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The rising importance of firearms – the product of a remarkable openness to technological innovation – also helps to explain Ottoman successes
in the centuries after 1300.
For several hundred years Ottoman armies used firearms on a vaster scale, more effectively, and earlier than competing dynasties. In the great Ottoman victories of the fourteenth, fifteenth,
and early sixteenth centuries, technological superiority often played a
key role.
Cannon and fire-armed infantry were developed at very early
dates and used to massive technological advantage in the Balkan as well
as the Safavid wars. These firearms required a long training and discipline that often were incompatible with nomadic life.
In many cultures, including the Ottoman, cavalry prevented or retarded the use of guns
that took a long time to reload and grated on the warrior ethic of bravery
and courage demonstrated through hand-to-hand combat.
Further, sultan used newly created fire-armed troops in domestic power struggles
against timar forces that were insufficiently docile. As firearms became
more important, the cavalry and its timar financial base became decreasingly relevant.
The rising importance of firearms is linked to another factor in the
An Ottoman success story, the dev¸sirme, or the so-called child levy system.
This system had its origins in the era of Sultans Bayezit I, Murat I, and
Mehmet II.
Until the early seventeenth century, recruiting officials went
to Christian villages in Anatolia and the Balkans as well as to Muslim
communities in Bosnia regularly. They assembled all the male
children and selected the best and the brightest.
These recruits then were taken from their village homes to the Ottoman capital or other
From its origins to 1683 31 administrative centers. There, in the so-called palace school system, they
received the best years-long mental and physical education that the state
could provide, including religious training and, as a matter of course,
conversion to Islam.
The crime of this group entered the state elites, becoming officers and administrators. Many rose to become commanders and grand viziers and played a distinguished role in Ottoman history.
The others became members of the famed Janissary corps, an extraordinarily well-trained, fire-armed, infantry center of armies that won many victories in the early Ottoman centuries. The Janissaries for centuries technologically were the best-trained, best-armed fighting force in
the Mediterranean world.
The dev¸sirmesystem offered extreme social mobility for males, allowing
peasant boys to rise to the highest military and administrative positions
in the empire, except for the dynasty itself. Significantly, it served as a
means for the empire to tap into the manpower resources of its numerous
Christian subject populations.
As the Ottoman state had matured during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and placed greater emphasis on its Islamic character, the military and bureaucratic service of unconverted
Christians became more problematic. And so the earlier use of Christians to make the land usage surveys faded away as did the appointment of Christian timar holders.
However, while such formal appointments of Ottoman Christians faded, imperial conquests in the Balkans mounted and Christians came to form a more important proportion of the total Ottoman subject populations than before. According to Islamic law, which the Ottoman administration claimed to uphold, the state could
not compel the conversion of its own Christian subjects to Islam.
The state’s primary concerns, however, were not religious but rather political:
to maintain and extend its power by whatever means necessary. Such
considerations, so-called “reasons of state” (see chapter 6), therefore
prevailed and, through an interpretive nicety, the dev¸sirme system was
retained as a legitimate state institution.
