Janissary Tüfek

Origins

The Janissaries were founded in the late fourteenth century as a standing infantry corps of the sultan. Most were recruited as boys from Christian families in the Balkans through the devşirme levy, converted to Islam and trained as professional soldiers. The Ottomans met gunpowder weapons in the Balkans in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and they adopted them quickly. Historians such as Gábor Ágoston date the first regular use of hand firearms by the Janissaries to the middle of the fifteenth century, in the reign of Murad II. At first only part of the corps had guns, with others still armed with bows. By the sixteenth century the matchlock tüfek had become the Janissary's main weapon, earlier than in many European armies.

Design & Construction

There was no single standard pattern. Tüfeks were made both in state workshops in Istanbul and by gunsmiths across the empire, and they varied in size and bore. Ottoman guns were often longer and heavier than European infantry muskets of the same period, with barrels that could be well over a meter long. The finer barrels were forged from twisted strips of iron and steel, which made them strong and allowed heavy powder charges. The stock was slim and often faceted, and many had a distinctive narrow butt with a many-sided cross-section, held against the shoulder or cheek. The early lock was a matchlock, which used a burning cord held in a serpentine to fire the priming. From the later seventeenth century Ottoman gunsmiths increasingly used the miquelet lock, a sturdy type of flintlock also used in Spain and North Africa. Many tüfeks were decorated with silver, brass wire inlay or coral.

Combat Use

At Mohács in 1526 the Janissaries stood behind a line of guns and wagons and broke the Hungarian army with musket and cannon fire; King Louis II drowned in the retreat. Janissary marksmen served in sieges from Rhodes to Malta, and they fought on the Ottoman galleys at the Battle of Lepanto. In the siege of 1683, before the Battle of Vienna, Janissaries manned the trenches and mine galleries dug toward the city walls and kept up constant fire on the defenders. When the relief army attacked on 12 September, many Janissaries were still held in the siege works, and the Ottoman field army could not stop the combined cavalry charge that ended the battle. The Janissaries also used the tüfek against Venetians, Russians and Persians in the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Legacy

By the eighteenth century the Janissaries had become a powerful political body that often resisted military reform, and European armies had moved ahead with the flintlock musket and bayonet drill. In 1826 Sultan Mahmud II destroyed the corps in the event known as the Auspicious Incident and replaced it with a new army trained on European lines. Many tüfeks survive in museums, from plain service arms to highly decorated pieces. In modern Turkish, tüfek is still the ordinary word for a rifle or shotgun.