1675.—"The other officers are the sardar ([Sirdar]), who commands the Janizaries ... the Spahi Aga, who commands the Spahies or Turkish Horse."—Wheeler's Journal, 348.
[1686.—"I being providentially got over the river before the Spie employed by them could give them intelligence."—Hedges, Diary, Hak. Soc. i. 229.]
1738.—"The Arab and other inhabitants are obliged, either by long custom ... or from fear and compulsion, to give the Spahees and their company the mounah ... which is such a sufficient quantity of provision for ourselves, together with straw and barley for our mules and horses."—Shaw's Travels in Barbary, ed. 1757, p. xii.
1786.—"Bajazet had two years to collect his forces ... we may discriminate the janizaries ... a national cavalry, the Spahis of modern times."—Gibbon, ch. lxv.
1877.—"The regular cavalry was also originally composed of tribute children.... The sipahis acquired the same pre-eminence among the cavalry which the janissaries held among the infantry, and their seditious conduct rendered them much sooner troublesome to the Government."—Finlay, H. of Greece, ed. 1877, v. 37.
SERAI, SERYE, s. This word is used to represent two Oriental words entirely different.
a. Hind. from Pers. sarā, sarāī. This means originally an edifice, a palace. It was especially used by the Tartars when they began to build palaces. Hence Sarāī, the name of more than one royal residence of the Mongol Khāns upon the Volga, the Sarra of Chaucer. The Russians retained the word from their Tartar oppressors, but in their language sarai has been degraded to mean 'a shed.' The word, as applied to the Palace of the Grand Turk, became, in the language of the Levantine Franks, serail and serraglio. In this form, as P. della Valle lucidly explains below, the "striving after meaning" connected the word with Ital. serrato, 'shut up'; and with a word serraglio perhaps previously existing in Italian in that connection. [Seraglio, according to Prof. Skeat (Concise Dict. s.v.) is "formed with suffix -aglio (L. -aculum) from Late Lat. serare, 'to bar, shut in'—Lat. sera, a 'bar, bolt'; Lat. serere, 'to join together.'] It is this association that has attached the meaning of 'women's apartments' to the word. Sarai has no such specific sense.
But the usual modern meaning in Persia, and the only one in India, is that of a building for the accommodation of travellers with their pack-animals; consisting of an enclosed yard with chambers round it.
Recurring to the Italian use, we have seen in Italy the advertisement of a travelling menagerie as Serraglio di Belve. A friend tells us of an old Scotchman whose ideas must have run in this groove, for he used to talk of 'a Serragle of blackguards.' In the Diary in England of Annibale Litolfi of Mantua the writer says: "On entering the tower there is a Serraglio in which, from grandeur, they keep lions and tigers and cat-lions." (See Rawdon Brown's Calendar of Papers in Archives of Venice, vol. vi. pt. iii. 1557-8. App.) [The Stanf. Dict. quotes Evelyn as using the word of a place where persons are confined: 1644. "I passed by the Piazza Judea, where their seraglio begins" (Diary, ed. 1872, i. 142).]
c. 1584.—"At Saraium Turcis palatium principis est, vel aliud amplum aedificium, non a Czar[[242]] voce Tatarica, quae regem significat, dictum; vnde Reineccius Saragliam Turcis vocari putet, ut regiam. Nam aliae quoque domus, extra Sultani regiam, nomen hoc ferunt ... vt ampla Turcorum hospitia, sive diversoria publica, quae vulgo Caravasarias ([Caravanseray]) nostri vocant."—Leunclavius, ed. 1650, p. 403.