corsairs of the Peloponnese. Within this framework, Christian captains were employed by Muslim owners on boats that travelled to European countries not only to contact foreign Christian clients but also, most importantly, as a way of approaching the Maniot corsairs and gaining easier access to the protection of Malta.³²

One of the many examples indicative of the above-mentioned practices that are to be found in the Ottoman judicial registers of Candia is that of Cretan Mustafa Karakaş, a third-generation Janissary commander of Candia, high-ranking officer of the Janissary organization (seksoncubaşı), captain of the thirty-seventh cemaat regiment, life-long ‘tax farmer’ (malikâne ağa) in the eastern part of Crete, major olive-oil producer, soap merchant, creditor and shipowner. Mustafa's probate inventory, which was recorded in 1815 following his execution by Sultan Mahmud II, is revealing of the way in which the Muslim entrepreneurs of the island saw the development of local shipping as a natural continuation of their commercial activities on the island. Mustafa's recorded property, which amounted to 4,286,166 paras, contained, among other things, olive plantations, olive-oil presses, large storage facilities, great amounts of soap and olive oil, and partial or total ownership of seven vessels governed by both Muslim and Christian captains.³³

As both French and Greek sources maintain, the development of the Cretan Muslim commercial fleet, its protection by the Maltese and the employment of Christian captains by Muslim shipowners would continue in the decades following Peyssonnel's correspondence. After the end of the Seven Years War and until Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, western – especially French – trade in the region started to grow again. However, the maritime commercial activity of local Muslims did not stop; it reached such great proportions that, in March 1770, the consul of Chania noted the following:

About forty years ago, the trading status of the island of Crete held little significance, but today, it has gained notable prominence. This transformation can be attributed to the introduction of luxury goods by the island's inhabitants, which have garnered popularity not only across Turkey but also in various regions of Italy with thriving commerce. These items have generated substantial profits, to the point that the island of Crete can now be regarded as an exceptionally prosperous territory.³⁴

A similar report, which suggested particular measures to be taken by the French in order to compete with the flourishing Cretan Muslim trade, was sent to Paris in 1798.³⁵ On 31 December 1782, the French vice-consul in Candia complained about the same issues as Peyssonnel while claiming that ‘there is an infinite number of ships flying the Turkish flag’³⁶ – a claim supported five years later by a number of Ottoman imperial decrees (fermans), which exclusively refer to the large number of local Cretan ships and order various Muslim shipowners to send vessels and marines to imperial campaigns.³⁷ In 1798, the French consul in Chania again underlined the connection that the Muslims of Crete had established with the Maltese corsairs, and reported that ‘since the war, Muslim navigation in the Levant has surpassed by far that of the Christian nations’.³⁸ By way of illustration, in one of his following reports, he records 71 ships that arrived at and departed from the port of Chania in the course of three months, noting that only 22 of them flew European flags, while 49 flew Ottoman flags. Out of the 49 Ottoman ships, he claims, 35 were Muslim-owned.³⁹ Decades later, Greek sources also inform us that the first revolutionary act that preceded the outbreak of the 1821 Greek War of Independence on Crete was the seizure by Christian Sfakian captains of the ships entrusted to them by Cretan Muslim shipowners and their transportation to Malta, where they sold them in exchange for military provisions – a testimony that points not only to the continuation of the practice of Muslim ships being governed by Christian captains well into the nineteenth century, but also to the enduring relationship between the captains of Muslim ships and the Maltese authorities.⁴⁰ With relation to the above information, one can also mention the following case from the judicial court of Rethymno, which is characteristic of the practices used in Crete at that time: in 1822, three Muslim co-owners of a ship worth 6,000 guruş and a merchant who had been using it to transport goods and money went to the judicial court of their town. The four men wanted to record their losses after Kostanti – the ‘traitor of religion and the Sublime State’ (hain-i din ve devlet-i aliyye) Christian captain to whom they had entrusted their ship and goods – had joined the 1821 Greek War of Independence and fled the town on board their vessel.⁴¹

