Defining “Ottomans” and “Foreigners”: Venetian Merchants, Jurisdictional Conflicts, and Legal Belonging in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul

This article examines the creation of state membership, or legal belonging, for European merchant groups residing in the Ottoman Empire during the seventeenth century. It focuses on the Venetian community of Istanbul and a jurisdictional conflict during 1613–1617 between Ottoman and European authorities over the legal belonging of European merchants. Given the absence of an empire-wide and uniform regime of citizenship and identification in the early modern Ottoman Empire, the classification as either “Venetian” or “Ottoman” was not self-evident but rather frequently a matter of controversy and diplomatic negotiations. This essay argues that an international body of rules and practices concerning state membership developed through interactions between Ottoman and European actors during recurring jurisdictional conflicts in the early modern period.