The Devshirme System

The devshirme, from the Turkish devşirmek meaning “to collect” or “to pick up”, was the system by which the Ottoman state recruited Christian boys from its Balkan and Anatolian provinces for service in the household army and the imperial palace. For more than three centuries, the devshirme provided the manpower for the Janissary corps, for the palace school (Enderun), and for the senior administrative offices of the Ottoman state. The system is examined here in its own right; for the broader institutional context, the article on Ottoman military and warfare gives a general overview.

Origins and the legal basis

The devshirme system is conventionally dated to the reign of Murad I in the mid-fourteenth century, although the earliest references are sketchy. The system acquired its classical form in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and it remained in continuous use, with periods of suspension and revival, until the seventeenth century. The system was a privilege of the sultan, and it was carried out by officials of the devşirme ocak, the devshirme office, who had the right to enter Christian villages and to select suitable boys for Ottoman service.

The legal basis of the devshirme was the distinction, in Islamic law, between the müslüman (Muslim) population and the zimmî (protected non-Muslim) population. The Christian subjects of the sultan owed a series of obligations, including the payment of the haraç (poll-tax), in return for the protection of the state; the devshirme is sometimes described as a “blood-tax” in the European sources, although the term has no exact equivalent in Ottoman usage. The system is widely discussed in the European sources from the fifteenth century onwards, often with strong anti-Ottoman polemic, and the surviving Ottoman records — chiefly the Mühimme Defterleri and the Tahrir Defterleri — give a more administrative picture.

The selection

The boys collected by the devshirme were Christian, between the ages of roughly eight and eighteen, and drawn from the families of the raya, the non-Muslim subject population. Single boys from rural families were preferred, although in practice the selection was not always as clean as the official regulations suggest. The boys of the towns of the Balkans, of Bosnia, of Albania, of southern Greece, of Anatolia, and (in the earlier period) of the southern Russian steppe were all eligible.

The devshirme officials were accompanied, on their rounds, by a scribe, a Muslim judge (kadı), and a representative of the local Christian community. The selection was supposed to be fair, and the boy chosen was supposed to be the strongest and the most able. In practice, bribery, local influence, and the connivance of Christian priests often shaped the result, and many Christian families attempted to evade the system by sending their sons into hiding, by registering them as married, or by paying a cash composition.

Routes into Ottoman service

Once collected, the boys were converted to Islam and assigned to one of several career paths. A small minority was sent to the palace school, the Enderun, in Istanbul, where they received a literary and religious education, learned Turkish and Persian, and rose through a graded series of positions in the household of the sultan. The alumni of the Enderun formed the pool from which the senior officials of the empire — the grand viziers, the defterdars, the provincial governors — were drawn.

The majority of the boys were placed, after a short period of instruction, with Turkish families in the Anatolian countryside. There, they learned Turkish, took Turkish names, and absorbed the customs of the ruling people. After some years they were sent to the acemi ocak, the acemi barracks, in the Anatolian and Rumelian towns. From the acemi ocak, the ablest were promoted to the Janissary corps; the rest were drafted into the auxiliary services of the army, into the imperial stables, or into the provincial garrisons.

The career of a devshirme recruit

A devshirme recruit who reached the Janissary corps had, in theory, a clear path of promotion. The corps was organised into ortalar (regimental companies), each with its own officers, its own kazan (mess-cauldron), and its own traditions. A successful Janissary might rise through the ranks of his orta to become a çorbacı (company commander), then an ağa (general officer), and, in exceptional cases, the Yeniçeri Ağası, the Agha of the entire corps. A devshirme recruit who entered the palace school might rise to the office of kızlar ağası, kapıcıbaşı, silahdar, or even grand vizier. The devshirme was the training ground of the senior officers of the navy as well as the army, and several of the greatest admirals of the empire were drawn from the devshirme.

The careers of the devshirme alumni of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are some of the most striking in Ottoman history. Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, a Bosnian devshirme who served as grand vizier under three sultans, is one of the best-known examples; Sinan, the architect of the Süleymaniye mosque in Istanbul, is another. The Ottoman ruling class of the classical period was, to a remarkable degree, a class of devshirme alumni, bound to the sultan and to the dynasty by the chain of recruitment that had brought them into Ottoman service as children.

End of the system

The devshirme declined in the seventeenth century. The Janissary corps had become largely hereditary; the provincial sipahi cavalry was no longer the same self-renewing class it had been; and the political weight of the devshirme alumni in the palace had begun to wane. The devshirme was formally suspended in the early seventeenth century, briefly revived, and finally abandoned. By the time of the siege of Vienna in 1683, the Janissary corps was a very different body from the corps of the classical period.

The abolition of the Janissaries in 1826 and the broader military reforms of the nineteenth century finally closed the institutional history of the devshirme. The system is, however, a permanent part of Ottoman administrative and cultural memory, and it remains one of the most discussed and most controversial institutions in the long history of the empire.

Related articles

• Ottoman military and warfare — A general overview of the Ottoman military, in which the devshirme played a central role.
• The Janissary corps — The infantry corps into which the bulk of the devshirme recruits were drafted.
• The provincial sipahi cavalry — The timariot horsemen of the Ottoman provinces, who were not recruited through the devshirme.
• Hayreddin Barbarossa — A corsair-admiral whose career, like that of many Ottoman grandees, depended on the devshirme-trained administrative system.
• The siege of Vienna — The 1529 and 1683 sieges that mark the height and the crisis of the classical Ottoman military system.