The Devshirme System — Imperial Ottoman

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. For the broader institutional context, the article on Ottoman military and warfare gives a general overview; the corps into which most devshirme recruits were drafted is treated in the article on the Janissaries.

Key dates

c. 1360s — Earliest references to the system under Murad I; pençik precursor well established.
1430s — Under Murad II, devshirme is recorded as a regular, cyclical institution.
1453 — Devshirme alumni hold senior posts in Mehmed II’s government.
1565 — Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, a Bosnian devshirme, becomes grand vizier.
1603 — Last great cycle of devshirme recruitment during the long war with Persia.
17th c. — System declines as Janissary corps becomes hereditary; effectively abandoned by the 1640s.
1826 — The Janissary corps itself abolished in the Vaka-i Hayriye, ending the devshirme’s institutional afterlife.

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. A firman (imperial decree) authorised each cycle of collection, and the timing was tied to the rhythms of the Balkan and Anatolian countryside — generally every three to five years, with some villages and some provinces exempted (yürük and voynuk groups, for instance, supplied auxiliary services in lieu of devshirme).

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, distinct from the cizye levied on adult male non-Muslims) and the ispençe, in return for the protection of the state. The term “blood-tax” is a European polemical coinage with no exact equivalent in Ottoman usage. The surviving Ottoman records — chiefly the Mühimme Defterleri (registers of important affairs) and the Tahrir Defterleri (cadastral surveys) — give a more administrative picture than the European pamphlets, and V. L. Ménage’s reading of the mühimme in the 1960s is still the starting point for the documentary history of the system.

The devshirme had a precursor in the older pençik system, by which one-fifth of prisoners taken in war was reserved for the household of the sultan. The pençik is documented from the reign of Murad I and probably earlier; it formed the original pool of slave-soldiers for the Ottoman household, and it was gradually replaced by the more regular devshirme as the empire moved from conquest to conquest of Christian populations who could supply boys on a predictable cycle. By the time of Mehmed II the pençik had become residual: most household troops were now devshirme recruits, and the pençik was reserved for the sons of Christian notables captured in war.

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. Each village was assigned a quota: a hane (household) of a given size was expected to contribute one boy per cycle, and the devşirme emini (collector) and his scribe moved through the district in a fixed order.

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 (bedel-i devşirme). The most famous case of priestly involvement is the Sokolović family of the village of Sokolovići in Bosnia: the young Mehmed Sokolović, taken through the devshirme in the early sixteenth century, became the grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha and later recruited his brother, the future Serbian patriarch Makarije Sokolović, into Ottoman service. From the 16th century onwards, certain çiftlikât (large estate-holdings) and certain Christian communities were granted exemptions by imperial firman, in return for special services to the state.

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 in Turkish, Arabic, 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 designated dış oğlan (“outer boys”). They were placed, after a short period of instruction, with Turkish families in the Anatolian countryside, where 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. A third and far smaller category — the iç oğlan (“inner boys”), drawn from the most promising of the palace-bound recruits — entered the Enderun itself and from there rose into the senior service of the state.

This three-track system (Enderun/iç oğlan, Anatolian households/dış oğlan, acemi ocak) was the classical pipeline of the devshirme. 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 kapıcıbaşı, silahdar, or even grand vizier.

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. Heath Lowry’s argument in The Shaping of the Ottoman Identity that the devshirme was less a slave-trade and more a state-building institution is, in my view, the more convincing reading; the standard “blood-tax” interpretation, in Noel Malcolm’s careful account in Useful Enemies, comes largely from sixteenth-century European polemic.

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.

Ottoman military and warfare — A general overview of the Ottoman military, in which the devshirme supplied the senior officer class of the household army and the palace.
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 but through the Muslim landholding class.
Hayreddin Barbarossa — The corsair-admiral of the sixteenth century, whose career depended on the devshirme-trained administrative system of the empire.
The siege of Vienna — The 1529 and 1683 sieges that mark the height and the crisis of the classical Ottoman military system.

Sources and further reading

Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1923 (Basic Books, 2005).
Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare 1500–1700 (Hurst, 1999).
Mesut Uyar and Edward J. Erickson, A Military History of the Ottomans: From Osman to Atatürk (Praeger, 2009).
Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Heath Lowry, The Shaping of the Ottoman Identity (Brill, 2008).
Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450–1750 (Oxford University Press, 2019).