Devşirme
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  Devshirme

Devshirme

Devshirme (W)

Devshirme (Ottoman Turkish: دوشيرمه‎, devşirme, usually translated as “child levy” or “blood tax”) was the Ottoman Empire practice of recruiting soldiers and bureaucrats from among the children of their Balkan Christian subjects. Ottoman soldiers would take Christian boys, ages 8 to 20, away from their parents in Eastern and Southeastern Europe and removing them to Istanbul. The boys were then converted to Islam with the primary objective of selecting and training the ablest children and teenagers for the military or civil service of the empire, notably into the Janissaries.

Devshirme started in the mid 1300s under Murad I as a means to counteract the growing power of the Turkish nobility. According to a number of scholars, the practice violated Islamic law. David Nicolle writes that the boys were “effectively enslaved” under the devshirme system, which was a violation of the dhimmi protections guaranteed under Islamic law. This is disputed by Halil İnalcık, who argues that the devshirme were not slaves.

From the mid-fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries, virtually all of the grand viziers, the sultan’s designated deputies, were converted Christians taken in the devshirme levy and trained in the palace system. By 1700, the practice was dying out, but perhaps 200,000 babies and young people had been “recruited” in this way. An attempt to re-institute it in 1703 was resisted by its Ottoman members, who coveted the military and civilian posts. Finally, in the early days of Ahmet III’s reign, the practice of devshirme was abolished.


History

The Devshirme came up out of the kul system of slavery that developed in the early centuries of the Ottoman Empire and which reached this final development during the reign of Sultan Bayazit I. The origin of the kuls was mostly prisoners from war, hostages or slaves that were purchased by the state. An early Greek source mentioning devshirme (paidomazoma in Greek) is a 1395 speech of the Archbishop Isidore of Thessalonica. The speech meant to comfort the parents of young boys abducted after orders of sultan Bayezid I.

The Ottoman Empire, beginning with Murad I, felt a need to “counteract the power of (Turkic) nobles by developing Christian vassal soldiers and converted kapıkulları as his personal troops, independent of the regular army.” The elite forces, which served the Ottoman Sultan directly, were divided into two main groups: cavalry and infantry. The cavalry was commonly known as the Kapıkulu Süvari (The Cavalry of the Servants of the Porte) and the infantry were the popular Yeni Çeri (transliterated in English as Janissary), meaning "the New Corps".

At first, the soldiers serving in these corps were selected from the slaves captured during war. However, the system commonly known as devshirme was soon adopted. In this system children of the rural Christian populations of the Balkans were conscripted before adolescence and were brought up as Muslims. Upon reaching adolescence, these children were enrolled in one of the four imperial institutions: the Palace, the Scribes, the Religious and the Military. Those enrolled in the Military would become either part of the Janissary corps, or part of any other corps. The brightest were sent to the Palace institution (Enderun), and were destined for a career within the palace itself where the most able could aspire to attain the very highest office of state, that of Grand Vizier, the Sultan's immensely powerful chief minister and military deputy.


The life of the devshirme


Illustration of the registration of Christian boys for the devşirme ("tribute in blood"). Ottoman miniature painting, 1558. Celebi, Arif (1588). Janissary Recruitment in the Balkans. Süleymanname, Topkapi Sarai Museum, Ms Hazine 1517.


The ideal age of a recruit was between 8 and 10 years of age,
recruitment of boys younger than 8 was forbidden. Those were called şirhor (nursling) and beççe (child). The devshirme system was at times locally resented and was resisted, even to the point of disfiguring their sons. On the other hand, as the devshirme were recruited to rise up to the grand vizier status (the second most powerful man in the empire), Christian parents in Bosnia were known to bribe scouts to take their children. "The children were taken from their families and transported to Istanbul. Upon their arrival, they were converted to Islam, examined, and trained to serve the empire. This system produced infantry corps soldiers as well as civilian administrators and high-ranked military officials."

