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[edit] Comments

[edit] Mercenaries

i have written a little about mercenaries in ottoman empire. expansion of this article should also include about local/tribal light cavalry especially from mountinous (thus less fields, less fiefs, less feudal penetration, as well as obvious less central pentration) areas such as Albania (also mentioned in "War and Peace", commander pejoratively calling russian hussars "Arnauts!" (Arnavut = Albanian in turkish)), Kurdistan (till the collapse of the ottoman empire in WW1) etc.

Volunteers which were not paid, adventurers looking for plunder, or in the later era to defend their country etc. one interesting thing about the latter is the existence of quite young or quite elderly women leaders of volunteer troops (a la turca jean d'arcs?).

there are other details about the why of irregulars in ottoman army, but they should go in ottoman military article. duration of wars extending in 18th. marching from istanbul or even further east to say ukraine or poland took very long too. it is true even more so for the iran border which is some 1,5 times longer than western one. feudal soldiers should return home for supervising harvest and sowing. bringing anything including people from center meant more camels, pack horses, etc. compounded with little pasture in most of the year and war time prices for fodder (barley etc.) much offset.

as a last word, this is like a brainstorming, i'm not disgussing anything here

--Calm 13:39, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

PS:

• pls someone improve and correct Military of the Ottoman Empire article.
• as a reminder to future editors; people seems to be confusing başıbozuklar which has nothing to do with "mentally unsound" as some anonymus editor has claimed, with deliler which means just that. however the latter one was not irregular, adventurer, or lunatics out of the asylums, either. they were, if we use the buzzwords, "shock and awe" troops. they were like (or a subclass of, i dont know) Akıncı (raider) light cavalry, but they made their appearence as fearsome as possible.

--Calm 14:44, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Pictures

The article is illustrated with two paintings by Jean-Léon Gérôme. Judging by the artist's other works - which feature lily-white Turkish people - these are presumably models hired in Paris, dressed in something approximating an idea of what real Turkish soldiers might have worn. Gérôme's biography here on Wikipedia states that he visited Turkey once, and he was a contemporary of the subject, but the paintings seem very New Romantic. Is there are more true-to-life pictorial record? -Ashley Pomeroy 22:43, 29 July 2007 (UTC)