Janissary

Turkish Yeni Ceri, or New Corps. Sultan Murat I, a big romantic and accomplished military commander in the early 1400's, organized the group from an infantry Yaya Brotherhood (to be distinguished from the Ya-ya Sisterhood), which was an earlier on effort by the early Ottoman bey Orhan to immitate the popular institution of Futuwa wide-spread in the nacent Turkic civilization in Anatolia.

By the way, the Futuwa are a bunch of semi-underground kind of fraternities, sort of like contemporary communes of anarchists and punks, composed of disenfranchized urban youth through the practices of Sufi worship and common property. These youth would go about doing their individual trade in the morning and bring home the money to share with the whole group, intertaining guests with elaborate banquets and invest in charitable properties (vakif). When they grew powerful, they joined force with the nomadic Turkmens in rebellion against the beys, or Anatolian marching lords. Orhan saw the power in these infantrymen and was awfully fond of the idea of a brotherhood that did away with the feudal tiers of power and inertia. So he organized his memlukes into the Yaya, later turned into the Janissary.

Throughout the early Ottoman period, the Janissary was mostly filled by slaves conscripted from non-Muslim populations in the Caucasus and the European part of the Empire, into a traing process called devshirmeh.

Later the Janissaries turned out to be super powerful. But it grew lazy and got involved in sapping the administrative and political power of the state. It actually grew so antiquated in military techniques that by the 1700's all they could do was to terrify their own masters. Besides, these slaves, not especially indoctrinated as Sunni Muslims, got carried away with the heretic Bektashi sect which had all these weird rituals and ideas about subversive activities. From them were harbored early installments of the thoughts of anarchism, Freemansonry and world domination. In other words, a bunch of Trotskyites.

So, Sultan Mahmoud II set up some French guns around their Uskudar barracks and smoked 'em all.