Flying over what was Yugoslavia

When I am writing this entry I am flying over parts of what was Yugoslavia: Bosnia, southern Serbia. Looking through the cloud cover, I can see some desolate hilly countryside. Back about 700 years ago all of this area was under the control of the Turks. Fairly regularly Turkish patrol groups would go into the villages to recruit the best and the brightest of the local Christian boys for service to the sultan. These newly enslaved boys were converted to Islam, brainwashed to obey without question, and given the top military and/or scholarly training of any group of people in the world other than possibly China.

Just about all of any Sultan’s advisers and bodyguards were these formerly Christian slaves. The whole Ottoman Empire was run quite literally by a slave government. Friday at the symposium that I am attending is a special panel of experts who will be discussing how slavery functioned in both the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. I have heard that during times of economic hard times, the Christian families of the Balkans were eager to give away their boys, knowing that they would have a life of privilege in Istanbul. Many times especially when the Ottoman Empire was in decline, these slave servants were the one’s selecting the next sultan. They used a system of succession that the Turk had inherited from their times as steppe nomads in Central Asia. Every son of the sultan would be strangled except for the one chosen to be the next sultan. Yikes!