Devshirme
'collecting',[a] usually translated as "child levy"[b] or "blood tax"[c])[3] was the Ottoman practice of forcibly recruiting soldiers and bureaucrats from among the children of their Balkan Christian subjects and raising them in the religion of Islam.
Ottoman officials would take male Christian children, aged 7 to 20, from Eastern, Southern and Southeastern Europe, and relocate them to Istanbul,[16] where they were converted, circumcised, assimilated and trained to serve into the Janissary infantry corps or palace duties.
The Ottoman Empire, beginning with Murad I, felt a need to "counteract the power of (Turkic) nobles by developing Christian vassal soldiers and converted kapıkulu as his personal troops, independent of the regular army.
However, after there were problems between sultan Mehmed II and the Turkish Çandarlı Halil Pasha the Younger, who became the first grand vizier to be executed, there was a rise of slave administrators devshirme.
[11][12][13] An early Greek source mentioning devshirme (paidomazoma)[b] is a speech by Archbishop Isidore Glabas, made on 28 February 1395, titled: "On the abduction of children according to sultan's order and on the Future Judgment".
[36] A reference to devshirme is made in a poem composed c. 1550 in Greek by Ioannes Axayiolis, who appeals to Emperor Charles V of Germany to liberate the Christians from the Turks.
The largest loss of children coincided with the peak of Ottoman expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries under the rule of Selim I and Suleiman the Magnificent.
[42] Many sources (including Paolo Giovio) mention different ways to avoid the devshirme such as: marrying the boys at the age of 12, mutilating them or have both father and son convert to Islam.
[citation needed] In Albania and Epirus the practice led to a Christian revolt where the inhabitants killed the recruiting officials in the year 1565.
Such was the case of an Athenian boy who returned from hiding to save his father's life but chose to die himself rather than abandon his faith and convert to Islam.
[38] A firman in 1601 gave strict orders to Ottoman officials to kill any parent that resisted:[23] To enforce the command of the known and holy fetva [fatwa] of Seyhul [Shaikh]-Islam.
In accordance with this whenever some one of the infidel parents or some other should oppose the giving up of his son for the Janissaries, he is immediately hanged from his door-sill, his blood being deemed unworthy.Sources show that it was not rare for the older youth to attempt to preserve their faith and some recollection of their homeland and their families.
For instance, Stephan Gerlach writes:[45] They gather together and one tells another of his native land and of what he heard in church or learned in school there, and they agree among themselves that Muhammad is no prophet and that the Turkish religion is false.
If there is one among them who has some little book or can teach them in some other manner something of God's world, they hear him as diligently as if he were their preacher.Greek scholar Janus Lascaris visited Constantinople in 1491 and met many janissaries who not only remembered their former religion and their native land but also favored their former coreligionists.
The renegade Hersek, the sultan's relative by marriage, told him that he regretted having left the religion of his fathers and that he prayed at night before the cross which he kept carefully concealed.
“We always thought about killing the Turks and running away by ourselves among the mountains,” he writes, “but our youth did not permit us to do that.” Once when he and a group of other boys broke free and escaped, “the whole region pursued us, and having caught and bound us, they beat us and tortured us and dragged us behind horses.”[51] It is said that: "Even those personally chosen by the Sultan found nothing admirable about their lot."
After Ottoman Sultan Murad II took eight Christian youths into his service, they made a pact to assassinate him by night, saying “If we kill this Turkish dog, then all of Christendom will be freed [from Ottoman tyranny]; but if we are caught, then we will become martyrs before God with the others.” When their plot was exposed, and Murad inquired what caused them to “dare attempt this,” they responded, “None other than our great sorrow for our fathers and dear friends.” He had the children slowly tortured over the course of a year before beheading them.
A petition of the Albanians of Himarë in the year 1581, addressed to the Pope reads: "Holiest father, if you could convince him and save us and the children of Greece, that are taken every day and are turned into Turks, if you could only do this, God may bless you.
You can see, then, that moral degradation and humiliation are part of the training system,” writes 16th century Italian diplomat Giovan Francesco Morosini (cardinal).
He went on to write that their numbers had increased to a hundred thousand but only due to a degeneration of regulations, with many of them in fact being "fake" janissaries, posing as such for tax exemptions and other social privileges.
"[72] Basilike Papoulia wrote that "the devishirme 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.
"[73] 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 had resisted the Ottoman invasion.
[74] 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.
"[75] 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".
[24][9][25][77][78][79] David Nicolle writes that since the boys were "effectively enslaved" under the devshirme system, this was a violation of the dhimmi protections guaranteed under Islamic law to People of the Book.
)[82] William Gervase Clarence-Smith points out that the reasoning is not accepted in the Hanafi school of law, which the Ottoman Empire claimed to have practiced.
[22] 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.
[103] 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.
[109] As a result, by the late 16th century, the devshirme system had become increasingly abandoned for less rigid recruitment methods, which allowed Muslims to enter directly into the janissary corps.
[111] 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.
