Slavery was a major institution and a significant part of the Ottoman Empire 's economy and traditional society. It has been reported that the selling price of slaves decreased after large military operations. In Constantinople present-day Istanbul , the administrative and political center of the Ottoman Empire, about a fifth of the 16th- and 17th-century population consisted of slaves.
Individual members of the Ottoman slave class, called a kul in Turkish , could achieve high status in some positions. Eunuch harem guards and janissaries are some of the better known positions an enslaved person could hold, but enslaved women were actually often supervised by them. However, women played and held the most important roles within the harem institution.
Many enslaved officials themselves owned numerous slaves, although the Sultan himself owned by far the most. Other slaves were simply laborers used for hard labor, such as for example agricultural laborers and galley slaves. Female slaves were primarily used as either domestic house servants or as concubines sex slaves , who were subjected to harem gender segregation.
While there were slaves of many different ethnicities and race was not the determined factor in who could be enslaved, there was still a racial hierarchy among slaves, since slaves were valued and assigned tasks and considered to have different abilities due to racial stereotypes.
Even after several measures to ban slave trade and restrict slavery, introduced due to Western diplomatic pressure in the late 19th century, the practice continued largely unabated into the early 20th century.
