[Page in progress.] The names come from shari’a court records, one of the richest primary sources available for the lives of ordinary people in the Ottoman empire. This particular batch was transcribed into the modern Turkish alphabet and placed online by ISAM, the Istanbul Kadi Registers Project, which focuses on records…
[Page in progress] Male and female slaves were different–so different that there were different words to refer to them. Male slaves were köle, and female slaves were cariye (pronounced “jariyeh”). Cariye literally means “runner,” one who runs to perform her master’s bidding, but even now it’s synonymous with “concubine.” So…
[Page in progress] To pick a SCAdian name for my 16th-century Turkish persona, I did the geekiest, most time-consuming thing possible: dug up shari’a court records from 16th-century Constantinople and extracted all the female names. The names are solid. The etymologies are not. Abide Adile Alemşah Alime Asiye Atike Ayni Ayşe:…
The Ottoman empire was a vast bureaucracy that churned out paper at a rate deserving of the respect of any modern bureaucracy. Quite a few of those records have been preserved. However, they’re written in Arabic script, using formal hands of varying degrees of intelligibility and legal formats and formulae…
16th-century Ottoman Turkish names were divided along religious lines, with Muslims, Greek Orthodox Christians, Armenian Apostolic Christians, and Jews having separate naming pools with very little overlap. Slaves, especially female slaves, often received names that set them apart from free people, adding another layer of complexity. See the Section Menu…