Defining “Ottomans” and “Foreigners”: Venetian Merchants, Jurisdictional Conflicts, and Legal Belonging in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul

What is it about?

This article analyzes the creation of rules over state membership or legal belonging in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. It focuses on the Venetian community of Istanbul and on a jurisdictional conflict between Venetian and Ottoman authorities in the years 1613- 1617. During this crisis, Ottoman officials tried to “naturalize” Venetian merchants and other Europeans in Istanbul as Ottoman subjects by imposing on them Ottoman taxes, which were forbidden according to international treaties. This action brought about a long diplomatic controversy in which Venetian and Ottoman authorities negotiated over the requirements to be legally considered “Venetian” or “Ottoman,” including residence duration, marital status, and property ownership. I argue that jurisdictional conflicts between Ottoman and European authorities promoted the creation of a body of international law regulating legal belonging in the early modern Mediterranean, a “proto citizenship” for Ottoman and European subjects. This corpus of norms and practices was not “Eurocentric:” it developed out of the interactions between Ottoman and European officials and subjects in a historical context, the seventeenth-century Mediterranean, characterized by Ottoman ascendancy. Overall, this article challenges long-time accounts of the emergence of regimes of citizenship and international law in the Mediterranean as the exclusive products of European policymakers and jurists in the nineteenth century.

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