Early Modern Albanians in the Hands of the Inquisition

Abstract

It is very difficult to find, in the historical records, the voices of ordinary Albanians from the early modern period; the only rich body of material suitable for this purpose consists of the records of the Inquisition, where individual testimonies are preserved. This essay presents evidence from the Inquisition archives of Venice, Udine, Naples and Malta, plus documents from Palermo (preserved in Madrid), and cases from Barcelona, Majorca and Lisbon. In the great majority of cases, people appeared before the Inquisition because they had converted from Christianity to Islam—mostly while they were living in the Albanian lands, but in some cases when they were elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire. Sometimes conversion was a deliberate choice on economic grounds (to avoid taxation), but often the change took place when the person was below the age (early- to mid-teens) when Muslim practice required consent. In several cases the life-story revealed by this evidence involves casual enslavement of young Albanians within the Ottoman Empire by others who were, like them, Ottoman subjects; it is argued that this was a more common phenomenon than standard accounts of Ottoman slavery have suggested. And in a few cases we hear the voices of Albanian women; for two of these, conversion to Islam was an opportunistic act to evade an unwanted marriage.