Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Armour Plates" to "Arundel, Earls of"

contemporary accounts of the Turkish army in the 14th and 15th centuries, when it reached the height of its most characteristic development, are Bertrandon de la Brocquiere, equerry to Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy, and Francesco Filelfo of Tolentino. Bertrandon, a professional soldier, visited Palestine in 1432, and returned overland in 1433, traversing the Balkan Peninsula by the main trade-route from Constantinople to Belgrade. He wrote an account of his journey for Philip: see _Early Travels in Palestine_, translated and edited by T. Wright (London, 1848). Filelfo served as secretary to the Venetian _baylo_ at Constantinople, and recorded his observations in a series of letters (see FILELFO). Both ascribe the military superiority of the Turks over the nations of western Europe to two facts--firstly to their possession of a well-organized standing army, an institution unknown elsewhere, and secondly to their far stricter discipline, itself a result of their military organization and of the moral training afforded by Islam. The regular troops comprised the Janissaries (q.v.), a corps of infantry recruited from captured sons of Christians, and trained to form a privileged caste of scientific soldiers and religious fanatics; and the Spahis, a body of cavalry similarly recruited, and armed with scimitar, mace and bow. Celibacy was one of the rules of this standing army, which, in its semi-monastic ideals and constitution, resembled the knightly orders of the West in their prime. The Janissaries numbered about 12,000, the Spahis about 8000. A second army of some 40,000 men, mostly mounted and armed like the Spahis, was feudal in character, and consisted chiefly of the personal followers of the Moslem nobility; more than half its numbers were recruited in Europe. This force of 60,000 trained soldiers was accompanied by a horde of irregulars, levied chiefly among the barbarous mountaineers of the Balkans and Asia Minor, and very ill-armed and ill-disciplined. Their numbers may be estimated at 140,000, for Bertrandon gives 200,000 as the total of the Turkish forces. Many 15th and 16th century writers give a smaller total, but refer only to the standing and feudal armies. Others place the total higher. Laonicus Chalcocondylas in his _Turcica Historia_ states that at the siege of Constantinople in 1453 the sultan commanded 400,000 troops, but most other eye-witnesses of the siege give a total varying from 150,000 to 300,000. Many Christian soldiers of fortune enlisted with the Turks as artillerists or engineers, and supplied them at Constantinople with the most powerful cannon of the age. Other Christians were compelled to serve as engineers or in the ranks. As late as 1683 a corps of Wallachians was forced to join the Turkish army before Vienna, and entrusted with the task of bridging the Danube. But in the 18th and early 19th centuries the introduction of Christians tended to weaken the _moral_ of the army already sapped by defeat; it was found impossible to maintain the discipline of the Janissaries, whose privileges had become a source of danger; and the feudal nobility became more and more independent of the sultan's authority. These three causes contributed to make reorganization inevitable. The destruction of the Janissaries in 1826 marked the close of the history of the old Turkish army; already the re-creation of the service on the accepted models of western Europe had been commenced. This was still incomplete when the new force was called upon to meet the Russians in 1828, and though the army displayed its accustomed bravery, its defective organization and other causes led to its defeat. Since then the army has been almost as constantly on active service as the British; the Crimean War, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 and the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 witnessed the employment of a large proportion of the sultan's available forces, while innumerable local revolts in different parts of the empire called for great exertions, and often for fierce fighting on the part of the troops locally in garrison and those sent up from the nearest provinces. UNITED STATES ARMY