110 ISLAM AT WAR
of the Ottoman army until about 1900. The army had a wide variety of
troops, including the Janissaries, a large body of disciplined infantry, and
a substantial force of highly disciplined and powerful heavy cavalry. An-
other force, the Spahis, or light cavalry, was among the best cavalry ever.
In addition, hordes of conscripted rabble subsisted, if they could, on loot.
Artillery had existed before the time of Suleiman the Magnificent, as had
specialized military engineers.
This reliance on irregular forces was both the greatest weakness and
the primary strength of the Ottoman military system. Some drawbacks are
obvious: the lack of discipline, coordination, and command control of such
an army. A less than obvious problem was that the irregular forces were
tied to the land, and when planting season or the harvest arrived, they
returned to their fields to tend to the business of agriculture.
As time progressed, the Ottoman military traditions became increas-
ingly antiquated and produced fewer and fewer successes. Still, they were
good raw material, and in the right circumstances, Turkish soldiers were
as good as any in the world. At the siege of Acre in 1799, a few hundred
of them held off the elite of Napoleon’s army. British General John Moore,
who was sent to evaluate the Ottoman army in 1801, reached the same
conclusion. However, he reported that under the existing Ottoman admin-
istration the army was “a wild, ungovernable mob.”
This would become apparent again in World War I. In a most unusual
admission of military incompetence, the Ottoman government made Gen-
eral Liman von Sanders, a German general who was head of the German
military mission in Turkey, Turkey’s commander-in-chief. Similarly, Ger-
man Feldmarschal von der Goltz was given supreme command of the
Turkish forces in Mesopotamia.
It was most evident in World War I that the Turks were individually
ferocious soldiers, but the Ottoman army failed on an organizational level.
The Ottomans were utterly incapable of managing the logistics necessary
to maintain an army, be it in the seventeenth century or the twentieth
century. Because of this lack of administrative ability their pre-twentieth
century armies tended to live off the land and were a plague on both their
enemies and their own citizens.
The most famous of the corps of the old Turkish army were the Jan-
issaries. These slave-soldiers were the elite corps of the standing army of
the old Ottoman Empire, of the Sublime Porte. They were first organized
in 1330 and annually received 1,000 twelve-year-old Christian boys from
the Balkans as a slave tribute to fill their ranks. Service in the Janissaries
brought with it great privilege, and parents actually begged to have their
children enrolled, even though they were converted to Islam. The strength