Janissary
A janissary was a member of the elite infantry units that formed the Ottoman sultan's household troops. They were the first modern standing army, and perhaps the first infantry force in the world to be equipped with firearms, adopted during the reign of Murad II . The corps was established under either Orhan or Murad I, and dismantled by Mahmud II in 1826.
Janissaries began as an elite corps made up through the devşirme system of child levy enslavement, by which Christian boys, chiefly from the Balkans, were taken, levied, subjected to forced circumcision and forced conversion to Islam, and incorporated into the Ottoman army. They became famed for internal cohesion cemented by strict discipline and order. Unlike typical slaves, they were paid regular salaries. Forbidden to marry before the age of 40 or engage in trade, their complete loyalty to the Ottoman sultan was expected. By the 17th century, due to a dramatic increase in the size of the Ottoman standing army, the corps' initially strict recruitment policy was relaxed. Civilians bought their way into it in order to benefit from the improved socio-economic status it conferred upon them. Consequently, the corps gradually lost its military character, undergoing a process that has been described as "civilianization".
The Janissary Corps were a formidable military unit in the early centuries, but as Western Europe modernized its military organization and technology, the Janissaries became a reactionary force that resisted all change within the Ottoman army. Steadily the Ottoman military power became outdated, but when the Janissaries felt their privileges were being threatened, or outsiders wanted to modernize them, or they might be superseded by their cavalry rivals, they would rise in rebellion. By the time the Janissaries were suppressed, it was too late for Ottoman military power to catch up with the West. The Janissary Corps was abolished by Mahmud II in 1826 in the Auspicious Incident, in which 6,000 or more Janissaries were executed.
Origins and history
The Janissary Corps was formed in the 14th century, either during the rule of Murad I, the third sultan of the Ottoman Empire, or during the time of Murad's father, Orhan. The Ottoman government instituted a tax of one-fifth on all slaves taken in war, and from this pool of manpower the sultans first constructed the Janissary corps as a personal army loyal only to the Ottoman sultan.From the 1380s to 1648, the Janissaries were gathered through the system of child levy enslavement, which was abolished in 1648. This recruitment of Janissary troops was achieved through the enslaving of dhimmi peoples, predominantly Balkan Christians. Jews were never subject to ; however, there is evidence that Jews tried to enroll into the system. Jews were not allowed to join the Janissary Corps, and so in suspected cases the entire batch would be sent to the Imperial Arsenal as indentured laborers. Ottoman documents from the levy of the winter of 1603–1604 from Bosnia and Albania wrote to draw attention to some children as "possibly being Jewish". According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "in early days, all Christians were enrolled indiscriminately. Later, those from what is now Albania, Bosnia, Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Hungary were preferred." The Bektashi Order became the official religious and spiritual institution of the Janissaries in the 15th century.
The Janissaries were , "door servants" or "slaves of the Porte", neither freedmen nor ordinary slaves. They were subjected to strict discipline, but were paid salaries and pensions upon retirement and formed their own distinctive social class. As such, they became one of the ruling classes of the Ottoman Empire, rivalling the Ottoman Turkish aristocracy. The brightest of the Janissaries were sent to the palace institution, Enderun. Through a system of meritocracy, the Janissaries held enormous power, stopping all efforts to reform the military.
According to military historian Michael Antonucci and economic historians Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane, the Turkish administrators would scour their provinces every five years for the strongest sons of the European Christians. When a non-Muslim boy was recruited under the system of child levy enslavement, he would first be sent to selected Ottoman Turkish families in the provinces to learn Turkish, subjected to forced circumcision and forced conversion to Islam, and to learn the customs and culture of Ottoman society. After completing this period, boys were gathered for training at the Enderun school in the capital city. There, young cadets would be selected for their talents in different areas to train as engineers, artisans, riflemen, clerics, archers, artillery, and so forth. Most were of non-Muslim origin because it was not permissible to enslave other Muslims.
