Devshirme

The devshirme (from the Turkish word meaning 'to collect') came up out of the system of slavery that developed in the early centuries of the Ottoman Empire, and which reached this final development during the reign of Sultan Bayazit I. The were mostly prisoners from war, hostages or slaves that were purchased by the state. The Ottoman Empire, beginning with Murad I, felt a need to "counteract the power of (Turkic) nobles by developing Christian vassal soldiers and converted as his personal troops, independent of the regular army." This elite force, which served the Ottoman Sultan directly, was called (The Hearth of the Porte Servants). They were divided into two main groups: cavalry and infantry. The cavalry was commonly known as the (The Cavalry of the Servants of the Porte) and the infantry as the janissaries (, meaning "the New Corps"). The devshirme conscripts were set apart from the janissaries in that they were not a cavalry group, rather exclusively infantry. At first, the soldiers serving in these corps were selected from the slaves captured during war. However, a new system commonly known as devshirme was soon adopted. In this system, children of the rural Christian populations of the Balkans were conscripted before adolescence and were brought up as Muslims. Upon reaching adolescence, these children were enrolled in one of the four imperial institutions: the palace, the scribes, the Muslim clergy, and the military. Those enrolled in the military would become either part of the Janissary corps (1363), or part of another corps. The most promising were sent to the palace school (), where they were destined for a career within the palace itself and could attain the highest office of state, Grand Vizier, the Sultan's powerful chief minister and military deputy. In the beginning of the Ottoman Empire, this office was held only by Turks. However, after there were problems between sultan Mehmed II and the Turkish Çandarlı Halil Pasha the Younger, who became the first grand vizier to be executed, there was a rise of slave administrators devshirme. They were much easier to control for the sultans, as compared to free administrators of Turkish noble origin. A reference to devshirme is made in a poem composed in Greek by Ioannes Axayiolis, who appeals to Emperor Charles V of Germany to liberate the Christians from the Turks. The text is found in the of 1624. In another account, the Roman Catholic bishop of Chios in 1646 writes to the director of the Catholic Greek Gymnasion of Rome asking the latter to accept Paulos Omeros, a 12-year-old boy from Chios, to save him from the devshirme. The recruitment of children took place every three to four years and at times even annually, according to the needs of the Sultan. The largest loss of children coincided with the peak of Ottoman expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries under the rule of Selim I and Suleiman the Magnificent. == The life of the devshirme ==

