Jus Primae Noctis – Institutionalised rape of Christians under the Ottoman Empire

Jus primae noctis or droit du seigneur is the right to sleep with a nubile (young and
sexually attractive) servant before turning her over to her servant husband (the right by
which a landlord may sleep first night with the bride of a newly married serf), although
the custom may be avoided by the payment of a fine.
This law was imposed by the Ottoman rulers and widely practiced in countries under the
Ottoman rule (provinces of the Ottoman Empire were: Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia)
until the very end of the 19th century.
The picture, painted by Paja Jovanovic, shows a bride preparing for the wedding night.
The first night she is going to spend with her landlord. Landlords (beg, aga) were usually
Turks but there were many local nobles converting to Islam to save their privileges when
the region was controlled by the Ottoman Empire.
* The right was used on a braid of a feudal dependant or servant, any dhimmi. They
were Christians and the right wasn’t used on Muslim brides.
On the day before her wedding the young Christian bride will be visited by a
representative of the landlord (beg, aga). The representative is usually accompanied by a
file of soldiers. The representative takes the bride to the house of the landlord for a day
and a night, raping her repeatedly, and returns her to her home at dawn on the wedding
day.
An interesting detail on the picture is that all women on the picture are dressed in
traditional oriental (Turkish style) clothing. Under the Ottomans textile styles has
influenced by Islamic tradition. Women on the picture except the one on the right have
their hair covered with a shawl (also called shamija or mahram) according to the Islamic
custom.
Women wore “dimije” (it looks like baggy trousers) of thin, often gold-woven, silk
brocade, emphasising the female figure.
1998 Yugoslav postal authorities issued 4 stamps dedicated to national customs. The
motif on the stamp of 6,00 din. value is the painting “Dressing/Adornmnet of the Bride”
by Paja Jovanovic

Source:
http://www.geocities.com/Eureka/Park/7313/primae_noctis_jus.htm

Jus Primae Noctis – Details
The historical acceptance of rape may have influenced the incidence of rape in the wars
of the last decade in former Yugoslavia. However, there were other historical factors
which tended to promote its use and lend themselves to propaganda promoting it, in
Bosnia-Herzegovina as well as Serbia. Under Ottoman rule, within which much of Serbia
gained autonomy in 1830 but Bosnia-Herzegovina was to remain until 1878, there had
been a disadvantaged position of Serbs and Croats.
The use or misuse of Serb and other Christian minority women by Muslim men, especially
Ottoman officials and the landlord class, has been a major source of grievance. Polygamy
and concubinage by Muslim men, especially Ottoman officials and landlords or begs,
resulted in wives and concubines being taken from the Christian population as well as the
Muslim one, and often abandoned when no longer wanted. The insecurity of these
women resulted in their having relatively few children, and resorting to abortion,
infanticide and other birth control measures (Stoianovich 1994, p. 159).
The other ‘misuse’ was through ‘first night’ arrangements, more generally known as the
jus primae noctis (right to the first night) or droit de seigneur (the right of the feudal
lord), by which the janissary in charge of an estate or the local landlord had the right to
the virginity of all brides among Serb and other serfs. These arrangements are a folk
memory rather than attested by literary sources. They were mentioned by Bosnian Serb
former politician Biljana Plavsic in 1993 in an attempt to assert that rape was the war
strategy of the Muslims and Croats. She noted that it was ‘quite normal of Muslim
notables to enjoy the jus primae noctis with Christian women’ during the Ottoman period
(Cohen 1998, p. 222). Levinsohn (1994, p. 274) quotes Belgrade publisher Petar Zdazdic
as saying that there was a tradition that the Serb serf or peasant would have to walk
around the house with his shoes in his hands when an Ottoman official or landlord came
to the house to have intercourse with his wife. In the early phase of Ottoman occupation
the janissaries, who were in control of major agricultural estates as well as forming the
core of the military, were forbidden to marry until they retired from the service of the
empire. First night and similar arrangements may have been important substitutes for
marriage.
However, the landlords became an increasingly hereditary class. In Bosnia some three
hundred years ago they had to persuade Serbs to come from Montenegro to work their
land as serfs or sharecroppers. Muslim peasants had chosen increasingly to purchase
their own land and work it as smallholders rather than be serfs, but this option was not
open to Christians in Bosnia-Herzegovina until after 1830. Hence first night and
concubinage arrangements for Serb and Croat kmet or serf women would have become
less common in the later phases of Ottoman rule. Also, the landlord class accounted for
no more than 5 to 10 per cent of the Muslim population – there were 4000 families who
had land redistributed from them in the 1919 land reform. Hence only a small proportion
of the Muslim population had access to Orthodox and Christian women where this was
common, certainly not the majority. In Kosovo the majority of Serbs were in effect serfs
working the land for Albanian clan leaders as well as Turkish landlords prior to the first
Balkan War of 1912, but it is not known what impact this had on access to women.
Arrangements whereby one community, or at least its privileged class, has access to the
women of another are controversial. A Greek film shown on the Australian Special
Broadcasting Service several years ago depicted such a use of Greek brides and wives
who were serfs on an agricultural estate by the Ottoman landlord and a visiting relative
of his a couple of decades before Greek independence in 1830. A film of the 1950s shown
on SBS also indicates this, but the ‘misuse’ did not extend to breaking the prospective
bride’s virginity, and the land tenancy was seen as a form of dowry given in exchange for
the sexual services rendered.

Source:
http://auspsa.anu.edu.au/proceedings/2001/Politics_and_Gender_Papers.htm