The Janissary Mirror: The Collection
Part I of III
An empire steals a child.
It takes him from his family, strips his name, buries his language, kills his god and gives him a new one. It trains him to fight, to kill, to obey. It pours years into making him the sharpest blade in its arsenal. Then it points him at its enemies and says: Go!
And sometimes the blade turns around.
This is one of the oldest stories that power tells about itself, and one of the oldest stories that the powerless tell about surviving it. You can find it in Albanian folk memory, where a stolen nobleman’s son named George Kastrioti burned twenty-five years of his life fighting the empire that raised him. You can find it in a 1970 Japanese manga called Skull Man, where an orphan remade by violence becomes a walking nightmare that frightens children. You can find it the following year, April 3, 1971, when a TV show called Kamen Rider premiered on Japanese television and told a cleaned-up version of the same story to millions of kids eating breakfast.
These two histories have nothing to do with each other. A fifteenth-century Balkan military system and a twentieth-century Japanese superhero comic share no common source, no line of influence, no borrowing. Shotaro Ishinomori, the manga artist who created both Skull Man and Kamen Rider, almost certainly never read a word about the Ottoman devshirme.
That’s the point.
The argument I want to make here is that the parallel between Ishinomori’s fiction and Ottoman history isn’t coincidence, and it isn’t influence. It’s convergence. Empires that manufacture soldiers out of stolen people produce, built into the logic of their own operation, the possibility of the weapon that turns. The story recurs because the machinery recurs. Ishinomori and the Ottomans arrived at the same narrative because they were describing the same thing: what happens when a system tries to erase a human being and rebuild him as a tool, and what happens when the erasure doesn’t take.
There’s a frame for this that political analysis misses. The boys taken by the devshirme didn’t come from a secular tradition. They came from the Eastern Church. And the Eastern Church had been thinking about this exact problem for over a thousand years before the Ottomans arrived. What happens when power tries to unmake a person. The Greek Fathers called it the eikon. The image. Genesis 1:26, in the Greek of the Septuagint: kat’ eikona hēmeteron, “according to our image.” Not a metaphor. An ontological fact about every human person. The way a coin carries the face of the emperor, the Church Fathers said, every person carries the image of God. You can bury the name. You can stamp over the face. But Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa were clear on the result: you can’t destroy the image. The Ottoman Empire spent four centuries running an empirical test on that claim.
The Devshirme: Empire as Production Line
The Ottoman word was devshirme. It means “collection.” The bureaucratic flatness of the term is worth sitting with for a second, because what it describes is the systematic kidnapping of children.
Starting roughly under Sultan Bayazid I in the late fourteenth century and reaching its full form by the 1400s, the devshirme worked like this: every four or five years, Ottoman officials rode into the rural Christian provinces of the Balkans and Anatolia and took boys. One boy per forty households. Ages seven to twenty, though the younger ones were preferred. The boys were separated from their parents, their churches, their villages. They were told to forget.
That was step one.
Step two was conversion. The boys were circumcised, given Muslim names, and forced to convert to Islam. Their birth names were buried. Step three was assimilation: the boys were shipped to Turkish villages in Anatolia and hired out as agricultural laborers for three to five years, learning Turkish, absorbing Islamic practices, forgetting whatever language they’d spoken at home. Step four was the recall to Istanbul for another three to five years of labor and training. Step five was deployment: the finished product entered the Janissary infantry corps, the Sultan’s personal military force, or was placed in palace schools to be trained as an administrator.
The whole process took a decade or more. By the end, the Christian boy from a Balkan village had been replaced. His name, his language, his religion, his family, his community, his sense of who he was before the officials came through town on horseback. All of it erased and overwritten. What came out the other end was a kul, a slave of the Sultan, loyal to no one and nothing except the Ottoman state.
That was the idea, anyway.
The Janissary Paradox
The Janissaries became the most feared fighting force in Europe and the Middle East for roughly two centuries. The Sultan’s personal guard. The shock troops of imperial expansion. The institution that held the empire together.
