Whatever Happened to the Janissaries? Mobilization for the 1768-1774 Russo-Ottoman War

Abstract

While most Ottoman historians would acknowledge warfare as an implicit or explicit part of the Ottoman modus operandi, no studies of a majority of the Ottoman military campaigns exist, exceptions being those of Rhoads Murphey and Caroline Finkel for the post-Suleymanic period. What follows is a preliminary exploration of the mobilization practices of the 1768–74 Russo-Ottoman War, part of a larger study in progress on the nature and impact of that war on Ottoman society of the period. For the Ottomans, like their European counterparts, found the costs of war in the eighteenth century outstripping revenue, and the results of such warfare devastating, disappointing and inconclusive. Ottoman historians have long asked what became of the janissaries after 1700. The question might be better framed as who or what replaced them, how they were recruited and how the central government viewed them. One of the more interesting views on state formation in the early modern European world interprets it as a response to endemic internal violence, an increasingly costly spiral of control of the military and the technology required to make it efficient. Some western historians see state formation as the struggle over ancient territorial rights, viewing the rise of local leaders and aristocracies as directly related to the management of military manpower for and/or against the state. Others construct models to account for the rise of bureaucracies and tax systems as a direct result of the need to finance violence, considering success or failure in harnessing and financing the military as the sole imperative of state for-