It was a similar system to the Iranian Safavid, Afsharid, and Qajar-era ghilman, who were drawn from converted Circassians, Georgians, and Armenians, and in the same way as with the Ottoman Janissaries, who had to replace the unreliable ghazi. They were initially created as a counterbalance to the tribal, ethnic, and favoured interests the Qizilbash gave, which make a system imbalanced.
In the late 16th century, a sultan gave in to the pressures of the Corps and permitted Janissary children to become members of the Corps, a practice strictly forbidden for the previous 300 years. According to paintings of the era, they were also permitted to grow beards. Consequently, the formerly strict rules of succession became open to interpretation. While they advanced their own power, the Janissaries also helped to keep the system from changing in other progressive ways, and according to some scholars the corps shared responsibility for the political stagnation of Istanbul.
Greek historian Dimitri Kitsikis in his book Türk Yunan İmparatorluğu states that many Bosnian Christian families were willing to comply with the devşirme because it offered a possibility of social advancement. Conscripts could one day become Janissary colonels, statesmen who might one day return to their home region as governors, or even Grand Viziers or beylerbey. Some of the most famous Janissaries include George Kastrioti Skanderbeg, an Albanian feudal lord who defected and led a 25‑year Albanian revolt against the Ottomans. Another was Sokollu Mehmed Paşa, a Bosnian Serb who became a Grand Vizier, served three sultans, and was the de facto ruler of the Ottoman Empire for more than 14 years.
Characteristics
The Janissary corps were distinctive in a number of ways. They wore unique uniforms, were paid regular salaries for their service, marched to music, lived in barracks, and were the first military corps to make extensive use of firearms. A Janissary battalion was a close-knit community, effectively the soldier's family. By tradition, the Ottoman sultan himself, after authorizing the payments to the Janissaries, visited the barracks dressed as a Janissary trooper, and received his pay alongside the other men of the First Division. They also served as policemen, palace guards, and firefighters during peacetime. The Janissaries also enjoyed far better support on campaign than other armies of the time. They were part of a well-organized military machine, in which one support corps prepared the roads while others pitched tents and baked the bread. Their weapons and ammunition were transported and re-supplied by the cebeci corps. They campaigned with their own medical teams of Muslim and Jewish surgeons and their sick and wounded were evacuated to dedicated mobile hospitals set up behind the lines. By the mid-18th century, they had taken up many trades and gained the right to marry and enroll their children in the corps and very few continued to live in the barracks. Many of them became administrators and scholars in other branches of government service.Recruitment, training, and status
The first Janissary units were formed from prisoners of war and slaves, probably as a result of the sultan taking his traditional one-fifth share of his army's plunder in kind rather than monetarily; however, the continuing exploitation and enslavement of dhimmi peoples, predominantly Balkan Christians, constituted a continuing abuse of subject populations. For a while, the Ottoman government supplied the Janissary Corps with recruits from the devşirme system of child levy enslavement. Children were drafted at a young age and soon turned into slave-soldiers in an attempt to make them loyal to the Ottoman sultan. The social status of devşirme recruits took on an immediate positive change, acquiring a greater guarantee of governmental rights and financial opportunities. In poor areas officials were bribed by parents to make them take their sons, thus they would have better chances in life. Initially, the Ottoman recruiters favoured Greeks and Albanians. The Ottoman Empire began its expansion into Europe by invading the European portions of the Byzantine Empire in the 14th and 15th centuries up until the capture of Constantinople in 1453, establishing Islam as the state religion of the newly-founded empire. The Ottoman Turks further expanded into Southeastern Europe and consolidated their political power by invading and conquering huge portions of the Serbian Empire, Bulgarian Empire, and the remaining territories of the Byzantine Empire in the 14th and 15th centuries. As borders of the Ottoman Empire expanded, the devşirme system of child levy enslavement was extended to include Armenians, Bulgarians, Croats, Hungarians, Romanians, Serbs, Ukrainians, and later Bosniaks, and, in rare instances, Circassians, Georgians, Poles, and southern