The Janissary Corps — Imperial Ottoman

The Janissaries were the elite infantry corps of the Ottoman standing army, a body of soldier-slaves recruited from the Christian population, converted to Islam, and bound by a strict hierarchy to the person of the sultan. For more than four hundred and sixty years, from the reign of Murad I in the mid-fourteenth century to the “Auspicious Incident” of 17 June 1826, the corps was the most recognisable institution of Ottoman military power, the subject of admiration and fear across the Christian Mediterranean, and a force of considerable political weight inside the empire itself.

The Janissaries are part of a wider story, surveyed in the article on the Ottoman military and warfare, and their recruitment is discussed at greater length in the article on the devshirme system. The corps, however, had a distinct institutional history, a distinct set of privileges, and a distinct role in the campaigns of the empire, and it is the subject of this article.

Formation under Murad I

The Janissary corps is conventionally dated to the reign of Murad I (r. 1362-1389), and more specifically to the years around 1363, when the chronicler Şükrullah places the formation of the new infantry. The new corps was an innovation of considerable importance. Earlier Ottoman forces had relied on tribal cavalry and on Christian mercenaries; the new infantry gave the sultan a disciplined force that did not depend on the goodwill of the Turkmen tribal chiefs. The first Janissaries were drawn from prisoners of war and from volunteers, but the corps was soon associated with the devshirme, the regular collection of Christian boys from the Balkan and Anatolian villages. By the time of Bayezid I, the Janissaries were a recognisable part of the Ottoman army, and by the time of Mehmed II they were the infantry backbone of the imperial field army.

Recruitment: the devshirme

The devshirme, from the Turkish devşirmek, “to collect” or “to pick up”, was the principal method of recruiting the Janissary corps from the late fourteenth century until the seventeenth. Christian boys aged roughly eight to eighteen, drawn from the Balkan and Anatolian provinces, were taken into Ottoman service, converted to Islam, and assigned to one of several career paths. Some went to the palace school, the Enderun, and rose into the highest offices of state. Some were placed with Turkish families in the Anatolian countryside to learn Turkish and to absorb the customs of the ruling people. Most were sent to the Janissary barracks, the acemi ocak, in the Anatolian and Rumelian towns, where they were trained as infantrymen.

The devshirme is examined in detail in its own article, but a few points are worth emphasising in the context of the Janissary corps. Recruitment was generally restricted to the Christian population, although some Muslim-born children entered the corps in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The selection was carried out by officials of the devşirme ocak, the devshirme office, and it is a mark of the long reach of the system that boys were collected from the raya (the non-Muslim subject population) in the Balkans as far as Hungary, Bosnia, Albania, and southern Russia. The boys were theoretically the property of the sultan, and they were bound to the corps for life.

Training and education

The training of a Janissary recruit began in the acemi ocak and continued, for the most able, in the Yeniçeri Ocağı, the Janissary corps proper. The training combined physical exercise, military drill, and the religious and literary education that was the mark of the corps. The Janissary was supposed to be a Muslim first and a soldier second, and the corps had its own imam, its own ceremonies, and its own strong corporate identity.

The acemis spent their early years as auxiliary troops, often on the palace construction projects or in the Anatolian fortresses, before they were promoted to the Janissary orta, the regimental company that was the basic unit of the corps. The orta was commanded by a çorbacı (literally “soup-man”), a senior officer, and it was organised into subunits of increasing seniority. The whole corps was led by the Yeniçeri Ağası, the Agha of the Janissaries, who in the classical period was one of the senior officers of the empire.

Organisation: the orta system

The Janissary orta was the basic unit of the corps. A fully manned orta had around 200 men, divided into squads and platoons of various sizes. The orta had its own kazan, a large field cauldron that served as a focus for the company mess and that was carried on the march. The “kazan of the Janissary” became a byword, and a famous privilege of the corps was the daily kazan kavurma — a meat-and-rice stew distributed to the men — that was issued to every orta in barracks or on campaign.

The orta had a distinct identity, with its own banner, its own patron saint, and its own bölük (corporal). The ortalar were numbered, and a roll-call in the barracks at the end of the seventeenth century listed over 100 ortalar, most of them in Istanbul but some in provincial garrison towns. The agha of each orta, and the higher officers of the corps as a whole, were responsible for discipline, pay, and the maintenance of the barracks.

Pay, privileges, and the kazan

The Janissary was paid in cash, in three-monthly instalments. The basic rate of pay was modest, but it was supplemented by a series of allowances, gifts, and the right to engage in trade. From the sixteenth century onwards, the Janissaries became an important element of the urban economy, working as porters, bakers, and small traders when they were off duty. The corps was, in the strict sense, forbidden to marry during the classical period, but the prohibition was gradually relaxed, and by the seventeenth century married Janissaries were the norm.

