Zarinebaf|203the woman and the Jew out of prison and buried them in the ditch up to their
arms. The crowd then started to throw stones at her until she died. The Jew had
converted to Islam the night before to try to escape death, but he too was put
to the sword [put to death] that day.Mehmed Raşid, the official chronicler of the court of Sultan Ahmed III (r. 1703–
1730) and the former kadi of Istanbul, recorded this strange case of stoning to
death in his multivolume history of the empire. According to Raşid (d. 1730), the
woman was stoned to death in the Hippodrome, across from the Sultan Ahmet
mosque in Istanbul. Sultan Mehmed IV watched the event from his pavilion in
the midst of a great religious controversy over the punishment of adultery. The
woman’s husband, who claimed to have caught them in the act, gathered with a
large crowd to stone her.
Raşid described the witnesses as “suspect” and blamed the chief religious
judge of Rumelia, Beyazizade Ahmed Efendi (d. 1685), who was a member of
the Kadizadeli revivalist faction, for issuing the harsh religious ruling after the
şeyhülislam (chief jurisconsult) had refused to do it. The tragic and extreme pun-
ishment of the Muslim woman and her Jewish lover underlined the prevailing
conservative religious mood among the Kadizadeli preachers and the growing
religious anxieties of the time about adultery, miscegenation, and sexual mixing.
Sex crimes and their definition, prosecution, and punishment in the Otto-
man Empire followed a pattern similar to the rest of the Mediterranean world.
Punishment ranged from fines to excommunication, expulsion, public shaming,
and corporal punishment, such as beatings, lashings, and even stoning to death
in rare cases. In Islamic law, illicit sex (zina) deserved the hadd punishment of
one hundred lashes if four adult and upright Muslim males directly witnessed
the act. In the absence of the necessary eyewitnesses, however, the accused could
confess or deny the charge four separate times, which was considered equal to
the four eyewitnesses. False accusation, if proven, however, could lead to eighty
lashes as punishment. The strict standards of evidence combined with the harsh
punishments for false witness resulted in Islamic courts being very careful to use
vague terminology when accusing a person of illicit sexual behavior and rarely
prosecuting such cases in the Ottoman empire.
Therefore, the leading Ottoman chroniclers, like Silahdar, Defterdar, and
Raşid, were all critical of the Kadizadeli influence over Sultan Mehmed IV and
his decision to issue this extreme punishment without proper eyewitnesses as
required by sharia. Both Defterdar and Silahdar believed that the accusation
was false, that the couple was not caught in the act of adultery, and that the couple
had denied the charges as slander before their deaths. Clearly, the religion and
gender of both victims must have played an important role in their punishment.
Religious tensions also arose in the peripheries of the empire during the
Ottomans’ war with Venice. In December 1672, a bloody rebellion against the