"Peasant" Janissaries?(Section III REGIONAL Issues) (Essay‪)‬

In the second volume of the monumental sequence "Osmanli Kanunnameleri", compiled by A. Akgunduz, there is an interesting law (Devsirme Kanunnamesi) concerning recruitment of Christians for the needs of the Janissary Corps during the reign of Sultan Bayazid II (1481-1512). Among the various provisions about the procedure for recruiting and sending young men to the Ottoman Capital, the following passage attracts attention: Significant here is the role assigned to the voynuks: as trusted agents of the Ottoman authorities in the Balkan provinces, they had to guard the Christian youths, recruited to become Janissaries, on the long way from their homelands to Istanbul. Since the law mentions the voynuks, it is clear that the Ottoman authorities deem them most suitable among those for the job. We are thus faced with an apparently strange situation: both voynuks and the boys taken under the Janissary levy originate from the Christian peoples, subjects of the Sultan. It is even known that the voynuk corps consisted mainly of Bulgarians (2) and therefore Bulgarian historiography offers some generalisations of the following kind: voynuks are "a stratum of the Bulgarian society with strong freedom-loving traditions ..., with a spirit of liberty and solidarity in the struggle against the Ottoman feudal order's injustice, with their own place in the great centuries-old process of preservation and manifestation of the Bulgarian national self-conscience in the fifteenth--seventeenth centuries". (3)