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:

https://auspsa.anu.edu.au/proceedings/2001/Politics_and_Gender_Papers.htm