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Excerpt from:
Leslie Pierce, The Imperial Harem (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993)
When one of [the maidens] becomes pregnant by the Monarch, her salary is increased and she is honored and elevated
above the others, and is served as a Lady. And if she gives birth to a son, the boy is raised by his mother until the age of
10 or 11; then the Grand Turk gives him a sanjak [a province] and sends his mother with him .... And if a girl is born,
she is raised by her mother until the time she is married.
So noted Giovanni Maria Angiolello, who was in the service of Mehmed the Conqueror's eldest son
Mustafa. It is unclear when the practice of sending a prince's mother with him to his provincial post began.
It is possible that the wife of the second sultan, Orhan, who entertained the traveler Ibn Battuta in Iznik,
was present there as the mother of the prince Suleyman, since Orhan had appointed his son to the city after
its conquest. Mehmed I took his mother and children with him on his 1415 campaign in western Anatolia;
to be sure, his was no longer a princely but rather the sultanic household, but it is note-worthy that Mehmed
did not leave his family behind in one of the capitals. In addition to Angiolello's comment above, the more
abundant evidence we have about the sultans' families from the mid-fifteenth century on makes clear that
the practice was routine by then. Gülah Khatun, the mother of Angiolello's master Mustafa, was with her
son in Konya and in Kayseri, where he died in 1474. çicek Khatun, the mother of Mustafa's younger
brother Jem, was with her son in Konya, where he was assigned after Mustafa's death; after Jem's first
defeat in the succession war following his father's death in 1481, the prince, his mother, and the rest of his
household took refuge with the Mamluk sultan in Cairo.
Of all the members of the prince's household, his mother was his most devoted ally. The individual
perhaps most able to help him attain the throne- his lala, the political tutor assigned to supervise and
instruct him-was also the person most able and likely to desert him if his prospects dimmed. Appointed by
the sultan and ultimately loyal to him, a tutor's primary concern was not always the success of his princely
charge. Gedik Ahmed Pasha, who had been tutor to Jem, failed to supply the prince with the support he
confidently expected in his challenge to the enthronement of his older brother Bayezid; Ahmed Pasha was
at the time the son-in-law of the grand vezir Ishak Pasha, supporter of the new regime.
Indeed, it was in the sultan's interest to prevent a tutor from yoking his career to that of a prince. The
history of earlier Turco-Islamic dynasties provided sufficient warning of the harmful consequences of
overly powerful guardians (called atabegs) who frequently set up independent states with their princely
charges as puppet rulers. Ensuring the loyalty of tutors to the central authority was a critical element in the
Ottomans' attempts to accommodate Turco-Mongol principles of power shared among family members
with their overriding concern for the preservation of unitary authority. The self-interest of tutors is
illustrated by the quickly shifting loyalties of Kara Mustafa Pasha, tutor toward the end of Suleyman's reign
first to Bayezid, then to Selim, the sultan's two surviving sons. When the grand vezir Rustem Pasha, a
partisan of Bayezid, assumed that the pasha was loyal to his first tutee and transferred him in 1556 to Selim
with instructions to undermine the latter's candidacy for the succession, Mustafa Pasha proceeded to betray
Bayezid in the hopes that Selim's victory would bring him the grand vezirate. Fittingly, Mustafa Pasha was
known by the epithet "Lala."
A prince's mother had a vital interest in his welfare. It was not simply a desire for power that motivated
her to do all she could to bring about her son's succession to the throne. If she and her son failed, the
practice of fratricide sealed the prince's fate, while the fate of his mother was at best honorable exile in the
former capital of Bursa. In order to strengthen the prince's position relative to that of his brothers in
anticipation of the inevitable struggle for succession, it was imperative that they win the loyalty of strategic
elements in the ruling class, most particularly Janissary officers and leading government officials in the
capital who could manipulate affairs to their advantage. A prince's mother was presumably able to perform
as an effective agent for her son through her connections with the imperial court, her wealth, and her status
as a royal consort and as the most honored person at the provincial court after her son. Although Jem was
deserted by his tutor Gedik Ahmed Pasha, he was well served by his mother cicek Khatun, who struggled
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on his behalf for years and served as his principal ally in his efforts to free himself from the European
captivity he endured after his defeat by his brother.
Mothers of princes were responsible for the proper behavior of their sons in their provincial posts. The
potential difficulties of this task are vividly illustrated in a letter to Bayezid II from Gulruh Khatun, one of
his concubines and mother of the prince Alemah. In the letter she responds to the sultan's instruction that
she look to the conduct -obviously unsatisfactory- of her son. The letter begins, "My fortune-favored sultan,
you instructed me to discipline my son. Since then . . . I have done everything I can to preserve order . . ."
She goes on to present her case against seven members of her son's suite-including his tutor (lala), his
doctor, and his preceptor-to whom she attributes responsibility for the problems. It is Alemah's tutor in
particular whom she blames: "What was required was a tutor who would strive to cause my dear son's faith
and government to flourish, who would ever direct him toward virtuous conduct, who would root out
corrupters in his household, preserve order among the people, and honor the subjects [of the empire].
Instead, what we have is a tutor who is the author of all corruption . She accuses the tutor and his
colleagues of inducing Alemah to drink excessively so that he might be persuaded to sanction proposals
"against the law of Islam and the law of the sultan" that he would ordinarily, when sober, refuse. Worried
about Alemah's ill health, she describes his difficult recovery from a month-long drinking bout (the prince
was to die at forty-seven from the effects of his drinking). "Unable to bear any longer the corruption of
these evil-doers," Gulruh Khatun called the tutor's shortcomings to the sultan's attention-among them the
squandering of the prince's treasury to the extent that even she, the mother of the prince, had not received
her stipend for a year. But the tutor had dismissed her protest as the work of the chief eunuch of the prince's
private household, and unjustly denounced the latter to the sultan. Gulruh Khatun implores the sultan to
remove the seven:
My fortune-favored padishah, heed my cry for help .... rid us of [my son's] tutor, teacher, and doctor. They are masters
of corruption .... Send us good Muslims, because our situation has been pitiful since these persons arrived. They have
deprived me of my mother's rights .... If these seven do not go, they will utterly destroy the household of my son, your
servant."
