Childhood in the Peasant Militia Registers and the Age Boundaries of Adolescence

Abstract

This chapter aims not only to problematise the ages of unmarried males within the Ottoman concept of childhood, but also to contextualise the constructed notions of childhood, as well as adulthood, in the early modern Ottoman official parlance. It contends that rather than formalising the already existing vague perceptions of childhood, the Ottoman state apparatus systematized a relatively well-defined category of adolescence to characterise the period of young people’s transition from childhood to adulthood. Although in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the identification of children was mainly influenced by the personal interpretations of clerks and social perceptions, it came to be systematised throughout the sixteenth century by designating specific lower and upper age limits for categories such as children, adolescents and adults. In this respect, the chapter argues that the notion of childhood in the early modern era did not simply emerge out of the existing social repertoire, as the state formation process, to a large extent, set the contours of childhood and adulthood according to the needs of the centralising state apparatus to finance its armies.