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This article considers four cases of runaway domestic slaves in Venice, spanning the period 1573 to 1649, to explore the varying assumptions about subjecthood, religious conversion, and transgression that went into the making and unmaking of bondage. Although rare, the archival traces left by early modern runaway slaves suggest that in their quest for freedom, domestic slaves had not only to sever one set of ties, but to cultivate another. The multiple narrations of slaves' trajectories before and after enslavement that form part of various official genres further allow us to explore the differing conceptions of subjection articulated by runaway slaves and their interlocutors. Moving beyond juridical definitions of freedom and slavery, this study emphasizes the myriad social mechanisms that cultivated a sense of membership and marginality among subaltern subjects. In particular, it underscores the complex trans-imperial nexus that both sustained early modern Mediterranean slavery and at times disrupted it.

This study explores how Venetian and Ottoman elites rearticulated religious and linguistic boundaries in a process that spanned both metropoles and their Dalmatian borderlands. It focuses on the case of a teenage daughter of an Ottoman-Bosnian governor, who in 1622 left her hometown for nearby Venetian territory, converted to Catholicism, and ended up in the Casa delle Zitelle, a Venetian boarding school for elite girls in “moral danger.” Five years later, when her enraged father arrived in Venice alleging she had been led astray, he was taken on two carefully orchestrated tours of the Zitelle, at the end of which he declared his satisfaction at the excellent treatment his daughter had received there. Diplomatic correspondence — especially reports by the two official interpreters who mediated the Ottoman dignitary’s interactions with his Venetian hosts — demonstrates how a potentially grave diplomatic incident was averted; it also shows how the protagonists’ competing ideas about the nature of the boundaries between Venetian and Ottoman societies, and, indeed, about conversion, subjecthood, and female piety, were ultimately commensurated. The ongoing, and at times mundane, ways in which religious, social, and political boundaries were drawn and redrawn in what is now understood as a circum-Mediterranean “Age of Confessionalization” reveals the historical contingency of these boundaries themselves.

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For both (primarily local) Jews and (primarily immigrant) Muslims, becoming Catholic in seventeenth-century Venice entailed a prolonged process of social transformation and insertion into new relations of patronage and surrogate kinship. This article traces these converts' long trajectories after baptism and their ongoing relationship with a charitable institution, the Pia Casa dei Catecumeni (Holy House of the Catechumens). It shows how the Pia Casa was instrumental in shaping distinct forms of charity and surveillance that brought together Venetian élites' corporate spiritual and civic claims while also furthering their individual and family interests by weaving dense networks of patronage. Ultimately, the article considers how conversion operated as a project of metropolitan subject making in the context of Venetian–Ottoman imperial competition.