Janissaries (like most ottoman Turk units) are seemingly impossible for wargamers to get right - because they’re hard to fit into the classifications of Western European troops and straddle the boundary between medieval and renaissance most rules sets either make them some elite unit of super soldiers weighed down with excessive special rules which doesn’t reflect their quite mixed historical performance, or give them (and the ottomans) such a poor representation that they feel like a disadvantage. Problem seems to be treating “Janissary” as a troop type within the army list, which causes all sorts of confusion based on equipment and tactics - my solution would be to treat it more as a sub faction or allied nationality within the army the same way as you’d handle French troops in an Irish Jacobite army - potentially quite good but with command and control issues and hard to coordinate with the sipahis and the Arabs etc. for Lilly banners maybe a separate order allocation for janissary units?
I have done some limited amendments for Janissaries in BLB. I personally have a lot of issues with the classification of many Western troop types. The word Guards gets everyone het up. In many cases Guard troops were no better than line troops other than in dress and equipment. Some notable exceptions in this period of course.. Blue Guards, Gardes Francaises. Your idea sounds like it might work.
about the terminology, it’s a bit of a question mark as to how they organized units as such. In the sources I often see orta and bölük (which means roughly division or part). There’s no right or wrong answer, just one of those academic questions to explore. Janissaries though are usually indicated as such from the provincial soldiers who were described based region they were mobilized from.
They seem to differ their organisation almost from campaign to campaign, I think wargamers could do with some new sources or access to some more recent scholarship and translated ottoman documents
@@olympiangamers7007 The organization is fairly consistent, there were just changes over time a lot of popular histories about Ottoman wars don’t pick up on. I have some videos on my page talking about Ottoman history monographs, I can’t fit a list into a RU-vid comment unfortunately. As for documents translating them is very slow going because of the complexity of Ottoman, but I am doing my small part to improve that in my real world work
Not forcefully converted perhaps, but forcibly taken from their homes as teenagers and trained intensively and brainwashed and then ‘voluntarily’ converted?
