‘Sever not their heads’

This article examines how the Ottoman Empire and Montenegro, a de facto autonomous frontier polity over which the Porte continued to claim sovereignty, reworked the laws governing internal imperial war during three major conflicts between 1853 and 1862. Following the empire’s abandonment of the Islamic law of Christian rebellion, Ottoman and Montenegrin statesmen turned to the Europe-centred law of nations to manage foreign interference, assert sovereign claims and perform legal modernity. Through a close analysis of the treatment of military captives — detained enemy combatants, hostages and the enslaved — the study reveals how both sides deployed the legal discourse of ‘civilized war’ to demand inclusion in the international order increasingly dominated by the European Great Powers. Yet as Ottoman and Montenegrin state builders invoked European legal norms, army officers and ordinary soldiers continued to rely on exemplary violence rooted in Islamic law and regional custom. By tracing how the law of nations gradually encased imperfectly overlapping normative orders in the transimperial Adriatic hinterland, the article challenges Eurocentric histories of the laws of war. It also positions Montenegro within the global nineteenth-century history of mass violence and state formation. Far from being passive recipients of the European rules of war, the Ottomans and their Montenegrin enemy-subjects pragmatically used international legal languages to subvert ‘civilizational’ hierarchies and redefine the parameters of imperial sovereignty.

captives · European great powers · hostages · imperial sovereignty · International humanitarian law · International law · Islamic law · legal modernity · mass violence · Montenegro · nineteenth-century international law · Ottoman empire · Slavery · State formation · Balkans: History, Politics, Society · Historical Turkish Studies · Ottoman Empire History and Society