Although the influence of Turkic nobility continued in the Ottoman court until Mehmet II (see Çandarlı Halil), the Ottoman ruling class slowly came to be ruled exclusively by the devshirme, creating a separate social class. This class of rulers was chosen from the brightest of devshirme and hand-picked to serve in the Palace institution, known as the Enderun. They had to accompany the Sultan on campaigns, but exceptional service would be rewarded by assignments outside the palace. Those chosen for the Scribe institution, known as Kalemiye were also granted prestigious positions. The Religious institution, İlmiye, was where all orthodox Muslim clergy of the Ottoman Empire were educated and sent to provinces or served in the capital.

Tavernier noted in 1678 that the Janissaries looked more like a religious order than a military corps. The members of the organization were not banned from marriage, as Tavernier further noted, but it was very uncommon for them. He goes on to write that their numbers had increased to a hundred thousand, but this was because of a degeneration of regulations and many of these were in fact “fake” Janissaries, posing as such for tax exemptions and other social privileges. He notes that the actual number of janissaries was in fact much lower (Shaw writes that their number was 30,000 under Suleiman the Magnificent. By the 1650s the number of janissaries had increased to 50,000, although by this time the devşirme had largely been abandoned as a method of recruitment. Recruits were sometimes gained through voluntary accessions, as some parents were often eager to have their children enroll in the Janissary service that ensured them a successful career and comfort. The Balkan peasantry tried to evade the tribute collectors, with many attempting to substitute their children in Bosnia, but there are cases Albanian families offering their children voluntarily as it offered them prospects not available to them in any other manner. Conversion to Islam was used in Bosnia and Herzegovina to escape the system. Some Muslim families tried to have the recruiters take their sons so they could achieve professional advancement.

Albertus Bobovius wrote in 1686 that diseases were common among the devshirme and strict discipline was enforced.

The BBC notes the following regarding the devshirme system: "Although members of the devshirme class were technically slaves, they were of great importance to the Sultan because they owed him their absolute loyalty and became vital to his power. This status enabled some of the 'slaves' to become both powerful and wealthy." Yet this system was clearly illegal according to Islamic law, sharia. Turkish historian Halil İnalcık writes that the devshirme were not actually considered to be slaves. Professor James L. Gelvin explains that Ottoman jurists were able to get around this injunction with an extraordinarily creative legal manoeuvre, arguing that although Islamic tradition forbade the enslavement of Christians, Balkan Christians were different because they had converted to Christianity after the advent of Islam.

According to Cleveland, the devshirme system offered "limitless opportunities to the young men who became a part of it." Basilike Papoulia wrote that "...the devsirme was the 'forcible removal', in the form of a tribute, of children of the Christian subjects from their ethnic, religious and cultural environment and their transportation into the Turkish-Islamic environment with the aim of employing them in the service of the Palace, the army, and the state, whereby they were on the one hand to serve the Sultan as slaves and freedmen and on the other to form the ruling class of the State." Accordingly, Papoulia agrees with Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb and Harold Bowen, authors of Islamic Society and the West, that the devshirme was a penalization imposed on the Balkan peoples since their ancestors resisted the Ottoman invasion. {!} Vladimir Minorsky states, "The most striking manifestation of this fact is the unprecedented system of devshirme, i.e. the periodic conscription of 'tribute boys', by which the children of Christians were wrung from their families, churches, and communities to be molded into Ottoman praetorians owing their allegiance to the Sultan and the official faith of Islam." This system as explained by Çandarlı Kara Halil Hayreddin Pasha, founder of the Janissaries, "The conquered are slaves of the conquerors, to whom their goods, their women, and their children belong as lawful possession".


Ethnicity of the devshirme, and exemptions

The devshirme were collected once every four or five years from rural provinces in Eastern Europe, Southeastern Europe and Anatolia, and with a few exceptions, only from non-Muslims. The devshirme levy was not applied to the major cities of the empire, and children of local craftsmen in rural towns were also exempt, as it was considered that conscripting them would harm the economy.

According to Bernard Lewis, the Janissaries were mainly recruited from the “Slavic and Albanian populations of the Balkans.” According to the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Encyclopaedia of Islam, in the early days of the empire all Christians were enrolled indiscriminately. Later, those from Albania, Greece, Bosnia, and Bulgaria were preferred. What is certain is that devshirme were primarily recruited from Christians living in the Balkans, particularly Serbs and Bosnians (islamized Serbs and Croats from Bosnia region, Albanians and Greeks. Well known examples of Ottomans who had been recruited as devshirme include Skanderbeg, Sinan Pasha and Sokollu Mehmed Pasha. The early Ottoman emphasis on recruiting Greeks, Albanians, Bulgarians, and south Slavs was a direct consequence of being centred on territories, in northwestern Anatolia and the southern Balkans, where these ethnic groups were prevalent.