These practices were by no means unique to Crete and could take different forms depending on the intended commercial activity and risks involved. For instance, one can note the case of the leading ayan (Muslim notable) of Smyrna and Janissary patron Kâtiboğlu Hacı Mehmed Efendi and his commercial enterprise with Antonis Paksimadis, an entrepreneur in Smyrna and Trieste. The two had created a business partnership and bought – most probably with Kâtiboğlu's capital, as the Ottoman sources imply – a large three-masted ship that, according to some testimonies, used a Russian flag and a Russian captain and sailed the Black Sea and, according to others, flew the Ottoman flag in order to escape the danger of North African piracy in the Mediterranean. No matter what the truth was, one interesting aspect of this case is the great efforts that the two partners made to conceal the details and profits of their partnership from the Ottoman administration, which posed a threat to their entrepreneurial activities. Such a secretive attitude, adopted especially by some members of the Ottoman Muslim elite involved in commercial navigation – often related to the bans on exports of staples imposed by the Ottoman government – does not help modern historians’ efforts at unearthing their role in Ottoman shipping. Yet this difficulty should not lead us to conclude that such a role did not exist.⁴² Contrary to what is usually believed to be the case, Muslim-owned ships were employed in western trade and, in certain regions, could even compete with some of Europe's strongest commercial fleets navigating in the Eastern Mediterranean.⁴³ The example of Crete clearly shows that this could be the case.

At this point, it is important to note that these observations are not meant to suggest that Muslim maritime activity emerged only after the Seven Years War. Rather, the 39 Muslim-owned ships recorded in Candia before the war point to a longer, more continuous history. A vibrant Muslim maritime presence in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea is unmistakably attested by a range of sources and studies; the fleet of Candia is but one piece of a much larger puzzle. For example, Palmira Brummett's foundational work has demonstrated that Ottoman sea power – driven by Muslim elites and oriented towards trade – was thriving in the sixteenth century. Daniel Hershenzon's study of the seventeenth-century Western Mediterranean reveals a ransom economy that actively fostered Christian–Muslim commerce.⁴⁴ Similarly, a multitude of Ottoman published and unpublished sources testify to the efflorescence of Janissary navigation in the first half of the eighteenth century – well before the Anglo-French war further accelerated the rise of Ottoman mercantile shipping.⁴⁵ Taken together, this evidence strongly suggests that late eighteenth-century Ottoman navigation – both Muslim and Christian – was characterized by long-term continuity, not rupture.

Moreover, the above-mentioned analysis is not meant to challenge the well-established picture of Ottoman Christian shipping's impressive expansion in the second half of the eighteenth century – a development that remained largely centred in locations with exclusively Christian populations. Research has shown time and again that the contribution of non-Muslim shipping to the Ottoman economy and naval power, as well as its integration into Ottoman policies, made it a vital component of the Empire's maritime strength and played a key role in shaping the region's history and development during that time. Especially in recent decades, a number of prominent scholars have produced valuable works that prove beyond any doubt the importance of Greek shipping for the Ottoman Empire.⁴⁶

The findings presented here nonetheless demonstrate that an equally systematic approach to Muslim navigation in the Eastern Mediterranean is still sorely lacking. Furthermore, they act as a strong reminder that Ottoman maritime commerce should not be treated as a zero-sum game between different religious groups, and that in certain cases the data provided by the sources might be deceiving and conceal the actual economic interests hidden behind the names recorded, downplaying the role of Muslim maritime commercial activity in particular regions.⁴⁷ Most importantly for the purposes of this study, they highlight that assessing the scale of Muslim commercial navigation in the Eastern Mediterranean requires attention to the grey zones of religious coexistence and collaboration. The above-mentioned case of Kâtiboğlu and Paksimadis is indicative of the intertwined interests that could develop between Christians and Muslims investing in commercial ships. The same applies to the case of the Cretan Janissary entrepreneur Mustafa Karakaş, also mentioned above: among the various vessels he partially or entirely owned, one ship was governed by captain Yani Kalamakta, a Christian from the Aegean island of Karpathos (Ottoman Kelpe). According to the source referring to their collaboration, Kalamakta and Karakaş were the co-owners of that ship, with Karakaş holding ‘18 of its shares’ (on sekiz pare hissesi).⁴⁸ Similarly, in the case of the three Muslim shipowners whose ship was stolen by the revolutionary captain Kostanti, the ship's value was divided into 40 shares, with 17.5 belonging to the Muslims. Although not explicitly mentioned in the source, it would not be far-fetched to assume that Kostanti owned at least some of the remaining 22.5 shares.⁴⁹ This was the case, for example, with Foti, a captain and investor in a ship owned by Janissary Osman Çavuş, which was used by the Ottoman government to transfer provisions to Istanbul from Moldavia in 1820.⁵⁰

