Customer Reviews

The Janissaries

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This could have been a very useful addition to the growing literature on the history of the Ottoman Empire. That it isn't is partly because the author chooses to concentrate on the popular notion of the janissaries rather than look at the historical development of the institution and its changing role over time. Whilst much of what he says is not wrong, one can never be sure which period of the institution's development he is referring to. It has its uses as a general history for someone totally unfamiliar with the institution but for a serious historian it leaves a lot to be desired.

I used this book in a thesis paper on the Janissaries. The book is rather disorganized and jumps around a bit. The author lists a wealth of other sources that the reader can delve into. It is one of the few books that deals directly and exclusively on the Janissaries. For me, he was too light on the first one hundred years of the Janissaries when they were at their most pure state. However, it is one of those must reads if you want to embark upon the discovery of the Janissaries.

The Janissary Corps sprung from the Christian levy of male youths from the Ottoman Empire's European lands following their conquest of Gallipoli and Adrianople in the 15th Century.

The youths were shipped off to Adrianople, named Edirne by the Ottomans, converted to Islam and formed into the empire's crack corps. And what a corps it was, sweeping across Europe under Suleiman the Magnificent, its most glorious victory was the defeat of King Louis of Hungary at Mohacs in 1526 of which Goodwin gives a riveting account

It was not to last and the corps descended into a wretched, brutal rabble, scared of the enemy and the terror of the empire's peoples. Various efforts at reform, under Sultans Osman II and Selim III, for example, failed when the corps, often aided by the reactionary religious hierarchy, the ulema, faced down the other powers of the empire and, in the above cases, saw the sultans put to death.

Their end did not come until 1826 when Sultan Mahmud II and his prime minister finally faced the inevitable task and butchered the corps in its headquarters in Istanbul and throughout the empire.

Goodwin marshalls his facts well and leavens the betimes dense material with an elegant, funny or startling phrase that brings the reader back to the essence of the Ottoman Empire and the corps: "by this time [Sultan] Ibrahim was so demented that he might have raped his close stool", "[Prime Minister] Kopruluzade was regarded with awe but also suspected of madness because, unlike normal ministers, he habitually thought out his policies.", "...as so often in war which, in reality, is an infernal game played by grey children in a vast nursery."

Grey children. Nicely put, that.

A good genral history of this Elite Ottoman fighting force. I recommend this for any who need or want a quick and dirty history of this facinating culture.