Jews were exempt from this service and until recently Armenians were thought to have also been exempt. However, Armenian manuscript colophons from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and foreign travelers of the time indicate that Armenians were not spared from the devshirme. Boys who were orphans or who were their family's only son were exempt.


Devshirme in the Ottoman Palace School

The primary objective of the Palace School was to train the ablest children for leadership positions, either as military leaders or as high administrators to serve the Devlet. Although there are many resemblances between Enderûn and other palace schools of the previous civilizations, such as those of the Abbasids, and Seljuks or the contemporary European palace schools, Enderûn was unique with respect to the background of the student body and its meritocratic system. In the strict draft phase, students were taken forcefully from the Christian population of the Empire and were converted to Islam; Jews and Gypsies were exempted from Devshirme, and so were all Muslims.

Those entrusted to find these children were scouts, who were specially trained agents, throughout the Empire's European lands. Scouts were recruiting youngsters according to their talent and ability with school subjects, in addition to their personality, character, and physical perfection. The Enderûn candidates were not supposed to be orphans, or the only child in their family (to ensure the candidates had strong family values); they must not have already learned to speak Turkish or a craft/trade. The ideal age of a recruit was between 10 and 20 years of age. Mehmed Refik Beg mentioned that youth with a bodily defect, no matter how slight, was never admitted into palace service, since Turks believed that a strong soul and a good mind could be found only in a perfect body.

The selected children were dressed in red, so that they could not easily escape on their way to Constantinople. The cost of the devshirme service and their clothes were paid by their villages or communities. The boys were gathered into cohorts of a hundred or more to walk to Constantinople where they were circumcised and divided between the palace schools and the military training. Anyone not chosen for the palace spent years being toughened by hard labor on Anatolian farms until they were old enough for the military.

The brightest youths who fit into the general guidelines and had a strong primary education were then given to selected Muslim families across Anatolia to complete the enculturation process. They would later attend schools across Anatolia to complete their training for six to seven years in order to qualify as ordinary military officers. They would get the highest salaries amongst the administrators of the empire, and very well respected in public. M. Armağan, defined the system as a pyramid which was designed to select the elite of the elite, the ablest and most physically perfect. Only a very few would reach the Palace Schoo.


Decline

According to historian Cemal Kafadar, one of the main reasons for the decline of the devshirme system was that the size of the Janissary corps had to be expanded in order to compensate for the decline in the importance of the sipahi cavalry forces, which itself was a result of changes in early modern warfare (such as the introduction of firearms and increased importance of infantry). Indeed, the Janissary corps would soon become the empire's largest single military corps. As a result, by the late sixteenth century, the devshirme system was increasingly being abandoned for less rigid recruitment methods that allowed Muslims to enter directly into the Janissary corps.

In 1632 the Janissaries attempted an unsuccessful coup against Murad IV, who then imposed a loyalty oath on them. In 1638 or 1648 the devshirme-based recruiting system of the Janissary corps formally came to an end. In an order sent in multiple copies to authorities throughout the European provinces in 1666 a devshirme recruitment target of between 300 and 320 was set for an area covering the whole of the central and western Balkans. On the accession of sultan Suleiman II in 1687 only 130 Janissary inductees were graduated to the Janissary ranks. The system was finally abolished in the early part of Ahmet III's reign (1703-1730).

After Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 there was a reform movement in Sultan Selim III's regime, to reduce the numbers of the askeri class, who were the first class citizens or military class (also called janissaries). Selim was taken prisoner and murdered by the Janissaries. The successor to the sultan, Mahmud II was patient but remembered the results of the uprising in 1807. In 1826 he created the basis of a new, modern army, the Asakir-i Mansure-i Muhammediye, which caused a revolt among the Janissaries. The authorities kept the Janissaries in their barracks and slaughtered thousands of them. This development entered the Ottoman history annals as the Auspicious Incident.

