The scope of the present treatise confines the discussion of the Ruling Institution as an army to those features which lie nearest the governmental aspect. The great majority of its members constituted the standing army of the empire, in the two great sections of Janissaries, or infantry, and _Spahis_ of the Porte, or cavalry. Subordinate sections cared for the artillery and transport services, and for other necessary adjuncts to campaigning. Although the feudal _Spahis_ did not receive pay from the sultan, and hence were not properly _kullar_, their officers were his slaves, even though many of them were supported during their term of service from fiefs. Besides these regular troops there were also attached to the Ottoman army certain irregular bodies of a lower order,—the _Akinji_, the _Azabs_, the Kurds, and so on. THE JANISSARIES[287] The body of regular infantry known as _Yenicheri_, or “new troops,” a name which the West has changed to Janissaries, comes near to standing in the Western imagination for the sultan’s entire slave-family.[288] In the sixteenth century, however, it formed not more than a fourth of the whole number; nor does its importance seem to have been beyond its numerical proportion, except in one or two respects. Since its members were physically trained beyond comparison with their intellectual education, since they were kept in poverty and hence were comparatively irresponsible, and since a large portion of them were in comparative idleness in time of peace, they were liable to act as an organized and very dangerous mob. They might start a riot on short notice, or burn a section of the city in order to pillage the neighboring houses, or rifle the shops of the Jews, or plunder the grand vizier’s establishment.[289] They could not easily be restrained from plundering cities which had capitulated or from violating terms of surrender.[290] They felt that the death of a sultan gave them an interregnum of license before the accession of a new sovereign.[291] They demanded donatives at the succession of a new ruler with such increasing rapacity as to embarrass the treasury;[292] and they needed to be braced at critical moments by liberal presents.[293] In time of battle, however, they drew up an invincible line behind which the person of their sovereign was as safe as in an impregnable fortress. Their devotion to his person was the greater because they were in a special sense his _kullar_, and because he was one of them, being inscribed in one of their _odas_ and receiving his pay regularly.[294] In small groups on garrison duty their severe training seems to have made of them an efficient police.[295] Yet their _esprit de corps_, resting on consciousness of power, made them feared at all times. They took an active part in determining the destinies of the empire in two ways,—by limiting conquests, and by influencing the succession to the throne.[296] They compelled the mighty Selim to turn back from both