4 ms·

> So, boys 8-10 years old, forcefully taken away from their Christian families by the Muslims to be the Muslim soldiers eventually "get influential" to "demand

> So, boys 8-10 years old, forcefully taken away from their Christian families by the Muslims to be the Muslim soldiers eventually "get influential" to "demand higher wages" should somehow make the fact that they were taken away "as a tax" less bad? You are still generalizing whole centuries like it's all the same, and nothing ever changed. Even tho I already presented you with plenty of evidence to the contrary, even the fact that the devşirme system for recruitment was largely abandoned as a recruitment method by the middle of the seventeenth century. Why you are doing that? I really don't know. At this point, it rather feels like you've just got some ax to grind with Islam, completely independent of the actual history of the Janissaries. As a Slav myself, I think their story has a tad bit more to learn from than just "Evil Muslims stealing Christian children". It also tells the story how these "children", many of which at that point have lived for generations in the Empire, then proceeded to "destroy the enemy from within". I'm also pretty sure the Ottoman Empire wasn't the only faction at that time that used "slave soldiers" or forced conscripts. At the end of the 18th, the British empire was the single biggest purchaser of slaves to be used as soldiers [0]. Yet I don't know about any units out of that with a similarly complex history, and influence, like the Janissaries, ended up having on the Ottoman Empire. If you know any, I'd be glad if you could share. [0] https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/slaves-red-coats-west-india-regiment https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/slaves-red-coats-west-india-re...

nec4b 8y ago
Please don't use thought killing cliches, like that he has an axe to grind with islam, because it is not PC to criticize Islam these days. I didn't read anything anti islam in his post. In my opinion he is strongly against you normalizing a kind of slavery.
- freeflight 8y ago
  > I didn't read anything anti islam in his post. The Janissaries had been around for nearly 5 centuries, 463 years of history. Yet he chooses to only talk about the devşirme system and only that. Completely ignoring that at one point it got phased out, and over the course of these nearly 5 centuries, the Janissaries evolved from "slave soldiers" to become the most influential political caste in the Ottoman Empire, dominating the Ottoman government. We are talking about people who, at that point, already lived in the Ottoman Empire for generations, not 8-year-olds who just got abducted from their families. > In my opinion he is strongly against you normalizing a kind of slavery. So much about "thought killing cliches". Nowhere did I normalize anything, I'm merely pointing out how these practices changed, turning the Janissaries into something completely different than slaves. While acqq keeps on insisting all the Janissaries had been forced converts, always living in servitude, which is factually wrong, as recruiting practices heavily changed over the centuries. So all that remains from his comments is pretty much just an appeal to emotion along the lines of "They abducted Christian children!" ignoring pretty much all other content from the submission, and every other angle on the Janissaries, like that's their most defining factor, but it isn't.
  - nec4b 8y ago
    I'm sorry i don't understand in what way your reply where your point is that things changed through time in any way invalidates what acqq and I wrote. Maybe we are just talking past each other and we don't see it. I also don't get it why are you hang up on the fact that the ottomans were muslim and the children were christian, it could be any other combination of religions or other ideologies and would still be very bad.
acqq 8y ago
> As a Slav myself And in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18690617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18690617 > As a German, I have to ask By the occasion, a Slav, or a German, interesting tendency in your replies, to point in them to what "you are." Still, "what you are" is not an argument for anything you write, but, if given honestly, can give the information about the possible biases. But even the known biases should not make the real arguments less worthy. One of my biases is: I am an atheist, and I'm particularly sensitive for all religions trying to present their worst acts as something "nice." But I've studied a lot of details from a lot of religions. Having said that, even the "worst" Islamists today consider the "blood tax" performed by the Ottomans as being against the very Sharia law, which does allow killing infidels, chopping the heads and limbs, and considering everyone by a Muslim male less worthy, but nevertheless doesn't allow forcing the "dhimmis" to serve military and even less enslaving them more than they are already dependent to the owner of the land on which they work (the dependency in the feudal system, in our parlance): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhimmi#The_dhimma_contract_and_sharia_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhimmi#The_dhimma_contract_and... Whereas the Ottoman military regularly went to the children enslavement "collecting" expeditions, year after year, for centuries, creating the military base which counted in at least some tens of thousands of soldiers. And these once "collected" fought the wars and killed for the Empire, including the very people from which they originated. In short, what the Ottomans did for centuries was even worse than what the Islamists of today would accept to be lawful.

nec4b 8y ago

Please don't use thought killing cliches, like that he has an axe to grind with islam, because it is not PC to criticize Islam these days. I didn't read anything anti islam in his post. In my opinion he is strongly against you normalizing a kind of slavery.

freeflight 8y ago
> I didn't read anything anti islam in his post. The Janissaries had been around for nearly 5 centuries, 463 years of history. Yet he chooses to only talk about the devşirme system and only that. Completely ignoring that at one point it got phased out, and over the course of these nearly 5 centuries, the Janissaries evolved from "slave soldiers" to become the most influential political caste in the Ottoman Empire, dominating the Ottoman government. We are talking about people who, at that point, already lived in the Ottoman Empire for generations, not 8-year-olds who just got abducted from their families. > In my opinion he is strongly against you normalizing a kind of slavery. So much about "thought killing cliches". Nowhere did I normalize anything, I'm merely pointing out how these practices changed, turning the Janissaries into something completely different than slaves. While acqq keeps on insisting all the Janissaries had been forced converts, always living in servitude, which is factually wrong, as recruiting practices heavily changed over the centuries. So all that remains from his comments is pretty much just an appeal to emotion along the lines of "They abducted Christian children!" ignoring pretty much all other content from the submission, and every other angle on the Janissaries, like that's their most defining factor, but it isn't.
- nec4b 8y ago
  I'm sorry i don't understand in what way your reply where your point is that things changed through time in any way invalidates what acqq and I wrote. Maybe we are just talking past each other and we don't see it. I also don't get it why are you hang up on the fact that the ottomans were muslim and the children were christian, it could be any other combination of religions or other ideologies and would still be very bad.

acqq 8y ago

> As a Slav myself And in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18690617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18690617 > As a German, I have to ask By the occasion, a Slav, or a German, interesting tendency in your replies, to point in them to what "you are." Still, "what you are" is not an argument for anything you write, but, if given honestly, can give the information about the possible biases. But even the known biases should not make the real arguments less worthy. One of my biases is: I am an atheist, and I'm particularly sensitive for all religions trying to present their worst acts as something "nice." But I've studied a lot of details from a lot of religions. Having said that, even the "worst" Islamists today consider the "blood tax" performed by the Ottomans as being against the very Sharia law, which does allow killing infidels, chopping the heads and limbs, and considering everyone by a Muslim male less worthy, but nevertheless doesn't allow forcing the "dhimmis" to serve military and even less enslaving them more than they are already dependent to the owner of the land on which they work (the dependency in the feudal system, in our parlance): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhimmi#The_dhimma_contract_and_sharia_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhimmi#The_dhimma_contract_and... Whereas the Ottoman military regularly went to the children enslavement "collecting" expeditions, year after year, for centuries, creating the military base which counted in at least some tens of thousands of soldiers. And these once "collected" fought the wars and killed for the Empire, including the very people from which they originated. In short, what the Ottomans did for centuries was even worse than what the Islamists of today would accept to be lawful.