 







 
  Enderun School

Enderun School

Enderun School (W)


The Neo-classical Enderun library.


The Enderun School (Ottoman Turkish: اندرون مکتب, Enderûn Mektebi) was a palace school and boarding school mostly for the Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire, which primarily recruited students via devşirme, a system of the Islamization of Christian children for serving the Ottoman government in bureaucratic, managerial, and Janissary military positions. Over the centuries, the Enderun School was fairly successful in creating Ottoman statesmen by drawing among the empire's various ethnic groups and giving them a common Muslim education. The school was run by the "Inner Service"(Enderûn) of the Ottoman palace and had both academic and military purposes. The graduates were expected to devote themselves to government service and be free of links to lower social groups.

The Enderun School’s gifted education program has been called the world’s first institutionalized education for the gifted.


History

The growth of Ottoman Empire is attributed and was dependent on the selection and education of statesmen. A vital component of Mehmet II’s goal to revive the Roman Empire was to establish a special school to select the best youngsters within the Empire and to mold them for government. Mehmet II improved the existing palace school founded by his father, Murat II and established the Enderun Academy (Enderun) in Istanbul.


Buildings

The third courtyard of the Topkapı Palace was surrounded by the Imperial Treasury, the Pavilion of the Holy Mantle, and the buildings of the Palace School, which educated the top tier of students from Enderun as well as princes of the House of Osman. There were seven halls or grades within the Palace School, and within each hall there were 12 teachers responsible for the students' mental and academic development. Students wore special uniforms designated by their achievement level, and Miller indicated that additional buildings included the library, mosque, music conservatories, dormitories, and baths.


Curriculum

The Enderun system consisted of three preparatory schools located outside of the palace in addition to the one within the palace walls itself. According to Miller, there were 1,000-2,000 students in three Enderun Colleges, and about 300 students in the top school in the Palace. The curriculum was divided into five main divisions:

  • Islamic sciences; including Arabic, Turkish and Persian language education
  • Positive sciences; mathematics, geography
  • History, law, and administration: the customs of the Palace and government issues
  • Vocational studies, including art and music education
  • Physical training, including weaponry

 

At the end of the Enderun school system, the graduates would be able to speak, read, and write at least three languages, able to understand the latest developments in science, have at least a craft or art, and excel in army command as well as in close combat skills.


Graduation

The graduation ceremony for students leaving the Enderun School was known as çıkma. The graduates themselves were referred as çıkma. The word çıkma literary means "who has exited". The pages were leaving Palace School and palace service to continue their training in the functional service. This "transferral" occurred every two to seven years, or after the accession of new sultan to the throne.

The successful graduates were assigned according to their abilities into two mainstream positions: governmental or science, and those who failed to advance were assigned to military. One of the most distinctive properties of the school was its merit system consisting of carefully graded rewards and corresponding punishments.

 



Enderun

Enderun (W)

Enderûn (Ottoman Turkish: اندرون‎, from Persian andarûn, "inside") was the term used in the Ottoman Empire to designate the “Interior Service” of the Imperial Court, concerned with the private service of the Ottoman Sultans, as opposed to the state-administrative "Exterior Service"(Birûn). Its name derives from the location of the Sultan's apartments in the inner courts of the Topkapi Palace; its head was the Kapi Agha.

The Inner Service was divided into four departments. In descending order of importance, these were the Privy Chamber (Hass Oda), the Treasury (Hazine), the Privy Larder (Kilar-ı Hass), and the Great and Little Chambers (Büyük ve Küçük Odalar). Among the responsibilities of the Inner Service was also the running of the palace school, where selected young Christian boys, gathered through the devşirme system (from the 17th century, however, Muslim boys were also admitted) were trained for the highest state offices. These boys served then as pages in the Inner Service, and were known as içoğlanı ("lads of the interior").

The Inner Service was also notable for its employment of deaf-mutes (dilsiz), at least from the time of Mehmed II, to the end of the empire. They acted as guards and attendants, and due to their particular nature were often entrusted with highly confidential assignments, including executions. Their number varied but they were never numerous; they had their own uniforms, their own heads (başdilsiz), and although many were literate, they also communicated in their own special sign language.

 







 
 
 

 


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