Auspicious Incident

Auspicious Incident a bloody repression during which thousands of Istanbul’s Janissaries were massacred and their barracks demolished. It was the forced disbandment of the centuries-old Janissary corps by Sultan Mahmud II on 15 June 1826. The so-called Auspicious Incident of 1826 was a true massacre, a bloody annihilation of thousands of men who were literally blasted away by the forces of modernism.

The Janissaries were first created by the Ottoman Sultans in the late 14th century and the creation of the Janissary Corps in the fourteenth century represented the establishment of one of the first standing armies in Europe.

The Janissaries boasted, and not without considerable cause, that they never turned their backs upon an enemy. Indeed, they passed from victory to victory, transforming a small frontier principality into the last great medieval Islamic empire. The supreme prowess and discipline of the Janissaries allowed them to become increasingly powerful in the palace. From the reign of Bayezid II (1481–1512), they regularly required sultans to provide extra pay in exchange for the support of the corps.

According to historian, Janissaries had begun to present a serious threat to the Empire. On the battlefield they were gaining a reputation among the modern foreign armies for ineptitude and even cowardice under arms and in the capital, they came to be a dominant power and a focus of sedition.

One of Sultan Mahmud II’s major goals for his reign was to modernize and westernize the Ottoman Empire, which was bad news for historical relics like the Janissaries. On learning of the formation of new, Westernized troops, the Janissaries revolted. After Mahmud II received news of the Janissary rebellion, he ordered his barge launched and immediately started for the palace.

Sultan Mahmud II declared war on the rebels and, on their refusal to surrender, had cannon fire directed on their barracks. The Sultan ordered criers sent to all corners of the Istanbul, Galata, Pera and Scutari to encourage all Muslims to join him in defeating the Janissary rebels.

Driven back from the barracks’ gate, the Janissaries broke rank and fled. Gunfire from the Sultan’s troops cut down most of the fleeing rebels, but some managed to reach the temporary safety of their immense wooden barracks. Most of the Janissaries were killed, and those who were taken prisoner were executed.

With a military action that lasted less than six hours from start to finish, the Ottoman Porte destroyed the Janissaries.
Auspicious Incident

Janissaries of Ottoman empire

As the Ottomans entered the 1300s, their military began a transition to an infantry based standing army led by a caste of professional officers and centered on specialized corps characterized by standardization, of which the Janissaries were the most well-known. It is a slave soldiers in its armies.

The Janissaries were first formed under Orhan, but like the early Muslim military slaves they were prisoners taken during war and moreover they functioned as a bodyguard for Orhan rather than as a normal military unit.

Ottoman units captured countless slaves and, for the first time, a special tax called the ‘‘Pencik’’ (one out of five) was introduced to take one out of every five slaves for the central treasury. These slaves were trained and organized under the structure of a new corps known as the Janissaries.

Orhan’s son Murad I reorganized the Janissaries into a larger force (though still numbering only about one thousand) and changed the method of recruitment; now the populations of newly conquered territories would combed by Ottoman authorities to locate strong and intelligent young boys who would be taken from their families, enslaved, and trained as Janissaries.

When they come into the palace for education as a child they had also been learning many other jobs like bread making, coppersmith, boot maker, tentmaker and jewelry etc.. among the other servant soldiers. Some of them were also being sent to the Turkish families’ homes in Anatolia to learn Turkish and a craft. Only physically fit, sturdy and young slaves were selected, and a special training center, the ‘‘Acemi Ocagı’’ (hearth of the inexperienced), was founded in Gallipoli in order to train them for at least two years according to the needs of the army.

They eventually rose to high positions within the government and formed the heart of the Ottoman army.

As the Ottoman state became increasingly unable to pay the Janissaries’ wages in cash, they lost their role as a professional fighting force, exploiting their status as organic elements of urban life to engage in economic activities as tradesmen and artisans.

Despite their origins as loyal slaves in the early centuries of the empire, the Janissaries had now become a formidable urban, civilian, and commercial corporate interest group, with enough reach and power in imperial politics to initiate regicides.

The Janissaries finally met their end at the wiles of a sultan in the 19th century.
Janissaries of Ottoman empire

The Ottoman Empire

The Ottomans descended from the mass of nomads who roamed in the area of the Altai Mountains, east of the Eurasian steppes and south of the Yenisei River and Lake Baikal in lands that today are part of Outer Mongolia.

The Ottomans, named after the founder of the dynasty, Osman (d. 1324), were one of many Turkic Anatolian emirates or principalities that emerged in the late 13th-century power vacuum caused by the Mongols’ obliteration of the empire of the Rum Seljuks.

Most important in terms of the influence over the Ottomans were the Seljuks, a group of Oguz warriors that apparently entered the Middle East in the tenth century. The Seljuks rose originally as mercenary guards in the service of the Karahanids.

Later they acted to defend towns in Horasan and Transoxania against nomads and military adventurers. And, finally, they assumed the role of protectors of the later Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad against threats to their dominions. In 1055 the real founder of the Seljuk dynasty, Tugrul Bey, forced the Abbasid caliph to make him protector of orthodox Islam and to recognize him as sultan, or temporal ruler.

The Ottoman state had emerged, c. 1300, in western Asia Minor, not far from the modern city of Istanbul. In a steady process of territorial accretion, this state had expanded both west and east, defeating Byzantine, Serb, and Bulgarian kingdoms as well as Turkish nomadic principalities in Anatolia (Asia Minor) and the Mamluk sultanate based in Egypt. The expansion continued until the late 17th century, the last significant conquest being Podolia (at that time, a province of Poland-Lithuania, nowpart of the Ukraine) in 1672. Expansion turned a small chiefdom of semi-nomadic pastoralists into a bureaucratic world-empire extended over three continents.

By the seventeenth century it held vast lands in west Asia, North Africa, and southeast Europe. In 1529 and again in 1683, Ottoman armies pressed to conquer Habsburg Vienna.

During the last decades before it disappeared in 1922 the Ottoman Empire existed without the European provinces that for centuries had been its heart and soul. In its last days, but only then, it fairly could be called an Asiatic, Middle Eastern power.
The Ottoman Empire