For nearly 300 years, until the mid-17th century, the Ottoman Empire operated a tribute system known as devshirme—the “collecting.” Army officers would descend on the villages of Anatolia and the Balkans and remove male, Christian children as young as 8. Enslaved, forcibly converted to Islam and discouraged from marriage, the boys would receive rigorous physical training and form the ranks of the Janissaries, an elite corps of soldiers directly serving the Ottoman sultan. A few would rise to positions of power, and thus some families paid bribes to secure entry into the system for their male children. For many other families, however, devshirme was viewed as a catastrophe; they did what they could to resist such brutal seizure, including the arrangement of childhood marriages and even disfigurement. Across Christendom, devshirme was considered perhaps the most notorious manifestation of Ottoman despotism.
A few Christian observers, however, counseled imitation rather than outrage. One was Scipione Ammirato, a 16th-century Florentine historian and servant of the Medici. Ammirato surveyed the Ottomans, then threatening Europe, with a mixture of loathing and awe. He pleaded with the leaders of Christendom to redouble their military efforts against the infidels. Indeed, he urged the creation of “a holy militia” manned by poor, 10-year-old boys taken from their parents and reared in the arts of war. Though ignored by Pope Sixtus V, it was an audacious scheme—in essence, a Catholic corps of Janissaries.