Gulruh Khatun's letter reveals concern not only for the precariousness of her son's physical and
political condition but also for the preservation of her own rights and status. The letter also suggests that the
mother of a prince served as eyes and ears for the sultan, a check on his political appointees. Since she was
ultimately more interested in her son's political survival than in that of his father, it might at first seem that
she could not be fully trusted by the sultan. However, because her survival and that of her son during the
sultan's lifetime depended upon his good will, he could rest assured that she would of necessity do all she
could to ensure that her son's behavior was (outwardly at least) impeccable. Her interest in her son's
survival could thus be turned to the political advantage of the sultan. Furthermore, just as the presence of a
prince's mother at his provincial post provided a disincentive to self-interested behavior on the part of a
tutor, the latter would presumably report to the sultan about the conduct not only of the prince but of his
mother as well. The dispersal of high-ranking royal women to the provinces may well have been motivated,
in part at least, by the requirements of this system of checks and balances. Furthermore, the princely
governorate ensured that mothers of princes were safely removed from the center of power, where freer
access to potential allies would have permitted them to engage more easily in faction building.
Even after her son's death, the mother of a prince continued to be concerned with her son and his
household. The mother of a prince who either died at his provincial post or was executed in a contest for
the succession did not return to the imperial palace in Istanbul. Instead, she retired to Bursa, the first
Ottoman capital, and the place where, until the conquest of Constantinople, members of the dynastic family
were buried. In retirement she occupied herself with pious works. Often she undertook the construction of
her own or her son's tomb. Befitting her role as senior member of her son's household, she looked after
members of the deceased prince's suite and assured that they were given appropriate new posts. Husnüah
Khatun, mother of Bayezid II's son Sehinah, corresponded with Selim I, Sehinah's victorious brother, on
behalf of Meviana Pir Ahmed celebi, a scholar who had been at Sehinah's court and who was neglected
when the members of the prince's household were assigned new posts."
Of Mehmed the Conqueror's known concubines, only Gulbahar Khatun returned to Istanbul as the
mother of his successor. Mustafa's mother, Gulah, settled in Bursa after her son's death in 1474. Angiolello,
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who with the rest of Mustafa's household accompanied the prince's cortege from his post in Kayseri to
Bursa, where he was buried, described the disposition of the prince's female household:
[T]he Grand Turk sent word that the elder Lady -that is, the mother of Mustafa-should remain in Bursa with those
maidens whom she required, and he had good provision made for her, that she might live there honorably. [He ordered]
that the young girl - Mustafa's daughter Nergisahj – and her mother and the rest of the maidens together with all others
belonging to the court of his deceased son should come to Constantinople . . . . The women were lodged in the palace
where the Grand Turk's other women and maidens stay, and after several days the maidens were married to courtiers
and others. . .
Gulah Khatun died in 1487, and was buried in Bursa in the tomb she had built for herself near that of
Mustafa. Jem's mother, çicek, shared her son's exile, and died and was buried in Cairo; the prince's corpse,
however, was returned from Naples, where he died, and buried in the tomb of his elder brother, Mustafa.
Most of the concubines of Bayezid II settled in Bursa after their sons were killed in the fierce war of
succession in which Selim I emerged victorious. For example, Bulbül Khatun, mother of Ahmed, the
governor of Amasya and Selim's principal rival, came to Bursa in 1513 when her son was executed by
Selim. She had already built and endowed a religious college in Bursa, and now she built a tomb for
Ahmed, in which she too was buried at her death in 1515.
Sexuality and Power in the Princely Household
The establishment of a princely household signified the political maturity and the onset of the public
political career of both the Ottoman prince and his mother. While she was presumably no longer the
sultan's sexual partner after her son's birth, a concubine remained within the sultanic household during the
prince's childhood. With the dispatch of the prince to his provincial post, there came into being a new
household shared by son and mother, subordinate to but separate from the sultanic household. The
concubine's identity was then clearly articulated as that of "mother of the prince." The seal of Hüsnüah
Khatun, one of Bayezid Ii's consorts, identified her as the "Mother of Sultan Sehinah"; it was with this seal
that she signed the letter she wrote to inform the sultan of his son's death in 1511.
Motherhood conferred no subordinate role. At Suleyman's court in Manisa, his mother, Hafsa Khatun,
received a monthly stipend of 6,000 aspers, the highest stipend of anyone on the princely payroll and triple
that of the prince himself.) This monetary differential was symbolic of the fact that the prince's mother was
present in his court as a representative of the senior generation. The prince was not the sole representation
of the junior generation, for present in this household was also Hafsa's daughter, Suleyman's presumably
unmarried sister; the princess received a monthly stipend of 1,200 aspers. It was the prince's mother, as the
elder member of the household, who enjoyed the privilege of adorning the provincial capital: until the late
sixteenth century, when Murad III built a mosque complex in Manisa, the city's two most prominent
mosque complexes were those built by Husnüah Khatun and Hafsa Khatun.
By the late fifteenth century, when the age of the prince's departure from the imperial household had
risen to sixteen or so, the prince's assumption of his political career also signaled the onset of his
reproductive career. Grooming her son's partners and ensuring the success of this aspect of his career was
one of the concubine mother's roles as senior member of the domestic household. The prince's
political/reproductive maturation initiated a change not only in his mother's role-to the onset of her public
political career-but in one of his father's roles as well. From the reign of Mehmed the Conqueror on, and
perhaps earlier, the sultan's reproductive function ceased when that of his sons began. Whereas earlier
sultans tended to continue producing offspring even after their first sons were well grown, Mehmed and his
descendents ceased fathering children after a healthy number of sons had survived childhood and could
themselves assume the function of reproducing the dynasty.
An interesting aspect of the dynasty's monitoring of the outflow of power through princes in that is was
accomplished by slaves of the sultan. Lalas were usually drawn from the governing slave elite. Just as the
concubine mother educated and restrained the prince, the lala was a kind of stand-in for the sultan,
performing as he did the paternal function of both training and con trolling the prince in his political
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activities. Even when he became sultan, the prince would treat both his mother and his lala with filial
respect; new sultans not infrequently appointed their tutors to the vezirate if they remained on good terms
(upon his accession Suleyman made his tutor Kaslm Pasha the fourth vezir).
There was precedent for the important role of the royal concubine as elder in a household separate
from that of the ruler. It resembled in some ways the Mongol ordu, the separate camp or household
maintained by each of the khan's wives, vividly described by Ibn Battuta in his visit to the Uzbek khan of
the Crimea."' A crucial difference, however, is that the principal identity of the head of the ordu was clearly
that of wife, not mother. Much struck by the power of wives in the Turkish and Mongol states he visited,
Ibn Battuta commented, "Among the Turks and the Tatars [Mongols] their wives enjoy a very high
position; indeed, when they issue an order they say in it 'By command of the Sultan and the Khatun.' " The
wife of Orhan who was in charge in Iznik when Ibn Battuta was making his way through Anatolia in the
1330s exercised some degree of sovereign power. However, the Ottomans quickly moved away from this
Turco-Mongol pattern to limit the authority of both wives and sons. Slave concubinage was a key
instrument in this process.
