Benefşe's Freedom: Manumission in the Ottoman Empire

Chris Gratien, Georgetown University

The following document will interest those studying issues of race or gender in the Ottoman Empire. It deals with a manumission case involving an African (zenciye) woman by the name of Benefşe who turned up in Adana claiming her freedom under the new laws of the Tanzimat period. However, before I explain the contents of this case, I would like to say a few words about where I found it, as this may be of relevance for researchers planning a trip to the Ottoman archives.

One of the peculiarities of the Başbakanlık Ottoman Archives is that particularly when moving to later periods, many documents have been catalogued individually and are available for request not in their original boxes but in individual folders sometimes containing just one sheet of paper. Without getting into the logic and politics behind this system, we can just say that this has the benefit of allowing researchers to immediately get to their topic of interest (ideal for the organization of a site like Tozsuz Evrak), but it prevents researchers from seeing related or adjacent documents (not ideal for a site with the curiosity of Tozsuz Evrak) and makes accessing large number of documents from a particular ministry or location time consuming.

However, sometimes individual letters are logged elsewhere in defters, where one can see an entire set of documents from a given place, time, or department of the Ottoman bureaucracy. This document comes from one such collection, an ayniyat defteri of the Bab-ı Ali Evrak Odası (BEO) for the Adana province. This notebook contains all the correspondence going to Adana from the center. With this comprehensive scope, the defter demonstrates the main questions facing the local government of Adana at the time. Many involve the issue of the changing status of newly settled tribes and immigrants during the 1860s. Among these issues, I stumbled upon another instance of changing status: the case of an enslaved woman named Benefşe claiming to be free. 

Abolition in the Ottoman Empire over the course of the nineteenth century was incremental. We've already discussed how some of the first laws passed regarding the limitation of the slave trade were related to assisting the British in their own abolition efforts. By 1857, the empire had banned the African slave trade, but implementation of this prohibition was gradual and did not mean that those who were already slaves would necessarily be freed. 

It was in this context that Benefşe was purchased by an Adana woman named Fatma, presumably as a domestic servant. But Benefşe claimed that she had the right to freedom based on the declarations of Sultan Abdülmecid I regarding the abolition of the slave trade. However, Benefşe had another reason as well. She alleged that she was the wife of an Ottoman official from İşkodra, Mahmud Pasha, the son of Mustafa Pasha. Benefşe also said that her young son was indeed the child of her now-deceased husband Mahmud. If this was the case, she would certainly be legally entitled to her freedom.

Yet, there were problems with the case regarding the identity of her alleged husband. Ottoman officials tracked down the family of Mustafa Paşazade Mahmud only to find Benefşe's would-be deceased husband alive and well, serving as the kaymakam of Yenipazar in Bosnia. In addition to being alive, Mahmud also didn't have any brother named Reşid as Benefşe indicated in her deposition. As a result, the government called for a re-interrogation of Benefşe with the following questions: 1. Is the person in question a different Musatafa Paşazade Mahmud? 2. When did Mahmud pass away? 3. What type of post did he have? 4. Is he really from İşkodra? 

This document shows what the manumission process entailed for an Ottoman slave seeking freedom. Benefşe needed proof that she deserved to be free, and while her claim to being the wife of a deceased Ottoman official would have been valid even prior to the new laws regarding the slave trade, it is possible that the new legal climate had emboldened her to seek manumission. The legal apparatus of the state showed genuine concern for correct application of the law in Benefşe's case, but required evidence. I could not locate any other documents pertaining to Benefşe in the archive catalog or the Adana court records, so I am not aware of the outcome of her case. It is a general rule in Islamic law regarding slavery that when in doubt, the default status of any person is freedom. This does not mean, however, that Benefşe would be freed if she could not prove her status, since despite the prohibition of the slave trade and a trend towards manumission during the 1860s, there was never an outright ban on the practice of slavery in the Ottoman Empire.

Source: BOA, BEO-AYN-d 867, no. 16.

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