The Janissaries — the corps that made and unmade sultans was annihilated in a day

The Janissaries — the yeniçeri, “new soldiers,” the elite slave-infantry of the Ottoman Empire — were created in the late fourteenth century, traditionally around 1363 under Sultan Murad I, and they were destroyed in a single bloody confrontation in the Ottoman capital in June 1826. On the night of 14–15 June 1826, the corps rose in revolt against Sultan Mahmud II’s military reforms; the next day, loyal artillery bombarded the rebel barracks at the Et Meydanı, killing thousands. By the sultan’s decree the corps was abolished, its order outlawed, and its survivors hunted down, executed, or exiled. The Ottomans called the episode the Vaka-i Hayriyye, the “Auspicious Incident.”

What fell was not merely a regiment but a power within the state. For four centuries the Janissaries had been the world’s first standing professional infantry, recruited as boys through the devshirme levy of Christian children from the Balkans, converted to Islam, and trained into a disciplined corps loyal in principle to the sultan alone. They spearheaded the conquests that built the empire — the taking of Constantinople in 1453 among them — and they were long the most formidable infantry in Europe and the Near East. But over time the corps swelled, decayed, and turned inward, until it had become less the empire’s sword than its veto.

By the early nineteenth century the Janissaries numbered well over a hundred thousand on the rolls, many of them not soldiers at all but tradesmen drawing pay and guarding privileges they no longer earned. They had repeatedly mutinied, deposed sultans, and killed reform-minded rulers who threatened them, including Mahmud II’s predecessor Selim III. They were a praetorian class the throne could neither command nor reform — and the central obstacle to the modernization the empire needed to survive.

The mechanism of the fall was a reform deliberately engineered to provoke the predictable revolt, and the means to crush it prepared in advance. Mahmud II spent years building support among the clergy, the navy, and a loyal artillery corps before announcing a new European-style army in 1826. When the Janissaries rose as expected, he had the religious authority of a fatwa, the Prophet’s Sacred Banner unfurled to rally the populace, and cannon trained on their barracks. The corps that had brought down sultans for centuries was broken in an afternoon and abolished outright; thousands were killed in the fighting, the burning of the barracks, and the executions that followed.

The Praetorian Guard — the bodyguard that sold the throne was abolished by the man it fought

The Praetorian Guard — the household troops created by the emperor Augustus around 27 BC to protect the person of the Roman ruler — became over three centuries the most dangerous force in Roman politics, and it was permanently abolished by the emperor Constantine in 312 after it had fought against him. On 28 October 312, Constantine defeated his rival Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge outside Rome; Maxentius drowned in the Tiber, and the Praetorians who had made him emperor and died for him on the riverbank were the corps’ last stand. Constantine disbanded the survivors, scattered them to the frontiers, and demolished their great fortress, the Castra Praetoria, ending a body that had lasted some three hundred and thirty-nine years.

What fell was the original imperial bodyguard, and the institution that had turned guarding the emperor into the power to choose, depose, and even kill him. Augustus established the Guard as nine cohorts of elite soldiers, the only substantial armed force permitted near Rome, better paid and shorter-served than the legions. Concentrated by Tiberius into a single fortified camp on the edge of the city in 26 AD, the Praetorians acquired what no other unit possessed: a permanent armed presence at the center of power, alongside an emperor with no comparable force to balance them.

From that position the Guard learned that the men they protected served at their sufferance. They assassinated Caligula in 41 AD and installed Claudius; they intervened repeatedly in the succession; and in 193 AD, having murdered the emperor Pertinax, they put the empire up for auction and sold it to the highest bidder, Didius Julianus. They were a praetorian corps in the literal and the figurative sense — a bodyguard that had become a kingmaker, repeatedly trading their loyalty for donatives and treating the throne as a prize in their gift.

The mechanism of the fall was the corps backing the losing side in a civil war fought by an emperor strong enough to dispense with them. When the tetrarchic system fractured, the Praetorians in Rome proclaimed Maxentius and fought for him to the end. Constantine, commanding a battle-hardened field army of his own and owing the Guard nothing, beat that army at the Milvian Bridge and then abolished the corps outright rather than buy its loyalty as so many predecessors had. The reforms of the era had already made the old Guard militarily redundant; Constantine’s victory made its destruction final.