JANISSARIES IN ALGIERS – PART 6

(This post is a continuation of Janissaries in Algiers – Parts 1 – 5. If you haven’t done so already, it’s best to read those posts before continuing on here.)

By the late 1620s, the janissaries had been in Algiers for the better part of a century. This had given them time to become a permanent part of the city’s population.

Janissaries were not supposed to marry. If they did, they lost their place in the janissary barracks—that is, they lost their free housing—and their daily bread ration was stopped. Despite these penalties, however, a significant number of janissaries married local Algerine woman—or at least slept with them and got the women pregnant.

After a hundred years of this, there were quite a few sons of janissaries in Algiers. They were collectively referred to as Kouloughlis—a term derived from the Turkish word kuloğlu, from kul, meaning “servant” or “slave” (one of the terms for the janissaries was Kapıkulu Ocağı, meaning “servants (or slaves) of the hearth” in Turkish) and oğlu meaning “son of.”

By the 1620s, the Kouloughlis were frustrated young (and not so young) men.

The Algerine janissaries no longer filled their ranks through the devşirme system, and they were a lot looser about whom they permitted to become yoldachs. But they rejected their own sons. Beyond this, the Kouloughlis were treated as second-class citizens in general, and while some of them managed to gain entry into the officer class of the janissaries, most found themselves unable to get prominent positions in either Algiers’ Ottoman/Turkish government or in the city’s massive corsair enterprise.

Exactly why the janissaries treated their own children this way is unclear, though it may have been a sort of self-fulfilling prophesy situation: the more the Kouloughlis were cut out of positions of influence and power, the more dissatisfied they grew and the more they agitated and plotted; but the more the Kouloughlis agitated and plotted, the more suspicious the janissary leaders became of them and so cut them out of positions of influence and power.

Whatever the cause,  the Kouloughlis felt this ostracization to be an outrageous affront. Algiers was their city. They were sons of the janissary elite. They believed they deserved more—much more. Their outrage grew so strong (and their chances of ever improving their position in the city’s hierarchical power structure were so dismal) that they decided desperate measures were call for.

They moved from simple agitation to planning an actual coup.

Here is a brief description of how it began: “One day, some of the Kouloughlis were seated together, drinking wine. One of them said, ‘We have now become as powerful as the Turks themselves. It should be easy for us to bring them down.’” As seems so often to be the case with secret plots hatched in taverns, the Kouloughlis were overheard: “One of the Turks heard this and warned the members of the Divan, urging them to be on guard, since the Kouloughlis wanted to overthrow them.”

The janissaries on the Divan reacted to this news—which proved all their worst suspicions to be well founded—by devising a political solution. Here is an explanation of the situation by a European observer:

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The Turks [the members of the Divan] hearing that the Kouloughlis, their own children, plotted against them, banished all of them who participated in the Divan as Bulla Bashees [Bölükbaşıs] and Odds Bashees [Odabaşıs]. The Turks performed this with great subtlety. No word passed in the city of their suspicions, nor did the Kouloughlis have any idea that their so secret plots had been discovered. All rested private until the next meeting of the Divan, when sixty of the most prominent Kouloughlis were banished from the city. Strange it is that the Turks should banish a faction more powerful than themselves in number, in friends, and in estates, and of equal dignities, all speaking one language; yet those banished departed at the Turks’ pleasure, without demanding the cause of their offence.

The conniving Turks first ordained that the banished Kouloughlis need go no further than to Bugea, the next port town to the east of Algiers. But the commissions given the janissary Captains to whose charge the banished Kouloughlis were committed, contained other orders: to transport the Kouloughlis to Tunis, much further distant.

After this, all rested without clamor until the next meeting of the Divan was called, during which two hundred more Kouloughlis were banished. At this, the citizens and natives of the city murmured, but dare not make complaints of their griefs. They, however, neglected their customary course of trade. The Turks by proclamation commanded all men to open their shops, to buy and to sell, and not to have any misapprehensions regarding their intents or doings, past or to come, betwixt them and their children, for such things were merely differences amongst themselves. They also gave hopes to the banished that in a short time they would be recalled to Algiers and restored to their former dignities.

At the third meeting of the Divan, five hundred more Kouloughlis were banished, and at the next meeting, all the rest. In total, 1,574 men, chiefest in the city for esteem, in that they were descended from the ancient Turks who conquered that country, were sent away.

During this time, no word reached Algiers about how the banished Kouloughlis were being transported to far-distant Tunis rather than Bugea. By the time the truth came out, the Kouloughlis realized that all hopes of returning in a fair way to their city had been dashed.

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By this point, not only had the Kouloughlis been outmaneuvered and ejected from Algiers, but their property had also been confiscated:

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The Divan banished all the Kouloughlis from the city. The Kouloughlis and their women and children, except for some women who chose to stay behind, were driven out by the Turks to the city of Tunis, 100 miles away. The Turks confiscated all of the banished Kollórar’s wealth, their cattle and sheep, and all their lands.

This news reached the Kouloughlis in Tunis, and some of them traveled by road to Algiers to see for themselves if the Turks had indeed taken everything that once was theirs and placed new masters in their fields. Seeing this to be true, the Kouloughlis then killed and injured many Christina slaves who worked these fields. Word of this spread throughout Algiers. The Turks sent soldiers to kill the Kouloughlis and bring back their heads. The soldiers found a few of the Kouloughlis and killed them and then returned, exhibiting twenty-four severed heads and claiming that all were from the Kouloughlis. But the rumor was that some of the heads belonged to their own men.

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The stage was now set for a major confrontation between the Kouloughlis and the Divan—between the sons and the fathers.

To see how this confrontation played out, go to the next post here in this blog.

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For those who may be interested…

The first quotation (about the Kouloughlis drunkenly planning their coup) and the third one (about the Kouloughlis reprisal raid and the twenty-four severed heads) come from Chapter XXXIII of Björn Jónsson’s, Tyrkjaráns-Saga, (The Turkish Raid Saga), a book written (in Icelandic) in 1643.

The second quotation (about the Divan’s Machiavellian handling of the Kouloughli situation) comes from the first chapter of Francis Knight’s A Relation of Seven Years Slavery Under the Turks Of Algiers, Suffered by an English Captive Merchant, a book first published in 1640.