“But the soldiers (taken from the Turks) proved intractable and could not be brought to submit to the strict discipline involved in military organizations. To obviate this difficulty the expedient was resorted to of rearing up in the doctrine of Islam the children of the conquered Christians inuring them from youth to the profession of arms and forming them into a separate corps. This black invention, as Von Hammer truly characterizes it, was adopted by Aladdin at the instance of Kara (black) Chalil Chenderli, the judge of the Army, and he adds, has ‘a diabolical complexion, much blacker than the gunpowder almost contemporaneously discovered by Schwartz (black) in Europe.’ Hence arose the Janissaries, a name which the westerns have corrupted from the Turkish Jenicheri, signifying the ‘new troops.’ The Corps continued to be recruited from the children of the captives taken in war, or from those Christian subjects, an inhuman tax of every fifth child or one child every fifth year, being rigorously levied upon the families. The number of the Janissaries, originally one thousand, was successively raised to twelve, to twenty, and to forty thousand, immediately connected with the Court, besides a much larger number scattered through the provinces. Hence it has been estimated that not less than half a million Christian children were cruelly torn from their parents, compelled to embrace Islamism, and trained to maintain it with the sword. At length, in the reign of Mohammed IV (A.D. 1648-1687) began the custom of admitting into the regiment the children of the soldiers themselves; and after this innovation, the Janissaries became a kind of military caste, transmitting from father to son the profession of arms. “In the days of their pristine vigor, the new troops were distinguished by their fanaticism and valor. Through upwards of three centuries, marked by a long series of great battles, they sustained only four single reverses, chiefly from Tamerlane in 1402, and John Humades, the Hungarian general, in 1442. During that period they extended the petty kingdom of Brousa over the vast dominions of Constantine the Great, and made known their prowess from the walls of Bagdad to the gate of Vienna, and from the Caspian Sea to the Nile, while their name was the common terror of Christendom.”[63]