The fact that the Christian side of Ottoman shipping is prominently displayed in many sources is certainly an indication of the flourishing Orthodox Christian navigation of the eighteenth century; however, it may also be reflecting a conscious choice on the part of Muslim shipowners to stay in the background in order to better serve their commercial interests within or outside the Ottoman Empire. This view makes it easier for us to interpret some phenomena that it is otherwise difficult to make sense of. For instance, as Sophia Laiou has shown, two lists registering the Ottoman captains who were licensed to trade with the Russian part of the Black Sea in the years 1792/1793 and 1796/1797 reveal that a number of these captains were Christian, despite the fact that their guarantors in Istanbul were Muslim.⁵¹ Although there is no way of knowing what the exact interests binding the guarantors to the captains were, in light of the above-mentioned information it would be plausible to assume that the latter either held shares in these ships together with the former or were the sole owners, opting to use Christian captains when conducting trade with the Russian Black Sea ports in order to ensure better trading terms for their enterprises.⁵² After all, as was the case with Crete, the Ottoman archives contain numerous cases of Christian captains boarding Muslim ships sailing the Black Sea.⁵³

The practice of Muslim shipowners entrusting their ships to Christians in the Black Sea can also be evidenced in Ottoman literary sources. For instance, the historian Cabi Ömer Efendi makes reference in his work to a ‘Kapan-merchant ship,⁵⁴ the owners of which were Muslim while the crew consisted entirely of Christians’. The ship was supposed to provision the Ottoman army – which was fighting the Russians at the time – with grain, but the revelation that it was trading with the enemy instead led to the execution of the crew by the Ottoman Grand Admiral (Kapudan Paşa).⁵⁵

A different example that is indicative of the grey zones created between different religious communities employed in maritime trade is that of the captain Kürd Hüseyin from Karamürsel, who was charged by the Ottoman government with transporting goods to Galați on a ship owned by a Muslim and with a crew of nine non-Muslims. As the Ottoman sources inform us, on his way to deliver the cargo, Hüseyin decided to change his route, landing on Odessa instead, where he sold the ship to a Russian, together with all the goods it was carrying, and subsequently converted to Christianity.⁵⁶ This case once again underlines that the interests of Muslims and Christians could often be interwoven and were not always defined by rigid confessional divides.⁵⁷ Furthermore, it touches on another interesting aspect of Ottoman navigation – namely, that the shared experiences of Muslim and Christian were not limited to entrepreneurial collaborations and deals between captains and shipowners but extended on board ships.

To appreciate the significance of mixed crews in the Ottoman context, it is useful to situate them within the broader historiography of maritime labour, both free and coerced. Studies of other early modern maritime spaces have recognized that shipboard communities were frequently heterogeneous, shaped by diverse mechanisms of recruitment that operated across ethnic, religious and legal boundaries. For example, Ghulam Nadri's study of the Dutch East India Company's operations in eighteenth-century Surat shows that it relied heavily on Moorse zeevarenden (‘Muslim sailors’) to man its ships, employing them through a system of labour contractors known as zielverkopers.⁵⁸ Ottoman ‘Turkish’ mariners were also present among the Dutch East India Company and British East India Company crews travelling to Bengal.⁵⁹

In the Mediterranean, as well, studies have shown that the phenomenon of galley slavery created complex hierarchies of unfree labour that brought crews of different religions on board the same ships. As Gül Şen has demonstrated in her work on the Ottoman Imperial Shipyards, galley slaves in the early modern Ottoman navy were drawn from multiple sources – prisoners of war, private slaves of wealthy individuals and state-purchased captives – and confessional backgrounds.⁶⁰ However, the inter-religious collaboration of Ottoman ship crews has so far only been examined within the framework of the Empire's seventeenth-century military fleet. Works on eighteenth-century Ottoman commercial navigation, on the other hand, maintain that the captain's religion and origins were almost always identical to those of his crew.⁶¹

