"The Romantic Backstory of the 'Soldiers of Ornament'..." Topic
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Tango01  | 08 Nov 2025 1:08 p.m. PST |
…: Bashi-Bazouks in Orientalist Art
"hen was the last time you heard the term bashi-bazouk being flung around? Rather like ‘pirate', ‘buccaneer', and ‘bootlegger' it seems to be a colloquialism that has faded ever so slightly in popular society, more suited to the children's books of the early 20th century. If you are familiar with Hergé's comic series The Adventures of Tintin, you will undoubtedly recall bashi-bazouk as a favourite interjection of Captain Haddock. Like a lot of Haddock's vocabulary, the term is hardly offensive but provides a good context to some of the idiosyncratic sayings of the time. In which case, are you familiar with who the bashi-bazouks actually were?
The word bashi-bazouk literally means ‘damaged head' meaning leaderless or without discipline. ‘Irregulars' in the Ottoman army, they hailed from lands across the Ottoman empire, from Egypt to the Balkans. The strain on the Ottoman feudal system caused by the Empire's wide expanse, required heavier reliance on these irregular soldiers. Of particular service to the Ottoman empire were bashi-bazouks recruited from Albania and the Circassia. These soldiers were known as Arnauts, whose ethnonym derived from the Greek term Arvanites, and it is they who pervade the work of Jean-Léon Gérôme. Arnauts were first used in a serious military context by Muhammad Ali Pasha, today largely regarded as the founder of modern Egypt. Initially serving as Ottoman governor of Egypt from 1805 to 1848, Muhammad Ali needed to consolidate his grip on power following the French withdrawal of Egypt by ousting the Mamelukes, the former ruling oligarchy…." link link link Armand |
| Col Durnford | 08 Nov 2025 1:58 p.m. PST |
Gotta love Bashi-bazouks. I have 2 mounted and 1 foot unit in my Egyptian colonial army. |
| Grelber | 09 Nov 2025 10:13 a.m. PST |
I like the bashi-bazouks and think they are not treated well by wargames rules writers. They certainly weren't regulars, and I'm not at all sure I'd want to invite one over to my house, but they were willing to fight, according to Billy Hicks which is more than can be said for a lot of the troops the Egyptians used to lose the Sudan to the Mahdi. I have a couple units of them, too. Grelber |
| Frederick | 09 Nov 2025 2:47 p.m. PST |
Not to mention being able to carry off anything that wasn't nailed down! |
| Tango01 | 09 Nov 2025 3:49 p.m. PST |
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checks out some 10/15mm railroad tracks for wargaming.
