Were people vying to become slaves in the Ottoman Empire?

Under a loophole of Muslim law, a sultan could take one-fifth of the spoils of war, including slaves. Learn how the sultan began a slave army -- and why would someone would want to be a soldier-slave -- in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Candice Keener, joined by staff writer Jane McGrath. Hey, Hey, Jane,
I really hope that you have a lot of time

(00:21):
on your hands because I thought I would cover the
entire history of the Ottoman Empire today. Let me get
some coffee. I know, yeah, I'm just kidding. We're not
going to do that. Um, there are a couple of
highlights we need to go over in order to put
into context this crazy, crazy idea that Jane has written about,
and that is why were people actually vying to become
slaves and the Ottoman Empire. When I first heard the assignment,

(00:45):
I had no idea, but it actually ended up being
really fascinating development that happened in the Ottoman Empire, and
and it actually came from one of our podcast listeners
that's right here, right to us, and he sort of
challenged us to research this and answer the question why
why would anyone wants to be a slave? And it's
just so ludicrous And he was really helpful as well
with the research many things. So it all dates back

(01:08):
to the fourteenth century and at this time, the Ottomans
had this. They went by this Muslim law. I'm not
sure the pronunciation, so please excuse me, ghana mat. And
this law stated that the Saltan could basically take one
fifth of the booty his soldiers collected in battle. And
usually this has to do with like material goods, you know, uh,

(01:30):
that the soldiers collected. But one ruler, orhan, actually adapted
this law to apply to people in addition to things,
and so he started taking one out of five captured
people that his soldiers took over, and he took them
in sort of his slaves, but not just normal slaves.
He made it sort of his personal army, and they

(01:53):
became a very elite corp known as janissaries. That's right.
So it seems like a remarkable idea, having slave soldiers
essentially manufactured from the spoils of war. And this is
not a concept that stuck just under this One sultan,
his son actually followed the same principle, and you're at

(02:15):
the first actually wanted to increase the number of his troops,
so he started going into conquered Christian territories and taking
young boys between the ages of eight and eighteen and
picking the very very best ones to make this incredibly
prestigious corps of soldiers that would serve the Sultan exclusively.

(02:36):
And one important distinction that Murad had to deal with
was the fact that he wasn't as as acquiring as
many lands as his dad did, though according strictly due
to a Muslim law, at least from what I read,
it was okay for Orhand to do what he was doing,
But what his son was doing was a little bit
more shady because he was going into lands that were

(02:56):
previously conquered, not freshly conquered, and so these were maybe
descendants of conquered people, and so they tried to um
rationalize what they were doing by saying it was okay
but um But even Muslims at this time argued against
this practice of taking these boys. And at this point,
I think it might be helpful to know a little
bit about the Ottoman Empire and its principles of expansion

(03:20):
and how it maintained pockets of Christian people throughout what
was ostensiblyah a Muslim empire. The Ottoman Empire actually lasted
a remarkably long time, from thirteen o one to nineto.
It didn't really crumble into pieces until after World War
One in the Balkan Wars. And what's so interesting about

(03:42):
the Ottoman Empires that it sort of picked up where
the Byzantine Empire left off. And when they conquered the
Christians from the Byzantine Empire, they actually maintained the same
capital city, only they changed the name, so instead of Constantinople,
Istambule became the seat of the Ottoman Empire. So if
you ever heard that song about the Istanbul and then Constantinople,

(04:04):
you'll know that this is why, because different people would
take over and rename it. And according to some history books,
when the Sultan rode into Constantinople to take it over,
he came in on a on a white horse, sort
of this crowning moment of the Constantinople going by the
wayside and Istanbul becoming established. And it was run by

(04:26):
Muslim principles, religious principles and military principles, and they were
very rigid, but one of the codes actually dictated that
they were to respect other religions. And it really behooved
the Sultan to allow the Christians and the Empire to
continue practicing their religion because first of all, there were
so many of them that if he tried to get

(04:46):
them to convert, it would resort to an awful uprising,
and rather than oppress the people, he just decided to
sort of live along with them. Yeah, but this caused
problems because he saw the one if he were to
um when he wanted to boot to his janissary uh Core,
he he would have taken Muslim kids. But the problem
with that is that he reasoned that if they grew up,

(05:08):
they would remain faithful to their family, and their family
their relatives would just assume that they wouldn't have to
pay taxes because they had these friends and high places.
So the as Sultan reasoned that if he took Christian
boys instead and converted them to Islam, that they would
grow to hate to their Christian families and the Christian
religion in general, so that they would not have any

