Janissaries

The Ottoman Empire’s answer to a standing army problem: take Christian boys, convert them, train them from childhood, and forge the best infantry in Europe for three centuries.

The devshirme system

Every few years, Ottoman officials toured Christian villages in the Balkans and collected boys — typically between eight and eighteen. The boys were forcibly converted to Islam and sent to training schools. The best became Janissaries (yeni cheri, “new soldiers”). The rest entered the Ottoman bureaucracy. It was a tax paid in children.

The system was brutal but effective. Because Janissaries had no family ties, no land, no tribal loyalty, they owed everything to the Sultan. They were slaves in the legal sense but lived better than most free men in the empire — paid regularly, fed well, given status. Some rose to become grand viziers.

What made them different

Janissaries were professional soldiers in an age of feudal levies and mercenary bands. They trained constantly. They used firearms early and well. They fought as disciplined units when most European armies were still relying on aristocratic cavalry charges and peasant mobs. At their peak in the 15th and 16th centuries, no army in Europe could match them on the field.

Decline into politics

By the late 1600s — the period of the novel — the Janissaries had become a problem. They’d won the right to marry, to enroll their sons, to engage in trade. They were now a hereditary military caste with economic interests, not a slave corps loyal only to the sultan. They could (and did) depose sultans who displeased them. They resisted modernization because new weapons and tactics threatened their privileges. The Ottoman military stagnated as a result.

In the novel

Jack Shaftoe encounters Janissaries during his eastern travels. They fit into the novel’s running examination of slavery and unfreedom — Eliza’s captivity in a harem, the Barbary corsairs, the African slave trade. The Janissaries complicate any simple story about freedom: they were slaves who held enormous power, captives who became the empire’s elite. Stephenson uses them to show that the line between slavery and freedom in the 17th century was blurrier than modern readers might expect.