According to historian William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Christian children were taken by Ottoman officials, every four to seven years, their age ranging from 7 to 20. One for every forty households was chosen, Christian parents undeniably resented the forced recruitment of their children, as a result they would beg and often seek to buy their children out of the levy. The Balkan peasantry tried to evade the tribute collectors, with many attempting to substitute their children in Bosnia. Many sources (including Paolo Giovio) mention different ways to avoid the devshirme such as: marrying the boys at the age of 12, mutilating them or have both father and son convert to Islam. Conversion to Islam was used in Bosnia and Herzegovina to escape the system. In Albania and Epirus the practice led to a Christian revolt where the inhabitants killed the recruiting officials in the year 1565. Any parent who refused to have their child taken as a slave was put to death, and children who attempted to resist being taken from their families as janissaries by fleeing would lead to the Turks arresting and then torturing their parents to death (Many children who attempted to flee on their own returned after hearing of their parents' torture). Such was the case of an Athenian boy who returned from hiding to save his father's life but chose to die himself rather than abandon his faith and convert to Islam. {{Blockquote Greek scholar Janus Lascaris visited Constantinople in 1491 and met many janissaries who not only remembered their former religion and their native land but also favored their former coreligionists. The renegade Hersek, the sultan's relative by marriage, told him that he regretted having left the religion of his fathers and that he prayed at night before the cross which he kept carefully concealed. In his memoir, Konstantin Mihailović (1430–1501), a Serbian who was abducted in his youth and marched away by the Turks, saw nothing "prestigious" or "lucrative" about becoming a janissary. "We always thought about killing the Turks and running away by ourselves among the mountains," he writes, "but our youth did not permit us to do that." Once when he and a group of other boys broke free and escaped, "the whole region pursued us, and having caught and bound us, they beat us and tortured us and dragged us behind horses." After Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II took eight Christian youths into his service, they made a pact to assassinate him by night, saying "If we kill this Turkish dog, then all of Christendom will be freed [from Ottoman tyranny]; but if we are caught, then we will become martyrs before God with the others." When their plot was exposed, and Mehmed inquired what caused them to "dare attempt this," they responded, "None other than our great sorrow for our fathers and dear friends." He had the children slowly tortured over the course of a year before beheading them. Christian boys were forced to convert to Islam. In Epirus, a traditional folk song expressed this resentment by cursing the Sultan for the kidnapping of boys: The Tübingen manuscript written by Andre Argyros and John Tholoites and given to Martin Crusius in 1585 shows what the Christian parents thought of the Janissaries: {{Blockquote Stephen Gerlach gives the case of a Greek Mother from Panormus in Anatolia who had two boys and begged God every day to take them away because she would soon be forced to give up one of them. The distress expressed here was motivated not only by religious considerations, but also by the low opinion the Byzantines held for Turks (whom they called barbarians). In desperation the parents would appeal to the Pope and western powers for help. A petition of the Albanians of Himarë in the year 1581, addressed to the Pope reads: "Holiest father, if you could convince him and save us and the children of Greece, that are taken every day and are turned into Turks, if you could only do this, God may bless you. Amen". In 1456 Greeks living on the western coast of Anatolia appealed to the Knights Hospitalers of Rhodes for help. Their village, district and province, parentage, date of birth, and physical appearance was recorded. Albertus Bobovius wrote in 1686 that diseases were common among the devshirme and that strict discipline was enforced. Although the influence of Turkic nobility continued in the Ottoman court until Mehmet II (see Çandarlı Halil), the Ottoman ruling class slowly came to be dominated by the devshirme, creating a separate social class. This class of rulers was chosen from the brightest of devshirme and handpicked to serve in the palace institution, known as the Enderûn. They had to accompany the Sultan on campaigns, but exceptional service would be rewarded by assignments outside the palace. Those chosen for the scribe institution, known as , were also granted prestigious positions. At the religious institution, İlmiye, all orthodox Muslim clergy of the Ottoman Empire were educated and sent to provinces or served in the capital. The children were subjected to a draconian training system: "They make them drudge day and night, and they give them no bed to sleep on and very little food." They were allowed to "speak to each other only when it is urgently necessary" and were made to "pray together without fail at four prescribed times every day." As "for any little offense, they beat them cruelly with sticks, rarely hitting them less than a hundred times, and often as much as a thousand. After punishments the boys have to come to them and kiss their clothing and thank them for the cudgelings they have received. You can see, then, that moral degradation and humiliation are part of the training system," writes 16th century Italian diplomat Giovan Francesco Morosini (cardinal). They were "degraded to the level of animals" and showed a "dog-like devotion to the sultan", writes Vasiliki Papouli. The members of the organization were not banned from marriage, as Tavernier further noted, but it was very uncommon for them. He went on to write that their numbers had increased to a hundred thousand but only due to a degeneration of regulations, with many of them in fact being "fake" janissaries, posing as such for tax exemptions and other social privileges. He noted that the actual number of janissaries was in fact much lower. Shaw writes that their number was 30,000 under Suleiman the Magnificent. By the 1650s, the number of janissaries had increased to 50,000, but by this time, the devshirme had largely been abandoned as a method of recruitment. According to Cleveland, the devshirme system offered "limitless opportunities to the young men who became a part of it." Basilike Papoulia wrote that "the devishirme was the 'forcible removal', in the form of a tribute, of children of the Christian subjects from their ethnic, religious and cultural environment and their transportation into the Turkish-Islamic environment with the aim of employing them in the service of the Palace, the army, and the state, whereby they were on the one hand to serve the Sultan as slaves and freedmen and on the other to form the ruling class of the State." Accordingly, Papoulia agrees with Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb and Harold Bowen, authors of Islamic Society and the West, that the devshirme was a penalization imposed on the Balkan peoples since their ancestors had resisted the Ottoman invasion. Vladimir Minorsky states, "The most striking manifestation of this fact is the unprecedented system of devshirme, i.e. the periodic conscription of 'tribute boys', by which the children of Christians were wrung from their families, churches, and communities to be molded into Ottoman praetorians owing their allegiance to the Sultan and the official faith of Islam." This system as explained by Çandarlı Kara Halil Hayreddin Pasha, founder of the Janissaries: "The conquered are slaves of the conquerors, to whom their goods, their women, and their children belong as lawful possession". == Status under Islamic law ==

According to scholars, the practice of devshirme was a clear violation of sharia or Islamic law. David Nicolle writes that since the boys were "effectively enslaved" under the devshirme system, this was a violation of the protections guaranteed under Islamic law to People of the Book. During this time, the Ottomans believed that the Qanun, the law enacted by the Sultan, superseded sharia even though the latter was treated with respect. James L. Gelvin explains that Ottoman jurists were able to get around that injunction with an extraordinarily creative legal manoeuvre by arguing that although Islamic tradition forbade the enslavement of Christians, Balkan Christians were different because they had converted to Christianity after the advent of Islam. William Gervase Clarence-Smith points out that the reasoning is not accepted in the Hanafi school of law, which the Ottoman Empire claimed to have practiced. Contemporary Ottoman chroniclers had mixed opinions on the practice. An Ottoman historian of the 1500s, Mustafa Âlî, admitted that devshirme violated sharia but was allowed only out of necessity. however, Islamic law allows no such booty from communities that had submitted peacefully to conquest and certainly not from their descendants. == Ethnicity of the devshirme and exemptions ==