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The Ottoman Military and Leadership: The Years of Glory: 1421-1566
Sultan Murad II (1421-1451) could never make up his mind. A brilliant man who could be methodical
when he wished, the Sultan had waged war upon the Byzantines, then decided he could let them survive.
He had built up the elite corps of Janissaries by allowing, for the first time, Muslim youths to enter service
of this formerly exclusive Christians’ club, but then decided that the Janissaries had gotten too big and
unruly, and spread them out across the empire. He abdicated in favor of his teenaged son and went to a
Mosque to spend his retirement in religious study, then changed his mind and returned when he saw the
danger of political chaos.
The one area in which Murad II was consistent was his desire to expand and solidify the power of the
empire. He sealed the ring around Byzantium by capturing Salonika. He then marched into the Balkans to
avenge the murder of his father at the hands of a Serb assassin. Several inconclusive campaigns against the
Hungarians followed, and Murad’s diplomacy was as inconsistent as his personal life. But the Sultan saw
opportunity in what most of his ministers saw as a diplomatic disaster: a coalition of Christian states
formed against him in 1444, led by the Polish king Wladislaw III. That year Murad finally got the decisive
battle he had so long sought: the Ottomans crushed the combined Christian forces at Varna, which
solidified Turkish control over Serbia once and for all.
When the old Sultan finally departed, he left behind a prosperous and powerful realm of modest
proportions, a son who had learned the ropes of political in-fighting, and a carefully-built army that had
been hardened by campaigning and was sure of itself.
Murad’s son, Mehmet II (1451-1481), forever after known as Fatih (“The Conqueror”), fully
launched the Ottoman state on its remarkable trajectory of conquest and dominance. His restlessness and
manic drive are reminiscent of another great conqueror of later years: Napoleon Bonaparte. Unlike
Napoleon, however, Mehmet built an empire that lasted five centuries.
From the outset, Mehmet was fixated upon Constantinople. The great city had fallen on hard times,
and its population had declined by as much as two-thirds. Nonetheless it remained a center of wealth,
religion, and culture, and Mehmet saw its capture as necessary to prove that the Muslim Turks were the
new inheritors of the great empires of the past. He spent a year in careful preparation (showing a patience
that was not to be typical of his style, in general), then on 6 April 1453 the Sultan pitched his command tent
within sight of the great walls, said the evening prayers, and gave the orders for the battle to commence at
dawn.
Mehmet’s siege, with seven separate major assaults, lasted all spring. At one point the Turks
constructed a special fleet of galleys that they hauled over land on the backs of cows and oxen, to launch
into the protected harbor behind the Byzantine defenses. The city fell on the night of 29 May. The next
morning the Sultan entered, went straight to the great Hagia Sophia church, and declared it consecrated as a
mosque. Thus began Istanbul, capital and showcase metropolis of the Ottoman empire.
When he wasn’t conquering, Mehmet lavished time and money refurbishing his new capital. But his
list of conquests was impresive: his campaigns put down a Serbian insurrection and extended the northern
frontiers of the empire to the Danube river. He subdued Albania and Macedonia, defeated the Venetians in
Greece, and pushed the eastern border all the way to the Turkmen and Kurdish lands at the headwaters of
the Euphrates. To the astonishment of the Venetians and Genoese, he landed an army at Otranto, and was
preparing a new campaign against southern Italy and Sicily when he died in 1481. Had he lived another few
years, there is no doubt that he would have begun a major campaign for Italy. (He had already written the
Pope, offering to accept the Pontiff’s conversion to Islam!)
Bayezid II (1481-1512), nicknamed Adli (“The Just”) faced a challenge to the succession from his
brother Cem. The Jannissaries were split in their loyalties, and this crisis represents one of the earliest
examples of the Praetorian politicking that would ultimately poison the morale and reliability of this fine
fighting force. Cem lost the struggle, but was given sanctuary by the Pope, who kept him as a valuable
hostage. Meanwhile Bayezid paid off those Janissaries who had supported his brother. It was the beginning
of a dangerous precedent whose results would not be fully evident for another century.
Unlike most of the men of his family, Bayezid was not particularly interested in war. (Macchiavelli,
who studied his career, wrote extensively of Bayezid as a model ruler). The Sultan preferred negotiations
and bribes, occasionally sending armies on limited campaigns of retribution, such as his incursion into
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Poland in 1488, as payback for an earlier Polish raid. That year, however, the Mamelukes attacked the
Ottoman flanks in south-eastern Anatolia, winning a victory that resulted in a humiliating peace treaty.
Bayezid was finally roused to war against Venice in 1499, which resulted in a Turkish victory and the
cession of several islands and parts of the Dalmatian coast.
Bayezid ended unhappily, once again immersed in fraternal conflict, this time among his own sons. He
had been defeated again by the new rising power of Persia in 1502, and again had been forced to make an
embarrassing peace. These defeats – at the hands of Shi’ite “heretics,” no less — had driven many officials
in the empire to campaign openly for the succession of the Sultan’s promising younger son, Selim.
Bayezid, however, had nominated his older son, Ahmed, as successor, and another civil war loomed.
Again, the Janissaries were split in their loyalties, although most of the noblemen (Sipahis) of the empire
supported Selim. After a shirmish between Selim’s and Ahmed’s forces resulted in a truce, support for
Ahmed began to wane because of his alleged conversion to Shi’a Islam. On 25 April 1512 the Sultan
received word that Selim was on his way to his father’s country residence in Adrianople, now with the full
support of all the Jannisary commanders. Bayezid took the hint and went peacefully. He abdicated that
afternoon.
Of all the Ottoman sultans, two stand out as true military innovators. One is Mehmet II, who sought
artillerists and military engineers throughout the Mediterranean world for his endless campaigns and sieges.
The other, and more important, is Selim I (1512-20). His nickname, Yavuz (“The Grim”), understates the
tremendously quick and fertile mind of this man, who rarely saw an innovation he didn’t like.
Ottoman tradition was to have the princes apprentice as provincial governors, in the expectation that
most of them would remain so, while one of them (usually but not always the eldest) would ascend to the
Sublime Porte, bringing his administrative team with him to the capital. Impatient and warlike, increasingly
disgusted with his plodding and weak father, Selim had become virtually ungovernable – a nearlyindependent ruler in his province of Trebizond. When he marched on the capital, he did so with a team of
loyal administrators, and the full support of the military high command. No one should have been
surprised, then, to see the Ottoman empire regain the offensive. But it is likely that nobody expected the
speed and scale of Selim’s operations.
