Of their soldiers the most formidable were the Janissaries. The policy of the earlier Sultans had demanded a tribute of boys from their Christian subjects. These children, early converts to Islam, were brought up with no home but the camp, no occupation but war; and, under the title of Janissaries, or the New Troops, were alternately the servants and the masters of the Ottoman Sultans. The strength of the Christians was drained, the strength of the Ottoman armies multiplied, and the fields of Paradise replenished at once, in the judgment of pious Mussulmans, by this policy. At this time the ranks of the Janissaries were not solely filled by this levy, but it has been computed that 500,000 Christian boys may have become instruments for the subjugation of Christendom, from the first institution of the tax in the fourteenth century down to the final levy made in 1675. Our commiseration for the Christian parents may be mitigated by the consideration that to sell their children into slavery, uncompelled, was a not unknown practice among the subjects of the Eastern Emperors, before the Mohammedan conquest.
These Janissaries formed a disciplined body of regular infantry. In the seventeenth century the Turks clung to the sabre, the musket, and even bows and arrows, as their arms, neglecting the pike, "the queen of infantry weapons," as Montecuculi calls it, just as afterwards they neglected the bayonet. But in the use of their arms every man of the Janissaries was a trained expert. The Turkish horsemen were famed for their rapidity of action, being generally more lightly armed and better mounted than the Germans or Poles. The Spahis, or royal horseguards, were the flower of the cavalry. The feudal levy from lands held by military tenure, swelled the numbers of their armies, and every province wrested from the Christians provided more fiefs to support fresh families of soldiers. Thus the children and lands of the conquered furnished the means for new conquests. Light troops, who were expected to live by plunder, spread far and wide before an advancing Ottoman host, eating up the country, destroying the inhabitants, and diverting the attention of the enemy. The Ottoman artillery was numerous, and the siege pieces of great calibre. Auxiliaries, such as the Tartars of the Crimea, the troops of Moldavian, Wallachian, Transylvanian, and even Hungarian princes, made a formidable addition to their forces. These armies lay, a terror to the inhabitants, a constant anxiety to the rulers, upon the frontiers of Germany and of Poland;--a black storm of war, ever ready to break in destructive energy upon them.