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 Streltsy — Russia’s musketeer caste, broken by Peter the Great’s terror

The Streltsy — Russia’s first standing infantry, founded by Ivan the Terrible around 1550 — were a hereditary corps of musketeers who became a turbulent armed caste at the heart of Muscovite politics, and they were broken by Peter the Great after their revolt in 1698. When the Moscow regiments mutinied while the young tsar was traveling in Western Europe, Peter rushed home, crushed the survivors of the corps with a campaign of mass torture and execution, and dissolved the Moscow Streltsy. Between September 1698 and February 1699, roughly 1,182 Streltsy were put to death and hundreds more flogged, branded, or exiled; further investigation and killing continued for years, and the corps was wound down over the following two decades.

What fell was not merely a regiment but a political institution. Created in the mid-sixteenth century as Russia’s first permanent infantry armed with firearms — the arquebus and later the musket — the Streltsy filled the bulk of the army for a century. Over time their service became lifelong and then hereditary; they lived in their own Moscow settlements, drew state pay in money and grain, and supplemented it with trade and craft. By the late seventeenth century, numbering tens of thousands, they had become a praetorian element: an armed bloc that could intervene in succession disputes and make or unmake regents.

They had already shown that power. In the Moscow uprising of 1682 the Streltsy stormed the Kremlin, killed leading boyars, and helped install Peter’s half-sister Sophia Alekseyevna as regent — a trauma the boy Peter witnessed directly and never forgot. Their grievances were real: arrears of pay, abuses by commanders, and resentment of Peter’s foreign-styled new regiments and his hostility to their privileges and their conservative, Old Believer sympathies.

The mechanism of the fall was a failed revolt answered with calculated terror. In 1698, with Peter abroad on his Grand Embassy, Moscow Streltsy regiments mutinied and marched on the capital, some hoping to restore Sophia to power. Loyal troops under the foreign general Patrick Gordon and the boyar Aleksei Shein crushed them at the New Jerusalem Monastery west of Moscow on 18 June 1698. Peter returned in fury, reopened the investigation under savage torture, and turned the punishment into a public spectacle designed to annihilate the corps as a force in Russian politics forever.