Yet archival material from Istanbul forces us to revise this currently dominant notion. During the Greek War of Independence, the Ottoman government ordered the registration of all vessels – regardless of their flag and origin or the cargo they transported – arriving at or departing from the Ottoman capital and its surrounding wharves. These instances are recorded in five registers of 1822–1823 describing a total of four weeks of maritime activity. Specifically, the first register records all maritime activity in the Ottoman capital for the time period 8–14 October 1822;⁶² the second is for 17–23 December 1822;⁶³ the third and fourth are for 13–19 January 1823;⁶⁴ and the fifth is for 27 January–2 February 1823.⁶⁵ Each of these registers records all of the ships, the ships’ names, the names of their captains, the number and religion/nationality of the crew and passengers, the type and sometimes the amount of cargo, the date of arrival and/or departure, the original place of departure, and the destination.

In these registers, 372 out of 1,382 records, or more than a quarter of all Ottoman ship entries, make reference to ships with religiously mixed crews, regardless of the religion of the captain (277 of these ships have a Muslim and 95 a Christian captain). Of these records, 49 refer to ships where not a single crew member had the same religious identity as the ship's captain, with 19 cases of Muslim and 30 cases of Orthodox captains using exclusively crews of a different religion. These instances not only act as a strong reminder of the importance of Ottoman sources for the study of Ottoman commercial navigation, but once again underline the fact that the latter can be understood much more comprehensively when not exclusively treated as the product of the activity of non-intersecting religious groups.

This and the above-mentioned examples are only a small sample of the intriguing historical evidence that is waiting to be discovered and explored in Ottoman records. Such research, however, first and foremost necessitates a shift in our current perception of navigation in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. The prevailing view currently not only excludes Muslims from the picture, but also creates rigid divides that prevent us from crafting a shared history of commercial shipping in the region.

Conclusion

In recent years, historians have successfully revised the traditional historiographical paradigm that studied the rise of Christian commercial shipping in the Eastern Mediterranean in isolation from the Ottoman Empire. Particularly through the pioneering work of Gelina Harlaftis, Sophia Laiou and other Greek historians, the ascent of Greek Orthodox shipping has been systematically reframed and can now be understood as an integral component of the Ottoman commercial fleet – one that flourished within the specific economic and legal frameworks established by the Ottoman state. This scholarship has been invaluable in correcting a long-standing omission, anchoring a major maritime narrative within its proper imperial context.

However, a significant gap remains: an equally intensive study that incorporates Muslim seafarers and entrepreneurs into this vibrant maritime picture is still wanting. Moreover, as this article has demonstrated, Ottoman archives conceal a rich, ‘hidden’ world of cross-confessional collaboration that is waiting to be fully discovered. This was a shared commercial sphere where Muslim shipowners partnered with Christian captains; where investments in vessels and voyages crossed religious lines; and where crews of mixed faith worked side-by-side aboard ships. These partnerships were not anomalous but a pragmatic and widespread feature of Ottoman maritime life.

Looking forward beyond the themes explored here, another critical aspect merits investigation and should be placed on the agenda for future research – namely, the seafaring communities on land that fostered and reproduced this shared experience. How did port-side neighbourhoods, familial networks and local institutions sustain these economic and social bonds? A systematic examination of these relationships – both at sea and onshore – will profoundly advance our understanding. This will illuminate not only the practical workings of Ottoman maritime enterprise but also the nuanced, everyday realities of religious coexistence that characterized the Eastern Mediterranean for centuries. Pursuing this line of inquiry, however, demands a prior and fundamental shift in our scholarly perspective on the region's maritime history.

Footnotes

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: Research for this article received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant number: 849911).

ORCID iD

Yannis Spyropoulos

Notes

Author biography

Yannis Spyropoulos is a Greek Ottomanist. He completed his PhD at the University of Crete in 2014. As a post-doctoral researcher, he has held positions at the Centre d’études turques, ottomanes, balkaniques et centrasiatiques (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales/Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/ Collège de France) in Paris (2015–2016) and the Institute for Mediterranean Studies (Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas) in Rethymno (2016–2017, 2017–2018), where he currently works as a full-time researcher. Since 2019, he has been the Principal Investigator for the European Research Council project ‘JANET: Janissaries in Ottoman Port-Cities: Muslim Financial and Political Networks in the Early Modern Mediterranean’.