Prostitution was prevalent in the Ottoman Empire, with both men and women, as well as Christians, Jews, and Muslims engaging in the practice. Clients met prostitutes in a variety of locations, including coffeehouses, inns for bachelors ("bachelor rooms"), laundries, restaurants, barbershops, and candy stores.
Prostitutes often served sailors and military members, particularly in their lodgings; additionally, prostitutes served clients in private homes, abandoned buildings, and taverns. In early modern Istanbul, evidence suggests that some women worked alone to find clients in public areas at night, while others worked together to bring clients to rooms they rented. To avoid attracting attention, some female prostitutes disguised themselves as men, and certain pimps married their prostitutes to remain inconspicuous. Many people who engaged in prostitution did so out of economic necessity and were primarily those left without a support system due to divorce, widowhood, or economic downturns.
Legally, the Ottoman Empire had a complicated relationship with prostitution. While Islamic law prescribes harsh punishments for crimes of illicit sex, most prostitutes did not face capital punishment. Instead, prostitutes were typically banished from their neighborhood or city or forced to pay a fine.
Scholars attribute this gap between legal theory and practice to the difficulty of proving sexual misconduct, the incentives faced by the state to permit prostitution, and the ambiguity embedded in legal theory on prostitution, given its legal equivalence to the broader category of zinā (fornication). Slaves, however, were often sexually exploited by their owners. Though prohibits slave owners from pimping their slaves, a pimp selling his slave to a new owner for sexual use and then having the ownership of her returned to him after intercourse, was seen as a loophole and not defined as prostitution.
Legal treatment of prostitution
Legal classification and punishment Under Islamic law, the crime of prostitution is considered an act of zinā, which encompasses sexual relations outside marriage or concubinage. As an offense included in the hudud, or Qur'anic punishments, zinā is one of the most severe offenses in Islam, alongside drinking alcohol and theft. Thus, Islamic law prescribes harsh fixed penalties for zinā: 100 lashes for a slave, non-Muslim, or unmarried offender and stoning to death if the offender is free, Muslim, and married. The application of these severe penalties required extraordinarily rigorous proof, namely, the testimony of four male Muslim witnesses of high moral standing who had to directly witness the act of penetration. As a result, it was "almost impossible to attain" evidence of illicit sex in most circumstances. Compounding this difficulty, witnesses were disincentivized from testifying because they could be accused of qadhf (sexual slander) if the prosecution of zinā was unsuccessful. If found to have made a false accusation of zinā, the offender would be punished with a fixed penalty of 80 lashes.
Despite the harsh penalties prescribed by Islamic law, Ottoman courts rarely enforced hudud fully, including the crime of zinā. In fact, prostitution was explicitly excluded by 16th to 18th century Ottoman jurists from the hudud penalties, although the act was not deemed legal. While the theoretical law called for severe corporal punishment and even death for offenders of sexual law, there is only one known case of stoning in the Ottoman Empire. The most common punishment for prostitutes was banishment from one's neighborhood or city. In legal records from Ottoman Aleppo, no prostitutes suffered physical punishments, only facing "banishment from the quarter", after which they could move to another quarter and continue to engage in prostitution. Punishments were slightly more serious in Istanbul, where prostitutes were banished to another area of the state and consequently alienated from their community.
There were certain instances in which legal consequences for prostitution were more severe than banishment, however. During the holy month of Ramadan, prostitutes were forbidden to be in public, and they were gathered and imprisoned to "protect the moral decency of society". Additionally, prostitutes occasionally faced forms of public humiliation and corporeal punishment, such as pillorying. These punishments were typically inflicted by high officials who were particularly stringent about sexual crimes, of which Sultan Mehmed II is an example.
Slavery and prostitution However, the situation was different in the case of slavery. During the era of slavery in the Ottoman Empire, prostitution was connected to slavery. Islamic Law formally prohibited prostitution as zina. However, since the legal principle of concubinage in Islam allowed a man to have intercourse with his female slave without it being defined as zina, prostitution was practiced by a pimp selling his female slave on the slave market to a client, who was allowed to have intercourse with her as her new owner, and who after intercourse returned his ownership of her to her pimp on the pretext of discontent, which was a legal and accepted method for prostitution in the Islamic world.B. Belli, "Registered female prostitution in the Ottoman Empire (1876–1909)," Ph.D. – Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2020. p. 56 The prostitution of female slaves was formally prohibited as a result of the issuing of a new code of law, the Kanunname of 1889.B. Belli, "Registered female prostitution in the Ottoman Empire (1876–1909)," Ph.D. – Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2020.
