Note 288 — Chapter IV · THE RULING INSTITUTION: AS AN ARMY

For an example of the persistence of this idea, see Bérard (1909), 12-13: “La Turquie désormais subsiste par le janissaire et doit vivre pour le janissaire d’abord ... depuis la prise de Rhodes (1522) jusqu’à l’apparition de la flotte russe aux Dardanelles (1770), tant vaut le janissaire et tant vaut l’empire.” Professor A. C. Coolidge suggests that the hold which this remarkable organization had upon the imagination of fellow-countrymen as well as of foreigners was in part “due to the fact that in almost all Oriental history good infantrymen have been extremely rare, and the Janissaries were the only good infantrymen in the Ottoman Empire.” It is also true that the Janissaries were that group within the Moslem fold which came least under the taming and subordinating influence of the system; they were a frontier province of Islamic society. When in the seventeenth century they ceased to be drawn directly from the Christian population and became a variety of military aristocracy, not only did they remain in part a fighting infantry, but their original freedom of spirit and action was by no means abandoned.