ABSTRACT
Lithgow also asserts, in his refutation of Greek complaints against the Turks, that the periodic devshirme or tithe of male children from the Christian populations of the Balkans had now been entirely abolished by Ahmed I (r. 1603-17), together with the carşs resmi or levy exacted by the Ottoman state on the wedding dowries of Christian women. The devshirme or ‘collection’ was an attempt to tap the manpower of the Balkan Christians for Ottoman state purposes at a time when the subject, non-Turkish population of the empire was almost certainly superior in numbers to the Turks themselves. The boys were selected for service either as Janissary infantrymen or as employees in the palace administration, and though pressure to convert to Islam does not seem to have been much used, these boys usually saw quickly the advantages of becoming Muslims. However, Lithgow’s information that the devshirmes had ceased by his time is almost certainly wrong. Sporadic levies were made throughout the seventeenth century until its closing years, and an attempt may even have been made at the opening of the next century; but by that time, the raison d’être of the devshirme had been destroyed by the intrusion from c. 1550 onwards of free-born Muslims into the swollen ranks of the Janissaries, a military necessity when greater numbers of infantrymen, as compared to cavalrymen, were required in an age of the wider tactical employment of À rearms. Furthermore, the levy on dowries (actually on all dowries, Muslim as well as Christian) continued to be made into the nineteenth century, when it was replaced by a fee payable to qazis or judges.73
