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By Root 1084 0

of their boots—red, yellow, or black. A high-ranking janissary wore a bird-of-paradise plume curving down his back as far as his knees. The Corps emblem was a kettle, and the Chief of Janissaries was titled Head Soup-Distributor. Each man wore in his cap a spoon in a brass socket. Every Friday a large delegation of janissaries came to the second court of the Seraglio, just inside the Executioner’s Gate, to get their weekly rice allowance, and if they were disgruntled about anything they would turn their kettles upside down and beat on them with their spoons, a warning to those in the inner palace that somebody’s head was wanted.

Janissaries were uneducated except in violence and were fanatically conservative. In 1763, when Lord Baltimore passed through Constantinople, he observed that the Corps was still carrying bows and arrows, sabers and lances, having never got used to firearms. Sultan Selim III, in 1807, was dethroned and murdered during a janissary revolt because he had attempted some reforms, among them the introduction of a printing press into Turkey. Turks had been resisting the printing press ever since it had been invented on the grounds that if the scriptures were printed they wouldn’t be scriptures anymore.

It is hardly surprising that the Sultan, the Sublime Turk, at the top of this peculiar political structure, was always eccentric, frequently blood-thirsty, and sometimes totally out of his mind. From his solid-gold cradle on, he was the center of lethal intrigue. While he was heir apparent he was in continual danger of being murdered by his younger brothers, who had everything to gain by his death, since the law of the land, the Law of Fratricide, required that when an heir apparent succeeded to the throne he must destroy all his brothers so that there could be no excuse for civil war. Another curious law, the Law of Succession, was borrowed by medieval Turks from the House of Genghis Khan in the warlike days when a Sultan was apt to be killed in battle while still young, leaving only a child heir. This law provided that the inheritance must go first to the eldest member of the royal family and then, on his death, back again to the direct heir. Thus a living brother of the Sultan took precedence over the Sultan’s son.

When Mohammed III came to the throne in 1595 he ordered the immediate destruction of his nineteen brothers. As these were all under the age of eleven and had not yet been circumcised, the executioners first circumcised and then strangled them. One child was eating chestnuts when his murderers found him and begged to be allowed to finish them, but his request was not granted. It was unlawful to spill royal blood, so the business was done by strangulation, usually by mutes, with a silken bowstring.

Ahmed I, the son of Mohammed III, was the first Sultan to break the Law of Fratricide. He refused to eliminate his brother Mustafa because Mustafa was half-witted, and all half-wits are, according to the Koran, especially beloved of Allah. Instead of killing him, Ahmed had him shut up in a small, two-story building in the inner regions of the harem, which came to be known as the Cage. When Ahmed died in 1617, Mustafa, under the Law of Succession, inherited the throne. But when it became clear that he was not up to functioning as Sultan, he was put back in the Cage and Ahmed’s fourteen-year-old son Osman was enthroned in his place. At once all the civil disorder broke out that the Law of Fratricide had been designed to prevent. The janissaries overturned their kettles, and for six years there was a terrible struggle between factions for Mustafa and factions for Osman. Before order was restored both of them had been murdered.

The next Sultan, Murad IV, who came to the throne at twelve, put things to rights by liquidating four thousand fractious janissaries and closing the coffeehouses, which had become nests of spies and plotters. Prohibition, already a church and state law, he emphasized by pouring boiling lead down the throats of drinkers. He also, for pleasure, used to cut an ass in two with