The Janissaries: Devshirme Child Levy to the 1826 Auspicious Incident

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The Janissaries, from the Ottoman Turkish yeniçeri, new soldier, were created in the 14th century under Sultan Orhan and Murad I to give the sultan a standing force with no ties to the nobility. They were filled through the devshirme, the child levy: officials used parish baptismal registers to line up Christian boys aged 8 to 18 in Greek, Albanian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Bosnian villages and carried the strongest away in baskets on horseback. Converted, sent to Turkish farm families to learn the language, then trained in barracks, they could not marry, wore mustaches but no beards, and ate the sultan's food from regimental soup cauldrons.

They were early masters of firearms, using rotating volley fire by 1605 and marching with field hospitals and engineers. But as the corps grew from about 1,000 men to some 40,000 by the early 1600s, freeborn Muslims were admitted, New World silver inflated away their pay, and they took up trades, married and passed on their places. They overturned their kettles to signal mutiny and dethroned sultans who tried reform. In June 1826 Mahmud II provoked a revolt, then had loyal artillery shell their barracks, killing over 4,000.

• Some Balkan fathers cut off a son's finger to make him ineligible, while poor families sometimes bribed officials to take theirs.
• Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, a Bosnian Serb taken in the levy, served as Grand Vizier for over 14 years under three sultans.
• In 1622 the Janissaries strangled the teenage Osman II in the Seven Towers, and in 1807 they deposed Selim III over his Nizam-ı Cedid army.
• Survivors of the 1826 purge were executed at Thessalonica in what became known as the Tower of Blood.
• Janissary bands inspired Mozart's Alla Turca, and a Naousa carnival recalls townspeople who resisted the levy in 1705.