The devshirme were collected once every four or five years from rural provinces in Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe and Anatolia. They were mainly collected from Christian subjects, with a few exceptions. However, some Muslim families managed to smuggle their sons in anyway. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Encyclopaedia of Islam, in the early days of the empire, all Christians were enrolled indiscriminately. Later, those from Greece, Albania, Bosnia and Bulgaria were preferred. What is certain is that devshirme were primarily recruited from Christians living in the Balkans. Since Muslim Bosnians were the only Muslim ethnic group allowed to be recruited, an armed guard was required to lead the Bosnians on their way to Istanbul to avoid any Turkish boys from being smuggled into their ranks. Jews were exempt from this service. Armenians are also believed to have been exempt from the levy by many scholars, although a 1997 publication that examined Armenian colophons from the 15th to the 17th centuries and foreign travelers of the time concluded that Armenians were not exempt. Boys who were orphans or were their family's only son were exempt. Well-known examples of Ottomans who had been recruited as devshirme include Skanderbeg, Sinan Pasha and Sokollu Mehmed Pasha. Unifying factor The diversity of the devshirme also served as a unifying factor for the Ottoman Empire. Greeks, Armenians, Albanians, and other ethnicities would see that the Sultan was Turkish, but his viziers were Albanian, Bulgarian, Greek and other ethnicities. The ethnic diversity in high-level and powerful positions of the Ottoman Empire helped to unite the diverse groups under its jurisdiction. They also prevented a hereditary aristocracy from forming but held sway over the Sultan themselves and practically formed their own aristocracy. == Devshirme in the Ottoman Palace School ==

The primary objective of the Palace School was to train the ablest children for leadership positions, either as military leaders or as high administrators to serve the Devlet. Although there are many resemblances between Enderûn and other palace schools of the previous civilizations, such as those of the Abbasids, the Seljuks or the contemporary European palace schools, Enderûn was unique with respect to the background of the student body and its meritocratic system. In the strict draft phase, students were taken forcefully from the Christian population of the Empire and were converted to Islam. Jews and Roma were exempted from devshirme and so were all Muslims. Those entrusted to find those children were scouts, who were specially-trained agents, throughout the Balkans. Scouts were recruiting youngsters according to their talent and ability with school subjects, in addition to their personality, character and physical perfection. The Enderûn candidates were not supposed to be orphans or the only child in their family to ensure that the candidates had strong family values. They also had to not have already learned to speak Turkish or a craft or trade. The ideal age of a recruit was between 10 and 20 years of age. Mehmed Refik Beg mentioned that a youth with a bodily defect, no matter how slight, was never admitted into palace service, since Turks believed that a strong soul and a good mind could be found only in a perfect body. The selected children were dressed in red so that they could not easily escape on their way to Constantinople. The cost of the devshirme service and their clothes were paid by their villages or communities. The boys were gathered into cohorts of a hundred or more to walk to Constantinople, where they were circumcised and divided between the palace schools and the military training. Anyone not chosen for the palace spent years being toughened by hard labor on farms in Anatolia until they were old enough for the military. The brightest youths who fit into the general guidelines and had a strong primary education were then given to selected Muslim families across Anatolia to complete the enculturation process. They would get the highest salaries amongst the administrators of the empire and very well respected in public. == Eunuchs ==

White eunuchs were sometimes recruited from among the devshirme. == Decline ==

According to the historian Cemal Kafadar, one of the main reasons for the decline of the devshirme system was that the size of the janissary corps had to be expanded to compensate for the decline in the importance of the sipahi cavalry forces, which itself was a result of changes in early modern warfare such as the introduction of firearms and increased importance of infantry. Indeed, the janissary corps would soon become the empire's largest single military corps. or 1648, the devshirme-based recruiting system of the janissary corps formally came to an end. In an order sent in multiple copies to authorities throughout the European provinces in 1666, a devshirme recruitment target of between 300 and 320 was set for an area covering the whole of the central and western Balkans. On the accession of sultan Suleiman II in 1687, only 130 janissary inductees were graduated to the janissary ranks. The system was finally abolished in the early part of Ahmet III's reign (1703–1730). After Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, there was a reform movement in Sultan Selim III's regime to reduce the numbers of the askeri class, who were the first class citizens or military class (also called janissaries). Selim was taken prisoner and murdered by the janissaries. The successor to the sultan, Mahmud II, was patient but remembered the results of the uprising in 1807. In 1826, he created the basis of a new modern army, the Asakir-i Mansure-i Muhammediye, which caused a revolt among the janissaries. The authorities kept the janissaries in their barracks and slaughtered thousands of them. That development entered the Ottoman history annals as the Auspicious Incident. == See also ==