The Sultan had given a clue of his intentions as soon as he came to power, for one of his very first acts
was to quadruple the recruitment assets of the Jannissary corps. He also spent a huge sum of money
modernizing their weaponry, including re-equipping several ortas with the most modern firearms. Finally,
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Selim commissioned a new, mobile artillery and invested in gun foundries and powder factories. Anyone
seeing the thousands of new recruits drilling with their weapons could have guessed what would come next.
Ever since his father’s humiliation at the hands of the Mamelukes and Persians, Selim had counted the
days before he could exact vengeance on these two Shi’ite regimes. In 1514 he opened his first major
campaign, smashing Shah Ismail’s army deep in Kurdistan, and annexing these mountainous regions to the
Ottoman empire. Shah Ismail had counted on the rugged terrain and long distances to hamper the Turks.
After his initial defeat in Kurdistan, he retreated and left scorched earth for hundreds of miles. When at last
he stood to fight in the heart of Persia, he was astonished to see the Ottoman forces still at strength and still
disciplined. Meticulous organizers, the Turks had driven their own herd animals with them for food, had
dug wells along the line of march for water, and had used water buffalo to pull the artillery. (Whenever
they anticipated a long siege, the Turks even planted vegetable gardens to grow their own food.) At the
ensuing battle of Chaldiran, Selim unleashed 12,000 muskets against the Persians, then broke them with a
cavalry charge.
He spent less than a year resting his army before he attacked again, this time on an even more
ambitious scale, south into Lebanon and Syria, destroying a Mameluke army outside Damascus. The
Sultan’s teenage son Suleiman watched, deeply impressed, as his father’s muskets shattered the Mamelukes
again in Egypt, bringing that huge and ancient empire to an abrupt end. Within five years, Selim had
doubled the physical size of the Ottoman state, conquering virtually all of the modern Middle East. The
huge populations of the Nile now came under Ottoman rule, and with them, the breadbasket of Egypt and
the marketplaces of Cairo, where more gold changed hands than in the entire Ottoman empire to that point.
In 1517 Selim’s armies occupied the Arabian Red Sea coast, as far south as Yemen. Thus the three
holiest cities of Islam: Mecca, Medina, and al-Quds (Jerusalem), had been added to the Ottoman empire in
three short years. Selim declared himself the Caliph al-Islam, defender and guardian of the Faith,
resurrecting the title of Islam’s chief authority, which had fallen to the Mongol sack of Baghdad three
centuries earlier. Mehmed II had attemped to grasp this mantle for himself when he took Constantinople,
but in those days the Ottomans were merely one of several Islamic states, and not the greatest nor richest.
Now, firmly in control of the entirety of the Holy Land, there was no one to contest Selim’s claim. It was a
declaration that stated the obvious: the Ottoman Empire had become the greatest power of the Muslim
world.
At the age of 55 Selim died, either from skin cancer or from a skin infection, probably exacerbated by
the way he had driven himself in eight years of almost ceaseless warfare. He left the empire his son, trained
in the crucible of war, raised in the saddle. This young man, twenty-five years old when his father died, has
forever after symbolized the height of Ottoman power and majesty. He was Suleiman I (1520-1566),
nicknamed Kanuni, “The Lawgiver,” later to be remembered as “Suleiman the Magnificent.”
Born at his father’s provincial palace in Trebizond, Suleiman was sent to the capital at the age of seven
to study history, literature, and mathematics. Under his father’s tutelage, he was also drilled rigorously in
Islamic theology and of course, the art of war.
Like his father, the new Sultan spent much of his life in the saddle. Unlike Selim, however, Suleiman
proved equally concerned with domestic reform, particularly with new models for the census, taxation, and
the law — all badly needed to standardize practices among the millions of new subjects he and his father
would add to the empire. While he was the very image of the “Terrible Turk” to the European Christians,
Suleiman was actually a fair and intelligent ruler to his own subjects, tolerant of minority rights, a patron of
the arts and, with his wife’s influence, of large-scale charitable projects. Fluent in Arabic and Persian, and
with a passable command of Greek and Hebrew, he was an educated and cultured man who loved fine
poetry and literature.1 Suleiman is justly remembered as the greatest of all the Sultans.
In his first year, Suleiman attacked North against the traditional Hungarian enemy. Belgrade fell in a
short campaign. Next year, South: the island of Rhodes fell after a grueling siege, thus completing the
dream of four generations of Ottoman Sultans. In a moment of generosity that he later came to regret,
Suleiman allowed the Knights of St. John to relocate to Malta, whence they proved every bit as much a
1
Suleiman’s hobby was the handcrafting of small figurines and jewelry. He apparently was quite skilled working
with precious metals, and made various gold and silver trinkets that he would give away as souvenir gifts to
visitors.
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thorn in his side as they had been on Rhodes, and would lead him in later years to undertake one of his few
unsuccessful campaigns: a half-year siege of that island that ended in frustration.
Suleiman was the only Ottoman Sultan to defy the traditional Harem system and to take a single wife
as Sultana. This was extremely controversial, not least because she was a Christian (a Polish princess who
converted to Islam and changed her name to Hürrem.) Happily married, the young Sultan spent three years
in domestic pursuits, but his inner restlessness prevailed and by 1526 he was on campaign again.
Here at last was the victory over the Hungarians that the Ottomans had been craving for a century. At
Mohacs, Suleiman crushed their army and overran all of Hungary. Three years later he was at the gates of
Vienna, embroiled in a war with the Holy Roman Empire. Two campaigns proved indecisive, two sieges of
Vienna failed due to extraordinarily terrible weather making forage and fodder unavailable, and Suleiman
eventually had to settle for a treaty which gave him the lion’s share of Hungary.
In the 1530s the Sultan returned to his father’s old campaign grounds of North Africa. Suleiman
extended Ottoman power to the Atlantic coast of Morocco, then turned back east and beat the Persians
again to solidify control over Iraq and a substantial part of Iran, to the mouth of the Persian Gulf at Basrah
and Kuwait. For decades the Mediterranean was virtually an Ottoman lake. It was during this period that
Suleiman spent several weeks in Jerusalem, and after praying at the al-Aqsa Mosque one Friday, vowed to
rebuild and renovate the city. Thus money and labor flowed into Jerusalem to refurbish ancient structures
and monuments, to build a new road and aqueduct system, and to construct the massive walls which still
stand to this day.
