The Ottoman Empire was growing east and south of Constantinople. It pushed against other Turkish beyliks, absorbing land as they were conquered. Orhan, son of Osman, defeated the Karası beylik and his son Murad married one of the captured widows. Her name was Gülçiçek, which means Rose Flower, though she had been born a Greek-speaking Maria. She bore him two sons, and although he had other wives, her son Bayezid became Murad’s heir. During the reigns of Murad and Bayezid, the Ottomans began a key practice that characterized the Empire for several centuries: a slave army with a few differences.
Murad’s reign began in 1362 with a bang: he crossed into Europe, where his father had taken the Gallipoli Peninsula south of Constantinople. He began campaigns against Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians, Greeks and Hungarians. His first big win was the capture of Adrianople, the city that now sits on the border of modern Turkey and Bulgaria. He renamed it Edirne, which probably to his Turkish ear sounded just like “Adrian.” It became his European capital.
Murad’s army grew as it captured soldiers to use as slaves and incorporated other Turkish armies. He directly held much of modern Bulgaria and Serbia, while some princes chose to pay him tribute to remain nominally independent. The Greek Emperor of Constantinople (a sad shadow of its former self, and now gutted by the plague) also paid him tribute to stay away.
Using his traditional one-fifth portion of captured men in Bulgaria and Serbia, Murad commissioned a new military corps; “New Soldier” in Old Turkish was Yeni Çeri. When the term became important to Europeans, they transliterated it in Latin letters as “Janissaries.” The Janissaries were to be the Sultan’s Mamluks, loyal only to him; they were known as “servants of the door” (kapıkulları). (The door or gate was the arch where the Sultan’s pronouncements were announced, which came to stand for the whole government. In later times, the Ottoman Empire is often referred to as “the Porte,” which was that symbolic gate.) They were not working for him voluntarily, they were actually slaves. But the Janissaries were to have high status: they were paid salaries. He began with 500 or 1000 as his personal guard.
Murad’s last battle came in Kosovo, where a band of Serbian knights pushed and slashed their way straight to his tent. Some number of them descended on him with sword and knife. One knight, Miloš Obilić, later got the credit. Murad’s heart was buried at the battlefield where he fell, with a tomb shrine raised around it, while his bones went back to Bursa. Bayezid, his son, was on hand to take over and so there was a seamless transfer of power.
During Bayezid’s years, the Janissary Corps grew to several thousand. They were distinctly different from other soldiers; for one thing, they were required to shave all beards. Beards were a sign of devout Islam, so these Christians had to look different. I don’t want to suggest that they remained practicing Christians; most or all of them converted to Islam. But their origin among Christians was the underpinning of the justification for enslaving them in the first place, so they were kept in a special bracket. They also wore metal helmets that were shaped like turbans, with ring-mail shirts under a red coat called the dolama. Their chief weapon was the bow, but with short arrows (crossbow darts were even shorter) and devices to help guide accuracy.
Bayezid seems to have started a new method to recruit Janissaries. Where Murad had captured children in Bulgaria, Serbia and Albania after battles, Bayezid now ruled those same lands. No battles. So he imposed a tax on Christians: the devşirme, the tax on children. Historians estimate that about one in 40 households had a child taken for the corps, several thousand per year. Recruiters preferred simple peasant boys, not street-smart city kids. They took them anywhere between age 8 and age 20, but in earlier years, the children were younger because bow training was much harder than later gun use.
The children were divided into two groups by aptitude. The elite ones began a course of study attached to the Palace, while the common ones were fostered in Turkish farm families to learn the language and culture. The common ones were trained in crafts and general military discipline; they were the infantry. The elite ones, of course, became the officers and could rise very high in government. They were educated in Turkish, Persian and Arabic literature; archery, wrestling and horseback combat; and even music. The best of their class became Palace officials, while the average students were cavalry officers, still elite among the Corps.
At first, the devşirme was levied only in the Balkans, mostly on Bulgarians, Serbs, Armenians and Albanians. Greeks tended to live in cities, so their kids were less often taken. Some places surrendered to the Ottomans with explicit exemptions in their terms, so the devşirme did not take place in Constantinople or Rhodes. Later, the levy extended eastward, too. With that said, apparently the Muslim religious establishment didn’t approve of the child-taking method of raising an army. Naturally, the Eastern Orthodox clergy were very much against it. But it’s surprising that there was opposition from within Islam. I can think of three reasons; the first is the most optimistic: that there was an emerging discomfort with slavery itself. The other two reasons would be that a minority sect of dervishes acted as chaplains to the Janissaries, which gave them more power; and that officials sometimes levied more children than their quotas actually required so that they could ransom them back to their families, which was certainly a pretty bad sort of corruption.
There’s an odd quirk in the Janissary nomenclature, stemming from an early pragmatic plan for how the Palace would feed their new soldiers. The Corps was known as the Ocak (ojak), which means “oven” in Turkish, while its commanding officers were the Soup Masters. Units had brass cooking pots that were displayed in parades, and some Janissaries had wooden spoons on their hats as decoration.
In 1402, the existing Janissaries were killed defending the town of Ankara against the new Mongol invasion. The devşirme child-tax was suspended as the Ottoman kingdom went into defensive confusion. When it picked up again later, the Janissaries grew larger than ever, and from the early 1400s they became masters of artillery and gunpowder. The devşirme system ran until the 1600s, but as the Janissary Ocak turned into a really enviable career path, Muslims were clamoring to have their sons admitted on a voluntary basis. Even Christian families were grooming sons to be chosen by the devşirme officers. So once again, the professional “slave” army turned into a governing class, just as it had in Cairo.