II
In fifteen months the Osmanlis had become masters of the principal strategic points in Thrace. This great campaign, undertaken and carried through under the spur of necessity, was an auspicious beginning for the reign of Murad and for the supremacy of the Osmanlis in the Balkan peninsula. Europe was suffering from another visitation of the Black Death.[257] The Balkan nations were completely demoralized. So unpopular was John Palaeologos in his own capital that Murad contemplated entering into a conspiracy with some Byzantine traitors to have John assassinated and complete the conquest of the empire.[258] If he did enter fully into this plot, it was as fortunate for him that the undertaking failed as it was for the Bulgarians in 1912 that their columns did not pierce the lines of Ottoman defence at Tchataldja. For the disaster that follows a too extended and too rapid subjugation of unassimilated masses is as sudden as it is irreparable. Durable empire-building is governed by a law of homogeneity.
The Osmanlis were still a race of limited numbers, and at the beginning of their existence as a nation. The process of assimilating the racial elements in conquered territories, begun by Osman when he first left the village of Sugut, could not be arrested; for the existence of the Ottoman state depended upon its continuance. The Greek of Bithynia had lived with Turk and Moslem for two centuries, and had found him a good neighbour. There was neither racial antipathy nor abhorrence of the religion of Mohammed to overcome. Nor had there been the hatred and dread of the conquered on the one side and the arrogance of the conqueror on the other. The Anatolian Greeks had been accustomed for generations to the economic and political conditions that finally caused the majority of them to cast their fortunes with the rising star of the Osmanlis.
The problem of assimilating the Christians, who formed the total population of the Balkan peninsula, was a new one. Here were huge and compact masses of Christians, who had come suddenly under the yoke of the Osmanlis in the first two years of Murad’s reign. They did not know their new masters. They did not know Islam. Benevolent assimilation by voluntary conversion seemed no longer possible. A radical change in the attitude of the Osmanlis towards the question of religion was demanded. Wholesale massacre was impracticable, for the Osmanlis had no reserve of colonists to call upon to replace the indigenous elements. Their position was still too precarious to allow them to draw freely from their adherents in the corner of Asia Minor under their dominion. To win the Macedonians and Thracians by forcible conversion was not feasible. It required the expenditure of all his military resources for Murad to hold what he had conquered. He could not add police duty to his already superhuman burden. Even had he thought of this method of conversion, he would have been deterred by the nightmare of a crusade.
Murad and his counsellors solved the problem of assimilation by sanctioning the reduction of captives to slavery, and by creating the corps of janissaries.
A law was promulgated which gave to the Osmanli soldier absolute right to the possession of prisoners, unless they consented to profess and practise Islam. Prisoners were regarded as booty. They could be kept for domestic or agricultural labour, or sold in the open market, subject to the government’s equity of one in five. The disgrace, even more than the hardships, of slavery was so keenly felt by the Greeks[259] that many for whom there was no other way preferred a change of religion to loss of freedom. The right to make slaves of prisoners was efficacious in providing wives and concubines for the conquerors, who were practically without women of their own. The widows of the fallen, and the daughters of Greeks, Serbians, and Bulgarians, became the instruments of increasing the Ottoman race. In the hundred years from Murad I to Mohammed II, the Osmanlis became in blood the most cosmopolitan and vigorous race the world had known since the days of the Greeks and Romans. Greek, Turkish, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Armenian, Wallachian, Hungarian, German, Italian, Russian, Tartar, Mongol, Circassian, Georgian, Persian, Syrian, and Arabian—this was the ancestry of the Osmanlis who, under Soleiman the Magnificent, made the whole world tremble. In richness of blood the only parallel to the Osmanlis in modern times is the present population of the United States and Canada.
But this indirect method of conversion as an alternative to slavery did not immediately increase the masculine element among the Osmanlis. In a city taken by assault the more virile portion of the male population was killed off, and those who remained were able to buy life and freedom. Male slaves were an embarrassment to the ever-moving armies of Murad. Ransom money was welcomed by the captors. In many cities the inhabitants surrendered without a struggle, and were secured in their freedom by the terms of capitulation. In rural districts the threat of slavery was little felt. The Osmanlis had neither time nor strength to put out the drag-net. Everywhere in the Balkans refuge in the mountains is easy. Then, too, the loss of cultivators would have made the highly prized timarets worthless, and would have caused a famine in foodstuffs or a diminution of taxes on harvests. Another means of bringing pressure to bear upon the Christians had to be devised.
