The effect of the long training, with its strictness on the one hand and its relaxations on the other, was to develop an esprit de corps among them such as has rarely existed in any other army. Everything was done that could be done to cultivate this spirit. Every means was employed to make the Janissary live his life in and look only to the interests of his regiment. He was forbidden to exercise any trade or occupation whatever, lest he should possess an interest outside his regiment. In the time of Suliman the sultan ordered the aga of a regiment of Janissaries to be beheaded because one of his men was found mending his clothes. The officer was spared at the request of his comrades, but the private soldier was dismissed from the service. The regiment was to be everything to the Janissary; the outside world nothing. No man was allowed to accumulate wealth, although his regiment could do so. Each man followed the good or ill fortune of the powerful body of which he was a member.
The result was that the regiment represented to the Janissary everything that he held dear. He became jealous of its honour, and the regiment in its turn became exclusive towards outsiders. The Janissary came before long to think of his position as privileged and to regard entrance into his corps as only to be allowed under severe restrictions. So careful indeed did he become of the rights of his regiment that before long no person born of Mahometan parents was admitted, even though his father had been one of themselves. As a consequence of this cultivation of regimental rights, the popularity of the New Troops became so great that many young Christians of adventurous spirit voluntarily sought to join their ranks.
The Janissaries developed into a species of imperium in imperio. Perhaps the body in Western Europe to which they may most aptly be compared is the Order of Knights Templars. Each was a partly religious, partly military Order. Each was jealous of its own privileges and constituted a fraternity largely isolated from the rest of the community. But the isolation of the Janissary was more complete than that of the Templar at any time. The Moslem had been cut off from his own family and had forgotten all the Christians he had known as a child, and his regiment had taken the place of father and mother, wife and home. His individual rights had been merged in those of his regiment. The resemblance between the Janissaries and the Templars might be noted in one other respect—namely, that their religion sat lightly upon them. Though the former were bound by the precepts of Hadji Bektash, these precepts were, from the Mahometan point of view, extremely latitudinarian.[221]
All their discipline and training tended to make them devoted to the sultan as commander-in-chief. The Janissary had nothing to gain and nothing to fear from any person except his military superiors. Each man’s promotion depended on the arbitrary will of his commanding officer, or ultimately of the sovereign. Each man saw before him a career in which he could rise to the command of an army or to other high office, provided he won the approval of his sultan.
Such a military organisation had never been seen in the world’s history, and furnished to the early sultans a force which was almost irresistible. Wholly Christian and largely European in origin, it was yet completely Mahometan in spirit and in action. It was indeed an army which would have satisfied Frederick the Great or any other ruler who has desired to model a force according to preconceived ideas. Take a number of children from the most intelligent portion of the community; choose them for their strength and intelligence; instruct them carefully in the art of fighting; bring them up under strict military discipline; teach them to forget the home of their childhood, their parents and friends; give them a new religion of a specially military type; saturate them with the knowledge that all their hope in life depends upon their position in the regiment; make peace irksome and war a delight, with the hope of promotion and relaxation from the hardships and restraints of the barracks: the result will be a weapon in the hands of a leader such as the world has rarely seen. Such a weapon was the army of the Janissaries.
The success of Mahomet’s predecessors in the Balkan peninsula had been largely due to the New Troops. Though their numbers appear to have been limited to twelve thousand, they had already proved their value. We have seen that when John Hunyadi had put the Turks under Murad the Second to rout, it was the Janissaries who saved the day and turned the disaster of Varna into a great victory. Their discipline and strength were even more triumphant in the defeat of the great Hungarian on the plain of Cossovo in 1448. Black John, as the Turks named him from the colour of his banner, succeeded in putting to flight the Anatolian and the Rumelian divisions of his enemy. But the attack on the Janissaries failed utterly. They stood like a wall of brass until the moment came for them to become the attacking force, and through their efforts the triumph of the sultan was complete.
The force which had thus shown its quality only five years previously was by far the most important division under Mahomet’s command. The ablest, bravest, most terrible portion of the army of the arch-enemy of Christendom was composed exclusively from Christian families. The most formidable instrument employed by the Turks for the conquest of the Christians of South-eastern Europe and for attacking the nations of the West was formed of boys born of Christian parents, enslaved, forcibly converted to a hostile religion, who yet became devotedly attached to the slavery to which they had been condemned. It was their boast in after years that they had never fled from an enemy, and the boast was not an idle one.
The remainder of the Turkish forces which may be classed among regular troops came from all parts occupied by the Turks but mainly from Anatolia. Their organisation, discipline, and powers of endurance probably made them as formidable an army as any which a European power of the period could have put into the field.
The Bashi Bazouks constituted an undisciplined mob who were good enough to be employed where numbers and wild courage were of use in annoying or weakening the enemy. La Brocquière states that the ‘innumerable host’ of these irregulars took the field with no other weapon than their curved swords or scimitars. ‘Being,’ says Philelphus, ‘under no restraint, they proved the most cruel scourge of a Turkish invasion.’
In speaking of the Turkish host it must not be forgotten that in 1453 hardly any European power can be said to have possessed a standing army. It is with no surprise, therefore, that we note that contemporary European writers from the West speak with astonishment of the discipline which prevailed. ‘Their obedience to superiors,’ says La Brocquière, ‘is boundless; none dare disobey even when their lives are at hazard, and it is chiefly owing to their steady submission that such great exploits have been performed and such conquests gained.’ The same writer bears testimony to the great mobility of the Turkish army. ‘Ten thousand Turks on the march will make less noise than a hundred men in our Christian armies. In their ordinary marches they only walk, but in forced marches they always gallop, and, as they are lightly armed, they will thus advance further from evening to daybreak than others in three days. It is by these forced marches that they have succeeded in surprising and completely defeating the Christians in their different wars.’[222]