And they were all stolen children.
This is the paradox at the center of the devshirme, and it’s the same paradox that powers Ishinomori’s fiction: the system’s most capable instruments were the very people it had seized and remade. The empire elevated its captives into positions of extraordinary power. Janissaries could rise to the highest offices of the state. They accumulated wealth, political influence, institutional authority. By the seventeenth century they were deposing Sultans.
Some historians have complicated the picture, arguing that the devshirme was also a vehicle for social mobility, that families sometimes volunteered their sons because the Janissary path offered wealth and status otherwise impossible for a Christian peasant. This is true. It’s also true that a kidnapped boy given a sword and a title is still a kidnapped boy. Elevation and enslavement aren’t opposites. They can live in the same body at the same time, and the tension between them is exactly where the story gets interesting.
The Spectrum of Resistance
The devshirme didn’t produce one type of outcome. It produced a full range of them, from total loyalty to outright rebellion, with every shade of compromise and subversion in between. Each of these outcomes has a counterpart in Ishinomori’s fictional world. I want to walk through the major ones, because the breadth of the parallel is where the real argument lives.
Skanderbeg: The Hero Who Broke Free
George Kastrioti was the son of an Albanian lord. He was taken into Ottoman service around 1414, possibly as early as age four, certainly by his late teens. The Ottomans renamed him Iskander, after Alexander the Great, and added the title Bey: Lord. He trained as a Janissary. He was good at it. He rose through the Ottoman military ranks and commanded troops in the Sultan’s campaigns.
Then, on a November night in 1443, during the Battle of Niš, Skanderbeg deserted.
He took three hundred Albanian soldiers with him. He rode south to the fortress of Krujë, presented a forged letter from Sultan Murad II to the garrison commander, and took the city. He raised the double-headed eagle of his family’s banner over the walls. On November 28, 1443, he proclaimed Albanian independence.
He would fight the Ottoman Empire for the next twenty-five years, until his death in 1468. He founded the League of Lezhë in 1444. Albanian chieftains who’d spent generations fighting each other joined his coalition and held off repeated Ottoman invasions. He won battles he should have lost, against armies that massively outnumbered his, using terrain and guerrilla tactics he’d learned while serving the very empire he was now fighting.
The name he reclaimed when he raised that banner was the one he was baptized with. George. In the Orthodox tradition, a baptismal name isn’t administrative. You’re named for a saint, placed under that saint’s protection, expected to imitate that life. George Kastrioti was named for the soldier-martyr whose icon hangs in churches across the Christian East: the one who kills the dragon. The Ottomans gave him Alexander. He took George back. Whether he thought of it in those theological terms I can’t say. But the act maps onto something the Church Fathers would have recognized immediately: a person reasserting the identity that no empire has the authority to revoke.
Everything the Ottomans gave him, he turned against them. Their military training. Their strategic doctrine. His understanding of their logistics and their weaknesses. Skanderbeg is the weapon that remembered who it was before. He is Albania’s national hero to this day.
Ballaban Badera: The Weapon That Didn’t Escape
Skanderbeg’s story has a mirror, and it’s uglier.
A boy named Michael was born Catholic in the village of Badera, in the Mat region of Albania. Son of Mark (some sources say Milosh) and Helena. Taken through the devshirme. Given the name Ballaban. He rose through the Ottoman ranks just as Skanderbeg had, and by the 1460s he’d reached the rank of Pasha under Sultan Mehmed II.
Here’s where it turns. Michael’s brother, Constantine, and Michael’s father, Mark, both served as soldiers under Skanderbeg’s command. They were fighting against Ottoman armies led by their own son and brother.
Ballaban commanded Ottoman forces against Skanderbeg at the Battle of Vajkal in April 1465. He came back as commanding general of the Second Siege of Krujë in 1466. He kept the fortress under siege for nearly a year. He died there, shot through the neck by an arquebus fired by Gjergj Aleksi, a city defender who was a hunter in civilian life.