(05:30):
loyalty to their old families their old life, and they
would be loyal to the Sultan alone. And the practice
of collecting these Christian boys was called the dev Strum system,
and it essentially gave the sultan the right to go
in and to inspect all the Christian boys from a
certain village and to essentially pick them over and deem

(05:51):
which ones were well behaved enough and untrained in any
sort of combat, and handsome enough and desirable enough for
him to to essentially have living in his palace under
him one day. Yeah, and these were really fascinating um
things that would go on. The the officials would be
sent into these conquered territories right now we'd know them
as as Greece, Austria, Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary, all all these places,

(06:16):
and the officials would go in and to these villages
there and they would tell their father the fathers to
bring out their sons of the right age and bring
out the baptism certificates to make sure they fit some
of this criteria. For instance, they couldn't be orphaned, uh,
they couldn't be only sons, etcetera. And is estimated that
about one in forty families in a village had to

(06:37):
sacrifice a boy to the Janissary Corps. And once the
boy was selected, they'd be taken to Istanbul and for
three to seven years they would undergo rigors training. First
they would learn Turkish and then they'd be schooled in
combat and depending on the type of talent they showed
and their potential, they'd be put on different paths. So

(06:58):
some went direct to labor in the fields or to
serve as assistants two different government officials. And then there
were some who were deemed intelligent enough to be scold
and academic subjects such as math, law, theology, and horsemanship
and military strategy. And these were going to be the
really really great elite soldiers. Yeah, so you really aspired

(07:20):
if you were Jannis, are you really aspired to be
a part of the standing army at the Sultan's palace?
And that's where these people on the highest these soldiers
on the highest track would end up going. And uh,
I think the most prominent one would actually be a
personal servant of the Sultan. And um, they basically had
such great prospects ahead of them. They once they proved themselves,

(07:41):
they could go on to have administrative posts and have
so much power involved. Even though they were always technically
slaves and personal slaves of the Sultan, they were able
to attain amazing amounts of power. And to sort of
give you a visual image, they were pretty elaborate uniforms too.
They had fancy how huts and really ornately embroidered cloaks,

(08:02):
and I think that the sultan gave each boy a
particular cloak or there was some unique aspect to each
of their attire. And um, they were celibates. They couldn't marry,
at least until the sixteenth century. The rules was a
little bit. It was a big issue, and they were
upheld to very very rigorous standards. They had to follow

(08:23):
all the rules and if they broke any of them,
there was well, you know, there was you know what
to pay. Yeah, I mean yeah, the cases like they
would be whipped with a thin cane on the soles
of their feet. That was one punishment for disobeying rules
and training. So historians aspect that over the course of
history and over the course of the different sultan's, nearly
five million Christian boys were taken from their homes to

(08:44):
become jannisaries and founding figure. It really is, and it's
very problematic for us today with our contemporary mindsets looking
at this idea of a foreign forest coming in and kidnapping, well,
kidnapping essentially, I guess that's a debatable term to years,
but taking children from their homes and repurposing them into slavery,

(09:08):
but the term slavery is yours sort of loosely. In
the Ottoman Empire, and the idea of a slave was
comparable to that of a servant, and it was considered
more prestigious than that of a subject. So if you
were the sultan slave or the sultan servant, you had
a higher regard in society than on his subject. And

(09:29):
this had to do with the with the idea that
they had so many prospects ahead of them. As a
janissary um. Like I mentioned, they got a lot of power.
One there was at least one situation where uh, someone
rose from the ranks. He was originally taken into through
the Devsherm system as a boy and kidnapped, and he
rose to the ranks to the Grand Vizier, which basically

(09:49):
means the chief ministry. I think it is one of
the highest positions you get aside from all sultan. So
it's just as sound need to think that this technical
slave was like second in command in this empire. And
to put it in another type of perspective, the Ottoman
Empire was able to grow and flourish because it kept
expanding its lands. It was sort of like a health

(10:11):
of cards empire, it's, if you can say, a business model.
The business model of the Empire was entirely based on
the fact that I had to keep growing in order
to thrive, and once it stopped growing, empire collapsed. It
sounds like I know exactly what she's thinking, um. And
the reason that I had to keep growing was because
when it went into a territory, it would use up

(10:34):
all of the resources there and all of the people
virtually drained everything to the ground. And so if you
look at the territories that have been conquered and filled
with Christian people, if the Ottomans were coming in and
depleting their resources and working the people to their bones,
they had children, what could they really provide them with?
You know, it accepts life and stasis life in these

