Jannissary

I decided to dabble in some research on the Janissaries because I knew nothing about the subject. As it turns out they were the first Ottoman standing army. According to Wikipedia (the source of all knowledge), the Ottomans were the only ones in Europe at the time to have a standing army. This is the part that grabbed my interest. I could not help but wonder if having a standing army added to the stereotype of a violent blood thirsty culture. Thus images of armed men who did not disband in times of peace gave a visual impression of a militarily and physically aggressive society.

Returning to the Jannissaries, they appear to originally have been prisoners of war or slaves. As time went on a devsirme system of recruitment was put in place. In this system, non-Muslim boys were taken from their families, possibly by force, and made to serve as a Jannissary. Sometimes this service of the son could be consider the feudal dues the family owed to the Sultan. The information on the page about the devsirme system says it was a way to humiliate non-Muslim families. I am not convinced of this statement, although this research is preliminary at best, it seems to me this is a way of passing on culture or enacting hegemony; however, considering the Janissaries were well paid, I am not sure humiliation is the correct description of the whole process. Jannissaries eventually became a lucrative position that sons of Muslim Turkish families were volunteered and the devsirme system was ended.

The Jannissaries became a strong political force. Those who were done serving would move onto positions in academia or the government. Eventually, they gained so much power they could control the Sultan. The famous Auspicious Incident, where the barracks housing the Jannissaries were fired upon killing about 4,000, saw the end of the Jannissaries. Those who were not killed in the Barracks were caught and executed later. It was been suggested that Mahmud II, the Sultan, was responsible for inciting this attack on the Jannissary.




This has been far from a comprehensive overview of this the Jannissary. What is interesting to me is the possibility of a standing army adding to the stereotype of a violent culture and the concept devsirme. It seems as though devsirme holds the possibility of being described as way to militarily homogenizing those people who are not a part of the dominant culture. This again would add to the idea of a violent culture and spread that idea if a person learns about the culture from inside a army. One could associate the violence with the culture as opposed to the nature of military or warfare in general.