Женският жребий според Книги на жалбите от XVIII век
Women's Lot According to the Seventeenth-Century Books of Complaints

Summary/Abstract: The study presents an analysis of a series of documents selected from three unpublished Ottoman Books of Complaints. These are: Atîk Sikâyet Defteri No. 29 of 1698/99, Rikâb Sikâyet Defteri No. 77 of 1718 and Rumeli Ahkâm Defteri No. 6 of 1747/49. As the very name of this type of historical sources suggests, they are concerned — among other things — with one of the darkest aspects of women's lot in the period under discussion: the theft, abduction and rape of women and girls, Muslims as well as Christians. This period was filled with violence; it bore witness to the emergence and growth of the so-called Kirdjali gangs whose activities soon brought total anarchy to the European provinces of the Ottoman empire. As has been noted by the authors, a clear distinction should be made between the cases of girls being abducted by their suitors who wished to marry them against their parents' or their own will, on one hand, and the cases of girls and women who were abducted in order to be raped, on the other. In the second group of cases, the abductors were gangsters who were of various ethnic, religious and social backgrounds. The study also explores the reactions of the male relations of the abducted women — their fathers, husbands, brothers, and other close relatives — as well as of their fellow-villagers and townspeople. They filed complaints against the perpetrators of this type of crimes and expected to see justice served. As a rule, the Ottoman authorities tended to persecute this type of crimes. However, given the total anarchy of the time period, it is small wonder that the persecution of criminals by the authorities was altogether unsuccessful. The above-mentioned Books of Complaints testify to the numerous cases of sexual violence against women that occurred in Southern Bulgaria and especially in the Eastern Rhodopes in the period between the late seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth century. The considerable amount of evidence concerning cases of abduction and rape of women in the area could be explained, in the first place, through the area's location: the relatively short distance to the capital made it easier for people to bring the cases of sexual violence to the attention of the imperial government in Istanbul. On the contrary, similar cases of sexual violence in the more remote parts of the country like Sofia, Bitolja and Rousse, for example, were brought to the attention of the local kadi and are mentioned in his siggils only. In the second place, the greater number of sexual crimes in the Eastern Rhodopes and Eastern Thrace was due to the higher crime rate in that area, as the Kirdjali movement reached its climax there in the 1780s. Finally, the authors argue that sexual violence against women was not characteristic of the European provinces of the Ottoman empire only; in the period under discussion, this type of crimes often occurred in Central and Western Europe as well.

• Details
• Contents