In his last two decades, Suleiman’s attentions again turned to Europe. One tradition, never confirmed,
holds that he received at this time an emissary from England’s King Henry VIII with whom he spent many
evenings in conversation, and which sparked his interest again in the western European world, its conflicts,
and politics.2 Whatever the cause, he once again prepared to meet the Holy Roman Empire in battle. In this,
his last campaign, Suleiman had to settle for less than he had hoped. He conquered Rumania and expanded
his Hungarian provinces north to Austria, but the prize of Vienna still eluded him, as it would his
descendants in the decades to come.
Suleiman the Magnificent died on the evening of 5 September, 1566, 72 years old. With him, it is often
said, passed away the greatness of the Ottoman Empire. As a young man he had always been superstitous,
daily consulting his astrologer and his dream-interpreter (dream interpretation was a profession in the
Ottoman Empire, and most of the upper class visited interpreters weekly, much in the manner of elite
Manhattanites reclining on their analysts’ couches.) In old age, the Sultan tried everyone’s patience with his
2
It may be true. Henry’s daughter Elizabeth did send regular ambassadors to Istanbul, who carried her personal
correspondence with Sultan Murad III.
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hours set aside for discussions of his dreams and possible “signs” he had witnessed. One story, perhaps
apocryphal, has the aged Sultan waking from a disturbing vision of a rotten fish, with flies swarming the
decaying head. “The fish is the empire,” his interpreter told him. “It will decay from the top.”
The Ottoman Empire at the Death of Suleiman the Magnificent
“Fish Stink from the Head”
An old Turkish saying warns that a rotten fish rots first at the head. Nobody could have known it at the
time, but the death of Suleiman the Magnificent would be seen by later generations as the crucial turning
point in Ottoman fortunes. The empire continued to expand for nearly a century, carried by its own mass,
wealth, and momentum. But the majority of the Sultans were mere shadows of their great ancestors.
The rot started immediately. Like Marcus Aurelius of Rome fourteen centuries earlier, the leader who
saw and understood so much so well, had a terrible blind spot when it came to his own son and chosen
successor. Selim II was as unlike his father as can possibly be imagined: a coddled, spoiled, and cowardly
man. Addicted to sex and alcohol, he earned the nickname “Selim the Drunk.” In marked contrast from his
sober, monogamous, and above all active father, Selim II rarely left the harem and his intoxicated orgies.
(Unfortunately, he even looked very different from his father. The half-Polish Selim had fair skin and
blonde hair, thus resulting in another disparaging nickname: “Yellow Selim.”)
A great empire can withstand the occasional Commodus or Selim II. There is enough talent and
competence in the administration to carry on for an entire generation, if need be. But the dynasty stumbled.
Mediocrity followed mediocrity, and in some cases far worse. Two sultans (Ibrahim I and Mustafa I) were
completely insane, the political playthings of powerful men and women within the palace. For half a
century the majority of the empire’s energy was squandered in internecine political struggle. This was
broken only by a single outstanding Sultan, Murad IV (1623-40), whose ferocious discipline was
unfortunately marred by paranoia and cruelty. He did, nonetheless, restore a reliable military and civilian
bureaucracy, but that ended with his death, and the rot continued.
One serious problem was inherent in the harem system. Originally, the concept had been based on the
assumption that all the male offspring of the Sultan’s many “wives” would train as princes, each being
raised and educated in one of the provincial capitals, and thus learning the ropes of leadership and
administration. One of them would rise to the Sublime Porte and become the next Sultan, while the others
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remained governors. But by the late 16th century there had been enough fear and actual threat of fraternal
power struggles that the young princes and their powerful mothers would conspire with favored ministers
to have any possible rivals locked up in “the Cage” – a small apartment in a wing of the palace – where
they would live under perpetual house arrest. Thus, instead of seeing the empire and training for leadership
at a young age (as Suleiman the Magnificent had done), they often reached the throne ignorant, fearful, and
easily manipulated.
In this leadership vaccuum there were many opportunities for the men who shaped the various
institutions of the empire to advance their own power at the expense of central authority and good
government. Most prominently, the Janissary corps transformed from a hard-fighting body of regular and
specialist infantry, into lazy and frequently rebellious prima donnas who protected the Sultan’s indolence as
long as the pay and perks were good. Under the active Sultans, the Janissaries had been allowed to derive
their own traditions and they substantially had their own internal rules and procedures. In return, however,
they went wherever the Sultan went and fought whenever he commanded. At their peak, they had been the
finest professional infantry in the world. Now, because the Sultan stayed at home, so did they. And because
there was always a reward for loyal Janissaries from any new Sultan, the temptation and motivation for
helping to overthrow the government became irresistable.
Another organ of the state which began to atrophy immediately was the office of Sheikh-al-Islam.
This position, originally instituted by Murad II, was conceived as the chief religious counsellor for the
Sultan, and head bureaucrat of the Faith within the empire. (There was also a Chief Rabbi for the Jewish
minority, a Chief Patriarch for Orthodox Christians, etc.) But once the Sultan himself laid claim to the
ancient and much loftier title of Caliph, the Sheikh’s job became redundant. His position evolved into a
kind of behavior monitor, a high-level prude who saw his job as keeping the empire free from “Infidel
Innovations,” as western ideas eventually came to be called. Thus open-mindedness and innovation –
hallmarks of the early empire – were replaced with conservatism and arrogance, the rejection of new ideas
from outside. This rejectionism sometimes went to absurd extremes, such as the prohibition against clocks
and pocket-watches, which had been invented by Christian Europe.
And so we see the Janissaries transformed from hard-hitting shock troops into the spoiled retainers of
their own privileges. Janissary commanders often sided with religious conservatives because “infidel
innovations” threatened their own time-honored traditions. Even when it became obvious, by the late 17th
century, that the Ottomans were no longer more advanced on the battlefield than their enemies, even when
the Turks began to lose battles and thus territory, even after the crushing defeat at Vienna in 1683, the
Janissaries clung to their past and the empire remained stuck in time.
How ironic and sad this change had become by the 1700s! Once, the empire had been led by vigorous
and innovative men who forced their bureacrats to keep pace with them. Now the empire was strangled by
the bureaucrats, who did their best to stop any Sultan who might rise above the mediocre and demand
change. The modest reforms of Mustafa III in the late 18th century were mooted by the depressing string of
defeats at the hands of the Russians, and by the gentle (and slow-witted) Mustafa’s unwillingness to do
more than criticize. The aggressively reform-minded Selim III lost his life in a palace coup. Finally, by the
early 19th century, Mahmud II combined the zeal for reform with the clever subterfuge necessary to get
around all the institutions for stagnation, and he destroyed the Janissary corps in a coup of his own in 1826.