Father and son on opposite sides of a siege wall. Brother against brother. The devshirme’s logic made flesh.
Ballaban is what happens when the conversion finishes. He is the completed product, the one who didn’t remember or didn’t let himself remember. In Ishinomori’s terms, Ballaban is every Kaijin that Kamen Rider has to fight: a former human, fully converted, sent back to destroy the one who escaped. The system made both Skanderbeg and Ballaban. The only difference was whether the final step held.
The Neomartyrs: The Conversion That Still Turned
The Orthodox Church documented a category of person who doesn’t appear in most political histories of the Ottoman period but is essential to any full accounting of what the devshirme did. They called them Neomartyrs. New Martyrs.
These were men and women, and some of them began as boys taken through forced conversion, who had been living as Muslims for years or decades. The conversion appeared to have held. Then they recanted.
Publicly. In front of witnesses. Knowing the penalty.
The Orthodox Church canonized several hundred of them between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. The scholar Nomikos Michael Vaporis documented them in Witnesses for Christ. The wave of public reconversions was especially concentrated between 1730 and 1820, the same decades when the Janissary Corps was at its most politically unstable. One of them, Demetrius the Neomartyr, was executed in 1803. They weren’t political revolutionaries. They weren’t military commanders. They were people who had apparently completed the conversion process and then, by their own choice, reversed it at the cost of their lives.
They washed out the stain of forced apostasy with an atoning death. That’s the theological category. That’s how the Church understood what they were doing.
In Ishinomori’s terms, the Neomartyrs are the strangest entry in the gallery. Skanderbeg escaped before the final step. Ballaban never looked back. The eight Christian boys resisted from inside and failed immediately. The Neomartyrs don’t fit any of those slots. They’re the completed product, the ones the process appeared to finish, who years or decades later reasserted the identity the system had buried. In Kamen Rider terms, they’re the Kaijin who, after full conversion and years of service, remembered the name on their baptismal certificate and said it out loud in public. No escape. No war. Just the image asserting itself, past everything the system spent years installing.
The Eight Christian Youths: The Resistance That Failed
Not every act of resistance produced a hero. Under Mehmed II, eight Christian boys taken into the Sultan’s personal service formed a pact to assassinate him. Their stated reason, preserved in the historical record: “None other than our great sorrow for our fathers and dear friends.”
The plot was discovered. Mehmed had the boys tortured over the course of a year, then beheaded.
No escape. No rebellion. Just eight boys who couldn’t bear what had been done to them and tried to strike at the source, and failed. The will to resist existed. The capacity to succeed didn’t. These are the stories the hero narrative requires us to forget, the ones who fought the system from inside and lost. In Ishinomori’s world, they’re the nameless captives in Shocker’s labs who resisted the brainwashing but never made it out.
Sokollu Mehmed Pasha: The Subversive Who Stayed
Sokollu Mehmed Pasha was born into a Serbian Orthodox family in Herzegovina. Taken through the devshirme as a boy. He never defected, never rebelled, never raised a banner or forged a letter. He did something stranger.
He climbed.
By 1565 he’d become Grand Vizier, the highest office in the Ottoman Empire below the Sultan himself. He held the position for fourteen years, until his assassination in 1579. And during that time he used the full weight of imperial authority to do something the devshirme was specifically designed to prevent: he preserved the identity the system had tried to erase.
In 1557, Sokollu secured the restoration of the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć, the institutional heart of Serbian Orthodoxy, and installed his own cousin Makarije Sokolović as Patriarch. He appointed both Muslim and Christian relatives to positions of power throughout the empire.
He never stopped being an Ottoman Grand Vizier. He never reclaimed his Serbian name. He operated entirely within the system. He used the tools the system gave him to protect the thing the system was built to destroy. If Skanderbeg is Kamen Rider, Sokollu is Dr. Midorikawa: the conscience inside the machine.
