Seeking a Homeland, Serving the Empire: Muslim Migrants from Montenegro and Their Integration within the Ottoman Bureaucracy (1870–1914)

Abstract

The present article examines the migration of the Muslims of Montenegro to the Ottoman Empire as forced displacements and coerced movements. These movements were the outcome of discourses of exclusion and exclusionary practices toward the “other.” During the Great Eastern Crisis (1875–1878), this policy took the form of discursive violence and the physical expulsion of Montenegro’s Muslim populations. By contrast, the Ottoman Empire welcomed these migrants (muhacirler) and integrated them as agents of frontier defense on the Ottoman periphery, or as the Sultan’s personal guard units in Istanbul, the imperial center. As a result of these policies, large numbers of these Muslims accepted their position in the Ottoman Empire, and became active players within the Ottoman bureaucracy. The article highlights that these migrants were a geographically and socially mobile group that played important roles in the Ottoman administration and its ideological and cultural activities, and eventually shaped the nature of Ottoman rule. Due to the new formulation of Ottoman provinces after the Russo-Ottoman War (1877–1878) that made Islam a more culturally prominent element, these itinerant people took advantage of this change to influence Ottoman rule at both its ‘peripheries’ and ‘center.’