By then, however, it was far too late. The empire had lost half its European territory and North Africa had
transformed from vassal states to vibrant independent rivals. The Turks awakened from a long slumber to
find Europe poised to embark upon the Industrial Revolution. One generation later, Tsar Nicholas I made
his uncharitable comment about Turkey being the “Sick Man of Europe,” and thereafter the empire was on
a sort of death-watch, with speculation on its demise a popular sport among the statesmen of the European
powers.
The empire hobbled on into the 20th century, shorn of most of its provinces by aggressive neighbors,
teetering on bankruptcy, generations behind the West in technology. One last war remained: “The Great
War,” by European nomenclature. To the astonishment of virtually everyone, including their allies, the
Turks rallied for one last display of courage and determination. Outgunned sometimes 5:1, outnumbered,
fighting simultaneously on five fronts, the empire withstood the blows of the British, French, and Russians,
finally collapsing in the last weeks of 1918. While the British and French took the Middle East, rapacious
Greek and Italian politicians descended upon what they thought was the corpse of Turkey itself, having
planned to carve it up into colonies and protectorates. To their dismay the Turks raised yet another army
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and drove them out. The Ottoman empire was thus felled not by its enemies, but by one of its own heroes,
Mustafa Kemal, who abolished the Sultanate and Caliphate and founded the modern Republic of Turkey.
Six centuries of history ended on that day.
As we look at the Balkans and the Middle East today, any thoughtful person can not help but
remember that the Ottomans ruled these lands with firmness and fairness, with respect for diversity and
freedom of religion, and kept them at peace. The empire was never free from local unrest and revolts, but
when we contrast that epoch with the current situation of religious genocide, terrorism, government-funded
rape, torture, and death-camps, and internecine conflict that repeatedly draws in the rest of the world…
Surely one must wax nostalgic for a man like Suleiman the Magnificent, and a government like the
Ottomans at their best.
Ottoman Military Categories:
Because the empire was so vast, encompassing many different regions with different customs and
traditions, and because it lasted so long, resulting in evolutionary changes over the centuries, there is a
bewildering array of terminology for Ottoman military units. Words which meant something in one century
mean something else in a different century. Certain kinds of units were slowly phased out, replaced by
others which often overlapped them, and so on.
Kapikulu: The Professionals
When he came to power in 1421, Sultan Murad II’s most pressing task was to restore the morale and unity
of his small empire, which had been badly defeated by Timurlane, and which faced a vast array of enemies
on all sides. Up to that point, the Sultans had relied primarily upon feudal Muslim infantry called Yayas,
and an array of feudal cavalry, plus Christian vassals and mercenaries. Murad needed an organization that
he could rely upon at any time, without having to send out a call to recalcitrant nobility, who might or
might not assist him as he wished. Therefore he enlarged the very small Süvarilieri (Sultan’s “household”)
troops and divided them into three categories. These three were collectively known as the Kapikulu, and
constituted the professional troops of the empire: salaried, uniformed, barracked and trained at the
government’s expense.
The infantry branch of the Kapikulu were the Yeni Ceri (“New Force”), the mostly-Christian
“Janissaries.” The Kapikulu cavalry remained small, comprising six divisions, which will be described
below. And the Ottomans created a professional artillery force as part of the Kapikulu, the Topchu Ocagi
(“Cannon Corps”), which was given extensive funding, divided into a gunners’ division and an artillery
train division (possibly the first professional artillery train in military history).
As this system took root and survived the baptism of fire in Murad’s campaigns against various
Christian powers for the very survival of the Ottoman realm, the old Yayas were phased out, and the word
“Yaya” came to mean simply “soldier.” Thus, even though there was not a body of troops officially known
as Yayas anymore, any Ottoman soldier could also be called a Yaya.
Kapikulu Cavalry:
There were six cavalry “divisions” within the Kapikulu corps. Each numbered 1000 men, although in the
17th century these were tripled in size (and became fairly unweidly as a result.) Unlike the Sipahis and other
feudal cavalry, the Kapikulu stables were ready at hand in the capital, and the men permanently mobilized.
On campaign, they fought as three brigades, each of two divisions. The first was called Ulufeciyan, the
second Gureba (meaning “foreigners,” and was traditionally recruited from non-Turkish speaking subjects
of the empire), and the third – considered the élite – were the Silahters. While not true “heavy” cavalry,
certainly not in the sense of platemailed European knights, the Kapikulu were remarkably disciplined and
reliable. They generally were not a match against fresh European heavy knights in a head-on clash, but
their superior mobility and discipline enabled the Sultan or his commanders to use them with great
precision, usually for a countercharge against enemy knights who had already been worn by fire and their
own charge.
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Kapikulu Infantry: The Janissaries
When the Ottomans first entered Christian lands in the earliest days of the regime, they took a number of
Christian noblemen prisoner after various victories. Many of these men had young sons, whom the
Ottomans took as hostages to ensure the loyalty of their new subjects. This practice soon evolved into a sort
of draft called the devishirme. This was not as exclusive as it may at first sound; until Sultan Selim Yavuz,
the majority of the Ottoman Empire’s subjects were in fact Christians, so this draft selected from a wide
array of nationalities. The boys were sent to a special academy where they were educated and trained in the
art of war. They were, however, kul — slaves.
Slavery in the Ottoman empire was very different from that in western countries and their New World
colonies. An Ottoman slave had legal status, the right to own property (including his own slaves), and the
ability to participate in the economy with his own resources. The English word “slave” is not a very good
translation of kul, because these men often rose to the highest ranks of the imperial bureaucracy, and thus
excercised power over “free” men. Perhaps it would be better to call them a caste: their status meant that
they could only do certain types of work, under certain situations. They were, essentially, slaves of the
state, not of a private master.
These boys thus graduated as an elite corps. Their performance was often so good that the Sultans kept
wanting more of them. When Murad II became Sultan in 1421, they numbered 6,000. Murad needed more,
and thus opened the corps to volunteers, including Christians who had converted to Islam. By the time his
son Mehmed II “The Conqueror” ascended to the Porte, there were already rumblings among Muslim
soldiers about the special perks and privileges of being a Janissary, and so the Sultan created new units for
these classes, too. Selim the Grim expanded them to 35,000. Thus the corps grew with each Sultan, and like
the empire itself, became steadily less Christian, until by the late 1600s there were no longer even attempts
to recruit from Christians at all.
