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Among these were praetorianism in the capital and the great provincial towns; subjection of land and peasantry to military seigneurs, who gradually detached themselves from the central control; wars undertaken abroad for no better reason than the employment of soldiery feared at home; consequent expansion of the territorial empire beyond the administrative capacity of the central government; development of the 'tribute-children' system of recruiting into a scourge of the rayas and a continual offence to neighbouring states, and the supplementing of that system by acceptance of any and every alien outlaw who might offer himself for service: lastly, revival of the dormant crusading spirit of Europe, which reacted on the Osmanlis, begetting in them an Arabian fanaticism and disposing them to revert to the obscurantist spirit of the earliest Moslems.
One race has never appropriated and exploited the vitality of another in so direct or so brutal a fashion, and the institution of 'tribute-children', so long as it lasted, effectually prevented any recovery of the Greek nation from the untimely blows which had stricken it down. The Awakening of the Nation
The janissaries had started as a militant, almost monastic body, condemned to celibacy, and recruited exclusively from the Christian tribute-children. But in 1566 they extorted the privilege of legal marriage for themselves, and of admittance into the corps for the sons of their wedlock.
Even the Janissaries were not now all 'tribute-children'. Their own sons, free men Moslem born, began to be admitted to the ranks.
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