The Enchantress of Florence
“Each year the press gangs roamed the expanding empire to levy the devshirmé tax, the child tribute, and took the strongest, cleverest, best-looking boys into slavery, to be changed into instruments of the Sultan’s will. The principle of the Sultanate was governance by metamorphosis. We will take your finest offspring from you and we will transform them utterly. We will make them forget you and turn them into the force that keeps you under our heel. By your own lost children will you be ruled. I...n Usküb where the process of change began there were many tongues but only one uniform, the baggy-trousered garb of the Ottoman recruit. The hero’s rags were taken from him and he was washed and fed and given clean water to drink. Then Christianity was taken from him as well and he was obliged to put on Islam like a new pair of pajamas. There were Greeks and Albanians in Usküb, Bosnians and Croats and Serbs, and there were mamlúk boys, white slaves, from up and down the Caucasus, Georgians and Mingrelians, Circassians and Abkhazas, and there were Armenians and Syrians as well.MoreLess
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