Child Slavery in Seventeenth-Century Crimea

Childhood and children are new areas of research in Ottoman social history. Despite increasing interest in the history of children, we have still not established how Ottoman subjects of the 1600s conceived and perceived childhood. As far as the Crimean Khanate is concerned, there are no studies on childhood of any kind whatsoever. To fill this gap, at least partly, I will address the children forced to live as slaves. As the child slaves that were born in Crimea or had arrived at an early age grew up within local society, they lived like Muslims, and were unaware of their Christian pasts.