The Janissary had a number of privileges, including the right to bear arms in public, the right to a daily meal at the kazan, and a series of legal exemptions. The most important of these was the ocak, the right of the corps to defend itself in its own court, and to discipline its own members. The kazan, the soup-cauldron, became a symbol of the corps: the famous metaphor of “the kazan boiling over” came to refer to Janissary mutiny, and the ritual overturning of the kazan was a sign of open rebellion. The Janissary was also exempt from the ordinary taxes, and the corps had the right to march through the streets of Istanbul with drums and banners, the only body in the empire permitted to do so.

Combat role

The Janissary fought on foot, in close order, and was originally equipped with the composite bow, the short sword, and a small shield. The bow was the dominant weapon of the corps for most of its history; the matchlock musket, adopted in the later fifteenth century, was slow to displace it, and the Janissary retained a strong archery tradition into the seventeenth century. By the seventeenth century, the Janissary was, in practice, a pikeman and musketeer, organised in the standard Ottoman manner.

The training of the Janissary was long and demanding. A recruit, after his years in the acemi ocak, joined his orta and was expected to master the bow, the musket, the pike, and the short sword, and to undergo a strict physical training that included running, jumping, wrestling, and marching. The corps had its own musicians, who played the davul (drum), the zurna (shawm), and the mehter (a kind of large wind instrument), and the music of the mehterhane was the distinctive sound of the Ottoman army. The Janissary march, the mehter marşı, became one of the best-known musical traditions of the empire, and it has been used, in various modern arrangements, by military bands in Turkey and beyond.

The corps was a siege infantry. It played a decisive role in the great Ottoman sieges of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including the sieges covered in the article on gunpowder siege warfare, the Great Siege of Malta, and the siege of Vienna. The Janissary was trained to dig, to mine, and to storm breaches; it was also trained to fight in open battle, in the centre of the Ottoman line, and to support the sipahi cavalry with massed musket fire. The combination of disciplined infantry fire and timely cavalry charge is the classic Ottoman tactical pattern, and the Janissary was its central element.

Political power and decline

From the sixteenth century onwards, the Janissary corps became a significant political force inside the Ottoman empire. The ortalar were concentrated in Istanbul, the capital, and a Janissary mutiny was, in practice, a coup. The corps was involved in the deposition of several sultans and in the choice of several grand viziers. The agha of the Janissaries was a high officer of state, and the corps was a political as well as a military institution.

The classical Janissary was a slave of the sultan, a member of a closed corps, and a disciplined soldier. The Janissary of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was, increasingly, a hereditary soldier, a tradesman, and a political pressure group. The devshirme, the original source of the corps, had declined in importance; the ortalar had become large, hereditary bodies; and the military effectiveness of the corps had fallen sharply. The repeated defeats of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries — most notably at Vienna in 1683 — were widely attributed, in part, to the failure of the Janissary to perform its old role.

The Auspicious Incident of 1826

Sultan Mahmud II came to the throne in 1808 with a clear determination to reform the army and to end the political power of the Janissaries. The new infantry, the Nizam-ı Cedid, was the first step. The Janissaries reacted with a series of mutinies, the last of which, in June 1826, was the occasion of the Vaka-i Hayriye, the “Auspicious Incident”. On 15 June 1826 the Janissaries mutinied in Istanbul, demanding the abolition of the new infantry; Mahmud II mobilised his loyal troops, the Sekban-ı Cedid, and on 17 June the Janissary barracks were surrounded and bombarded. The corps was abolished by imperial decree, and the surviving Janissaries were either executed, imprisoned, or dispersed.

The abolition of the Janissaries marks the end of the old Ottoman military system. The new infantry, organised on European lines, took the corps’ place, and the older institutional vocabulary of devshirme, orta, kazan, and agha disappeared from official use. The corps, however, remained a powerful presence in Ottoman popular memory, and the soup-cauldron of the orta is still a symbol in Turkish popular culture.

Ottoman military and warfare — A comprehensive overview of the Ottoman military, from the akıncı raiders to the conscript armies of the early twentieth century.
The Ottoman navy — The imperial fleet of galleys and capital ships built at the Golden Horn, with which the Janissaries were transported on amphibious campaigns.
Ottoman gunpowder siege warfare — The great sieges in which the Janissary corps played a central role, from Constantinople in 1453 to Vienna in 1683.
The devshirme system — The “blood-tax” by which Christian boys were collected for service as Janissaries and in the palace school.
The provincial sipahi cavalry — The timariot horsemen who fought alongside the Janissary infantry in the Ottoman field army.