ing this process. Women effected through marriage
or inheritance the commercial and cultural fusion
of the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean worlds
and linked otherwise racially and ethnically incon-
gruent components to an Ottoman society. The
very origins of the Ottoman dynasty reflect the
function of marriage in bridging racial and ethnic
divides. Sultan Osman’s Turkic-speaking contem-
poraries in the late fourteenth century forged rela-
tionships with other culturally hybrid peoples
throughout the Anatolian and Balkan regions
through marriage. These marriages constituted
political and economic alliances that ignored reli-
gious or ethnic differences, assuring in the process
a harmonious transition of newly conquered terri-
tories to Ottoman rule.
Over time, the empire affirmed these methods of
distributing power by way of a uniquely structured
military apparatus. The Janissaries, for example,
represented a confluence of the empire’s ethnic
diversity, integrating marginal communities through
the devçirme(recruitment of Janissaries) into the
mainstream of imperial power. Formerly “Chris-
tian boys,” Africans and mountain villagers from
the Caucasus trained as loyal extensions of the
empire, representing a system that linked Istanbul
with subject societies in North Africa, the Arab-
speaking territories, and the Balkans. While repre-
senting distinct, often self-identifying units embedded
in occupied regions, Janissaries usually integrated
with the local community by marrying women
from prominent local families.
The Harem-i Hümayun (Imperial harem) and
the harems of prominent officials in the provinces
also served this integrative function at the highest
level of imperial politics. The harem was a virtual
melting pot of the world’s racial and ethnic diver-
sity as the politics of reproduction assured integra-
tion of much of the empire’s peoples. Race and
ethnicity did matter in the empire’s harems to the
extent that chief eunuchs of African origin were
highly prized, creating a lucrative market in cap-
tured slaves. While slavery was practiced in many
corners of the empire, there are many cases in
Ottoman history of African men wielding consid-
erable power. The sultan’s palace as a whole served
as a microcosm of imperial diversity in which
Albanians, Arabs, Slavs, Ethiopians, Nubians,
Kurds, and Turks all specialized in specific duties.
These servants, much like the harem’seunuchs,
operated within networks that linked people
through common origin. These regionally based
networks explain how certain groups in Ottoman
society monopolized particular trades, a source of
the ottoman empire 693the periodic outbreaks of ethnic or sectarian vio-
lence that resulted in the breakdown of the empire’s
stewardship of its diversity.
Women played the symbolic as well as practical
role of preserving the integrity of the communities
out of which the diversity in imperial circles came.
This is clear in how local traditions (örf oryasa)
evolved during Ottoman history to prescribe
specific productive roles for women in societies
throughout the Balkans, Middle East, and Ana-
tolia. The Kanun of Luk Dukagjin found in North-
ern Albania, for example, went to great lengths to
outline the Albanian woman’s role in the larger
context of how the community interacted with the
Ottoman state. These traditional systems, found
from Bosnia to the Caucasus to Yemen, reflected an
undercurrent of tension in which women would
serve as markers of the community’s self-perceived
boundaries, separating the local from a heteroge-
neous empire that often used marriage to integrate
these otherwise isolated communities.
In many documented cases, women were able to
utilize the institutions erected by the state to secure
greater individual rights, often at the expense of
these local misogynistic traditions. Scholarship
has shown that women who had access to Otto-
man courts in cities, Damascus and Jerusalem for
instance, sometimes challenged indigenous legal
codes, liberating them from strategic marriages as
well as securing their personal fortunes. Ultimately,
the Ottoman state’s capacity to shape the lives of
individual women by way of its institutions helped
affirm the integrative principles at work among the
empire’s elite. Many powerful local women used
the state’s administrative mechanism to catapult
them beyond their immediate, at times repressive,
environment and assure them a prominent place in
the larger world.
Of course, the empire’s heterogeneous character
left it vulnerable to periodic conflict among various
communities. This is particularly true in the nine-
teenth century when the significance of racial, eth-
nic, and religious differences took on new weight in
the face of Christian Europe. One consequence of
this was the economic changes induced by greater
European influence. These changes systematically
extricated large numbers of Ottoman woman from
their traditional roles in local communities. Cases
in Lebanon, for instance, demonstrate how Euro-
pean capitalists and missionaries targeted rural
women, tying them to small-scale factory labor
schemes that, coupled with increasing violence
instigated by members of self-identified ethnic-
national communities protected by outside powers,