Janissaries
The Ottoman sultan's elite slave-soldier infantry, raised from Christian boys through the devshirme, and one of Europe's first standing professional armies.
For four centuries the sultan's deadliest soldiers were slaves, and most of them had been born Christian. The Janissaries, from yeni çeri, meaning new soldiers, were the Ottoman Empire's elite standing infantry, formed in the late fourteenth century when most European armies were still feudal levies that went home after the harvest. They lived in barracks, drew a salary, drilled constantly, and answered to no lord but the sultan. They were, in effect, the first professional standing army Europe had seen since the Roman legions, and for a long time nobody could match them.
The blood tax
Their origin was one of history's strangest recruiting systems. Every few years Ottoman officials swept through the Christian villages of the Balkans and levied a quota of boys, roughly between eight and eighteen, in a practice called the devshirme, the collection, remembered by its victims as the blood tax. The boys were converted to Islam, taught Turkish, and sorted by talent. The sharpest entered the palace schools to become administrators; the rest were trained as soldiers. Legally they remained the sultan's slaves, kapıkulu, but it was a slavery that could end at the top of the state. A shepherd's son taken from a Balkan village could rise to command armies or serve as grand vizier, running the empire in the sultan's name. Cut off from family and clan, owing everything to one master, they were meant to be loyal precisely because they had nothing else.
From spearhead to praetorians
The early Janissaries were a fearsome instrument. Disciplined where their enemies were a mob, quick to take up gunpowder muskets when European knights still sneered at them, they were the hard core that won Kosovo, took Constantinople in 1453 for Mehmed II, and broke the Hungarians at Mohács in 1526. Their marching bands, the mehter, so impressed European armies that they were copied across the continent, seeding the modern military band. But the qualities that made them dangerous to enemies eventually made them dangerous to their masters. Over the generations they won the right to marry, to enroll their own sons, and to run trades on the side, and the corps swelled with men who drew pay but rarely fought. Like the Praetorian Guard of Rome, they learned they could set the price of loyalty, and they began to make and unmake sultans, murdering Osman II in 1622 and vetoing every reform that threatened their privileges.
The Auspicious Incident
By the nineteenth century the Janissaries were a militarily obsolete cartel blocking the very modernization the empire needed to survive. In 1826 Sultan Mahmud II, who had watched them depose and kill his predecessors, laid a trap. He announced a new European-style army; the Janissaries rose in revolt as they always had, overturning their pilaf kettles in the traditional signal of mutiny. This time the sultan was ready. Loyal artillery bombarded their barracks in the heart of Istanbul and set them ablaze, killing thousands in a single afternoon. Ottoman chroniclers called it the Vaka-i Hayriye, the Auspicious Incident. The corps that had carried the empire to the walls of Vienna was destroyed in an afternoon of cannon fire, and the Ottomans spent their last century trying to build something modern in the crater it left.