Devshirme

History of the Ottoman Empire
Social structure
Court and aristocracy
Ethnoreligious communities
Rise of nationalism
Classes
Illustration of an Ottoman official and his assistant registering Christian boys for the devshirme. The official takes a tax to cover the price of the boys' new red clothes and the cost of transport from their home, while the assistant records their village, district and province, parentage, date of birth and physical appearance. Ottoman miniature painting, 1558.[1][2]

Devshirme (Ottoman Turkish: دوشیرمه, romanized: devşirme, lit. '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.[4][5][6] Those coming from the Balkans came primarily from noble Balkan families and rayah (poor) classes.[7][8] It is first mentioned in written records in 1438,[9] but probably started earlier. It created a faction of soldiers and officials loyal to the Sultan.[10] It counterbalanced the Turkish nobility, who sometimes opposed the Sultan.[11][12]

The system produced a considerable number of grand viziers from the 1400s to the 1600s. This was the second most powerful position in the Ottoman Empire, after the sultan. Initially, the grand viziers were exclusively of Turk origin, but after there were troubles between Sultan Mehmed II and the Turkish grand vizier Çandarlı Halil Pasha the Younger, who was the first grand vizier to be executed, there was a rise of slave administrators (devshirme). They were much easier for the sultans to control, compared to free administrators of Turkish aristocratic extraction.[13] The devshirme also produced many of the Ottoman Empire's provincial governors, military commanders, and divans during the 1400s–1600s period.[14] Sometimes, the devshirme recruits were castrated and became eunuchs.[15] Although often destined for the harem, many eunuchs of devshirme origin went on to hold important positions in the military and the government, such as grand viziers Hadım Ali Pasha, Sinan Borovinić, and Hadım Hasan Pasha.

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.[17] Devshirme were rarely sold, though some could end up as slaves in private households.[17] The fact that they were taken forcibly from their parents made the devshirme system resented by locals.[18] However, revolts were rare, with the exception of a revolt against the devshirme in Albania in 1565.[19][20] Ordered to cut all ties with their families, some managed to use their positions to help their families.[21] There is some evidence that urban Christian and Muslim parents resorted to bribery or sending their children to the country to assure the advancement in life that devshirme recruitment could bring.[22] The boys were forced to convert to Islam.[23] Muslims were not allowed into the system (with some exceptions), but some Muslim families smuggled their sons in anyway.[24] According to Speros Vyronis, "The Ottomans took advantage of the general Christian fear of losing their children and used offers of devshirme exemption in negotiations for surrender of Christian lands. Such exemptions were included in the surrender terms granted to Jannina, Galata, Morea, Chios, etc. Christians who engaged in specialized activities important to the Ottoman state were exempted from the blood tax on their children by way of recognition of the importance of their labors for the empire. Exemption from this tribute was considered a privilege and not a penalty."[25]

Many scholars consider the practice of devshirme as violating Islamic law.[26][9][27] David Nicolle writes that enslavement of Christian boys violates the dhimmi protections guaranteed in Islam,[28] but Halil İnalcık argues that the devshirme were not slaves once converted to Islam.[29][d] The boys were given a formal education, and trained in science, warfare and bureaucratic administration, and became advisers to the sultan, elite infantry, generals in the army, admirals in the navy, and bureaucrats working on finance in the Ottoman Empire.[2] They were separated according to ability and could rise in rank based on merit. The most talented, the ichoghlani (Turkish iç oğlanı) were trained for the highest positions in the empire.[21] Others joined the military, including the famed janissaries.[30]

The practice began to die out as Ottoman soldiers preferred recruiting their own sons into the army, rather than sons from Christian families. In 1594, Muslims were officially allowed to take the positions held by the devshirme and the system of recruiting Christians effectively stopped by 1648.[9][31] An attempt to re-institute it in 1703 was resisted by its Ottoman members, who coveted the military and civilian posts. Finally, in the early days of Ahmet III's reign, the practice of devshirme was abolished.

