The Grand Seraglio. Within its walls the Turkist Sultans sought an answer to a an old question: Can absolute power bring absolute bliss? Within the confines of what is today the Topakapi Museum, the Sultan’s residence the answer between the violence and the mystery, its decisions taken there shaping millions of lives, the brainwashed slaves, the ornate gardens, the answer was less obvious at the time…
John Frederick Lewis. Life in the Harem. ---Ottaviano Bon:and was the last Sultan to lead " his army in the field. His intemperate habits, however, proved fatal, and after an attack of fever, provoked by drink and terror at seeing air eclipse of the sun, he died at the early age of twenty-eight. One of his last acts was to order the execution of his brother Ibrahim, thus making the Ottoman race extinct, and giving the throne to his favourite, the Silihdar Pasha. But once again the harem triumphed, and Kiusem falsely reported Ibrahim's death. At the news Murad grinned a ghastly smile, and tried to rise from his bed to gloat over his brother's dead body. His attendants, knowing that their lives were at stake in the event of the discovery of the truth, held back the dying man in his bed. Read More:http://www.archive.org/stream/haremaccountofin00penquoft/haremaccountofin00penquoft_djvu.txt
…Those kidnapped children who showed an aptitude for ferocity were not sent to the Palace School but put into the Janissary Corps. The janissaries were a sort of private army of the Sultan who took the field only when he did and acted as his personal bodyguard. They were first organized in 1330, when the Turks were still living on the Plains of Anatolia, and were called “new soldiers.” A legend says that a holy man passed his wide sleeve over their heads, blessing them, and for this reason they wore a cap that hund down behind like a sleeve. They were spartan in their habit, celibate and forbidden to quarrel with one another. Native Turks and children of former janissaries were not allowed to join the corps.
They were a brave and valuable lot until the great period of Turkish conquest was over and the Sultans became more interested in dallying at home in the Seraglio than in leading troops into battle. Their number swelled from twelve thousand under Suleiman the Magnificent to forty-nine thousand a hundred years later, as more and more captured children entered their ranks with no great wars to kill them off. From admirably disciplined assault troops they turned into a rowdy and dangerous mob of hoodlums, always discontented, looting, starting fires, and prone to start revolutions. By 1826, when Mahmud II succeeded in abolishing them, there were 135,000 of them, including many native Turks and sons of janissaries.
---...explained the true origin of the corps of janissaries, showing that the distinctive feature of the system was the recruit- ment of the corps from a levy of Christian children, who were forcibly converted and specially trained for their profession. This could not come into being all at once, and the earlier Sultans main- tained a kind of bodyguard of bought or captured slaves, which as it grew in size was organized and trained, not as a single unit, but as several distinct divisions, in each of which the individual exhibited that state of bodily condition or mental capabihty that caused his inclusion in the particular division to which he was detailed. Thus boys of pleasing appearance, bodily perfection, and of good ...Read More:http://www.archive.org/stream/haremaccountofin00penquoft/haremaccountofin00penquoft_djvu.txt image:http://greatestbattles.iblogger.org/Ottoman/byEuropeans/Brindesi.htm
Six Sultans in two and a half centuries had been dethroned or murdered, or both, by the corps that was supposed to guard them. Lady Mary Whortley Montagu in 1717:
The government here is entirely in the hands of the army and the Grand Signor with all his absolute power as much a slave as any of his subjects, and trembles at a janissary’s frown. Here is indeed a much greater appearance of subjection than amongst us. A minister of state is not spoke to but upon the knee; should a reflection on his conduct be dropped in a coffee house (for they have spies everywhere) the house would be razed to the ground, and perhaps the whole company put to the torture. No huzzaing mobs, senseless pamphlets and tavern disputes about politics A consequential ill that freedom draws; A bad effect, but from a noble cause….
Pierre Auguste Renoir. The Harem. Read More:http://onokart.wordpress.com/category/orientalizm/page/2/
None of our harmless calling names! But when a minister here displeases the people in three hours time he is dragged even from his master’s arms. They cut off his hands, head and feet, and throw them before the palace gate with all the respect in the world, while the Sultan (to whom they all profess an unlimited adoration) sits trembling in his apartment, and dare neither defend nor revenge his favourite. This is the blessed condition of the most absolute monarch upon earth, who owns no law but his will. Read More:http://www.swan.ac.uk/visualanthropology/projects/004_Montagu/turkishEmbassyLettersTheLetters.htm
The Janissary Corps emblem was a kettle, and the Chief of Janissaries was titled head soup distributor. Each man wore in his cap a spoon in a brass socket. Every Friday, a large delegation of janissaries came to the second court of the Seraglio, just inside the Executioner’s Gate, to get their weekly rice allowance, and if they were disgruntled about anything they would turn their kettle upside down and beat on them with their spoons, a warning to those in the inner palace that somebody’s head was wanted.
Mohammed II painted by Gentile Bellini---It was the royal gardeners who sewed condemned women into weighted sacks and dropped them into the Bosphorus—it is said that another Sultan, Ibrahim the Mad (1640-48), once had all 280 of the women in his harem executed this way simply so he could have the pleasure of selecting their successors—and the tread of an approaching group of bostancıs, wearing their traditional uniform of red skull caps, muslin breeches and shirts cut low to expose muscular chests and arms, heralded death by strangulation or decapitation for many thousands of Ottoman subjects down the years. A bostancı, or member of the Ottoman corps of gardener-executioners. The artist, a European who worked from travelers' accounts, has incorrectly shown him wearing a fez rather than the traditional skull cap. When very senior officials were sentenced to death, they would be dealt with by the bostancı basha in person, but—at least toward the end of the sultans’ rule—execution was not the inevitable result of a death sentence. Instead, the condemned man and the bostancı basha took part in what
surely one of the most peculiar customs known to history: a race held between the head gardener and his anticipated victim, the result of which was, quite literally, a matter of life or death for the trembling grand vizier or chief eunuch required to undertake it.---Read More:http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2012/03/the-ottoman-empires-life-death-race/
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