Note 376 — Chapter IV · THE RULING INSTITUTION: AS AN ARMY

Several contemporary estimates of the complete army may be compared: Marini Sanuto, under date of October 26, 1529, gives an estimate of the Turkish army then before Vienna as containing 305,200 men. The same writer (Diarii, lvi) gives three or four estimates from the year 1532, when Suleiman went forth on the Güns campaign: on p. 768, Suleiman’s army is said to contain 500,000 men; on p. 870 is found an account of Suleiman’s entry into Belgrade, in which 170,300 men are mentioned, besides “adventurers” and “many others”; on the same page is estimated the number with which the Sultan was to leave Belgrade, which sums up 284,500, and does not seem to account fully for the territorial armies; on p. 894 he summarizes a despatch from Ratisbon, dated August 23, 1532, which relates the testimony of three Turkish prisoners to the effect that the Turkish army numbers over 300,000 persons, but that not over 80,000 are good fighting men. Postel, iii. 38, estimates the enrolled army at 218,000, and the whole at 500,000. He states elsewhere that Suleiman took 500,000 men with him on the Persian expedition of 1534-35. Chesneau’s impression (pp. 106-108) of Suleiman’s army, when he saw it near Aleppo in the spring of 1549, was that it occupied 80,000 to 100,000 tents, on a plain eight to ten miles long; that it contained 300,000 to 400,000 fighting men, of whom all but 10,000 or 12,000 Janissaries were on horseback; and that the total number of persons assembled was about a million. Chesneau’s chief, the ambassador D’Aramont, writing concerning the same expedition from Esdron (Erzerum?) a few weeks later, speaks of “the mass of his (Suleiman’s) army, which is by common estimate of 300,000 men, as may be judged from the extent of the camp, which extends ten or twelve miles in length, and contains at least 60,000 tents or more, with such order and obedience that, considering the great multitude, it is almost unbelievable” (Charrière, ii. 68). In the year 1558, A. Barbarigo, 150-151, estimated the cavalry alone at more than 300,000. Twenty-six years after Suleiman’s death Bernardo, 331, says that the paid troops, in which he includes the sultan’s household and the feudal army, amounted to 250,000 men. Zinkeisen, iii. 199, estimates the extreme total of the sultan’s cavalry alone at 565,000. Knolles (ed. 1687, p. 984), writing about 1603, says that the sultan could always gather 150,000 Timariotes for a great expedition. He says that the Timariotes numbered in all 719,000 fighting men, of whom 257,000 were in Europe and 426,000 in Asia. The last two estimates are incredibly large.