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My latest article is a short history of the Janissaries -
Janissaries - the Ottoman Empire's Infallible Army

If you want to know more about the Janissaries, you might want to check out the May or June book club books - The Janissary Tree and Lords of the Horizons both by Jason Goodwin. My review of The Janissary Tree will be up in the next few days, in the meantime, you might want to check out our Mystery Books editor's review - Karm's review of The Janissary Tree

Julie

My review of The Janissary Tree is now up. Check it out and see what you think. Don't forget, The Janissary Tree is going to be our book club book for May.

Julie

Thanks Julie for information and nice article.
We read about Janissaries in our history books, yeah they were strong and brave fighter and warlike, we called them Yenicheris in fact. I guess they had reared up similar to Sparta kids. They made killer machine. I guess power and corruption has link to each other.
Iranian had long term war with Ottoman Empire. When Ottoman was capturing the Europe, Iran was a traitor behind them. Ottomans were Sunnis leader and we were Shiite one, some of our wars happened in Iraq where South was Shiite and North was Sunni as you see right now. Yeah even on that time Shiites were Westerns ally, maybe for that reason Sunnis call us traitor.

Babak - I think you mean ally, not traitor. At any rate, while you might consider the Ottoman Empire part of the West, Europe considered it to be part of the East.

In fact, I recently found out that the term "Turk" was used in Europe to mean any resident of the Ottoman empire, which is really different that what I would have assumed!

Julie

Julie
On that time Ottoman ruled most part of Islamic world from North East Africa to west of Asia. Sunnis called Ottoman king as Caliph means Islam leader. After world war one Turkish tended to be close to western community.

I talked about the era that Ottoman army were most powerful in the world and they even threat Austria Vienna. On that era "Safavid" dynasty ruled in Iran.
Now Sunnis call Shiite Iraqi government as "Safavid".

we call Turk to people that speak Turkish. I think Turk origin is people with close face to East Asian people like Turkman, Uzbec, Kyrgyz, Cossack and so on. I guess people of west Turkey were originally Greek and in East part Armenian who converted to Turkish and Kurds who are nearly 30 percent of population of Turkey. Turks started to come to Middle East from nearly 700 years ago I think.

I didn't know that the Sunnis see the Shiite Iraqi government as Safid. That's really interesting.

Sounds like the modern Iranian definition of Turk is the same as the modern US and European one. It's sure funny to think that a Egyptian in Europe in the 1800's would have been called a Turk though!

I'm reading a really interesting book about the Ottoman Empire right now - "Lords of the Horizon" by Jason Goodman. It's amazing how large and diverse their empire was!

Julie