Russians.The slave trade in the Ottoman Empire supplied the ranks of the Ottoman army between the 15th and 19th centuries. They were useful in preventing both the slave rebellions and the breakup of the Empire itself, especially due to the rising tide of nationalism among European peoples in its Balkan provinces from the 17th century onwards. Along with the Balkans, the Black Sea Region remained a significant source of high-value slaves for the Ottomans. Throughout the 16th to 19th centuries, the Barbary States sent pirates to raid nearby parts of Europe in order to capture Christian slaves to sell at slave markets in the Muslim world, primarily in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, throughout the Renaissance and early modern period. According to historian Robert Davis, from the 16th to 19th centuries, Barbary pirates captured 1 million to 1.25 million Europeans as slaves, although these numbers are disputed. These slaves were captured mainly from the crews of captured vessels, from coastal villages in Spain and Portugal, and from farther places like the Italian Peninsula, France, or England, the Netherlands, Ireland, the Azores Islands, and even Iceland. For a long time, until the early 18th century, the Crimean Khanate maintained a massive slave trade with the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East. The Crimean Tatars frequently mounted raids into the Danubian Principalities, Poland–Lithuania, and Russia to enslave people whom they could capture.
Apart from the effect of a lengthy period under Ottoman domination, many of the subject populations were periodically and forcefully converted to Islam as a result of a deliberate move by the Ottoman Turks as part of a policy of ensuring the loyalty of the population against a potential Venetian invasion. However, Islam was spread by force in the areas under the control of the Ottoman sultan through the devşirme system of child levy enslavement, by which Christian boys from the Balkans were taken, levied, subjected to forced circumcision and forced conversion to Islam, and incorporated into the Ottoman army, and jizya taxes. Radushev states that the recruitment system based on child levy can be bisected into two periods: its first, or classical period, encompassing those first two centuries of regular execution and utilization to supply recruits; and a second, or modern period, which more focuses on its gradual change, decline, and ultimate abandonment, beginning in the 17th century.
In response to foreign threats, the Ottoman government chose to rapidly expand the size of the corps after the 1570s. Janissaries spent shorter periods of time in training as acemi oğlan, as the average age of recruitment increased from 13.5 in the 1490s to 16.6 in 1603. This reflected not only the Ottomans' greater need for manpower but also the shorter training time necessary to produce skilled musketeers in comparison with archers. However, this change alone was not enough to produce the necessary manpower, and consequently the traditional limitation of recruitment to boys conscripted in the devşirme was lifted. Membership was opened up to free-born Muslims, both recruits hand-picked by the commander of the Janissaries, as well as the sons of current members of the Ottoman standing army. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the devşirme had largely been abandoned as a method of recruitment. The prescribed daily rate of pay for entry-level Janissaries in the time of Ahmet I was three Akçes. Promotion to a cavalry regiment implied a minimum salary of 10 Akçes. Janissaries received a sum of 12 Akçes every three months for clothing incidentals and 30 Akçes for weaponry, with an additional allowance for ammunition as well.
For all practical purposes, the Janissary Corps belonged to the Ottoman sultan and they were regarded as the protectors of the throne and the sultan. Janissaries were taught to consider the corps their home and family, and the sultan as their father. Only those who proved strong enough earned the rank of true Janissary at the age of 24 or 25. The Odjak inherited the property of dead Janissaries, thus acquiring wealth. Janissaries also learned to follow the dictates of the dervish and Sufi saint Haji Bektash Veli, disciples of whom had blessed the first troops. The Bektashi Order served as a kind of chaplaincy for the Janissaries. In this and in their secluded life, Janissaries resembled Christian military orders like the Knights Hospitaller. As a symbol of their devotion to the order, Janissaries wore special hats called börk. These hats also had a holding place in front, called the kaşıklık, for a spoon. This symbolized the kaşık kardeşliği, or the "brotherhood of the spoon", which reflected a sense of comradeship among the Janissaries who ate, slept, fought, and died together.