In her famous Turkish Embassy Letters (1763), the English ambassadress, Lady Montagu, listed the financial and social freedoms that Ottoman women enjoyed and proclaimed that they had more freedom than men.

Upon the whole I look upon the Turkish women as the only free people in the empire. Those ladies that are rich having all their money in their own hands, which they take with them upon a divorce with an addition, which he is obliged to give them.

Montagu’s observation of women’s property rights in Islamic law was accurate and could be contrasted with England and the rest of Europe, where women were bound by laws of coverture, in which the wife’s legal existence was suspended during the marriage. The earlier English diplomats to the Ottoman court did not make elaborate comments on Muslim women’s financial rights. However, according to a document I came across in the archives, the first English ambassador William Harborne tried to take advantage of women’s financial autonomy over their finances in Islamic law and appealed to a shariah court on behalf of the English consul to Chios and his wife in order to bypass Catholic matrimonial law.

William Harborne, a merchant-diplomat, represented Queen Elizabeth I in Sultan Murad III’s court as the first English ambassador in Istanbul between 1582 and 1588. Harborne was primarily concerned with two things: arranging for an Anglo-Turkish military campaign against Spain and establishing a safe and independent English trade with the Ottoman realm. The former did not materialise as the Ottomans were engaged with the Persian campaign from 1577 to 1589. But the latter did and Harborne succeeded in getting a national charter of trading privileges for the English, who used to seek French protection until then. Harborne had the power to decide where the consulates should be opened and who should run them. It appears that by 1585 he had appointed a consul on Chios, a primary centre of English trade in the Levant, and that the consul married a local lady, which scandalised the island. Let’s have a look at the register-copy of Sultan Murad’s farmān[1] sent to the governor of Chios on this matter to see what happened after the English consul’s marriage:

It is our command to the beg [governor] of Chios; the queen of the island of England’s ambassador at my gate of felicity[2] submitted [a] petition to my sublime court that the English consul in Chios has been married to a dhimmi[3] lady named Balsīne from the abovementioned island’s residents and that a group and the bishop in the island, out of grudge to the abovementioned lady saying that “you have married someone against our kind and from thence you are not one of us” infringed her rights through freezing her properties, victuals and estate, [the bishop] also wrote to the Pope and affected the freezing of the abovementioned lady’s clothes and assets under her brother’s care in Messina. In this regard the ambassador asked for my honourable command that the case be resolved in accordance with sharia law. Thus I command thee; when (space reserved for the courier’s name) arrives [with the farman] inquire the matter thoroughly, and resolve the case in accordance with the honourable Islamic law unless the case has been decided according to the shariah before or it is a case in which fifteen years have elapsed, and prevent any action that violates the shariah.

17 D̲j̲umādā ’l-Ūlā 993 (May 17, 1585)

Image: The summary of the royal decree at the top right from a mühimme defteri that is, “Registers of Important Affairs” that contain the decisions made at the Imperial Council of Ottoman Empire between 1553 and 1915; currently held at the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Istanbul. BOA DVNSMHM f.58 271v.

From this brief summary of Sultan Murad’s command, it is understood that some on the island, including the Catholic bishop of Chios, who was Benedetto Garetti between 1579 and 1597, were quite hostile towards Lady Balsine for marrying an Englishman and Harborne countermanded it by petitioning the sultan for the shariah court to step in. Balsine probably was a member of the Catholic Genoese community that constituted the majority of the island’s population in the sixteenth century. Catholics as well as Greek Orthodox communities on the island were exempted from Islamic law. While the notaries practiced customary law, the clergymen practiced canon law, and the Muslim population followed the shariah. It appears that the parallel justice systems in the Ottoman Empire enabled the bishop to confiscate Lady Balsine’s assets for marrying someone outside the Catholic faith.

The bishop’s attack on this interfaith marriage could be prompted by the nature of English trade in addition to the raging conflict between Protestant England and the Catholic world. Queen Elizabeth’s excommunication by the Pope in 1570 led England to become estranged from Catholic Europe and make alliances with Muslim powers for leverage. It also released English merchants from papal dictates prohibiting trade with Muslims in materials used in war. Tin, lead, copper and woollen cloth were the main English exports circulating in Ottoman Levantine trade hubs. While the metals were used in armaments, woollen cloth was used to dress the janissaries. English ships departing from the West of England would go directly to Chios carrying bell-metal and tin.

The Ottoman chancery scribe, who entered the summary of the original farmān to the register book, spelled out the English consul’s wife’s name while dropping the consul’s name, as well as Harborne’s, in contrast to Christian law where women’s legal identity is erased. It could be because she, as an Ottoman subject, was the victim and the plaintiff in this legal case. Indeed, Balsine makes a lyrical Turkish name meaning ‘honey-bosom’ or ‘honey-heart’. It could be the result of an error while the scribe transcribed her original name, which might be Balsini, a family name in Italian. Her wealth in Chios as well as in Messina, another important city on the Levantine trade route, gives the impression that she was a rich lady from a wealthy merchant family. This might be how her path crossed with the English consul, who was most likely a merchant just like Harborne was. However, it is hard to ascertain his identity. The earliest record referring to an English agent on the island belongs to Thomas Dallam, an English organ builder, who in 1599 brought to Istanbul a fantastic mechanical organ, Elizabeth’s gift for Mehmed III on the occasion of his accession to the throne. Dallam notes in his diary that “in [Chios] was an Inglishe Consoll whose name was Mr. Wilyam Aldridge, a fine jentleman”. Aldridge may or may not have been Balsine’s husband.

Did Lady Balsine and her husband manage to release her property from the clutches of the Catholic Church? Did they live happily in Chios?  We do not know. Nevertheless, her story, though incomplete, shows us how two Elizabethans navigated their way in a multi-ethnic Muslim empire, and where they positioned themselves vis-à-vis other Christian communities as they sought the protection of a shariah court instead of negotiating with the Catholic Church. It also displays how the friction between Protestant England and the Catholic world, which was exacerbated by the pope’s excommunication of Elizabeth and her subsequent alignment with the Muslim powers in the Mediterranean impacted Chios, a small island on the Aegean sea.

Image: Map of the Levant with main trading routes highlighted. Accessed here

Title Image: Braun & Hogenberg Bird’s Eye View Chios Map, c. 1593. Accessed here

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[1] A royal decree issued by the sovereign

[2] The Sultan’s court, gate, palace; especially said of the outer department of the palace where the mayor of the palace and the secretaries transact business and beyond which strangers do not penetrate.

[3] Dhimmi was the Muslim term for a Christian or Jewish subject of a Muslim ruler. Islamic law would be applied to dhimmis only when all parties involved in a legal case agreed to it or in cases involving dhimmis and Muslims in which Muslim law was the only option.