In his article, ‘Some notes on the devshirme’, Dr. V. L. Ménage deals in some detail with the vexed problem of the status in law of the members of the Ottoman slave institution. His comments are directed toward what he gives as Dr. Papoulia' conclusion concering the problem, that ‘the čikma, the “passing-out” from the various training-schools, amounted to a modified manumission and bestowed a status comparable with that of the “client” (mawlā) in the classical Muslim world’. Having quoted passages from two documents of the mid-fifteenth century and a notation in the comtemporary histories of the same period, Dr. Ménage conculdes: ‘These three examples suffice to show that—in the middle years of the fifteenth century at least—a čikma did not automatically bring with it legal manumission; thus although the čikma as an institution seems to imitate the Mamluk kharj—and the term itself sounds very like a calque—it differed from it fundamentally in that the ič oghlani, unlike the Mamlūk, was not (or Perhaps not necessarily) then ceremonially manumitted’.