Devşirme

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"Blood tax" (from Topkape Saraj); gravure that depicts young boys forcibly taken from their families to grow up in captivity and later become the elite of the Ottoman army.
"Blood tax" (from Topkape Saraj); gravure that depicts young boys forcibly taken from their families to grow up in captivity and later become the elite of the Ottoman army.

Devshirme (derived from Ottoman Turkish: devşirme, "collection, gathering"; called "collection of boys" or "blood tax" in Balkan countries in their native languages) was the systematic abduction of young boys from conquered Christian lands by the Ottoman sultans as a form of regular taxation in order to build a loyal slave army (formerly largely composed of war captives) and the class of (military) administrators called the "Janissaries", or other servants such as tellak in hamams. . Boys delivered to the Ottomans in this way were called ghilmán or acemi oglanlar ("novice boys").

[edit] History

The devshirme was similar to a system used by earlier Islamic dynasties, such as the Abbasids, who used slaves to build armies, especially guard troops, intended to be loyal to the ruler and thus to provide a steady pool of manpower that was outside local politics, but which in many cases ended up supporting or staging coups.

The descendants of these slaves would form the Mamluk dynasties. Despite the intentions of the Abbasid rulers, the Mamluks would eventually grow in power, reducing the Caliph to a virtual puppet.

The devshirme was an outgrowth of this system, but it also proved to be more efficient and effective in achieving its goals. Under the Ottomans, the system was first instituted by Murad I who needed a large pool of manpower from which the Sultan could build armies to fight in the seemingly endless wars on many fronts and to put down insurrections.

Under the Ottomans, newly conquered lands were "taxed" of their youth, with each province ordered to present a certain number of peasant sons aged 7 to 10 to the Sultan. Initially, these boys came from Christian families. The boys would not be forced to convert to Islam[citation needed] (however, since the vast majority of them were very young and permanently cut off from their original families, they did in the end convert), but their children would be Muslims, and thus their children would not be allowed to enter the devshirme. This was intended to keep the system from generating a hereditary class, such as the Mamluks.

Boys were collected every year from Christian lands, first mainly in the Balkans (mainly Greeks, Serbs, Armenians, Bulgarians, and Albanians); in the 17th century more came from Ukraine and southern Russia. They were initially billetted with Turkish farming families to learn the language and toughen up physically before being transferred to the capital or another specialised garrison for training.

Training of these acemi ocağı involved physical preparation in the arts of war, as well as the study of culture, such as calligraphy, theology, literature, law and languages. Despite the rigors of training, while students, the recruits were not allowed to leave. Of the Janissary corps' 196 orta (companies), no less than 14 in Rumelia (Europe) and 17 in Anatolia (Asia) were specifically devoted to their training; after the abolition of devshirme, only four such cadet companies remained.

Upon reaching adulthood, the brightest were set aside for a career within the palace itself where the very ablest could aspire to attaining the very highest office of state, that of Grand Vizier, the Sultan's immensely powerful chief minister and military deputy. The rest were assigned to the various units of the Janissaries and other elite palace troops.

The devshirme declined in the 16th and 17th Century due to a number of factors, including the inclusion of free Muslims in the system. Since 1568 the 'boy harvest' was only occasionally made and in 1648 it was officially abolished; attempts to reintroduce it failed due to the resistance of the new Turkish members of the Janissary corps in 1703, who wanted the coveted posts exclusively for their own families.

The families of those taken in Christian countries often reviled it as forced servitude and loss of ancestral identity, fearing that their children were never to be seen again and that some boys were fated to become sexual servants to Turkish high officials (see Pederasty in the Middle East and Central Asia), and did their best to hide their eligible sons.[citation needed] This practice was called "the blood tax" in many Balkan languages, and was considered to be one of the worst manifestations of the oppression affecting Christian peoples in the empire. Sometimes cities, e.g., Pera and Yannina, that surrendered voluntarily to the Ottomans were granted immunity from the devshirme.[citation needed] The Bosnians Muslims, on the other hand, negotiated inclusion into the devshirme.

There are accounts, however, of Muslim families attempting to smuggle their offspring into the levy, which was strictly forbidden. Although the devshirme made boys into the Sultans' state slaves, some considered it an honor as it conversely led to a highly privileged position in Ottoman society, but inevitably led to their conversion to Islam (a price many adult Christians paid voluntarily for social promotion). The system also had specific limits on who and how many could be taken. The seizure of sons whose absence would cause hardship and difficulties was not permitted.

Another aspect is that recruiting Christians for the military and administration counterbalanced the grip of the old Turkish nobility, which was largely channelled into education, law, Muslim religion and the provincial cavalry, in the spirit of division of tasks and rights of the millet system which benefitted the cohesion of the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural empire.

[edit] See also

[edit] Sources, references and external links

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