A Janissary was a slave soldier recruited as a young boy in the Ottoman Empire. They served as the backbone of the Ottoman Army and were also the elite guards of the Sultan himself.
History[]
The Janissaries were the elite personal guard of the sultan as well as the backbone of the Ottoman Army, serving as the almost exclusively-recruited infantry unit of the Ottoman army. The Janissary Corps consisted of slaves, mainly prisoners or Christian converts, who were trained at a young age and brought up with nothing to lose but their lives. Fiercely (sometimes suicidally) loyal to the Sultan, the Janissaries were a political force in their own right, as they were the fists of the government as well as powerful decision-makers. Many times, they opposed reforms, overthrowing Sultan Selim III in 1809, but they were abolished in 1826 to allow further advances in technology.
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