…Turkey's Legendary Janissary Corps.
"THOUGH IT WAS Napoleon Bonaparte (or possibly Frederick the Great) who first coined the phrase "an army marches on its stomach" no military formation in history placed more emphasis on food than the elite Janissary Corps of the Ottoman Empire.
Formed in the 14th Century, to serve as the sultan's personal army, the janissaries were supposed to operate outside the system of Ottoman feudal loyalties. To achieve this, all janissaries were recruited from the non-Turkish (especially Christian) slaves paid as tribute by the conquered peoples under Ottoman rule.
The word janissary literally means ‘new soldier' and the system of forced conscription, known as the devºirme (blood tax), took boys of around nine years old from their families and converted them to Islam before training them in the arts of war. Forbidden to marry and housed in communal barracks, every janissary was the personal property of the sultan. So how did these slave-soldiers become an elite fighting force with the power to depose their almighty master?
The answer lay in a most unlikely places. To foster a potent spirit of comradeship whereby every janissary thought of his brothers-in-arms as his family, the corps' military vocabulary and symbolism drew heavily on that of the kitchen. Consider the following…"
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