His son and successor, Orkhan, inherited the same commanding qualities and the kind of ability required to organize a new state.
By one terrible stroke of genius he created the most effective military organization which has ever been known--one which, from that time down to our own century, was the terror of Europe and of Asia.
He conceived the idea of exterminating Christianity by means of Christians.
The plan was, every year to enroll 1,000 Christian boys taken from the Christian families captured in war. Only the finest were selected. They must be very young, so that they would have no ties to remember, no human sympathies to enfeeble them.
These boys were placed under a rigid military training, with rich rewards and indulgences for zeal and aptitude, and terrible disgrace and punishment for the reverse.
They were familiarized with awful atrocities, their sensibilities destroyed, and at the same time intelligence rendered acute by severe intellectual training.
In this way was developed the strongest, the fiercest military corps, the most terrible instrument for the use of despotic power, ever created by subtle craft or employed by fanaticism.
They were called the Janizaries. And the very name struck a terror which almost conquered in advance.
When Orkhan led his first 1,000 boys to a dervish priest to bless them, he flung the sleeve of his robe over the head of one of them, and asked that the great God of Mahomet would make "their arrows keen, and their swords deadly."
Thereafter, the dervish cap which they wore had always a long sleeve-like pendant behind. And the prayer of the dervish was certainly answered.
One thousand boys recruited these ranks every year; and as the years rolled into centuries, the organization became a more and more terrible instrument of vengeance in the hands of the Sultan, whose body-guard it formed.
The line of Sultans following Othman was characterized by intellectual force of a high order. There was a swelling and irresistible tide of conquest which moved not only toward Europe, but into Asia. One tribe after another was absorbed, until all the strongholds of the old Saracen Empire were in the hands of the Sultans, who replaced the Caliphs; and like them were not alone temporal rulers, but the representatives of Mahomet himself.
