«“You cannot produce a Muslim witness”: Early Ottoman Attitudes Towards Proof and Religious Difference »

When dealing with Ottoman judges and judicial authorities, Frankish merchants and diplomats, but also craftsmen, seamen and even slaves encountered unexpected difficulties. one of the obstacles these foreigners came up against was the Ottoman ‘witness system’, privileging the word of Muslims, and more generally, Islamic notions of proof and evidence. In this article I report the story of a Venetian merchant who fell bankrupt in Syria in the late 1520s, and analyze how his default was dealt with by Ottoman judges and judicial authorities. A trader in diamonds, rubies, pearls and luxury armors, Marco Priuli found his customers among the Syrian upper class, comprising of judges and officials, as well as their wives and daughters. Muslims, but also Jews and Christians were equally affected by his default as his creditors, his debtors, and as his associates. Surprisingly for members of a veteran trading nation that proudly claimed five centuries of presence in the area, Marco’s heirs and associates proved to be unfamiliar with the legal practices sponsored by the Ottomans, and with the court’s requirements for proof and evidence. By approaching Priuli’s case, I describe how, shortly after the Ottoman conquest of Syria and Egypt, judges and officials started to deviate from previous legal practice regarding non-Muslims and mixed cases, promoting their own practices for producing evidence. For the Ottomans, the new approach to proof and evidence served as a means to differentiate themselves as a political community, delimited by identity boundaries, and to mark out their vision of their sovereign as guarantor of the rule of law.