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Ethnic-Regional (Cins) Solidarity in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Establishment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Metin Ibrahim Kunt
Affiliation:
Bosporus University, Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey

Extract

Similar to many previous and contemporary Islamic states, the basis of classical Ottoman administration and military was a highly elaborate system of slavery. Slaves, carefully recruited and educated, made up the bulk of the central army and filled many of the administrative posts of the empire. To the traditional sources of slaves the Ottomans added a new one: the levy of children from non- urban, mostly Christian subjects of the empire (devşirme). The motive behind this elaborate system of ‘slaves of the sultan’ is obvious: to provide the sultan and the central government with an efficient, well-trained and loyal professional army. The basis of the loyalty was that theoretically they were without root and without ties.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

page 233 note 1 The main argument of this article was presented at the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, held in Columbus, Ohio, in November 1970.Google Scholar

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page 234 note 1 I would like to express my thanks to Professor Leon Carl Brown for letting me see portions of the typescript of his forthcoming study of Tunisia in the early nineteenth century, where he discerns a similar situation (chapter III, pp. 76 ff.).Google Scholar

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page 234 note 3 Miller, Barnette, The Palace School of Muhammad the Conqueror (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1941), p. 9. Renegades may have been few; there are, on the other hand, countless examples of rebels in Ottoman history who were products of the palace school.Google Scholar

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page 236 note 3 Cins usually connotes ‘sex’ in modern Arabic, Persian and Turkish; the article ‘Djins’ by Charles Pellat in EI 2, for instance, is on the sexual life of Muslims and its reflection in literature. Another basic meaning, common to all three languages, is ‘genus, class, category’. Redhouse Ottoman–English dictionary has ‘nationality or race’ as a further connotation.Google Scholar

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page 238 note 1 Gibb & Bowen, vol. I/I, p. 75, note that ‘from the end of the sixteenth century… the majority of the Harem women were recruited from the Caucasus’; according to Lybyer, p. 52, ‘the strongest and ablest youths came from the mountainous regions inhabited by Albanians and Southern Slavic peoples’.Google Scholar

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