(10:57):
poor conditions. So for many Christian family ways, the idea
of giving up their child to the sultan for a
life and the palace and perhaps a very high administrative
position was a much better trade off than living in poverty. Yeah.
So while at first you have the situation where some
Christian parents are trying to um to buy their children

(11:18):
out of the system and trying to switch out. I
read about a situation where Christian parents would try to
switch out their child for for someone else's early on
when the system was first starting, and then much later
when they saw the prospects that these kids would have,
they would actually try to bribe the officials into taking
their child into the system. Even I guess these must
not have been extremely devout Christians, because even though they

(11:40):
had to be converted to Islam uh, these parents were
willing to get their kids out of the penurin which
they lived. And according to some historical accounts, there were
some Muslim families that were trying to get the Sultan
to take their kids. Yeah, and that's understandable. I mean
if you're a Muslim and you see all these Christian
kids getting all these these opportunit duties, and you're like,

(12:00):
why can't I get that from my child? And that
was forbidden. No Muslim children had that opportunity. But a
question that I had for Jane when she originally wrote
this article about the Janis Aaries was what did the
Janis Saries themselves think of their lives? I mean, their
their parents were vying for them to become slaves, and
many instances and many people wanted into this system. But

(12:23):
once they were there, what did they think of their life? Well,
I don't know. I mean that's a good question, but
you'd think because of all their prestige and you know
how they showed themselves off with their nice clothes and everything,
it seemed like you would have a pretty sweet life
and you would appreciate it. That's that's the impression that
I got from Janis series. And then along and eighteen

(12:44):
six came the Auspicious Incident. Yeah, this was a major
problem that, um, the power sort of went to their
head a lot. All throughout their history, Janis series would
revolt and they try to get more power than they had,
often like to get reform or to just get more
of a say into who became sultan. Yeah, in the
nineteenthentury twenty six, like you said, they revolted again, and
this time it was disaster. Yeah. The sultan was none

(13:06):
too happy. He essentially dissolved the janissary core and to
call the rebels, he fired cannons at them and most
of them actually died. It's pretty tragic. Yeah, And yeah,
those who didn't die were flinging from the cornage. So
it was I'm not sure what it's called the auspicious incident,
but but yeah, it's it's pretty nasty. Maybe the Jannis

(13:28):
Serius had a really good sense of irony. I'm not sure,
but that in itself, if if there's not a lot
of information about how the Danni Serius felt really about
being Janis Serius, I think that the Auspicious incident would
indicate that certainly they were pretty fed up with their conditions.
And it's important to note too that um the sultan,

(13:49):
that the office of sultan or the idea of sultan
had really evolved throughout the Ottoman Empire. And at first
there was um strict adherent to codes, and the sultan
was not a figure or to be messed with who
was very well regarded in public society. What is the
empire stretched on? The Sultan became less concerned about what
people thought about him, so he became a little bit

(14:10):
less popular. I think that the rules were relaxed and
there was some unrest brewing, and um there were other
cultures around the world who were looking at Turkey, uh
and Istanbul and they started calling Turkey the sick man
of Europe. And this is when the term Oriental, which
we consider now a disparaging term, and even back then

(14:32):
it was a disparaging term too. But this is when
it came into um conversation, I guess about what was
going on in the Ottoman Empire, and they were seen
as revelers, people who engaged in far too much to bashery.
It was associated with the Harem and this really sort
of strained and lazy lifestyle and the Janna series. It

(14:53):
was almost like an institution of decadence. Had once been
really great soldiers in high regard under the sultan, and
who wouldn't want to be in service to the sultan.
But as the Sultan became less popular and they were
serving this man who was sort of despised by other
countries and other cultures, I guess there wasn't that sense
of pride and honor anymore. Yeah, and it's such a
fascinating situation just thinking about how these they have this

(15:16):
you'd think very contrary terms. It seems like an oxymorn
to be, you know, a slave soldier in this elite,
very elite, powerful core. And I should mention um. When
I first got this assignment, it was pretty funny because
a couple of weeks beforehand, our colleague Molly Edmonds. You
might know from the Stuff Your Mom Never Told You podcast.

(15:37):
She actually was getting coming up with nicknames for everyone
around the office out of the dictionary, and she went
ran across the Janissaries and that became my nickname. And
then a couple weeks later I had to write about them,
so I had to mention that because she still called Eugenisara.
Yeah she does. I'll talk about that later. Meanwhile, if
you like the podcast, you will love our new stuff

(15:58):
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(16:20):
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