Note 262 — Chapter III · MURAD THE OSMANLIS LAY THE FOUNDATIONS OF AN EMPIRE IN EUROPE

Col. Djevad bey, p. 251, says that Anatolian Christians were exempt to give time to recuperate ‘after the exhausting struggles of generations’. But exhausting struggles had been no less frequent and no less severe in the Balkan peninsula. Gibbon’s suggestion, that the levies were made in Europe because Moslem and Christian Anatolians were not apt for war, shows how completely the great English historian missed the raison d’être of the janissaries.