The basic unit of Janissaries was the Orta. This is often translated as “regiment,” but that word does
nothing to explain the complexities of the system. Each Orta recruited its own boys, educated them, and
trained them according its own traditions and specialty of service. Most Ortas were known for a particular
specialization. The 64th escorted the Sultan on his hunting trips, for instance, and trained his hunting dogs.
The 82nd, 84th and 99th trained Imams (Muslim clerics) for the army. (Each unit had an Imam, but the Imam
of the 99th Orta was the senior cleric for the whole army, sort of the “Preacher-General.”) 3
An Orta fielded essentially a “battalion” of 400-700 men. A depot or training cadre was left behind in
the capital when the Orta went on campaign. These “inactive” Janissaries steadily grew over the years,
creating a huge problem for the treasury. (By the 18th century there were nearly 200,000 Janissaries,
although fewer than half of them were still on active duty.) In theory, every Janissary was trained and
equipped in a wide variety of weapons: bow, crossbow, musket, pike, sword, battleaxe, halberd, etc. In
reality, the Orta left the capital having chosen or been ordered to bring only one or two of these, so they
were not as bristling with weapons as they appear on paper. Many Ortas also regarded themselves as
specialists in certain weapons, and favored them to the exclusion of others. The 26th was an all-halberd unit,
for instance, and the 82nd was all-crossbow. Even after Mehmed II declared that musketry was the way of
the future, many Ortas retained their bows. (Although the new Ortas raised by Selim I were all-muskets.)
An Orta was a fraternity. Once he joined, a man never left. He was tattooed on both arms with the
unique symbol of that Orta, and although all Janissaries wore the same basic cut of uniform, each Orta had
a unique color combination or style of decoration, which that man wore his whole life, even in civilian
dress. After he retired, the Orta paid his pension until he died. If he fell in battle, the Orta retrieved his
body from the field for a proper burial and paid his pension to his widow, if he had one.4 (A Janissary could
only marry if the Sultan decreed that he had achieved veteran status.)
3
4
Religion is complicated, with regard to the Janissaries. Most ortas had rituals that were covertly or overtly related
to the Bektashi order of dervishes. Depending upon the mood in Istanbul, the Bektashis were sometimes regarded
as heretics, at other times merely odd. Although derived from Islam, their theology placed the individual soul as
primary, even over God. The 99th Orta – and thus the army’s chief Imam – was in fact Bektashi.
The Janissaries left no man behind. Even under enemy fire, they sent out parties to fetch the bodies. The
Byzantines remarked in astonishment at the additional casualties the Turks were willing to suffer retrieving the
wounded and dead from beneath the walls of Constantinople.
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Ultimately, the Janissary corps grew to 136 Ortas, ranked in order of seniority by “class.” The first five
were considered the most elite. The 6th through 21th Ortas were considered the second class, for instance,
the 22nd through 51st a third class, and so on. Realistically, there was rather little difference among them in
terms of performance. Under a vigorous Sultan who used his army and kept it in shape, all Janissary Ortas
were first-rate professional infantrymen, perhaps the finest in the world at that time. In their heyday, the
period covered by this book, they took readily to new technologies, and adopted gunpowder weapons with
devastating effect.
It took a strong Sultan to keep them in line. The Janissaries’ pride in their own units and traditions was
such that they were hard to command, and resisted being told to make any change. Under the fierce
discipline of a man like Mehmed II or Selim I, they were unbeatable. Under a weak leader, however, they
became unruly, insolent, and demanding. To their enemies, they were the very image of the Turkish
Empire.
The Topchu Corps: Artillery
The Turkish fascination with artillery dates to the earliest days of the empire. The first cannon appeared in
Ottoman service in 1366, when the dynasty was barely 70 years old and could hardly be called an
“empire.” The first Sultan to make artillery equipment a central part of his strategy was Murad II. Although
his foreign policy was equivocal, when Murad did go to war, he did so patiently, and planned for long
sieges of fortified places. Thus big guns were carefully emplaced and used with steady deliberation to blast
the foe into submission. Thus also the gunners were permanently added to the establishment as part of the
Kapikulu. After the conquest of Constantinople, the artillery school, the barracks and stables, the foundries
and the ammunition warehouses were all moved to the new capital, where they covered acres and employed
thousands.
Murad’s son lacked his father’s patience, but more than compensated with other talents. Mehmet II
“The Conqueror” rarely met an artillerist he didn’t like, and he reached deep into his pockets to hire them
from across the Mediterranean. Thus the Sultan’s forces were lavishly equipped with guns of various sizes
and purposes from across the Christian and Muslim worlds. Mehmet’s tactics required careful timing and
concentration. He would mass fire on two or three points of an enemy wall simultaneously, hoping to create
multiple breaches (as well as caving walls into moats to create impromptu bridges.) While the defender had
to guess, Mehmet could then launch his infantry assault at the breach of his choosing. This was done even
while the guns were still firing, and the timing was better than that achieved by many First World War
generals: the last projectile hit the walls just as the Janissaries attained the breach. So as the defenders
raised their heads, they were already assaulted. Mehmet’s record of success speaks for itself; in addition to
his most famous prize, Constantinople, he stormed a dozen major fortified places in an almost incessant
string of campaigns. Nonetheless, he was profligate with the lives of his infantry, and a bit more of his
father’s patience could probably have achieved the same results with fewer corpses.
While their cannon were usually very good, Ottoman siege mortars were poor, and were in fact banned
for a while as being more dangerous to their own gunners than to the enemy. Suleiman the Magnificent
hired the Italian master gunner Pietro Sardi to renovate the arsenal, which did improve things, but the Turks
never quite trusted their mortars.
The Feudal Forces
Sipahis
Every nobleman who held a fief (called a Timar) in the Ottoman Empire owed to his Sultan a certain
amount of military service each year. The Sultan could call these men together to fight as Sipahis: the
heavy shock cavalry of the empire. Unlike the western feudal system, a Sipahi owned his Timar only at the
discretion of the Sultan. It was state property, and although it was very rare for a Sultan to take a Timar
away from a nobleman, neither could the nobleman pass the Timar on to his son, unless the Sultan
approved it. (The system changed in the mid-17th century, to allow for hereditary ownership of some
Timars.)
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Once called, Sipahis formed divisions of 1000 men each, although they frequently brought younger
brothers or sons along, or the Turkish equivalent of a “squire,” and thus their ranks could swell to three
times that number. The largest number of Sipahis ever tallied was nearly 140,000, although it is more likely
that the entire empire could usually call up a maximum of 70,000 for any one campaign.