The famous corps of the janissaries was, according to the Ottoman historians, a creation of Orkhan.[260] As a bodyguard of slaves, cut off from their families and educated and trained to serve nearest the person of the sovereign, the janissaries may have originated with Orkhan. If so, it was but the adoption of the idea already put into practice by the sovereigns of Egypt in the organization of the Mamelukes.[261] But as an agency of forcible conversion by the incorporation of Christian youths in the Ottoman army, there is no evidence of its existence before Murad. In fact, historians are agreed that the janissaries were recruited only from the Christian population in Europe.[262] So Orkhan could hardly have conceived this scheme. The problem of which it was a solution did not arise until after Orkhan’s death.
That the corps of the janissaries was an agency for forcible conversion, and was not created in order to increase the strength and efficiency of the Ottoman army, is proved by the records we have of the number of janissaries in the early days of Ottoman history. Murad and Bayezid are represented as having a thousand or less janissaries. In the confusion of the ten years of civil strife among the sons of Bayezid, the janissaries played no part. There were only twelve hundred janissaries in the time of Mohammed the Conqueror,[263] and twelve thousand when the Ottoman Empire was at its zenith under Soleiman the Magnificent.[264] But Mahmud II counted one hundred and forty thousand in his army.[265] These figures show that this most celebrated of Ottoman military organizations did not become a powerful factor until the period of decadence. The janissaries were not, as has been commonly represented, the principal element of the Osmanlis’ fighting strength in the wars of conquest of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Their great rôle in Ottoman history was that of maintainers and defenders of conquests already made. In organizing the janissaries, Murad was certainly influenced by the desire of forming a bodyguard on whose loyalty and devotion he could rely implicitly. But his principal purpose was to emasculate the Christian elements in Macedonia and Thrace, which were too fanatical or too ignorant to see of their own accord that self-interest should lead them to renounce their nationality and their religion.
Murad’s law of drafting (devchurmé) provided that in each conquered district in Europe the privilege of exemption from military service through the payment of the capitation tax (kharadj) should be denied to Christian youths. The Osmanlis reserved the right to select at discretion Christian boys, who were taken from home and kindred and brought up in the Mohammedan religion. They were trained for service as the Sultan’s bodyguard. They depended directly upon the sovereign, who paid them according to a definite scale. Their insignia were the pot and the spoon, and their officers received names which symbolized the functions of the camp kitchen.[266]
One is compelled to dissent from the consensus of opinion of European historians on the organization of the janissaries. Their scathing criticisms are best summed up in the words of a French historian: ‘It is the most fearful tribute of human flesh that has ever been levied by victors upon the vanquished.... It justifies the execration of which the Osmanlis have been the object on the part of Europeans during centuries. Let us add that, by this strange mode of recruiting, the Osmanlis have found, at the same time, the means of taking away from the Christian populations their most virile element, and of doubling their troops without putting arms into the hands of the conquered.’[267]
The actual number of janissaries under arms refutes the latter part of this criticism, when it is applied to any one of the Ottoman sovereigns of the period of conquest. As for putting arms into the hands of the conquered, we shall see that both Murad and Bayezid availed themselves of the services in war of their Christian subjects, led by their own princes. The tearing away of boys from their homes, and the loss of their Christian heritage, is a shock to humanitarian and religious sensibilities. But we must judge the Osmanlis of Murad and Bayezid by the Christians of their own century. When we compare the methods of conquest of the Osmanlis with those of the Spaniards against the Moors, of the English against the French and Scotch, of the Italians against each other, we must concede that Murad devised a humane, clever, and highly successful scheme in the institution of the janissaries.
The ignorant Balkan peasantry—especially the Slavic elements—prized their sons far more highly than their daughters. Recruiting for the army was a greater blow to them than recruiting for the harem. It was the strong, sturdy son who was chosen. This touched the pocket-book as well as the heart-strings. The Anatolian Greek, especially of the cities, had been deterred from becoming a Moslem more by a lack of eagerness to assume military obligations than by a zeal for his ancestral faith. The Macedonian Greek, the Bulgarian, and the Serbian regarded the bearing of arms as a natural obligation. Fighting was a part of living. Better the faith of Mohammed, then, than the loss of the son’s help with the harvest. That there were wholesale conversions to Islam as a result of the threat to apply the law of devchurmé is a logical inference from the fact that Murad never mustered more than a thousand janissaries.