Coping with Life’s Challenges in Ottoman Sarajevo: Freed Slaves and Agency in an Early Modern Borderland Society

Abstract

This paper aims to fill in the gaps in the social history of the Ottomanborderlands by exploring the social integration and agency of freed slaves in EarlyModern Ottoman Sarajevo. Recent scholarship has made considerable advances inevaluating the agency of freed slaves in the Ottoman Empire by using the collective biography approach. However, with few exceptions, attention has mostly beenpaid to materials relating to the inner parts of the Ottoman world, particularly to the Sharia court protocols of the Istanbul Region. The author argues that if weare to come a step closer to writing a social history of the Ottoman borderlands, as well as to the prosopography of freed slaves in the Ottoman Empire, archival materials from various regions should be taken into account. To achieve the above-said goals, this paper focuses on analysing the information on freed slaves found in the records of the Sharia court in Sarajevo, as well as in the cadastralsurveys and endowment deeds. Using such sources, the author shows the interplay between social structure and agency in the examples related to the freedmen and freedwomen.