contemporary accounts of the Turkish army in the 14th and 15th
centuries, when it reached the height of its most characteristic
development, are Bertrandon de la Brocquiere, equerry to Philip the
Good, duke of Burgundy, and Francesco Filelfo of Tolentino. Bertrandon,
a professional soldier, visited Palestine in 1432, and returned overland
in 1433, traversing the Balkan Peninsula by the main trade-route from
Constantinople to Belgrade. He wrote an account of his journey for
Philip: see _Early Travels in Palestine_, translated and edited by T.
Wright (London, 1848). Filelfo served as secretary to the Venetian
_baylo_ at Constantinople, and recorded his observations in a series of
letters (see FILELFO). Both ascribe the military superiority of the
Turks over the nations of western Europe to two facts--firstly to their
possession of a well-organized standing army, an institution unknown
elsewhere, and secondly to their far stricter discipline, itself a
result of their military organization and of the moral training afforded
by Islam.
The regular troops comprised the Janissaries (q.v.), a corps of
infantry recruited from captured sons of Christians, and trained to
form a privileged caste of scientific soldiers and religious fanatics;
and the Spahis, a body of cavalry similarly recruited, and armed with
scimitar, mace and bow. Celibacy was one of the rules of this standing
army, which, in its semi-monastic ideals and constitution, resembled
the knightly orders of the West in their prime. The Janissaries
numbered about 12,000, the Spahis about 8000. A second army of some
40,000 men, mostly mounted and armed like the Spahis, was feudal in
character, and consisted chiefly of the personal followers of the
Moslem nobility; more than half its numbers were recruited in Europe.
This force of 60,000 trained soldiers was accompanied by a horde of
irregulars, levied chiefly among the barbarous mountaineers of the
Balkans and Asia Minor, and very ill-armed and ill-disciplined. Their
numbers may be estimated at 140,000, for Bertrandon gives 200,000 as
the total of the Turkish forces. Many 15th and 16th century writers
give a smaller total, but refer only to the standing and feudal
armies. Others place the total higher. Laonicus Chalcocondylas in his
_Turcica Historia_ states that at the siege of Constantinople in 1453
the sultan commanded 400,000 troops, but most other eye-witnesses of
the siege give a total varying from 150,000 to 300,000. Many Christian
soldiers of fortune enlisted with the Turks as artillerists or
engineers, and supplied them at Constantinople with the most powerful
cannon of the age. Other Christians were compelled to serve as
engineers or in the ranks. As late as 1683 a corps of Wallachians was
forced to join the Turkish army before Vienna, and entrusted with the
task of bridging the Danube. But in the 18th and early 19th centuries
the introduction of Christians tended to weaken the _moral_ of the
army already sapped by defeat; it was found impossible to maintain the
discipline of the Janissaries, whose privileges had become a source of
danger; and the feudal nobility became more and more independent of
the sultan's authority. These three causes contributed to make
reorganization inevitable.
The destruction of the Janissaries in 1826 marked the close of the
history of the old Turkish army; already the re-creation of the
service on the accepted models of western Europe had been commenced.
This was still incomplete when the new force was called upon to meet
the Russians in 1828, and though the army displayed its accustomed
bravery, its defective organization and other causes led to its
defeat. Since then the army has been almost as constantly on active
service as the British; the Crimean War, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877
and the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 witnessed the employment of a large
proportion of the sultan's available forces, while innumerable local
revolts in different parts of the empire called for great exertions,
and often for fierce fighting on the part of the troops locally in
garrison and those sent up from the nearest provinces.
UNITED STATES ARMY