Hybridizing Camels in Sixteenth-Century Selanik

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With their potential to move goods across the spaces of empire, camels were closely associated with Ottoman mobility. In the 1570s, the Ottoman Imperial Council ordered two groups of two-humped Bactrian camels to be sent from Crimea and southern Anatolia to the port city of Selanik to be hybridized with one-humped camels. This attempt to intervene in the bodies of animals can be seen in the context of an increasingly technological understanding of animals, one that was integral to the formation of the Ottoman state, and a new ability to mobilize environments, finances, and knowledge. In addition, this article connects the case of the camel-breeding program in Selanik to the rise of communities of rural experts and to the Ottoman understanding of the hybrid origins of the “Rumis,” the Ottoman elites.