In the years of great expansion, the Sultan was able to create new Sipahis by rewarding new fiefs,
carved out of the newly-conquered territories, to common soldiers or the younger sons of noblemen. Thus
the Sipahis remained important as long as the conquests continued. As the empire’s borders solidified, this
corps steadily declined in importance because there were fewer rewards for service. A special division of
“Sipahis of the Porte” or Müteferrika were on call at the capital at all times. These were the younger sons
of rural nobiliy, who had received plush city estates and government jobs, instead of the traditional big
farm out in the provinces. Their proximity implied a certain élite, as if they were a Guard Cavalry escort,
but their primary asset was as a political counterweight to the Janissaries, who grew steadily less loyal as
the decades wore on.
Akinjis
In the earliest days of the House of Osman, the dynasty relied upon Turkic light horse called Akinjis
(“raiders”) who fought without pay. Much like their Kazakh (Cossack) cousins who ultimately fought for
the Russians, the Akinjis came to war for the plunder and rewards, and their lack of discipline made them
less useful on the battlefield and more useful raiding behind enemy lines.
As the empire grew and settled, the Ottomans did manage to impose some discipline upon the Akinjis.
They were frequently summoned as a single large corps (up to 70,000 strong, in some cases) and then
released ahead of the main Ottoman army, to wreak havoc upon the enemy and to keep him busy while the
main army approached. Although they were still generally kept off the battlefield, when facing an enemy
with a strong horse contingent, such as the Poles or Lithuanians, the Ankinjis were indeed brought onto the
field en masse. The classic example of this dual role is Suleiman the Magnificent’s first Hungarian
campaign, in which the Akinjis, moving as their own army, penetrated deep into Hungary, wreaking
bridges and pillaging the estates of Hungarian knights, until Damat Ibrahim (the Sultan’s grand vezier and
deputy commander) summoned them back in time for the battle of Mohacs. There, fifty thousand Akinjis
were held in reserve on the right, released by Ibrahim at the climax of the fighting, and then rode roughshod
over the broken enemy in their flight from the battlefield.
The Akinjis were officially disbanded in 1595 after a series of defeats in Wallachia. That left the army
with only small numbers of light cavalry, augmented by Tatar vassals.
Derbents and Martolos
As the empire grew, so did its need for permanent fortifications and garrisons. In some crucial spots (Cairo,
Diyarbekir, Baghdad) these were small Janissary garrisons, augmented with local troops. But most of the
fortified places throughout the empire were defended by local militia called “Derbents” in Muslim regions
of the empire, and “Martolos” in the Christian regions.
It was the duty of the Sipahis to ensure that their Timars had a functioning system to distribute the
militia duty evenly among the able-bodied males. This generally meant that a Derbent served anywhere
from a week to a month each year, then returned to civilian life, replaced by the next “shift.” These men
were not expected to move out on campaign, but might have duties to prepare their region for the approach
of the imperial army; requisitioning supplies and extra horses. And, of course, it was their task to ensure
that the fortresses were kept well-maintained and defended.
Conscripts and Vassals
Azaps
As the old Yayas were phased out, the empire needed a replacement, and so a new system, not dependent
upon feudal call-ups, evolved. Azaps (the word simply means “infantry”) were the conscripted regular
infantry of the Ottoman empire, and formed the backbone of most large armies. By the late 1400s they
were mostly bow-armed,
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Because they were paid, trained, and equipped by the government, and usually raised in very large
numbers, the Azaps were expensive. As a result, they were usually drafted in time of war, although a
smaller peacetime force existed in most of the regions of the empire. The Azaps were also looked upon
with mistrust by the Sipahis, who viewed with alarm any system whereby their local peasants might be
well-armed and organized. This concern resulted in an imperial policy that limited the Azaps only to bows,
reserving muskets for the Janissaries. By the late 15th century, however, local Azap commanders simply
began to ignore the restriction, and the Sultan stopped enforcing it. Indeed, after the introduction of the new
Tüfek musket in the late 16th century, the Azaps embraced the new weapon while the Janissaries stubbornly
stuck with their old arquebuses. As a result, the Azaps were actually better-armed than their elite peers for
at least a generation.
Later, in the 17th century, those Tüfek-armed Azaps spawned a new troop-type: mounted infantry
musketeers, very similar to European dragoons. These Tüfekjis wore a distinctive red uniform with red
headgear, and in some ways compensated for the army’s decline in the older branches, such as the
Janissaries and Sipahis.
Yörüks and Voynuks
As we have already observed, a majority of Ottoman subjects were actually Christians, until Selim the
Grim’s conquest of the Middle East. As a feudal state, the early Ottomans thus made several arrangements
with their Christian lords, in return for military service. Although some Christian nobility did serve as
Sipahis, in the early empire it was more likely that the nobles of a Christian region would draft an entire
local force of Yörüks: a vassal contingent of Christian soldiers, sometimes mounted, sometimes on foot.
Certain regions of the empire performed this more reliably than others. Bulgaria, in particular, proved
enthusiastic to serve the Ottomans although they stubbornly refused to convert to Islam. Thus Bulgarian
vassals were numerous enough to merit their own name: Voynuks.
The Christian vassal contingents were gradually phased out, as the empire converted to a more regular
and national army. By Suleiman’s last campaign, for instance, only 1,300 Yörüks and 1,100 Voynuks
served in an army of nearly 100,000.
Other Special Units
Delis
The word “Deli” (“madman” or “fanatic”) had been in Ottoman military usage since the first days of the
dynasty, and originally described those few actual Muslim infantrymen who served as infantry in the
Sultan’s otherwise-Christian realm. As the empire expanded and the army became more sophisticated, the
term changed to mean units of Muslim infantry who were all members of a particular religious order.
Although the Sultan was a Sunni Muslim who kept a religious ‘ulema (“council”) on hand for
theological advice, the Ottoman realms were notoriously full of wild sects and various odd cults. In most
cases, these were heretical spin-offs of Sufi Islam, but in any event the early Sultans realized that it was
much more efficient to enlist such men than to waste effort in a probably-futile attempt to stamp out their
beliefs or make them martyrs.
The Delis provided generally good service in the 15th century. They were often insanely, suicidally
brave. Mehmed II was cynically ruthless about squandering their lives. He regarded them as expendable
cannon-fodder, to tie down Byzantine gunners while his precious Janissaries could approach for the real
assault. Selim I never trusted them, having seen his father’s regime threatened by competing Muslim rulers
who exploited the religious differences within the Ottoman empire. Thus the Delis disappeared in the 16th
century, although the men of these sects and cults simply filtered into the mainstream of the Ottoman
military and society.