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 English East India Company — chartered in London on 31 December 1600 as the “Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies” — was a private joint-stock trading firm that ended its life as the ruler of a subcontinent, and it was stripped of that rule not by a foreign rival but by the British state that had licensed it. After the Indian Rebellion of 1857 exposed both the brutality and the fragility of Company government, Parliament passed the Government of India Act 1858, which liquidated the Company’s authority and transferred its Indian territories, revenues, and armies to direct rule by the British Crown. The administration changed hands on 1 November 1858; the Company itself lingered as a hollow corporate shell until it was formally dissolved on 1 June 1874.
What fell was the most consequential corporation in history. A venture that began with a fleet seeking pepper and spices had, over two and a half centuries, transformed into a territorial sovereign governing more people than lived in Britain itself, fielding one of the largest standing armies on earth and collecting the land revenue of Bengal, Bihar, and beyond. Its rule over Indians was not the benign commerce of its charter but conquest, taxation, and extraction, punctuated by catastrophe — most starkly the Bengal famine of 1770, which killed an estimated seven to ten million people, between a quarter and a third of the affected population, while the Company kept collecting revenue.
The Company’s power rested on a contradiction that eventually destroyed it. It conquered and governed India largely through an army of Indian soldiers, the sepoys, commanded by a thin layer of British officers. When that army turned in 1857 — sparked by new rifle cartridges rumored to be greased with cow and pig fat, an affront to Hindu and Muslim soldiers alike, atop years of grievance over pay, annexations, and cultural contempt — the entire structure was revealed to rest on the obedience of the men it had armed.
The mechanism of the fall was political rather than commercial. The rebellion of 1857 was suppressed with great violence on both sides, but it shattered the legitimacy of rule-by-corporation in British eyes. A firm that could provoke a war of this scale, and that answered to shareholders as much as to the public interest, could no longer be trusted to govern an empire. The Crown took the territory it had long supervised, and the Company that had won India for Britain was abolished by the country it had enriched.
The Mamluks were a caste of slave-soldiers who had governed Egypt as a military elite for more than five centuries, and they were destroyed on 1 March 1811 in a single morning of planned slaughter known as the Massacre of the Citadel. The man who ended them was Muhammad Ali Pasha, an Albanian officer who had risen out of Egypt’s chaos to become the Ottoman governor of the province in 1805. Having invited the leading Mamluk beys to a ceremony at the Cairo Citadel, he had them trapped in a narrow passage and shot. Of roughly 470 who entered, almost none came out alive; the killing then spread across Egypt for days.
What fell was not a foreign army but the country’s own ruling military caste — a self-perpetuating order built, paradoxically, on purchased and enslaved foreign youths. The original Mamluks were boys, mostly Turkic and later Circassian, bought as slaves, converted to Islam, and trained from childhood as elite cavalry. From 1250 they ruled Egypt and Syria in their own right as the Mamluk Sultanate, halting the Mongol advance at Ain Jalut in 1260 and expelling the last Crusaders. The Ottoman sultan Selim I conquered the sultanate in 1516–17, but the Mamluk system survived: under Ottoman suzerainty the beys continued to dominate Egypt’s land, revenue, and soldiery as a turbulent, autonomous aristocracy.
By the early nineteenth century that autonomy had become an obstacle to anyone who wished to rule Egypt outright. Napoleon’s invasion of 1798 shattered the old order without replacing it, and the French withdrawal left a three-way contest between Ottoman authority, the surviving Mamluk beys, and the Albanian troops sent to expel the French. Muhammad Ali, commanding those Albanians, won the contest by maneuver and was confirmed as governor in 1805 — but the Mamluk beys remained, armed, landed, and capable of raising forces against him.
The mechanism of the fall was treachery dressed as ceremony. Rather than fight the Mamluks in the field, where they had repeatedly proven resilient, Muhammad Ali eliminated their leadership in a controlled space. He summoned the beys to honor his son Tusun’s departure on a campaign against the Wahhabis in Arabia, drew them into the fortress, sealed the gates, and ordered them killed. The decapitation of the caste’s command was followed by a hunt for Mamluks throughout the country. With its leaders dead and its survivors scattered or absorbed, the order that had ruled Egypt since the thirteenth century ceased to exist as a political power.