Legal theory vs. legal practice One challenge facing researchers on this subject is the ambiguity present in Ottoman legal records concerning prostitution. In Islamic law, zinā occurs when a woman has sexual contact with any man except for her husband or master, which includes prostitution. The conflation of the broad category of zinā with prostitution suggests that a woman who has contact with a man outside of her family is considered a prostitute. As a result, it is difficult for scholars to determine whether archival material related to women's sexual behavior pertains to prostitution, adultery, or "moral looseness". Ottoman court documents also utilize euphemistic language to describe sexual offenses, employing vague terms accusing men and women of being "'harmful to neighbors (yu'thi al-jiran)', committing 'acts of indecency (af 'al shani'a)', or 'morally repugnant deeds (af'al qabiha).'" These descriptions give little information about the specific crimes of which the defendants are accused, but they appear to be crimes under the category of zinā. Scholar Abdul-Karim Rafeq proposes that such euphemisms were used to protect the privacy of families and neighborhoods who did not want the details of these crimes to be made public. Offering a different perspective, Elyse Semerdjian suggests that vague descriptions allowed accusers to avoid the extremely difficult requirements of proving zinā, instead seeking punishment at the judge's discretion.
Scholars of Ottoman prostitution provide a variety of explanations of why the treatment of prostitution differed so greatly from Islamic legal theory. Firstly, the legal resemblance between prostitution and concubinage complicated the application of zinā. The dynamic between a client and a prostitute was similar to that of a husband and wife or a master and slave since it also involved an exchange of money for sexual services. In legal records, Ottoman jurists were conflicted over this dynamic; some argued "that by paying for the services rendered, the client assumed temporary quasi-ownership of the prostitute, making the relationship akin to concubinage". This similarity introduced legal ambiguities regarding the encounters between clients and prostitutes, preventing the application of fixed penalties for zinā.
Other arguments highlight the social necessities and benefits of prostitution from the perspective of the Ottoman state. As Marinos Sariyannis explains, Ottoman law treated prostitution as "unavoidable, though immoral". Accordingly, prostitution in Ottoman Aleppo was seen as inevitable due to the demands of soldiers for prostitutes and the city's persistent military presence. Eradicating prostitution entirely was not feasible, as doing so could lead to increased risks from soldiers and possibly from unruly single men living in the area. Consequently, the government permitted the discreet operation of prostitution within designated entertainment districts like Galata and Pera. The government may also have directly benefited from this practice and deliberately allowed it to continue. According to Ö. L. Barkan, the state sought to collect "taxable income" from prostitution in the form of adultery fines, thus providing a source of revenue—albeit at the cost of "public morality". Historical records indicate that local governors had the power to tax or outlaw the practice of prostitution within their cities. In 18th-century Damascus, for instance, the governor abandoned unsuccessful attempts to curb prostitution and simply instituted a monthly fee from each prostitute to generate income.
To explain the disparity between the legal treatment of prostitution in theory and in practice, scholar James Baldwin points to how court cases originated. Ottoman sharīʿa courts did not proactively prosecute zinā cases, given their immense burden of proof; instead, subjects were the primary instigators of prostitution cases. Most commonly, residents brought cases against prostitutes and pimps in their communities in order to "clean up their neighborhood, not to exact vengeance or to set an example through punishment". Further, the nearly impossible onus of proof and the penalties for making a false accusation dissuaded subjects from explicitly accusing others of zinā, leading them instead to offer vague evidence sufficient to warrant banishment. Through this explanation, Baldwin argues that Ottoman courts did not simply stray from Islamic jurisprudence but had a nuanced response to prostitution shaped by the initiative of private litigants.
History of prostitution The sixteenth century saw strict punishments for those who engaged in prostitution. The earliest known edict relating to prostitution in the Ottoman Empire was issued in 1567, which stated that prostitutes were to be identified and imprisoned. A second amendment shortly after allowed men to marry prostitutes under the condition that the couple immediately leave Istanbul. In 1577, the sultan ordered all "whores" and women without husbands expelled from the empire. Prostitutes were forbidden from following the army during campaigns and were temporarily imprisoned whenever the army visited Istanbul. In 1596, five women caught with cavalry soldiers were executed, and the soldiers were imprisoned.
In the 17th century, during a period of Ottoman "decline and social unrest because of the weakening of authority", the state enacted further measures to combat illicit sexual activity.Füsun Çoban Döşkaya and Ahmet Aksın, "Prostitutes in Ottoman Archival Sources", in International Conference on Knowledge and Politics in Gender and Women's Studies (METU GWS Conference, 2015), 456–65 Sultan Suleiman's kanunname (law code) imposed harsher consequences for adulterers. In 1652, the governor of Sofia, the capital of Rumeli, or the modern-day Balkans, publicly hanged several prostitutes as a warning and expelled all others. In 1657, prostitutes in Tulca, Izmail, and Kiliya, in modern-day Ukraine, were detained and left naked on an island to die of mosquito-borne disease.