Patrona Halil: The Creation That Seized the Throne
In September 1730, an Albanian Janissary named Patrona Halil led a force of 12,000 Janissaries, most of them Albanian, in an open revolt in Istanbul. They forced the abdication of Sultan Ahmed III. They killed his Grand Vizier, Nevşehirli Damad Ibrahim Pasha. They ended the Tulip Period, an era of cultural flourishing and elite extravagance that the Janissaries saw as corrupt. They installed Mahmud I in Ahmed’s place.
Two months later, Mahmud I invited Patrona Halil to a meeting and had him killed.
Patrona Halil didn’t escape the system. He seized it. The creation deposed the creator. A stolen Albanian child, processed through the devshirme, trained as a Janissary, became powerful enough to remove a Sultan from his throne. The empire’s own production line had built something it couldn’t control.
Kabakçı Mustafa: The Creation That Refused to Be Replaced
In 1807, Sultan Selim III attempted to modernize the Ottoman military through the Nizam-ı Cedid, the “New Order,” which aimed to train a new European-style army that would eventually replace the Janissaries entirely.
The Janissaries saw this for what it was: their own obsolescence.
A Janissary officer named Kabakçı Mustafa led the revolt. The rebels forced Selim’s abdication, installed Mustafa IV, and demanded the abolition of every reformist institution Selim had created. The creation refused to be scrapped. The tool informed its maker that it wouldn’t be replaced by a newer model, and backed the refusal with violence.
The Dahijas: Rogue Weapons Catalyzing Revolution
By 1801, renegade Janissary commanders called the Dahijas had seized power in the Sanjak of Smederevo, roughly modern central Serbia. They ruled independently of both the Sultan and any Ottoman chain of command. They suspended Serbian rights, confiscated land, imposed forced labor.
In January 1804, the Dahijas ordered what became known as the Slaughter of the Knezes: the execution of somewhere between 70 and 150 Serbian village leaders and Orthodox priests, in a single coordinated purge designed to prevent a rebellion.
It caused one instead.
The First Serbian Uprising began on February 14, 1804. It was the start of the Serbian Revolution, the process that would eventually produce an independent Serbian state. The Dahijas were captured and beheaded by August of that year.
Janissaries, gone completely rogue, with no imperial authority behind them, committed an atrocity so severe it triggered a national liberation movement that eventually tore a piece of the empire away. The system’s products, uncontrolled, catalyzed the system’s dismemberment.
The Köprülü Family: The Weapons That Ruled
The Köprülü family came from Roshnik, a village near Berat in Albania. Taken through the devshirme. They produced six Grand Viziers between the mid-1600s and the early 1700s. Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, the first of them, served as Grand Vizier from 1656 to 1661 with a degree of autonomy no Grand Vizier before him had held. The Sultan granted him extraordinary powers, political rule without interference.
The Köprülü era represents the Ottoman Empire at its peak geographic expansion. The largest version of the empire, its greatest territorial reach across Europe, Asia Minor, and Africa, was administered by a family of stolen Albanian children.
The devshirme’s final paradox. The weapons didn’t just serve. They ran the whole operation.
The Auspicious Incident: The State Destroys Its Creation
By the seventeenth century, the devshirme had largely been abandoned as a recruitment method. The Janissary Corps had become entrenched, hereditary, politically untouchable, and increasingly resistant to any reform that might weaken their position.
On June 15, 1826, Sultan Mahmud II ended the argument. He surrounded the Janissary barracks in Istanbul with loyalist troops and artillery. He opened fire. Approximately 6,000 Janissaries were killed. The survivors were exiled, imprisoned, or executed in the following weeks. The corps was abolished. Mahmud II called it the “Auspicious Incident.” The Janissaries didn’t get to name it.
Read against everything above, the Auspicious Incident is the empire’s answer to every variation of the problem the devshirme created: escape, subversion, revolt, rogue action, seizure of power. When the system can no longer manage what it made, it reaches for the only tool left. Extermination.
Stay stuned Next week for In Part II: Legendary Mangaka Shotaro Ishinomori built the same machine in 1970. He just didn’t know it.
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