  1. ^ Nasuh, Matrakci (1588). "Janissary Recruitment in the Balkans". Süleymanname, Topkapi Sarai Museum, Ms Hazine 1517. Archived from the original on 3 December 2018. Retrieved 20 November 2016.
  2. ^ a b Finkel, Caroline (2007). Osman's dream : the story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1923. Basic Books. p. 325. ISBN 978-0-465-02396-7.
  3. ^ Ingvar Svanberg and David Westerlund, Islam Outside the Arab World, Routledge, 1999, p. 140
  4. ^ Hain, Kathryn. "Devshirme is a Contested Practice". utah.edu. University of Utah. Retrieved 13 June 2020.
  5. ^ a b James L. Gelvin (2016). The Modern Middle East: A History. Oxford University Press. p. 80. ISBN 978-0-19-021886-7.
  6. ^ Hanson, Victor Davis (18 December 2007). Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise to Western Power. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-307-42518-8.
  7. ^ Charles Jelavich; Barbara Jelavich, eds. (1963). The Balkans in Transition. University of California Press. p. 68. Politically, it meant that the devshirme class, composed primarily of descendants of the Balkan noble and rayah classes
  8. ^ Kumar, Krishan (2019). Visions of Empire How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World. Princeton University Press. p. 68. ISBN 978-0-691-19280-2. Lowry shows that not only Christian peasants but large numbers of the Byzantine-Balkan aristocracy were recruited into the Ottoman ruling elite
  9. ^ a b c David Nicolle (2011). "Devshirme System". In Alexander Mikaberidze (ed.). Conflict and Conquest in the Islamic World: A Historical Encyclopedia. Vol. 1. pp. 273–4.
  10. ^ William L. Cleveland (4 May 2018). A History of the Modern Middle East. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-429-97513-4.
  11. ^ David Brewer. Greece, the Hidden Centuries: Turkish Rule from the Fall of Constantinople to Greek Independence. p. 51. The outsides would owe their position, and their continuance on it, solely to the Sultan, and so be more reliably loyal than Turks subject to influence from court factions.
  12. ^ Ahmad Feroz. The Making of Modern Turkey. Routledge. p. 1820. From the very beginning, the relationship between the ruler and his Turcoman allies was fraught with tension which undermined all attempts by the sultan to create a strong state. With the conquest of the Balkans, the sultan found that he could lessen his dependence on his Turcoman notables by creating a counter-force from among the Christians in the newly conquered territories.
  13. ^ Aksin Somel, Selcuk (2010). The A to Z of the Ottoman Empire. Scarecrow Press. p. 67. ISBN 978-0-8108-7579-1. The disappearance of this dynasty [ Çandarlı family ] was symptomatic with the rise of the class of slave administrators, who were much easier for the sultan to control than free administrators of noble origin.
  14. ^ William L Cleveland and Martin Bunt; William L. Cleveland (July 2010). A History of the Modern Middle East. ReadHowYouWant.com. p. 115. ISBN 978-1-4587-8155-0.
  15. ^ Duindam, Jeroen [in Dutch] (2016). Dynasties A Global History of Power, 1300–1800. Cambridge University Press. p. 196. ISBN 978-1-107-06068-5. Dikici, 'Making of Ottoman court eunuchs', makes clear that white eunuchs could be recruited among devshirme boys, with the pages and their eunuch supervisors coming from the same background. They were sometimes castrated in the palace, whereas the harem's black eunuchs were more often castrated in their region of origin.
  16. ^ John K. Cox (2002). The History of Serbia. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 29. ISBN 978-0-313-31290-8.
  17. ^ a b Clarence-Smith, W. (2020). Islam and the Abolition of Slavery. Hurst. p. 49. ISBN 978-1-78738-415-6.
  18. ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/history/slavery_1.shtml#section_4; "...and point out that many Christian families were hostile and resentful about it—which is perhaps underlined by the use of force to impose the system.".
  19. ^ Malcolm, Noel (1998). Kosovo : a short history. London : Macmillan. p. 96. ISBN 978-0-333-66612-8.
  20. ^ Goodwin, Godfrey (1997). The Janissaries. London : Saqi. p. 40. ISBN 978-0-86356-049-1.
  21. ^ a b Douglas E Stresusnd. Islamic Gunpowder Empires: Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. p. 83.
  22. ^ Shaw 1976, p. 114.
  23. ^ The New Encyclopedia of Islam, ed. Cyril Glassé, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 129.
  24. ^ R. M. Savory, ed. (1976). Introduction ṭo Islamic Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  25. ^ Vryonis, Speros (1965). "Seljuk Gulams and Ottoman Devshirmes".
  26. ^ Gillian Lee Weiss (2002). Back from Barbary : captivity, redemption and French identity in the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Mediterranean. Stanford University. p. 32. Many scholars consider that the "child levy" violated Islamic law.
  27. ^ David Nicolle (2019). "Devshirme System". In Spencer Tucker (ed.). Middle East Conflicts from Ancient Egypt to the 21st Century: An Encyclopedia and Document Collection. p. 353.
  28. ^ David Nicolle (22 July 2011). "Devshirme System". In Alexander Mikaberidze (ed.). Conflict and Conquest in the Islamic World: A Historical Encyclopedia [2 volumes]: A Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. pp. 273–. ISBN 978-1-59884-337-8. This effectively enslaved some of the sultan's own non-Islamic subjects and was therefore illegal under Islamic law, which stipulated that conquered non-Muslims should be demilitarized and protected
  29. ^ Halil Inalcik, "Ottoman Civilisation", p. 138, Ankara 2004.
  30. ^ Basgoz, I. & Wilson, H. E. (1989), The educational tradition of the Ottoman Empire and the development of the Turkish educational system of the republican era. Turkish Review 3(16), 15.
  31. ^ Peter F. Sugar (1 July 2012). Southeastern Europe under Ottoman Rule, 1354–1804. University of Washington Press. p. 56. ISBN 978-0-295-80363-0.


Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).